Altar of Bones (18 page)

And now she’d beaten them here, thank God, but she had to hurry.

Wind drove the rain into her face as she raced up the steps of the huge granite-and-glass house. But the sight of the tall, ebony double doors, with their sterling-silver handles, stopped her cold.

Thirteen years ago, on the day of her high school graduation, she had walked through those doors and out of her old life with nothing but a duffel bag full of clothes. She swore to herself she would never come back, but she should have known better. You can escape some of your past, but not all of it.

Zoe drew in a deep breath, lifted her head, and pressed the bell. Less than five seconds later it was opened by a man with no neck and hands the size of turkey platters. She shoved past him, probably not smart since she could see he sported a gun in a shoulder holster under his loosely cut black jacket.

“I’m her daughter,” Zoe said as he grabbed her arm. “So if you’re fond of your hands, you’d better take them off of me.”

The man had a weathered face, weary eyes, and fast reflexes. He immediately released her.

“Where is she?” What if she wasn’t here? Please, God, she had to get to her mother before the cops, she—

“The
pakhan
,” he said, “is up in the library.”

Zoe wasn’t about to get in the coffin-size elevator. She ran up all four flights of the sweeping limestone stairs, but at the top another door stopped her.

This one was made of solid, shining mahogany, and on the other side of it was Anna Larina’s sanctuary. Thirteen years since she’d been inside this house, and two more since she was inside that room. Not since a summer’s day when she was sixteen, the day her father had gone in there and sat down at her mother’s desk, a giant slab of black marble. Sat down, put a gun under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

Zoe had been the only one in the house that day, the only one to hear the shot. The one who had seen the blood soaking into the ivory
silk Persian sarouk and teak floor, who’d seen the splattered bits of gore. The one who’d had to look into was left of her father’s face.

Z
OE FLUNG THE
door open with such force it banged against the wall.

Her mother looked up from a laptop computer screen, while her right hand went under the black marble desk to where she kept a Glock 22 on a spring-loaded shelf. Anna Larina Dmitroff had not connived and fought and murdered her way to become the boss of a Russian
mafiya
family by being careless.

“Zoe,”
she said, and Zoe was surprised to see real shock and concern flash across her mother’s face. “Why are you here? Has something happened?”

“Why? Would you care if something had?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I would care.” Anna Larina, who’d half stood up, settled once more behind the massive marble desk. “You’re looking a bit harried and damp, but otherwise well. All grownup,” she said, assessing her daughter now with cool, indifferent eyes. “But, since in all these years I haven’t received so much as a Christmas card from you, I could only assume something dire has happened to bring you here now.”

Zoe had to set her teeth to keep from screaming. God, how she’d always hated that light, dry voice that could mock and cut and scar so easily. Thirteen years and nothing had changed. One look at that beautiful but soulless face and all the old bad feelings came rushing back, mixing in her blood like poison.

She needed to pull herself together, to push her emotions down deep. She knew from bitter experience that you couldn’t show so much as a flicker of feeling to Anna Larina, show her anything like love or hate or fear, or even anger, because feelings opened you up and then she would eviscerate you. Quickly and cleanly.

Zoe walked toward the great black marble slab of a desk slowly, to give herself time. The room was beautiful but cold, like the woman who occupied it. Shaped like a triangle, it jutted out into the sky like a ship’s prow, overlooking the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Against the
one wall not given over to the floor-to-ceiling windows stood expensive Scandinavian bookcases. They held some books, but were mostly filled with the finest pieces of her mother’s antique Russian icon collection. When Zoe was a little girl, it had hurt so much to think these icons mattered more to her mother than she did.

She set the crime-scene photo she’d filched from Mackey carefully down onto her mother’s desk. “Look at this and tell me what you see.”

Anna Larina laid both hands flat on either side of the photograph and looked down. She studied it in silence, while Zoe studied her. Absolutely no hint of recognition, no hint of shock, no hint of anything.

