The Lost (20 page)

Yet Kit's family had long known that coupling salacious, outlandish, or even just eyebrow-raising bits of gossip with known information—then adding in a reporter's well-honed instinct—could unearth something even better than cold, hard facts. It provided possibility. Nuance.

Negative space.

And that's what Kit needed to unearth more regarding Sergei Kolyadenko and his merry mob of Russians. The attack on Marin wouldn't stop that. In fact, after her aunt was settled in her hospital room, and the strangers taking blood and tests and statements had all gone away, Marin made Kit promise to pursue this story through to the end. “Don't let them get away with this!” Marin snapped, glaring at the IV in her arm. “I'd go after them myself if these quacks would just cut me loose.”

“Auntie,” Kit said quietly. “They had a syringe filled with addictive poison taped to your forearm.”

Marin just stared, gaze stubborn and hard, hands knotting within Kit's own. They were fragile against Kit's, almost brittle, and not at all the way they appeared when flying across computer keys, or pointing and waving about in the air as she gave orders. Marin's personality was so forceful that she appeared physically stronger than she was, and Kit suddenly realized that despite the cancer, it was her aunt, and not Grif, whom she most often considered immortal.

Which made the attack all the more shocking. Marin simply couldn't,
shouldn't,
be touched.

“Dangerous shit,” Marin had agreed, nodding with vigor. Her hair was flattened on one side, giving her a tilted look, but the resolve remained. “That's why we must get it off our streets.”

Kit, refusing to be guilted into anything, shook her head.

“I'd die if anything had happened to you,” she said, heaving the plate of guilt back Marin's way.

“You thought you would die once before,” Marin pointed out. “And you didn't.”

Kit shook her head and pulled her hands away. “Let someone else do it. It's not worth it to me. You're all I have left.”

“It's always worth it, Katherine. And I'm not all you have left.” Marin reached out, surprising Kit with her speed, and again with that strength. “You still have
you.
You always have you.”

And how could Kit argue with that?

Besides, Kit also had three dead addicts, all teens, an aunt who'd been threatened because of Kit's investigation into those deaths, and a mystery woman who disguised herself as an over-aged Katy Perry while spreading disease and death all over the city.
Kit's
city. Finding this woman, she knew, was key.

So she pulled up the file photo on Yulyia Kolyadenko, and studied it. Fifty years from now, people would probably look back on this snapshot in the same way Kit viewed those from the midcentury years. They'd think this woman glamorous, classic, and chic. Who knew, she might even be those things . . . though she might be the opposite of them, too. Either way, Yulyia was stunning.

Yet there was a hardness there as well, Kit thought, studying the jawline, the lips, the eyes. Skepticism shellacked the clear blue gaze, a look that said she'd seen and survived more than her share of trouble. There was an almost brittle curve to her sharp mouth, like life was one big laugh and the joke, comrade, was on you. She was not kind, either, Kit decided. There was a lifelessness to her artifice that Kit had always considered a shortcoming in a woman. She was so perfectly groomed she might as well be a prop or a doll.

Question was, was she a weapon in some man's arsenal meant to control Vegas's drug-fueled underworld? Would she wear cheap leather? Multicolored wigs? Hang out with junkies in the city's dankest holes?

Kit's gaze settled on those thumbnail-size diamonds. “No way.”

And she didn't think the man the files described as proud and imperious, Sergei, would ask or allow it of his wife, either.

Another woman, then. Kit scrolled through the digital files, eyeing the slim Slavic faces of those with known ties to the Kolyadenkos'
bratva
. It would have to be someone close, trusted, and with an investment in seeing the Russians pick off Marielito progeny—or as close as they could get—one by one. Kit paused on a photo of a woman named Anna Vaganova, mentally imposing a brightly colored wig on her delicate features. Yet Kit also couldn't discount the power of coercion, and that turned the woman she was seeking back into the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Leaning back, Kit blew the bangs from her forehead, because that was the most likely answer. The
krokodil
itself was like a neon arrow flashing in the Russians' direction, so why not send a native English-speaker to do your dirty work?

