Chapter Six
Kit was on her phone before the morgue doors even slammed shut behind them, the Q&A between her and her aunt rapid-fire as she slid behind the wheel. Marin’s raspy staccato was an evenly matched rival as they exchanged information, and despite the long night and day, Kit had to smile. It was good to be able to move quickly beyond the niceties and get right to the point.
It was, Kit thought, good to have family.
Kit was still wearing a faint smile twenty minutes later, when she stepped into Marin’s office at the Las Vegas Tribune. However, the expression fell as she searched her aunt out over the mounds of papers and books threatening to topple from her desk. Kit heard the clacking of computer keys as she crossed the room and finally caught sight of Marin’s dark, spiky hair, though her shoulders remained hunched, her head bent.
“What the hell happened in here?” Kit asked, gesturing at the mutating pile of dead trees.
“What the hell are you wearing?” Marin shot back, never looking up, and not missing a key. Someone, Kit thought with a wry smile, was on a deadline.
“I’ve been up since three A.M.,” Kit said, wishing she’d said nothing when Grif, who’d trailed her in, gave her a knowing scowl. “But I still managed to spruce up.”
“Of course you did.” Still typing, Marin added, “I see you brought your lap dog.”
“That’s guard dog to you, Wilson.” Grif perched himself on the only free edge of Marin’s desk.
Her aunt looked up then, eyes narrowing into slits. “And how’re you doin’ on that count, champ?”
Grif jerked his head at Kit. “She’s still walking this mudflat.”
Marin leaned back in her chair. “Yeah, walked right into a drug den this morning. Where were you then?”
“That’s enough.” Kit stepped forward, and Marin’s hard gaze shifted. Marin and Grif might like sparring, but Kit’s idea of sport stopped short of drawing blood. “Grif’s only mistake was in trusting me too much.”
Marin turned back to her work. “Ran into that problem a few times myself.”
Grif said nothing, but Kit sighed. “And if it weren’t for Grif we would have never known about this Russian street drug.”
“Krokodil,” Marin said, mouth twisting like the word itself was poison. She punched a key, then shifted her laptop around so they could see the images she’d gathered there. “Crap makes chemo cocktails look like Kool-Aid.”
Not to mention chemo was meant to help its host, Kit thought, looking her aunt over. Three years past her last treatment and Marin was thriving.
“Yeah, we already got the Technicolor version of that,” Grif said, jerking his head at the gangrenous images offered up from the bowels of the Internet. “Question is, how’d it get here?”
“Know how to read Cyrillic script?” Marin asked, hitting a button on the computer so that the screen flashed to Russian text.
“No,” they both replied.
“Well, if you did you could print this baby out here and cook up your own fresh batch of crocodile soup. I’ve been using the Latin alphabet to transliterate it and decipher at least some of the ingredients. Did you know they put paint thinner in this garbage?”
“Don’t forget codeine,” Kit added. “Lots of it. So who’d be able to secure enough of it to boil it down into a street drug?”
“A doctor,” Grif guessed.
“Aren’t we smart?” Marin then switched her screen to another, this one in English. “A Russian one, in fact. I’ve already begun searching Russian surnames in the valley. It’s a long shot, and total cultural profiling, but it’s a start.”
“Ever hear of delegating?” Grif asked her.
“Ever hear of ‘no’?” she said, reclaiming her computer.
Kit interrupted again, trying to get them both back on track. “Ever hear of the Russian mafia plying their drug trade on the Las Vegas market?”
“The Rusanovka bratva. They’re small, and not too powerful . . . except when they are.” And before either of them could ask, Marin said, “Meet Sergei Kolyadenko, originally from Kiev. He’s the bratva’s comrade and leader. He’s also a felon with ties to drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and money laundering.”
“He’s fond of action words, I see,” Kit said, writing it all down in her beloved Moleskine.
“He’s damned crafty, is what he is. He was out of the country most of last year, returned to his motherland to be treated for an undisclosed illness, but now he’s back and word is that he’s reasserting his strength.”
“Think he brought krokodil back with him?”
“I think he’s not above making radical statements. And krokodil would certainly do it.” Marin swiveled, yanking the photo she’d just downloaded from the printer, and handed it to Grif. “Sergei and his crew fly under the radar, mostly because they have the great good fortune of looking like the majority of the populace, at least until they open their mouths. It’s very hard to hide a Russian accent, not that most of them even try. English is barely a second language to the bratva.
“As for the alleged dealers and launderers, the individuals enter and leave Vegas as they please, departing when the heat gets turned up, though not before entrusting someone else with their role. They give the local law enforcement fits, because police never really know who they’re looking for. You know those pasty white men. They all look the same.”