She looked up, met Zoe’s eyes full on. “I see some random old woman who looks dead. Did you expect me to know who she is?”

“Oh, please. Are you really going to try to pretend that you don’t recognize your own mother?”

It was a deliberate slap, a hard one. Her mother’s head jerked as she stared back down at the death photo. Her hands, still lying flat, turned white at the knuckles. But beyond that small reaction it was still impossible to tell what she was thinking, what she was feeling.

Zoe knew her mother could order one of her enforcers, her
vors
, to whack someone as easily as she could order up a pot of tea, but she didn’t believe her mother was responsible for this if for no other reason than it was sloppy, and Anna Larina Dmitroff was never sloppy. Zoe had wanted to rattle her, though, and she had.

She picked up the silver-framed picture on the desk—an enlarged version of the one in the glassine envelope Mackey had shown her—and laid it faceup next to the crime-scene photo. “Do you see the resemblance now? She’s got our eyes. Or rather we have hers.”

“I don’t—” Anna Larina cut herself off. Zoe saw her mother swallow convulsively but she didn’t say anything more.

“You don’t what—believe it? Because she died in a car accident when you were eleven? Drove off a cliff and into the ocean in bad weather and left you to grow up in an orphanage. Did you actually see her buried, Mother? Or did you just make the whole thing up to keep me away from her?”

Anna Larina seemed not to have heard her. “She is so old here. So
old.” She lightly touched the face of the woman in the crime-scene photograph with the tips of her fingers. “All these years I’ve seen her in my mind the way she was then. Young and beautiful, so full of life and laughter. She had the sweetest laugh. I always thought of rose petals when she laughed because of how the sound of it would curl up on the edges. Just like rose petals do.”

Her voice trailed off and her mouth softened a little. “Odd how I just remembered that, and now she’s dead.”

“Not just dead, Mother. Murdered. Or don’t you know a crime-scene picture when you see one?”

Anna Larina pushed the photograph away from her. “Yes, of course I do.”

She got up from her desk and went to close the door. The click of the latch as it swung shut seemed loud in the taut silence.

She stared at Zoe, letting the silence drag, then she said, “I thought she was dead. I never lied to you to keep you away from her. That’s ridiculous. She didn’t want me. Why in hell would she want you?”

The words were spoken in that cool, emotionless voice, but Zoe had seen a dark emotion flare in her mother’s eyes. Hurt, yes, but something more. Guilt? Fury?

Zoe looked at this woman who was her mother. The sculpted cheekbones and high forehead, smooth as a polished seashell. The gray eyes, wide-spaced and tilted at the corners. Anna Larina’s age had always been a closely guarded secret, but she had to be almost sixty by now. Yet she seemed not to have aged a day in all these years.
I could be looking in a mirror
, Zoe thought, and the horror of it twisted in her like a knife in the guts.

If she’d inherited her mother’s face, had she also inherited her black soul?

Anna Larina’s full mouth curved into a wry smile. “What are you looking for, Zoe? The mark of Satan on my brow? Proof that we aren’t anything alike, after all? That’s what you’ve always been afraid of, isn’t it? It’s why you ran away, why you’re on that battered-women’s crusade of yours. You’re trying to buy your salvation by atoning for my sins.”

Zoe felt a sharp pain in her arm. She looked down and saw her fist
was clenched in a tight knot. She uncurled her fingers, made herself breathe. “Don’t flatter yourself. Right now all I want to know is how the woman who gave you birth ended up homeless, living with the winos and drug addicts in Golden Gate Park.”

“I don’t—Golden Gate Park?” Anna Larina waved a hand at the photograph on the desk. “Is that where she …”

“Was murdered? Yes. It happened in front of the Conservatory of Flowers. She was stabbed with a knife. The cops didn’t know who she was at first—”

“And yet they came hotfooting it right to you with their crime-scene photos? So either they’re psychic, or you’re not telling me everything.”

