The Stolen Ones (4 page)

IRINA MILOSOVICI CURLED UP
on the hard prison bunk and forced herself to lie still, staying as far away from the cell door as she could until the men disappeared, and the courthouse was quiet again.

There were men everywhere. Big men, leering men. Rough men. They’d wrenched her away from the dead man’s body. She’d felt their hands on her skin, through her ragged clothes, as they dragged her into their police car, and then out again and into the cell. She’d felt their eyes on her, read the hunger. They were tough, violent men, and she was nothing but prey, no matter the badges on their chests or the guns at their waists.

The men wanted her. She could tell from their eyes. They would come for her, too. It was only a matter of time.

Irina gathered that the Americans believed she’d killed the young man. She’d tried, frantically, to tell the first woman, the large woman from the diner, about Catalina. Tried to tell her the whole story, but her English wasn’t good enough. Glossy American magazines didn’t teach the right vocabulary words for situations like this. And then the men had arrived.

The men had replaced her clothing when they’d put her in the cell. They’d forced her to bathe, too, but Irina still felt the stink of the box, a maddening filth on her skin, in her hair, inside her body. She knew how awful she must appear, her long hair—her pride and joy—tangled and unkempt, her eyes sunken, her cheeks gaunt. A pitiful little vagabond in the wilderness.

Not that it mattered what she looked like. The men still consumed her with their eyes. And Catalina was gone. Still in the box probably. Or maybe with the thugs, enduring horrible things. Or maybe she was already dead.

>   >   >

IRINA HAD RUN AWAY
from her family once, as a child. Spent the night in the forest on the outskirts of her little town. She’d decided that she would disappear into the woods, carve out her own civilization, live free from her parents and her sister and the other girls at school, the girls who laughed at her dresses and unfashionable shoes, who tripped her and pulled her hair.

She hadn’t realized the woods would be so unpleasant. Brambles caught in her clothes. Branches raked her face. Very quickly, her shoes and stockings were soaked through with mud. Within an hour, she’d eaten the one sandwich that she’d brought. She’d imagined—foolishly—there would be berries to pick, and wild animals she could hunt. She’d imagined she would be queen of the forest, told herself she needed no one else.

Catalina had found her at sunset. Irina could still remember her little sister trampling through the woods, loud as a bear, calling her name and dragging her big suitcase behind her. At first, Irina had hid, desperate to be alone, to make a point to her parents, her classmates, the entire world that she didn’t need anybody.

She’d hid well. Catalina had passed her, wandering deeper into the forest, unfazed by the setting sun, the shadows, the temperature dropping. Irina had waited until Catalina was almost out of sight before calling to her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked when her sister had turned around and dragged that big suitcase back to the crook of the root where Irina had hidden herself. “Why are you following me?”

In response, Catalina tipped the suitcase over on the ground, fumbled with the catch. “I brought chocolate,” she said proudly. “Matches to start a fire. Magazines, in case we get bored.”

“I have matches,” Irina said. “Anyway, the wood is damp.”

“So we can burn the magazines.”

Irina stared at her sister. Felt frustration like an itch.
This is my story,
she wanted to say,
my tragic escape. Why do you always have to be such a tagalong?

Catalina seemed to read her mind. “I won’t stay if you don’t want me to,” she said, smiling wide. “I won’t tell them where you are, either.”

She stood, set out again in the direction of the village. Irina watched her go.

She felt lonely suddenly, stupid for running away. “Wait,” she called out. “Catalina.”

>   >   >

SHE’D MADE THEM
spend the night in the forest out of principle. It was a long night, cold and restless. Irina had huddled close to her sister, shivering and afraid, thinking of her parents, hating Catalina for finding her, and loving her all the same.

Catalina had always followed her. Stolen her clothing and makeup and glossy American magazines, tagged along with her friends to movies after school. Of course she’d followed Irina to the United States.

Irina had bragged to her little sister incessantly about Mike, about America, the places she would visit, the people she would meet. She had conjured a magnificent fantasy. Was it any wonder, then, that on the day she was to meet Mike, she’d found Catalina at her door?