Grif passed Kit the photo of the Rusanovka gang. Sergei was as handsomely nondescript as Marin had said. So was the handful of men staggered behind him. However, the woman next to Sergei was a different story. Kit’s gaze slid over her milky face, down plentiful curves, and dropped to her name, printed just below. Yulyia Kolyadenko. Sergei’s wife.
“So how is Jeap Yang involved?” Kit wondered aloud, handing the photo back to Grif. The kid’s dark skin tone had spoken of a different background. “He can’t be Russian.”
“So what exactly is he, Asian?” Marin asked sharply as Grif handed the picture back. She shook her head—it was meant for them—so he silently pocketed it.
“Working on it,” Kit replied, already cringing, because she knew what was coming next.
“Dammit, Kit,” Marin snapped. “Don’t just come to me with questions. Come to me—”
“With answers,” Kit finished for her, nodding. “Jeap’s background check is up next. Including who he was spending his time with most recently. Dennis is going to see if his family will talk to me—”
“Us,” Grif corrected.
“And we know he was hanging out with a new girl.” Kit huffed, blowing her bangs from her forehead. “She was the one who introduced him to the stuff.”
“What a sweetheart.” Marin folded her hands. “She got a name?”
Swallowing hard, Kit dropped her gaze. “Not yet.”
“Goddamn it, Kit.”
“Hey, easy—” Grif started.
“No.” Marin stood so quickly that her chair cracked against the wall. The tower of papers on her desk wavered as she slapped her hands on either side of her computer and leaned forward. “No, I will not go easy on one of my reporters who brings me a half-baked story with more holes than a sea sponge, and asks me to do the majority of the legwork.”
“This is your niece,” Grif tried, but he’d never seen Marin in one of her full-blown tirades. Kit had, which was why she said nothing at all.
“No,” Marin snapped. “Right now she’s one of my employees, and she knows better than to cross that threshold with more questions than answers.” Marin turned her attention away from Grif, and Kit felt a familiar warmth flush over her cheeks. “Don’t waste any more of my time. Do you want this story or not?”
“Yes.”
“Then give it some weight, Ms. Craig. Facts, not speculation.” Yanking at her chair, she took a seat. “That’s the only thing that’s going to help Jeap Yang. Not your pity, not your horror.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Chagrined, Kit turned away.
“Give me something that I can put in black-and-white,” Marin yelled after her, leaving out that Kit had gotten ahead of herself. That she’d been so shocked by the horror of krokodil that she was forgetting to dot her is and cross her ts. That emotion was clouding her judgment.
But Marin didn’t have to say it. It was on the faces of everyone in the pressroom who’d overheard the command. And it was in Kit’s heart, too, berating her with every beat.
Hey!”
Kit paused to run a hand over her head as Grif clomped down the stairwell behind her. She wanted to be composed when she reached the ground floor, so she’d opted for the stairs.
“Kit!” Grif yelled again, but Kit was counting stairs, and rummaging for cigarettes in her bag, pissed at herself for not doing better. Being better.
What was wrong with her? She knew not to let her enthusiasm get away from her like that. She might be a bit impulsive—and maybe Grif was right that she was a tad flighty, too—and passion was fine in one’s personal life. “But not in your professional one,” she chided aloud, and kept counting down.
Old accusations of nepotism and favoritism and other “-tisms” rattled off the old stairwell, and as much as Kit tried to ignore them, they also rattled in her brain. Yes, there were those who believed she worked at the paper solely because it’d been started by her great-grandfather, but none of those people really knew Marin Wilson. She hired, and kept, only the best.
“Hey,” Grif huffed, finally catching up with Kit halfway down the second-to-last flight. “What was that all about?”
“That was me being an idiot,” she muttered, wincing again as she remembered the disdain in Marin’s stare. Kit worked hard to prove to her aunt that while she might be the mercurial Shirley Wilson’s—Marin’s sister—daughter, her father’s stalwart blood roared in her veins, too. It burned that she could blow it so damned easily. “I didn’t prepare before I went in there. I didn’t give her anything to work with or bring anything new to the table. I failed.”
“Failed?” She could feel Grif staring at her. “Honey, you’ve barely begun.”
“Exactly.”
Grif remained silent for a moment. “But there was more. That was . . . personal.”
Kit reached the ground floor, and pushed steel, emerging into the open air. The heat ambushed her, and she blew out a breath against it. “She expects a lot from me.”
“More than the other reporters?”
“Of course.” Tucking her head, she lit her cigarette.
“Because she hopes you’ll take the editorial reins someday?”
Inhaling deeply, Kit looked at him, thinking maybe if she said the words aloud they wouldn’t weigh on her so very much. “Because if I don’t, then I’ll be just like my mother.”