God, the woman is quick
, Zoe thought. She needed to remember that. She’d learned in the martial arts not to let the enemy get inside your moves or inside your head; she needed to remember that Anna Larina was her enemy. Her mother was her enemy, and in her heart of hearts, since she was the smallest child, she’d always known that. She just didn’t know
why
.

“Before someone rammed a knife up to the hilt in her chest,” Zoe said, deliberately making her words blunt, shocking, “your mother managed to swallow a piece of paper. Or half swallow it. It had my name and address on it.”

Another cold smile curled Anna Larina’s mouth. “Good Lord, how deliciously mysterious of the old woman. She knew where you were, yet she couldn’t manage to find the time in between panhandling and urinating in doorways to drop by to see you before she was stabbed? No? Well, what a touching scene we all were spared.”

“For God’s sake, Mother.”

“‘For God’s sake, Mother,’ “Anna Larina mimicked. “What do you want from me, Zoe? Tears? I used mine up a long time ago.”

Zoe uncurled her fist again, drew in another deep breath. “I thought maybe she’d been here to see you. Because how else would she have known about me?”

Again Zoe saw something flicker deep in Anna Larina’s eyes.
She knows something
, Zoe thought.
She knows what brought her mother here
.

After a moment, Anna Larina shrugged and said, “It’s not like either of us has been hiding out in the witness protection program. A three-minute search on Google would’ve done the trick.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and went to look out the wall of glass, although there was nothing to see today, no bridge or bay, just clouds and rain. “So are we done here now, Zoe?”

“No, we are not done, Mother. Not even close. Let’s say for the moment I believe you. That this is all such a big surprise to you. Was any of that sappy orphanage story you fed me over the years the truth?”

“Oh,
God
,” Anna Larina said in a burst of sudden and genuine exasperation. “What a stubborn little bitch you are, and, yes, of course you got that particular attribute from me. Very well. I’ll allow you five more minutes to probe away at the festering childhood wounds you imagine I have, if only you will promise to leave me in peace afterward.”

Anna Larina took a package of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of the pocket of her black cashmere pants and lit up. She watched the lighter’s flame a moment, before she snapped it closed.

“The orphanage,” Zoe said. “Was any of that real?”

“Oh, it was real all right. A big, ugly brownstone run by the Sisters of Charity in a run-down part of Columbus, Ohio. There were even bars on the windows, although I suspect they were more to keep the neighborhood riffraff out then us little Orphan Annies in. It wasn’t all gruel and daily beatings, but it was still pretty grim. Only my mother was very much alive when she dumped me off there. Me and one small suitcase of clothes and a cardboard box with a few of my treasures.”

“But why Ohio, of all places, when you were living in L.A.? And, besides, no woman would just up and abandon her child. She must have had a reason.”

“You surprise me, Zoe. Given whose daughter you are and what you do for a living, you still have a remarkably rosy view of human nature.”

“But you must have some inkling of why she did it. If not then, then now, looking back on it.”

Anna Larina tilted her head back and blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. “Must I?”

Zoe picked up the silver-framed photograph and returned it to its
place on the desk. Anna Larina had cared enough to keep it where she could see it every day. The woman in front of the studio gates with her arm wrapped around her little girl’s shoulders certainly looked happy, full of life. But this had been taken a year before the orphanage, if Anna Larina was to be believed.

“You told me she worked for Fox as a cinematographer—”

“More like a cameraman’s gofer, I think. Although …” Anna Larina trailed off, staring at the end of her cigarette, as if she was really trying to remember now.

“I think the studio was finally putting her to work behind the camera there at the end. I remember she’d already done some actual filming for one picture, and she was all excited because they were about ready to go into production on another. I was worried because it was coming up on my birthday—I was going to be nine—and I was afraid she’d get so wrapped up with her new job that when the big day arrived, she wouldn’t remember it. But then we ran off before that could happen, just took off in the middle of the night, or so it seemed to me. She didn’t even bother to leave a note for Mike.”