Altar of Bones (20 page)

Anna Larina almost smiled. “This is America, Sergei. Here you don’t ‘get rid’ of the cops by bonking them over the head and dumping them in the river, much as you might be tempted. For one thing, they’ll only come back at you with a blizzard of warrants and subpoenas. Besides, it’s nothing important, so I may as well talk to them and get it over with.”

He nodded and turned to go, but she stopped him. “Sergei?”

He turned back, and she looked at his face, into his hard eyes. He was from the gutter, a brute, but he’d been with her for over a year now and she was beginning to realize that he had far more cunning than her other
vors
, whose usefulness tended to stop at the end of their fists.

“Do you know how I came to be the
pakhan
?”

If he was surprised by her question, he didn’t show it. “The one with the most brains and balls always ends up as the
pakhan
. Eventually. But I did ask around when I first got here. Who wouldn’t?”

“And what were you told?”

She thought he nearly smiled. “I was told your husband was a connected member of the Dmitroff outfit down in L.A., the boss’s favorite nephew and would-be heir apparent if he ever got his shit together, while you were a high-priced call girl working the star circuit in Hollywood.

He paid you a thousand bucks to spend the night with him and ended up on his knees the next morning, proposing marriage with a two-carat diamond ring.”

“It wasn’t the next morning, it was a week later, and it was only a one-carat ring. He’d just been dumped, you see, and was on the rebound. Go on.”

He looked at the big honker diamond she now wore on her left hand and raised his eyebrows, and she laughed. “I upgraded. Go on, Sergei.”

He shrugged. “It turned out one of the loan sharks who worked for your husband was skimming off the top, and you spotted it right off soon as you took a look at the books. The next thing anybody knew the shark was found dumped in an alley, every bone in his body broken, and you’d taken over the loans and numbers business from your husband. After that you branched out into hookers and heroin, moved up here to San Francisco, and started encroaching on the Dmitroff family’s northern territory. Only you took it high-tech, with computer-stock and banking scams, and by the time they figured it out, they were too late.”

She said nothing to that, but instead made him stand there while she took her time lighting up another cigarette. And he did stand there, big and unmoving, so self-contained she couldn’t even see him breathing.

“Well,” she finally said, on an exhale of smoke, “you left out most of the blood and gore, but essentially you got it right. And do you know why I had you repeat that little story?”

This time he did smile. “You got a job you want me to do, something delicate, and you want me to understand what could happen to me if I fuck it up.”

The smile she gave back at him was calculatedly mean enough to make his bowels water. “I don’t just want you to understand it, Sergei Vilensky, I want you to
know
it. Know it in your gut—how far I’ve come, and how far I’m willing to go.”

She paused, but he said nothing, his face showed nothing, and she thought she could trust him. At least as far as she intended to trust him.

“Because the ‘delicate job,’ as you put it, has to do with my daughter.”

Z
OE LOOKED
down at the white plastic body bag that lay on a stainless steel gurney in the morgue. Too small surely to hold even the shrunken remains of an old homeless woman.

“Do it,” she said.

Christopher Jenkins, the assistant medical examiner, studied her face, a worried look on his own. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go through with this back in the viewing room, by video?”

“I want to see her. I need to see her, Chris.”

“I don’t know …,” he said, although he was already reaching for the bag’s zipper, “I could catch all kinds of grief for breaking protocol, even though most of the guys around here know you.” He pulled the zipper open just far enough to expose the head.

Zoe had steeled herself, yet she still wasn’t prepared for the gut punch of seeing her grandmother like this.

Katya Orlova’s face was like gray putty, the bones sunken, nothing left of the pretty young woman in the silver-framed photograph. But in her gut and in her heart, Zoe knew her. This was the woman who’d given her own mother life. Zoe had never realized before how primal were the ties of blood. She felt something for this woman. Not love—that was both too deep and too shallow a word. A bond, perhaps. A blood bond.

Yet this was also the woman who’d dropped her daughter off at an orphanage and disappeared. For forty-nine years. What loving mother could do such a thing? Had she been running even back then from whatever had finally killed her?

“Why?”

Zoe hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud until Jenkins said, “We’ll get the bastard, Zoe. It’s early yet.”

Zoe stepped back and turned away from the body. The morgue was supposed to have an excellent ventilation system, but she would swear the smell of death hung in the air like an oily cloud.

“It might help to know …,” Chris Jenkins said, as he zipped up the body bag. “I don’t think she was homeless for long. She had some fairly expensive dental work done recently, and she didn’t have lice or any of the other parasites you can’t help but pick up living on the streets. Also, if she hadn’t been murdered, she would only have lived another month or so at the most. She was riddled with cancer.”

