“Yes, could I speak to Doctor Patel? Tell him this is Detective Rupert calling.” My voice-mail greeting yapped in my ear as I pretended to call the Burn Unit. “Yes, Doctor Patel, it’s Detective Rupert. I’m just calling to check in . . . Yes. Is he still intubated? Tell me what we’re looking at.”
Behind me I could hear Niki pretend to contact companies in the area where the van burned, searching for surveillance cameras. We both kept up our ruse until Briggs huffed and walked back to his office.
Once he’d gone, we laid our receivers down on our desks, keeping the lines lit up so Briggs would think we were still on the phone.
“See what I mean?” Niki said.
“Yeah, he’s up to something.”
From his office Briggs had no clear line of sight to our desks. I quietly got up and walked to a filing cabinet at the opposite end of the Unit—our cold-case drawer—and brought back the Jane Doe file.
“A Salvation Army employee found her in a dumpster behind their facility on North Fourth Avenue. The worker was tossing a bag into the trash when he saw a shoe that looked nicer than what he expected to see in the garbage. He reached in to retrieve the shoe and discovered that it remained attached to a human foot.”
I handed Niki a crime-scene photo. Jane Doe had black hair tangled around fair skin, her face showing a hint of freckles under her makeup. Her eyeliner and lipstick were both badly smeared and had been applied in thick, dark shades, the work of someone wanting to look older—or sexier—than her years allowed. She wore a black dress, skimpy, with no bra and no panties.
“Given her attire, we’re pretty sure she was killed indoors and moved to the dumpster postmortem.”
“Rape?”
“The autopsy couldn’t determine if there had been sexual penetration at or near the time of death, although the evidence suggested that the she’d undergone significant sexual abuse in the days and weeks preceding her death.”
“She looks young.”
“Mid to late teens, we figured. We could never fully determine her age because we never figured out who she was.”
“Cause of death?”
“Drowning.”
“Drowning?”
“She had bruises on both cheeks and around her neck, as if someone had held her by the throat and smacked her around. She also had bruises up and down her torso, and finger marks on both arms. She had been handled roughly in the hours before she died. My first thought was that she was beaten and then strangled, but the medical examiner’s report came back with drowning.”
“She’s not dressed for the swimming pool, so . . .”
“The water in her lungs didn’t have enough chlorine to be pool water, nor was it lake or river water.”
“Bathtub?”
“That was my conclusion, but this was no accidental fall. She wouldn’t step into a tub with a full complement of makeup, nor the black dress. A young girl, drowned, dumped, and left to be disposed of like trash. That was all we knew about Jane Doe—except for the tattoo.”
Niki spread the file across my desk, fanning out the autopsy and crime-scene photos. “You think this is Zoya?” Niki whispered.
I picked up one of the autopsy photos. With her face scrubbed clean of makeup, Jane Doe looked childlike, freckles, thin eye lashes, thin lips. “She matches Farrah’s description: five-five, dark hair. And there’s the tattoo behind the left ear.” I laid Farrah’s napkin drawing next to a close-up photograph of the ruble symbol on Jane Doe’s neck.
“You know,” Niki said, “I think I remember meeting a girl . . . when I was in Vice. She had . . . I swear it was the same tattoo.”
“You met Jane Doe?”
“No. It wasn’t her; at least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t her. We were doing a sting at one of the hotels downtown.” Niki paused as if struggling with her memory. “I had agreed to meet one of the guys in the hotel bar. While I was waiting, I struck up a conversation with another working girl who was also there to meet a client. She had an accent.”
“Russian?”
“I believe so.”
“But you don’t think it was Jane Doe.”
“No. The girl I met looked nothing like these pictures. Part of the job back then was to build up a network of informants. Try and gain their trust. It’s the only way to learn who the inside players are. I remember this girl fidgeting with her hair, and I saw a tattoo behind her ear. I think it was like this one.” Niki pointed at the ruble on Jane Doe’s neck.
“Identical tattoos on two different girls?” I said.
“Branding,” Niki said.
I closed my eyes, and to myself I whispered, of course.
“If it’s a brand,” Niki continued, “it’s pretty low-key. Most pimps put their marks where it’s more visible. Back in the day, I saw tats that covered the girl’s entire chest. The name of their pimp plastered forever for the world to see. I mean, that was the point. Brand the girl so other pimps stay away.”
“So why the small ruble? Hidden behind the ear? Doesn’t that cut against the rationale?”
Niki leaned back in her chair to ponder. On this subject, she was the teacher, having spent five years in Vice. “My guess? When you work for a really bad man, you don’t need the billboard on the chest. All you need is enough proof of ownership that the other gorillas know to leave her the hell alone.”
“And you only saw the one ruble tattoo during your time in Vice?”
“As far as I remember. That suggests that the pimp is careful. Probably does referral clients only. You have to be vetted to get into the club. I’ll check the database of known tattoo brands, see if that ruble’s on the list.” Niki turned to her computer and started typing.
For my part, I began looking for the reports tied to Zoya’s visit to HCMC. I searched Cappers for anything written on the same day as my wife’s death. If Farrah had her facts straight, then an officer found Zoya wandering the streets. She was taken to HCMC, which suggests that she was found in Minneapolis. Also, an investigator showed up at the hospital. That investigator would have made a report even if no information had been gained at the hospital.
The Homicide Unit took on the solemnity of a library as Niki and I clicked away on our keyboards. The wind had picked up outside, but it was still too cold for snow. A furnace kicked on somewhere in the bowels of City Hall and added a low hum to the room, a base note beneath our keyboard castanets. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Then Niki said, “Do you think there’s a connection?”
I had been so deep in my concentration that I didn’t understand what she was asking. “Connection?”
“Between this Zoya girl and Jenni’s death.”
“I honestly don’t know. This could be important, or it could just be a coincidence.”
“Don’t worry, Max. We’ll get ’em.”