Grif spoke softly. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Unless you were her sister.” Kit smiled wryly, then shrugged. “My mother was . . . golden. It was hard on Marin.”
“You’re standing up for her,” Grif said, with a tilt of his head.
Kit took a drag, then sighed. “Being my mother’s daughter wasn’t easy, either.”
Shirley Wilson-Craig—the beautiful black sheep of the Dean S. Wilson newspaper fortune—had married blue-collar, and at the time it was a scandal among the Vegas elite. Shirley had reveled in it, which made Kit smile . . . but it also meant Kit had a mother with a high-class pedigree and no sense of duty, and a father who valued duty but possessed an utter disregard for class.
Kit disregarded nothing. She was twelve when cancer claimed her mother’s life, and sixteen when that bullet felled her father. After she’d grieved the second time—broke down, as she told Grif, and put herself back together yet again—she swore that whatever remained of her tenuous life would hold meaning. That’s why she was so upset now. She hadn’t just disappointed Marin. She’d disappointed herself.
“I thought you loved her,” Grif said, not understanding.
“I did. Still do.” She spoke quickly, because her heart came near to bursting every time she thought of her mother. “She was perfect. Beautiful, graceful, aristocratic, wicked smart.” She smiled wistfully, but the smile faded as a thought ambushed her: If I were more like my mother, Grif would have already forgotten Evelyn Shaw.
“You’re all of those things, too,” Grif said, his timing uncanny.
Kit snorted, but waved away his raised eyebrow by saying, “Marin has some other words for me . . . but, look, she’s under a lot of pressure. Most newspapers are worth less than the paper they’re printed on, these days, and the fate of ours weighs on her. So, no, I’m not standing up for her, but I don’t blame her, either. Besides, a dead woman can still cast a long shadow. If anyone knows that, it should be you.”
She hadn’t meant to say that last part. It slipped out, more of a murmur around her cigarette than a statement, but Grif’s hearing was impeccable, and his hand was immediately on her arm. “What does that mean?”
“I just meant that your wife’s death, even though it was over fifty years ago . . .” Kit ducked her head. “It still haunts you.”
“ ’Course it does. But it doesn’t cast . . . what’d you say? A shadow over me.”
“No,” Kit said, and finally looked up. She swallowed hard. “Just everyone around you.”
Grif’s hand fell away. The look on his face was so injured and stunned that Kit wanted to reach for him. But she’d finally said what had been haunting her for so long, so not only couldn’t she stop, she didn’t want to.
“Look, what do you think it feels like?” Flicking her cigarette away, she crossed her arms. “To know the man I love spends most of his waking hours thinking of another woman?”
Hurt shifted to confusion as he drew back. “I’m not thinking about her all the time.”
“No, but you’re chasing her down.” She laughed humorlessly. “And sometimes it feels like she’s chasing you, too.”
“What?”
Kit shook her head. For a smart P.I., he could be so stupid. “You say her name in your dreams all the time, Grif.”
“That’s what this is about? I’m not even conscious.”
“Have you ever dreamed about me?”
“I don’t need to. You’re here.”
Kit felt her expression turn to stone. Grif swallowed hard. “Wrong. Answer.”
She turned away, and when his fingers wrapped around her arm this time, she gave it a violent shake. She shouldn’t have let herself get drawn into this conversation, she thought, striding to her car. But all it’d taken was one slip in thought, one reminder of how hard it was to be compared to someone who was perfect—someone who would always be perfect now that time had also made her saintly—and Kit was suddenly doubting everything she was.
But what’s to doubt? She wasn’t perfect, but she was vibrant and smart and, yes, cheery.
She was also alive.
So, with the safety of her car between them, she finally looked up. Grif was on the other side, his reply waiting, too. “I don’t compare you to Evie, Kit.”
“Maybe not consciously,” she conceded, “but the shadow of her memory is in your eyes every time you look at me. You should at least know that.”
Grif just continued to stare at her so blankly that she knew he’d never even given it any thought. Shaking her head, Kit wished the whole conversation away. Then her phone rang.
Wish granted, she thought, answering without viewing the number as she climbed behind the wheel of her car. Still silent, Grif slid in next to her. “Kit Craig.”
“Detective Carlisle.” Dennis’s voice teased at her formality, though it sobered again with his next question. “How would you like to visit with a junkie who spent all of last weekend with one Jeap Yang?”
Right now? Kit thought, blowing out a hard breath. “I’d like nothing more,” she said, and busied herself by pulling out her Moleskine. A little conversation about drugs and rotting flesh might be just what she needed to banish her worries over a dead woman.