Yet Jeannie Holmes said the woman who fed them the
krokodil
recipe had a clunky accent. “I have new drug to try. You weel love eet to death,” Kit attempted and winced.

Talk about clunky. As easy as an Eastern European accent was to identify, it was almost impossibly hard to mimic.

Kit scrolled back to Yulyia Kolyadenko's photo again. Maybe Jeannie had it backward? What if this mysterious woman wasn't trying to hide her Russian accent? What if she was trying to put it
on
?

Like the earrings, it wasn't something Grif or Marin—or someone willing to inject lighter fluid into their veins—would pay heed to, but Kit did. A woman who was particular about the things she put in and on her body could spot a fellow acolyte, regardless of time period, age, and ethnicity.

“I voodn't be caught ded een cheep hoop earring,” Kit tried again, channeling Yulyia . . . badly. Yet Kit smiled anyway, then switched to her own voice. “So what about a woman from your rival Cuban gang, then? Could that be the source of our mysterious Bella?”

Frustrated, Kit switched screens to locate her own private files, but caught her breath when an archived photo jumped out at her. The pain she'd managed to shunt aside all night ambushed her as Grif's face—the sprouting stubble and hard lines and probing stare that Kit loved so much—gazed back at her in black-and-white . . . though, of course, he wasn't really looking at her at all.

At the time this photo was taken, Kit didn't even exist.

But the woman his arm was draped loosely around had not only existed, she'd been his entire life. The same hand cupping that slim waist sported a thin gold wedding band, and there was an answering diamond on her finger, a chip of a thing that, though not large, winked in the photographer's flash like a taunt. Kit wondered why Grif's wedding band never reappeared on his body at four
A.M
., same as everything else he'd died in. Obvious answer? He hadn't been wearing it when he died, though he swore he had. So had someone removed it just before that? Had he simply forgotten to don it earlier?

Kit took her gaze off the diamond, and moved it up to the woman's open, direct stare.

The monochrome tones did nothing to diminish Evelyn Shaw's peaches-and-cream complexion, and cheekbones as high as the Rockies sat beneath eyes that shone with amusement and mystery. Her clothing was business casual for the day—a tidy, if sexier, Jackie Kennedy—though Kit knew Evelyn Shaw hadn't had a job—at least not at the time this photo was taken, just before her and Grif's deaths. This was obviously a special occasion, and Kit's gaze briefly dropped to the accompanying tagline.

Yes, it was the week Grif had brought little Mary Margaret DiMartino back home to her family. Her kingpin uncle, Sal, was in the foreground with arms splayed wide, and he was the real focus of the photo, while Grif vainly attempted to skirt the press's view. Kit's eyes shifted again to Evie.

She wasn't shying away from anything. She was in a lean-legged stride halfway between both men, head tilted toward the blazing-hot photographer's bulb. Unlike Grif, his wife clearly relished having her photo taken, and she wore the same knowing, closed-mouth smile in every photo. Kit frowned, wondering exactly what Evie knew. That Grif loved her? That he always would?

That Kit had to rival her for his love?

“You're obsessing,” Kit muttered, reminding herself to be careful. She had to keep her feelings, especially regarding this woman, under control. If there was any danger of slipping into negativity, this old love epitomizing everything Kit had ever wanted—the era, the lean looks, the man—would be the trigger.

Kit could easily see herself losing control then, burning up inside, just like Jeannie, and without ever touching an invasive drug.

Learn her secrets
.

Fleur's voice visited Kit in memory.

I bet if you look close enough, you'll find she wasn't so damned perfect.

What the hell, Kit thought, copying and pasting the photo of Grif and Evelyn into a new file. Ignoring this dead, now near-mythic woman hadn't worked. Grif couldn't move on while fixated on the past, so Kit began compiling an action list, beginning with calling on Mary Margaret again to see if she might be up for a private visit with Kit. She'd find out for herself just what hold Evelyn Shaw had over Grif. What magic she possessed from beyond the grave that even Kit—flesh and blood and
here
—couldn't seem to break through.

“And then what?” Kit muttered, fingers falling still over the keys.

“Then you ruin his every loving memory of her . . . just for fun.”

