Mortar and Murder (27 page)

“Just be careful,” Derek said, pulling his boots on. “I’ll call you when I get back, OK?”

I nodded.

“See ya, Tink.”

And with that, and another quick kiss, he was gone. I heard the front door slam behind him and—a few seconds later—the sound of the truck’s engine cranking over. I buried my face in the pillow and groaned. Dammit.

I was awake, though, wide awake, and after lying there futilely trying to get back to sleep for fifteen minutes, I gave up and crawled out of bed. After a shower and change, with my hair still damp and kinking wildly around my face, and with a cup of coffee in my hand from the coffee maker in the kitchen, I padded down the hall to the front parlor and booted up the computer.

If everyone was hunting down Irina and her two companions on the Appalachian Trail, then no one was doing much of anything else, it seemed to me, and I thought I might use the time to dig up some background on Olga and Katya. Yes, I know Wayne had said he’d contact his colleague in Kiev for information, but A) Wayne was with the other searchers and wouldn’t be back in Waterfield for hours, and B) the information Kiev came up with—if any—might not be the kind of information I was looking for.

I started by searching both names, without much to show for my trouble. Yes, there were people sharing those names. Plenty of people. One of the Katyas was listed, as far as I could tell, as a student with the university in Kiev. So that might be a connection to Svetlana. The problem was that I couldn’t read the websites, which were in Cyrillic, and when I tried to use an online translation program, I got gibberish.

So I turned to the Russian-bride websites again, starting with the one where I had seen Svetlana’s listing. There were a few Olgas there. One of the Olgas might have been the dead girl from the water. It was hard to tell, but she was blond and blue-eyed, with lots of makeup, dressed in virginal white. Her picture was one of the handful I had handed over to Brandon after my earlier search.

There were also quite a few Katyas, Katya being one of those fairly common names in the Ukraine; I guess like Kathy or Katherine or Kate is here. You don’t stumble over one every time you turn around, but there are enough that you don’t have to wait too long between each, either. I printed out profiles for all the Katyas to give to Brandon. One or two of them might have been the girl from the water; blue-eyed blondes with sweet faces and too much makeup.

This particular website offered a way to search for available women by name—in case you saw one you liked one day, I guess, and you wanted to go back to her later—and I typed in the name Angela—as in Angie Burns.

Angela, it turns out, is not a common Russian name. Angelina is more common, or Aneta or Anichka. An Angela did come up; however, the website noted that she was no longer “available,” and so I couldn’t view her listing.
But we have others!
the website proudly proclaimed.

I glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen. It was getting close to nine o’clock. Not too early to call, even on a Sunday. I dialed.

“What’s up?” Josh said. “Isn’t Derek’s phone working?”

I wrinkled my brows. “As far as I know, Derek’s phone’s working just fine. Why?”

“Why are you calling me? Why aren’t you calling him?”

“Because I want to talk to you?” I suggested.

“Oh.” I pictured him blushing. “Sorry. I thought . . . Derek’s just up ahead. I thought maybe you couldn’t get hold of him, and so you tried me instead.”

“No,” I said, “I’m actually trying to get you.” Although if I’d realized he’d be with the search party up on the Appalachian Trail, I wouldn’t have bothered. “I need some computer help, but I guess if you’re up in the mountains, you’re not gonna be able to do that, are you?”

“Not until I get back. Unless it’s something simple that I can just walk you through. What do you need?”

I explained the situation. “The listing is blocked. Archived or something. I’d like to look at it.”

“Might take a little bit of hacking. Probably too complicated to do over the phone.” I could hear him breathe as he walked; the terrain must be steep. “Tell you what,” he continued after a moment’s thought. “Send Ricky an e-mail. This is his e-mail address.” He rattled it off; I scribbled it down. “Send him the link to the website and tell him what you want. He’s even better at this kind of thing than I am, and he’s home. He’ll access it for you. I’ll give him a call and tell him to look out for it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Are you sure he won’t mind?”

“Of course not. Ricky lives for this kind of thing. It won’t take him long to do.”

“What’s going on where you are?”

“Oh, you know. The usual. Walking straight up the sides of mountains. Derek’s fine, but I spend too much time sitting on my butt to be comfortable being this active.”

I smiled. “Any sign of them?”