“What are you doing?” she’d asked her sister, staring at her battered suitcase, her inexpert makeup. “What about school? Mom and Dad will kill you.”

Catalina had laughed and pushed past her into the dingy apartment. “It’s summertime,” she’d said. “They’ll forgive me. Soon as we become movie stars.”

Movie stars.
Irina pulled the thin blanket around herself and tried to find comfort on the hard mattress. She was tired, but she dared not close her eyes. Could not let her guard down. The men could come back for her at any minute.

And if she slept, she would only dream of Catalina, and the American men who would devour her like monsters.

STEVENS CALLED NANCY
from outside the Paul Bunyan Diner, five miles east of Walker. “I’m going to have to call in a tech team from Bemidji,” he told her. “Try and process what’s left of this crime scene, get an autopsy done. You might as well check into the motel and scrounge up some food for the kids.”

There was a pause, and Stevens braced himself. But Nancy surprised him. “This is about the girl, isn’t it?” she said. “And the sheriff’s deputy.”

“Well, yes.” Stevens scanned the muddy parking lot. The rain had come and gone quickly, but the lot was uneven and there were still puddles everywhere. He was standing at the front door of the diner, to save his shoes. “How’d you know?”

“Read about it in the paper,” Nancy said. “Heard about it all over town. Watched it on the local news in the restaurant at lunchtime. Everyone’s talking about it. Have they brought in a translator for that poor girl yet?”

“Working on it,” Stevens told her. “She’s not speaking, though, not at all anymore. They’re having kind of a hard time figuring out where she’s from.”

“Jesus.” Nancy muttered something, and Stevens could imagine his wife, a Legal Aid lawyer and perennial champion of the underdog, shaking her head in disgust. “At least make sure they’re feeding her, Kirk. That girl looks like she hasn’t eaten a solid meal in weeks.”

“Sheriff says she’s not eating,” Stevens said. “They’ll keep trying. Anyway, I’d better get back to it. I’ll hook back up with you all in a bit.”

“Make sure they treat that girl right, Kirk,” Nancy said.

“I promise they’ll treat her as right as any suspect in a murder investigation has ever been treated,” Stevens told her. “Tell the kids I say hi.”

He ended the call and pictured his wife on the other end of the phone, gathering material about the mystery girl. Wondered if the staff at the Cass County courthouse was ready for her. Then he stepped away from the diner and out into the mud. Behind him, Sheriff Watkins hurried to follow.

“Dale’s Suburban was over that way,” he said, pointing around the edge of the lot. “Guess Betty said it was kinda crowded when he came in.”

“Cleared out by the time he left, though?” Stevens asked.

Watkins smiled. “Dale was a talker, that’s for sure,” he said. “Figure a cup of coffee and a slice of pie’d take him on average two hours to consume, factoring in all the bullshitting.”

Stevens wandered over to where Friesen had parked his Suburban. Stared back across the mud to where Highway 200 paralleled the lot and, a hundred yards down, met Highway 371 headed south.

“Clear view of the lot from those windows,” Stevens said, pointing back at the diner. “Anyone inside would have seen. Anyone on the highway, too.”

“Sounded like Betty was in back,” Watkins said. “And I guess Dale decided to go and get shot the one time that highway’s been empty all summer.”

“Bad luck.”

“You said it.”

Stevens wandered along the edge of the parking lot to where the driveway turned in from the highway. “You said about here’s where the body was found?”

“That’s right,” Watkins said. “Flat on his back, right there.”

About eighty feet, give or take, from where the Suburban had been. Nowhere near the diner’s front door. Friesen would have had to walk out a ways. Something had caught his attention. “And you say your guys found shell casings in this muck?”

“Eight or nine,” Watkins said. “We figured there were more out here. Just didn’t have the manpower to dig up this whole mud pit and find them.”