Kit's hands fell still, and she looked up to find a fallen angel sitting up in her aunt's hospital bed, wearing Marin's flesh along with its own knowing smile, and watching her with a darkly glittering gaze.

Chapter Eighteen

Y
ulyia Kolyadenko had a serious shopping habit. This hadn't been referenced in Grif's gathered data. Ditto the almost disturbing affection for something that looked like a cross between a gerbil and a rat, yet barked like a dog. She carried the shivering, useless thing for three long hours, never allowing its painted pink toes and sweater-clad underbelly to touch the ground. Grif knew this because he'd trailed her and two bodyguards as they wound their way through a cavernous place that reminded him of one of the lower levels of hell. The indoor monstrosity was serpentine, brightly lit, loud, and hosted a population of screeching young girls. It was called a mall.

Dodging cart vendors who inexplicably kept trying to put lotion on his hands, and others who wanted him to buy T-shirts stamped with the names of places he'd never been, he watched Mrs. Kolyadenko enter stores with a brisk, confident gait, yank clothing and belts and jewelry and shoes from the racks, purchase most without trying them on—thank God—then hand the packages over to the men flanking her, essentially turning them into beefy bellmen. Grif started to believe his hunch was wrong—how could a woman so obsessed with red-soled shoes run an entire network of foreign mobsters?—and he'd just decided to abandon her and her pampered fur ball when she slipped through a pair of discreetly placed side doors, and into a waiting stretch limo. Pausing halfway into the car, she turned slightly, then marched back through the porte cochere and directly up to Grif.

“You are following me.” Her voice was husky and low, her eyes cerulean and sharp.

Grif glanced down at the fur ball, spotting eyeballs and a pink tongue. It was definitely a dog. “Yes.”

“I don't like it when strange men follow me.”

“I'm not that strange,” Grif replied.

Yulyia remained still and cold, like a Siberian ice sculpture.

“Besides,” he added, flicking his gaze at each of the flanking bodyguards, letting them know he saw them. “I'm a detective.”

She sneered. “First a cop. Now detective. I am starting to get paranoid, I think.”

“A cop?”

“Yes. This morning. He requested a meeting with my husband.” She lifted her chin. “He got me instead.”

Disquiet settled in Grif's stomach like a stone, weighing him down at the center. “Detective Carlisle?”

“You know him?”

Grif inclined his head.

“Of course you do.” Yulyia flipped her hair, and her voice turned thin, honed. “All of you
followers
know each other.”

“I'd like to talk to you, Mrs. Kolyadenko. If you have a few minutes.”

Yulyia just turned and walked away. “If you're trying to use me to get to my husband, Mr. . . . ?”

“Shaw,” Grif said, keeping stride. “Griffin Shaw.”

Yulyia paused as before, one heel perched inside the waiting limo, right arm thrown over the open door. “Mr. Shaw. My husband has not been well and he is getting tired of being harassed.” She drummed her long red nails on the window. “I'm getting tired of it.”

Tired? Grif mused. Because female or not, given the look in her cold blue eyes, he'd have said “furious.”

“You're the boss,” he replied lightly, tucking his hands into his pockets, but Yulyia's head whipped up, gem-like eyes narrowing. She held up a hand before her bodyguard could close her door, and Grif let a closed-mouthed smile grow on his face.

“Get in,” she told him, and the bodyguards headed his way.

Grif had never been in a limousine before, and took a moment to study the interior—the creamy leather, the thick carpeting, the bar, and the glossy woodwork—but ignored the bodyguard currently trying to drill holes through Grif's head with his eyes alone. Instead, Grif shifted to face the Viper and the real danger.

“Now,” she said, as the limo pulled smoothly from the curb. “What could you possibly want from me?”

“I'd like to know why your
bratva
attacked a woman in a parking lot, and left her bloody and terrorized with a drug-filled syringe attached to her arm.”

Yulyia laughed and folded her hands over her knee. “Why would I do that? Who is this woman?”

“Why would
you
do that?” Grif asked.

“We,” she corrected so quickly the word emerged like buckshot.

“We?” Grif echoed, widening his smile.

Yulyia, though, was no longer amused. “I mean Sergei, of course.”

