It was just past five o’clock in the evening when I got to his house, parking down the block. Darkness had settled over the City of Minneapolis, and lights were blooming in the windows of the houses around me, random buds of white and yellow, vivid against the darkness. In Whitton’s house, a light flicked on, filling the square of a picture window, another, dimmer, light bled from a room deeper in the guts. I didn’t see his car, but it made sense that he’d have parked in the garage.
I pulled my Glock from its holster and chambered a round. He won’t be expecting me. He doesn’t know that I know. I slid the gun back into its holster. I wasn’t sure what I would do when he answered the door. I trusted that something in his reaction, in his answers to my questions, would tell me what to do.
I walked down a sidewalk across the street from his house, the frozen Lake of the Isles over my shoulder, the crunch of ice under my shoes. Pausing opposite his house, I stood in the shadow of a streetlight and pictured his face when he’d see me, eyes wide with confusion, then squinting thin as he tried to figure out why I was there. I would pull my gun and be inside before he could put the pieces together.
I looked both ways before crossing the street, even though I knew I was alone in the darkness. Careful not to make a sound, I made my way up to his porch, pressing the doorbell and then resting my hand on the grip of my gun. I heard the muffled padding of someone approaching the door. The porchlight came on. I turned slightly to block the peephole view of my gun and waited.
A click of a lock. The door opened.
A woman stood on the threshold, looking at me with a mixture of curiosity and hesitation. She was stunningly attractive, with long, dark hair falling loose past luminous blue eyes that seemed to hold light. I tried to place her in Whitton’s world. She appeared too old, and far too beautiful to be genetically entwined with that pig, so daughter was out. Wife? Girlfriend? Lover? Again, she was far too attractive to be any of those, either.
“Yes?” she said as a question.
“I, um . . . is Reece home?”
“Reece is not here.”
She spoke in a heavy accent, Russian or something in that neighborhood. Why did that not surprise me?
“Do you expect him soon?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“Who are you?”
“I’m . . . just a coworker. I’ll try back later.”
I turned around and headed back to my car, muttering curses under my breath. I would wait until Whitton came home. I could be patient. Strategy, not reaction. Intellect, not emotion. That’s what I told myself, but that didn’t stop me from slamming my fists into the steering wheel as soon as I closed the car door. I thought about leaving, driving around the block. The woman might have been watching me from a window, calling Whitton and screwing up my plans.
I was about to start the car to move to a different vantage point when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I looked at the screen and saw it was Niki. I gave serious thought to not answering. How many ways can I tell her to give up on me? Leave me to my blindfold and my ledge. She was my last tether and she refused to let it be a simple cleave.
“Rupert,” I answered.
“Oh, is that how it is now, Detective?” No sarcasm. Hurt.
“Yes, that’s how it is.”
“Well, I called because I thought you might want to know Zoya’s last name.”
“You know her last name?” I heard a note of excitement in my voice that I didn’t mean to put there.
“Yes. It’s Savvin.”
I returned to my flat tone. “I appreciate that. How’d you find it?”
“I looked on Interpol and other databases for missing persons and had no luck. Then I typed in the name Zoya and Lida, the city you thought she might be from. I found a local website for missing Belarussians. There’s not much on her. It says she and her sister left Belarus to take jobs in Canada. They disappeared from Toronto. I’ll e-mail you the link.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I stopped talking and let the silence drag on.
“Max . . . are you okay?”
“I got to go.” I ended the call without saying good-bye.
I turned my attention back to the house. Nothing had changed, and I decided not to move my car. I checked my watch. Five thirty. Any minute now.
My phone chirped to let me know that Niki’s e-mail came through. I opened e-mail app. Might as well kill some time reading.
I scrolled past rows of Russian letters and words that meant nothing to me—of course it would be written in Russian—until I came to Zoya’s picture. There was no question it was her, a little younger than the autopsy photos, and much more beautiful. A high-school class picture, maybe. She wore a mischievous smile, the smile of a girl with plans, the smile of a girl who couldn’t fathom a path that would lead to a frozen dumpster in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I shook my head and scrolled down, looking for more pictures of Zoya. Soon, another picture entered my screen, a face I recognized, but not Zoya. This was a different girl—a girl with luminous blue eyes. I had seen those eyes before. They were the eyes that had greeted me just now when I knocked on Reece Whitton’s door.
I tried to understand the connection as I looked back and forth between the picture and the house, summoning my memory from only a few minutes ago. It had to be the same person—a little older now and packaged as a woman—but the same person. Who was she, and what was she doing in Reece Whitton’s house?
I toggled to a pop-up at the bottom of the screen that offered to translate the page for me. I hit it and looked at the name under the picture. Anastasia Savvin, the sister of Zoya Savvin. The woman in Reece Whitton’s house was Jane Doe’s sister.
I grabbed Zoya’s file from my case, stepped out of my car, and walked at a brisk pace back to Whitton’s front door. Fragments of understanding floated around me, always in my periphery, like fireflies. I wanted answers. She would give me those answers.
The door opened, and this time I held up my badge. “I’m Detective Max Rupert. I need to talk to you.”
She didn’t smile or ask me in, so I stepped past her.
Her eyes lit with fear. “What are you doing?”
“I want to talk to you about your sister, Zoya.”
Fear turned to confusion. “My sister? I don’t understand.”
“You are Anastasia Savvin, aren’t you?”
“I am married now. But I was born Anastasia Savvin, yes.”
“Sister to Zoya Savvin?”
“How do you know my sister?”
“I’m investigating her death. I—”
“You are wrong,” Anastasia hissed. “You are a liar. Why do you say this to me?” She looked like she was searching my face for proof of my deception. “My sister is not dead. She is home in Lida.”
Now it was my turn to search her face for deception. I saw none. This was not going the way I expected it to go. I opened my folder and pulled out the crime-scene photos of Zoya Savvin. I hesitated before handing them to her.