Stevens could see his point. The lot was torn up with tire tracks and mud puddles; the place was a shoe swallower. “How many shells were in Deputy Friesen’s magazine?”

Watkins said, “If memory serves, Dale had a forty-cal Smith and Wesson, tricked out for a .357 Sig shell, fifteen-round magazine. Didn’t have a bullet left when we took the gun from the girl.”

“Sure,” Stevens said, thinking,
If the girl shot off a full mag, there’s at least six more casings in this mud.
Thinking,
Let’s start digging.

THE DRAGON WAS WAITING
in Andrei Volovoi’s home.

The loft was a mess. It reeked of marijuana and dirty laundry and burnt fish, and it was filled, as always, with idiots.

Volovoi felt the tension as soon as he walked in the door. A couple of foot soldiers sat on his leather couch, their women beside them. Normally, the soldiers would be playing video games, sharing a joint. The women would be bored as corpses. Today, though, the women sat as rigid as the soldiers. They weren’t speaking to one another. The TV played sports highlights on mute.

One of the soldiers gestured out at the balcony. “He’s out there.”

Shit.
Volovoi followed the man’s eyes to the windows. Couldn’t see anyone in the darkness outside. Knew, though, instinctively, who the soldier meant.

The Dragon was here.

>   >   >

ANDREI VOLOVOI
had not meant to go into business with the man his men knew only as the Dragon. He’d never intended to partner with anyone when he’d started importing women from the Old Country. He’d been a petty thug, a lowlife like the idiots on his couch, a new arrival in America tempted by music videos and flashy action movies. He’d struggled and starved for years before he’d hit upon his idea.

His idea was women. America was a country full of men accustomed to buying whatever they pleased, be it land, luxury cars, or political influence. Why should sex be any different? In Romania, Volovoi knew swarms of eager, starry-eyed young women, as desperate as he to make a mark on the New World. In America, he saw opportunity, an ocean of wealth and a dwindling morality.

He’d imagined the scheme would be easy to execute. A shipping container full of fresh product, all of them believing they were destined for happy, glamorous, American lives. They would arrive terrified, disoriented, helpless, and he would sell them to pimps and brothel owners at a terrific markup. Sex was a commodity. Young women were currency. Andrei Volovoi would import them and make himself rich.

It was not, as it turned out, that easy. No matter how dumb and impressionable the young women may have been, they still had eyes and ears. They still saw and heard and remembered, and sometimes they escaped. Sometimes, the police raided brothels. Sometimes, the women told their stories.

Volovoi had not been aware how close he was to disaster until the Dragon found him. Until he saw, in disturbing detail, how near the American authorities were to closing down his operation.

“You cannot simply ship boxes of women, Andrei,” the Dragon had told him, smiling his devil smile. “Sooner or later, somebody will notice. And if you haven’t taken the steps to protect yourself”—the Dragon mimed a knife to his throat—“you will not be in business very long.”

The Dragon brought capital, enough money to expand Volovoi’s operation tenfold. He also brought expertise, culled from years of ruthless, back-alley dealings and criminal enterprise.

The Dragon helped Volovoi hide his operation under layer upon layer of shell corporations and false fronts, behind byzantine trails of corporate ownership, anything to bypass the Americans and their laws. He was as good as his word. Volovoi’s basement operation soon blossomed into a flourishing business; revenue soared, and the authorities lost the trail. Volovoi bought a Cadillac, moved into a swank penthouse loft. And the women kept coming in their boxes.

But the Dragon’s knowledge didn’t come cheap. Even as the boxes multiplied and the customer base grew, Volovoi struggled to make a profit. The Dragon wanted royalties on his investment. Percentages on every dollar. And Volovoi, loath as he was to admit it, could hardly keep up.

Business was booming. Profits were not. Still, the Dragon wanted to be paid. And now that Bogdan Urzica had killed that police officer, Andrei Volovoi had one more worry to add to his list.