“Nothing yet. We haven’t gone very far. Terrain is too steep to hurry.”

“I’ll let you go,” I said, “so you can concentrate on climbing. Be careful. Tell Derek to be careful, too.”

Josh promised he would. We both hung up; Josh to call Ricky, and me to e-mail him.

While I waited for Ricky to get back to me with what I assumed would be Angie’s Russian-bride profile, I did as I had told Derek I would and turned my hands to straightening and cleaning the house.

An old house—and Aunt Inga’s house is old; a Second Empire Victorian built in the 1870s, with ten-foot ceilings and old plaster walls—produces a lot of dust. I’m sorry to have to report that there was a layer on all my flat surfaces: tables, chairs, mantels, baseboards. I spent thirty minutes just walking around with a dust cloth, and that was before I started vacuuming.

In my opinion, a perfectly clean house is a sign of a wasted life. I even have a refrigerator magnet that says as much. I’ve found, however, that a time of doing mindless housework is a good time to think. And I had plenty to think about.

The connection between the Russian women, Gert Heyerdahl, and the Russian blue cat still bugged me, and so did Irina’s reaction to Gert’s caretaker that day we went to Shaw’s Supermarket.

A splotch of red on the floor by the love seat caught my attention for a second before I realized it wasn’t blood, just ketchup. Or maybe tomato sauce from the last time we’d eaten spaghetti in here. And there I was, right back on the case again.

True, that jar of tomato sauce might simply have slipped out of Irina’s hand and shattered on the floor the other day—sometimes they do that; the jar might have been slick or her hands cold—but what if she’d seen or heard something that had startled her?

I stuck the wand of the vacuum under the love seat and sent a mouse sailing across the floor. For a second, my heart jumped, until I realized it was just a cat toy, something that Jemmy or Inky must have left there. I picked it up—by the tail—and put it into the box beside the door.

Back to that night in Shaw’s Supermarket. Someone’s voice had rung out right then, hadn’t it? Just as Irina reached for the jar? And after it dropped, Irina had looked up, beyond my shoulder. What if she had seen Gert Heyerdahl’s caretaker behind me and recognized him? Maybe they’d been working together on smuggling these young Ukrainian women into the country. Irina would have needed help; she didn’t have access to a boat. And Gert’s caretaker had one; a nice, unremarkable, unnoticeable, oldish wooden boat, with a little cabin below deck. A cabin cruiser. A boat that people were probably used to seeing in the waters around Rowanberry Island.

So maybe Irina had connected with him and had arranged for him to bring the girls ashore there. And she had used our house to hold the girls until she could make arrangements to get them into Waterfield. If this was the case, it’d be no surprise that she’d be startled when she saw him, since he could probably identify her. And if there was ever a time when Irina wouldn’t want to be identified, it would be then, with a suddenly dead Russian girl in the hands of the police that day.

I stopped, vacuum still grinding away, my eyes fixed on nothing. Gosh, what if Derek and Wayne were right and she was a murderer? What if she’d decided she needed to kill the caretaker . . . ? Wipe out anyone who could connect her to the human trafficking before disappearing into the Appalachian Mountains with her sister and friend?

I hadn’t seen Gert’s caretaker since that night; for all I knew, he was lying somewhere with his head bashed in. Maybe Irina had tried to get to Angie, too, and that was why Ian kept a baseball bat behind the counter and a shotgun beside the door. Maybe that was why Angie was so terrified she wouldn’t leave the house or let anyone in. She was afraid that Irina was gunning for her.

The vacuum was making desperate choking sounds while sucking so hard on the old Persian that the rug wrinkled. I started moving again, slowly, while my mind scrambled along.

Maybe I was on the completely wrong track. I mean, it wasn’t like I
wanted
Irina to be guilty. Yesterday, I hadn’t even wanted to believe Derek when he suggested it. Maybe there was another explanation that made at least as much sense.

Assuming Irina wasn’t guilty, who was? If Irina’s reaction at the morgue was sincere, then she truly hadn’t known Katya, or Olga, or whoever our dead Russian girl was. If she’d truly been surprised and worried when she hadn’t been able to get in touch with Svetlana in Kiev, then Irina hadn’t had anything to do with bringing Svetlana here. And I thought Svetlana must be here. The three names on the piece of newspaper in our house, coupled with Irina’s contact information in the pocket of the dead girl, coupled with the fact that Svetlana hadn’t shown her face in the Ukraine for three months, at least . . .