“Of course.”

Hands cradling her small dog, Yulyia began petting it in quick strokes. “You should not look at me in such a way, Mr. Shaw. Bare so many teeth, and someone might think you came here to bite.”

Placing his elbows on his knees, Grif leaned so close to Yulyia that she would need only to extend her index finger to touch him. Yet, her knuckles were white, bones showing as her hands fell still, and after a moment her little dog squealed. With a jerk, she relaxed her hold, and looked away.

Grif did not. “Why was the editor of the
Las Vegas Tribune
left lying in a parking lot with
krokodil
kissing her veins?”

Surprise widened Yulyia's deep-set gaze, but she instantly blinked it away. Marin's attack hadn't hit the wires yet, so of course she wouldn't know about it . . . unless she was a very good actress. By the time Grif had completed that thought, Yulyia was stroking her rat-dog again, fully recovered. “Mr. Shaw,” she said, slanting her legs to one side and nestling into the plush leather. “Do I really look like a woman who deals drugs?”

“I don't care about the drugs, Kolyadenko,” he snapped back, using her surname, same as he would a man. “I care about the woman.”

For a moment Yulyia looked like the Viper that Ray had likened her to—body taut, head tilted, blood all but vibrating beneath her skin. Yet she didn't strike. Even the oversize rat in her lap remained still. Grif wondered what he'd said that'd stunted her aggressiveness.

“The Rusanovka
bratva,
” he went on when she still said nothing, “which your husband is known to head, is infamous for its drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and money laundering.”

“Yes, I've heard that, too.” A deep frown appeared on Yulyia's forehead. It did nothing to detract from her beauty. “But, again, I ask you. Do I look like a woman who deals drugs?”

She looked sleek and sexy to his mortal eyes, and his celestial ones didn't detect even a tinge of fatalistic plasma, and if she'd ever done drugs, even long ago, it would be there. Staring at the crystalline etheric outline, Grif had to wonder if she'd ever had a cold. She was a blank canvas . . . minus the canvas. There was simply nothing there. Grif finally answered, “No.”

“That's right,” she said, tossing that thick, golden mane, and settling her dog next to her. Even with all the fur obscuring its features, the little animal looked relieved. “And has anyone been able to prove that the Kolyadenkos are anything but good American citizens?”

“Not that I know of.” Grif shrugged.

“Exactly. People are jealous. People are stupid. And people make up things that they can't prove.
Krokodil,
” she scoffed, infusing the sole word with Slavic disdain. “I'd have to be stupid to bring that trash into this country.”

Grif didn't point out that she'd never asked what
krokodil
was in the first place. “And who would like to make you look stupid?”

Eyes narrowed, she leaned so close her breath shocked him into a shiver. “What is your angle, Mr. Shaw?”

“No angle,” he answered shortly. “Just wondering about your enemies. It's only a theory, but maybe other outfits have designs on your drug territory.”

“I told you. I don't do—”

“Maybe,” Grif went on, “Marco Baptista.”

The hitch was slight, but Grif caught it, and Yulyia knew it. She lifted her chin and ran the tip of her tongue across her bottom lip. The move was both thoughtful and provocative. Grif thought he heard the bodyguard next to him swallow hard.

“That Cuban,” she finally spat. “That nothing of a man who likes to hit women.”

The description married with Grif's gut instinct about the man. “He beats women?”

“How do you think his own grandmother lost all her teeth?” Yulyia scoffed, though Grif couldn't tell if the disdain was for Baptista or his grandmother.

Grif trained his gaze on her placid face and not the long, bare legs in front of him. “He doesn't seem to be a big fan of the fairer sex, does he?”

“Unlike you?” she retorted, scorn slithering through her words.

No, Grif decided, he wasn't wrong about her. Although, locked in the back of a speeding vehicle with that look, along with an armed man next to him, Grif wasn't feeling very self-congratulatory about it. “Unlike me.”

“Pull over,” Yulyia called to the driver, then addressed the man across from Grif. “Get out.”

His gaze flicked to Grif, but he left the car as soon as it came to a halt, without comment or question. Yulyia pressed a button, raising the privacy shield between her and the driver, saying only one word before he disappeared. “Drive.”