Her grandmother had been dying of cancer? Was that why she was here? Zoe wondered. Had finding out that she was about to die driven her to reach out to the family she’d abandoned so long ago? Except she hadn’t reached out.
Surely, she meant to, though. She had a piece of paper with my name and address on it
. A piece of paper she’d tried to swallow right before she died. To keep it from her killer? But why?

And whatever the reason, did it go all the way back to that young woman in the photograph? Had the seeds of her death been sown that long ago?

“Inspector Mackey said the murder weapon had been left in the body,” Zoe said. “Can I see it?”

Jenkins hesitated a moment, then shrugged. “It’s in the lab.”

He led the way, holding open the door for her. “Did anyone ask you yet about giving us a DNA sample? It would give us a pretty definitive answer on whether the vi—the woman is your grandmother.”

“Whatever I can do to help.”

The cops would need the DNA test to compile their case, but she didn’t. She knew the murdered woman in the body bag was her grandmother. Katya Orlova.

The blood bond.

“W
E DUSTED THE
weapon for prints,” Chris Jenkins said, as he snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Nothing. Not even a smudge. There were fibers,
but they were all consistent with her clothing. Nothing extraneous.”

He opened a manila envelope and upended it so the knife slid hilt first into his hand. He held it out, twisting his wrist back and forth like Darth Vader wielding a light saber. The dull gray blade was long, double-edged, with a hooked point.

“You don’t run across a knife like this everyday,” he said. “It’s Russian, called a
kandra
. It took some digging, but I got the manufacturer nailed down to a small, nameless reindeer herder on the slopes of Siberia…. Zoe, that last bit was a joke.”

But Zoe couldn’t even manage a smile. In some dark corner of her heart, she’d been afraid there’d be something about the murder weapon to connect it with her mother. That it was some rare Russian knife was probably not good.

Jenkins rebagged the weapon and held up a cotton swab. “Open please.”

Zoe opened her mouth and he swabbed the inside of her cheek.

“I don’t know how much you know about maternal-lineage testing,” he said, “but it uses a unique form of DNA found in the part of our cells responsible for energy called mitochondrials. They’re passed down directly through the maternal bloodline.”

“A blood bond,” she said, marveling again at the thought.

“Yeah, you got it. Mitochondrials mutate so rarely over time, theoretically we could trace every woman alive today back to the first female homo sapien.”

He held up the swab. “We’re talking one hundred and seventy thousand years’ worth of evolution, and on the end of this little piece of cotton I’ve got Eve.”

I
T WAS DARK
by the time Zoe left the Hall of Justice. The rain had fizzled into a thick mist. She zipped her black leather bomber jacket and turned up the collar against the winter cold, but it didn’t help her insides.

She’d parked the Babe farther down on Bryant, underneath the freeway. It wasn’t the best part of town, and so she kept a wary eye out. The
streetlamps barely penetrated back here among the concrete stanchions, and the wind whipped empty food wrappers against her legs.

There was little traffic, the only other pedestrian a ponytailed man who was chaining his bicycle to a row of mostly empty newspaper vending machines. She made eye contact as she passed. He nodded back at her and smiled.

She stepped off the curb to go around to the driver’s side of her car, digging in her purse for her keys, then heard a footstep behind her. She caught a blur of movement out the corner of her eye—

The ponytailed man, swinging the bicycle chain at her head.

She ducked and spun around on the ball of her foot, but not quick enough. He whipped the chain around her neck, jerked her off her feet, and dragged her deep beneath the overpass. The chain dug into her throat, cutting off her air. She threw her satchel off to the side, but his eyes didn’t even follow it.

Not a mugger. One of the abusers then, looking for his woman? Or … Oh, God, is he going to rape me?

His hot breath blew against the side of her face. “Where is it, bitch?”

What?

Zoe went limp, trying to draw the man off-balance, but he didn’t fall for it. Instead he tightened his grip on the chain, and black spots danced before her eyes.

“Now you listen,” the man said, in a heavy Russian accent. “I am going to ease up on this chain a little and you are going to sing for me like tweetie bird. The old lady wouldn’t cooperate and she took a knife in the heart. How about you not being so stupid?”

Her chest heaved, and she fought back panic as her lungs strained for air. This was the man who’d killed her grandmother and now he was after her. But why? What did he want?

Hot breath again. “Now, I want the altar of bones, and you are going to have just one or two seconds to tell me where it is. If you don’t, I’ll choke you with this chain until you black out. When you come to, I’ll have a knife pointed at your eyeball, and if you don’t tell me then, I’ll pluck out your eye like a wet grape.”

As soon as Zoe felt the pressure of the chain ease, she slid her right
leg back and twisted sharply away from him, whipping her fist across her body and smashing it into his throat.

He reared back, gagging.

She pivoted, lashed out with her right leg, and kicked him hard in the groin. It was only a glancing blow because he moved so fast, but it was enough to double him over. He hugged himself, cursing her, cursing the pain.