There is no we. I wanted to say. This was a mistake. I should have never let her get involved. I was about to say something, although I had no idea what words were going to come out of my mouth, when an incident report popped onto my screen with the name Zoya on it.
“Here it is,” I said. “I think I found it.” I read down the page. “It’s a report from the same day Jenni died. A patrolman with the Second Precinct found a girl walking down Broadway. She was bleeding and dazed. The report lists her as Zoya. She couldn’t speak English, and the officer thought she might be speaking Russian. He couldn’t understand if she gave a last name or not. He took her to HCMC.”
“Are there any pictures in the file?”
The directory for the case had a file marked Photos. I held my breath and clicked it. Nothing but an empty page.
“God dammit!” I muttered through gritted teeth. “It’s empty. There’s a file for photos, but there’s nothing in it. Just when you think you’re catching a break.”
“Empty?”
“The officer created a file for the photos but forgot to—or just didn’t bother to download ’em.”
Tendrils of lost possibilities twisted around my fingers, knotting my hands into fists. No last name. No address. No path to known associates, occupation, enemies. If we had a picture, we could have gotten a search warrant for Zoya’s hospital records. That might have opened a thousand doors. Without those records, all we had was speculation.
“Does the incident report give us anything to go on?” Niki asked.
I read through it again. “It’s pretty thin. The girl had glass in her hair, so they did a search of the area to see if they could find any broken windows. Found a motel five blocks away with a broken front window. Room rented for cash.”
“Yeah, that sounds like the life of a sex worker.”
As I stared at the screen, at the scant report by the patrol officer, something caught my attention—not something I saw in the report, but something missing from it. “That’s strange,” I said. “There’s no supplemental.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ms. McKinney said that an investigator showed up at the hospital that morning. She said that Zoya freaked out when the investigator walked into the room. But there’s no supplemental. No mention of an investigator at HCMC.”
“Maybe it got logged in under a different incident number,” Niki said. “Let’s come at this thing another way.”
Niki pulled up Cappers on her computer and typed Jennifer Rupert into the search box. The screen lit up with rows of reports listing Jenni as a witness.
“Holy crap,” Niki said.
“Yeah, Jenni was a mandated reporter. She dealt with this kind of thing all the time—girlfriends and wives getting assaulted, sex workers being abused, children molested. Her name will be listed as a witness on hundreds of reports.”
“But, Max, look at this.” Niki pointed to the screen. “The day she died, there’s a report of the hit-and-run, but there is no report of an investigator meeting with Jenni at HCMC.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe Ms. McKinney got it wrong. It’s been over four years. Maybe the guy that walked in was a doctor or . . .”
Briggs’s door creaked open again. I folded the Jane Doe file closed and Niki and I returned to our fake phone calls. When Briggs stepped past our cubicle, Niki was pretending to convince a convenience store manager to check his security system, and I was pretending to learn the healing time for third-degree burns. Briggs stood at the opening of our cubicle for less than thirty seconds before giving up. This time he went back to his office, grabbed his coat, and left the Homicide Unit, waving at us without actually looking our way.
Niki and I hung up our phones and looked at each other.
“So where does that leave us?” she asked.
“About the same place we started,” I said. “We know that Farrah McKinney was right about Zoya. Brought to HCMC after getting beat up. Probably a working girl. Has a tattoo of a ruble behind her ear that may or may not be a pimp’s brand. What do you see?”
Niki gave pause, then said, “I see a witness who is spot-on, but also said there was an investigator at HCMC—yet we have no supplemental—nothing to verify that the man in the room was a cop at all. There’s a file for photos, but no photos. Something’s not adding up.”
“Welcome to my world,” I said.
“Where do we go next?”
“Home.” I looked up at the clock on the wall. Almost three o’clock. “Let’s finish up what we need to do on Fireball and call it a day.”
“I got ahold of the Holiday station this morning,” Niki said. “They should have a copy of the surveillance footage ready for pickup anytime now.”
“I need to stop by the Burn Unit to see if Orton is able to talk yet. I want to question him before he has too much time to think.”
“I’ll swing by and pick up the surveillance footage,” Niki said. “It’s on my way home.”
“It’s the opposite of your way home, but thanks.”
“What are partners for?”
“Look, Niki, about that—”
“No you don’t. I will kick your ass if you take back anything you said today.”
“But the thing is—”
“Fuck you. We had a beautiful moment. Don’t ruin it.”
“But—”
“I mean it. Not another word. You get out of here. Go interview Fireball. I’ll shut the computers down and lock up.”
I stood but hesitated.
“Go!” She pointed at the door, her face scrunched up into her best tough-matriarch look.
I picked up my coat and shuffled out the door.
CHAPTER 13
Up North
I put the tip of the auger on the ice and turn it. The spoon-shaped bit doesn’t bore at first, so I push down on the cap of the auger. With that, the bit starts to dig. The growl of metal against ice breaks a silence that holds little more than my own heavy breathing. I expect the man to start talking again, but instead he just sits there, watching me. He’s probably trying to figure out his next move, studying me to size up the strength of my backbone. His silence is fine by me.
I drill down an inch or so, enough to see the full circumference of the shovel—a first impression for my template. I move the auger to start another hole, this one a quarter of an inch away from the first. When that is marked, I start a third and a fourth. I keep a thin partition of ice between the starter holes so that the blade won’t catch on an edge and jam up as I drill down to the lake.
When I finish my fifth starter hole, I step into the middle of my pattern and look down to see if it’s wide enough to accommodate a man’s chest. I’m a little bigger than he is, and if I can fit through the hole, he will fit. The six-inch-wide shovel on the business end of the auger is duller than I’d expected. It forces me to push down on the tool, exerting energy that I’d hope to save. I mark three more notches, completing the oval—eight starter holes in all—big enough to slip a man through. I step back and give the project one last look before taking on the arduous task of drilling through three feet of ice with that dull-bladed auger.
Satisfied that I have the dimensions right, I go back to my first hole and begin cranking.
“I don’t think you’ll do it,” he says.