Grif thought better about waving to the meathead outside the car. The tinted glass would keep him from seeing it anyway, and the man already had his head down as he trudged along the gravel next to the asphalt, the rocky terrain a better choice than the still blazing street.

“What is your interest in Marco Baptista?” Yulyia asked, dropping her head against her soft leather headrest and observing him through a half-lidded gaze.

Grif held out his hands, palms up. “Two of the kids using
krokodil
died in his neighborhood.”

“Then maybe you should be questioning him.”

“I have.”

“Good. Because he's known for dealing trash. In fact, he has a lot in common with the drug's namesake. He lurks in the murkiest of places. He feeds on other living beings. He lives like an animal.”

Grif said, “And how would a woman like you know that?”

“And what kind of woman do you think I am, Mr. Shaw?” She uncrossed her legs at the ankle, lifting the right, draping it over her other knee.

“I think you're calculated. And driven,” he answered immediately. “I think you once stood for so many hours in a breadline that you swore you'd never go hungry again,” he said, paraphrasing a line from the most famous movie of his childhood. “I think you'd do anything to keep from doing so again.”

Yulyia stared at him so long that the road ribboning beneath their tires took on a musical quality as they slid back onto the freeway, as if it could go on forever, and so could a breadline, and so could a stare.

“What did you mean earlier?” he was surprised to find himself asking. “When you called me a follower?”

“Just what I said. If you had any initiative at all, you wouldn't be taking the orders, Mr. Shaw. You would be giving them. Then again, followers have their place in the world, too. We can't all give orders.”

“Like you?” he asked.

“I like to be heard, if that's what you mean. But that's not what makes me different,” she added, preventing him from having to ask. “I have a gift for seeing a situation both as it is and as it could be. Most people merely long for the world to be as they wish it.”

“You're not a dreamer?”

“Dreamers are easily deceived.”

“So you're a realist?”

“I am . . . settled.”

Some guys spend their entire lives searching for a place to settle . . .

Grif frowned, Sarge's words hitting him as hard as the paper had the morning the Pure angel appeared in a paperboy's flesh. Was this what he'd meant? That Grif had more in common with someone who was Lost, like Jeap, than the coolly self-possessed woman who sat across from him now? He didn't mind the contrast with Yulyia, of course, but he didn't think that made him a follower.

Yulyia had been intensely quiet during Grif's musings, but she tilted her head to the right now, interrupting his thoughts. “I like your hat. May I see it?”

Grif shrugged, then handed over the hat Kit had given him. Yulyia spotted the button to activate the navigation feature immediately, and Grif quickly explained what it was. He didn't want her dropping her pretty pooch and reaching for the lady's pistol she no doubt had stored back here. The bodyguard might be gone, but the danger was not. “It's just a tool to find my way around the city. Like an electronic compass.”

Turning the hat in her hand, she still looked suspicious. “Why do you need electronic compass in hat?”

“I get lost easy.” Grif shrugged, his genuine embarrassment causing Yulyia to laugh, possibly her first genuine emotion during the day. Smiling, she placed the hat atop her head.

“Why do you do it?” Grif asked her as she adjusted the fedora into a fashionable tilt.

“Do what?”

“Hide behind a man.” Which would disappoint Kit. It put Yulyia firmly out of the running for Bella. “We both know your husband isn't the one running the
bratva
. So why pretend it's him?”

Yulyia propped an arm against the door, tucking the long red fingernails beneath her chin as she stared out the window. “I am Russian, Mr. Shaw. In my country, women are traditionally subservient to men. Like most men who came of age in Soviet society, my Sergei still lives in past. Such men are obsessed with honoring their fathers and family name, and doing something that will make those old, dead men proud. Yet I am woman.”

“I noticed,” Grif said.

“And as woman I am charged with looking forward. I must create my own future.”

“Only women do that?”

“Women know, as most men can't, that we must choose fate before it is chosen for us.” Outside, the city passed by with frightful speed. Yulyia licked her bottom lip again, this time more slowly. “You are considering my words. That is also novel for a man.”