>   >   >

VOLOVOI PAUSED FOR A MOMENT
at the balcony door. Then he pushed the door open and stepped out into the night. It was warm again, humid. The day’s heat wafted up, as if from a furnace, from the city streets below, but still the figure at the railing wore an overcoat, long and black and punk rock. Volovoi had rarely seen the Dragon without the coat; it complemented his spiky hair and coarse, wiry black beard, and made the gangster look like some kind of heavy metal rock icon or something—assuming you didn’t notice the long, wicked knife at his belt.

The Dragon grinned as Volovoi approached, that devil smile, wide, all teeth and barely disguised menace. “Andrei,” he said. “Here you are, at last.”

Volovoi hesitated. Then he shook the gangster’s hand. “To what do I owe the honor?” he asked.

“You are behind on your payments.” The Dragon kept his tone conversational, but Volovoi felt the danger in the man’s voice, regardless, like the blade of a knife to his throat. “What’s going on, Andrei?”

Volovoi tried not to betray his fear. His business partner had not earned his mantle through acts of kindness and decency. No, he was named after the
balaur
, the fearsome dragon of Romanian mythology. He’d earned his nickname peddling weapons and women during the insurgencies in the Baltic states, where his appetite for blood and his relentless greed made a natural pairing.

“I apologize to you sincerely,” Volovoi told the gangster. “Our profits are down, but I have been trying to reduce overhead. Streamline the operation. You will get your late payment as soon as this latest shipment is fully delivered.”

“And the next payment, Andrei?” the Dragon said, his lips pursed. “When will
it
come?”

“I am ordering more women from our supplier,” Volovoi said. “My buyers are lined up and ready. Business is growing. It is only a matter of time before our profits catch up.”

The Dragon didn’t answer for a moment. Left Volovoi hanging, wondering, his eyes drifting down to the knife on the gangster’s belt.

“Your business isn’t the problem,” the Dragon said, finally. “It’s your buyers, Andrei. They’re too small for our operation.”

“So you have said,” Volovoi replied. “But as our reputation grows, so does our reach. We have nearly thirty clients ready to buy women from us. They are—”

“They are nobodies,” the Dragon said. “They are small-town operators. They are where, Andrei? Duluth, Minnesota. Chicago, Illinois. Pittsburgh. Saint Louis. Reno, Nevada. They are nowhere, Andrei, nowhere that matters.”

Volovoi followed the man’s eyes. “You still think we should expand to New York.”

“I don’t just think it, Andrei,” the Dragon said. “I have clients willing to pay ten times what your buyers pay for a woman now. They’re all stinking fucking rich, and they’re desperate to buy. We could drown ourselves in money if we tapped into the market.”

Volovoi said nothing. He’d had this conversation with the Dragon before, and he knew what the gangster’s wealthy friends expected for their money: not women, but girls, the younger the better. The Dragon’s Manhattan friends were perverts and pedophiles—wealthy, yes, but still the scum of the earth—and every time Volovoi considered expansion, he pictured his young nieces instead.

“I am not ready to expand to this market,” Volovoi said finally. “I will streamline my business. You will be paid.”

The Dragon shrugged. “Someday you’ll see things my way, Andrei,” he said, and smiled that unpleasant smile again. “At least I hope you do. I would hate to have to terminate our partnership over something so stupid.”

Volovoi was careful to keep his face expressionless, but he couldn’t chase the chill that coursed through his body. The Dragon was not known for his patience, or his mercy. If he terminated the partnership, he would terminate Volovoi with it.

Volovoi had resisted the Dragon’s Manhattan overtures thus far. He did not intend to give in.

All the same, he’d recently instructed his thugs to stockpile the youngest-looking girls from each new shipment of women, just in case. Just in case profits continued to suffer, and things became desperate.

Successful businessmen planned ahead. They made sure they had options. Volovoi tried to emulate that mentality. Still, he could see little fun in crawling further into bed with the Dragon. He hoped fervently that things wouldn’t become desperate.

He eyed the Dragon again, thought of Bogdan Urzica and the missing girl. Wondered how in the hell he was going to sleep at night now.