So maybe someone else was bringing Russian girls into the country illegally. Maybe Irina had been smuggled in the same way, and that was why she had reacted the way she did in the supermarket. Maybe she had recognized the man I knew as Gert Heyerdahl’s caretaker as her own transporter. Maybe he was using the time while Gert was away each winter to smuggle Russian women onto Rowanberry Island and he was hiding them in our house and then, when we bought the place and went to work, in Gert’s house. Where the shutters were closed and he wouldn’t let me look around inside. The girl in the water—Katya or Olga—had shown up the day after I stopped by Gert’s house. Maybe the girls were held there against their will, waiting for someone to come and buy their freedom. Relatives, future husbands, or worse. Several articles I’d come across when I originally did my Internet search for Russian women had detailed how lovely young girls and women from East European and Southeast Asian countries were brought to Western Europe and Britain as prostitutes and sex slaves.

Maybe they had heard me outside that day and had realized that there were people nearby they could go to for help. Maybe they had waited until it was dark and had somehow managed to get one of them out of Gert’s house and over to ours, but of course we hadn’t been there, and instead of going back to Gert’s house, Katya (or Olga) had tried to swim to shore and find Irina. But she had underestimated the temperature of the water and the distance to shore, and she’d died instead, and we’d found her.

Maybe Irina had realized—from recognizing her sister’s handwriting on the scrap of paper—that Svetlana was somewhere in Maine being pimped. Maybe she had recognized the caretaker from Gert’s house in Shaw’s Supermarket. She had asked me who he was. Maybe she had gone to look for him. And then maybe she had killed him and had found Svetlana and whichever other woman wasn’t in the morgue right now, and then she had killed Agent Trent when the agent had stumbled onto the girls in Irina’s house, and then all three of them had lit out for the Appalachian Trail.

I turned off the vacuum and tried to call Derek to run my theory past him and, through him, past Wayne, but by now they must have moved out of range of cell towers, because none of my calls went through. I tried Derek’s phone, I tried Wayne’s, I tried Josh’s again.... They all refused to cooperate with me. In desperation, I called Kate, only to get her voice mail, as well.

“Thank you for calling the Waterfield Inn. I’m afraid I’m away from the phone and can’t take your call right now, but if you’re interested in making a reservation, please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

As I stood there, wondering who else I could call, finally my e-mail program dinged to let me know I had a message. It was from Ricky.

Here you go
, he wrote, followed by a link. I clicked it and found myself—not unexpectedly—looking at Angie Burns’s beautiful face. She looked ethereal, with her enormous, melting brown eyes, dainty face, and a cloud of long, dark curls falling over her shoulders. She wasn’t pregnant when this picture was taken but was dressed in a skimpy bikini. I made a mental checkmark on the air. Point to me: Seems like all these women were connected through this one website.

Can you tell me anything about the owner of the website?
I shot back to Ricky, quickly.

Gimme 5
, was the response I got.

While I waited for five minutes to pass, I went back to the listing for Angie, who turned out to be just twenty-two and from the small village of Nemyriv, whose chief claim to fame is being the birthplace of Nemiroff vodka. She liked moonlight, walking in the woods, and listening to music.

Ricky, bless him, hadn’t sent me only Angie’s unlocked page, but he had done something that allowed me to enter the rest of the website from there, as well, and to cruise to my heart’s content though all the pages, archived as well as active. And that was how I found Irina’s Russian-bride listing.

It was old, from four or five years ago, but Irina looked much the same as she did now. A few years younger, perhaps, but other than that, she hadn’t changed much in the past half-dozen years. Her hair was still long and dark, although in the picture, she had it unbound. These days, she keeps it pulled straight back from her face into a tight bun or braid, and she makes as little as possible out of herself. In this picture, she was wearing what I can only describe as slut-wear. The hot pink top was low cut and skin tight, and the leather miniskirt ended just below her butt, nowhere close to meeting up with the black, thigh-high boots. Her hair was down, falling over her shoulders, and her lips were dark red. There was so much makeup on her eyes that she couldn’t seem to keep her eyelids all the way up but looked ready for bed. Maybe that was the point.