“Why did you stop me? Why didn’t you let me finish it?”
“I didn’t stop anything,” I said. “That bartender already had your gun. The only thing I stopped you from doing was getting wrestled to the ground and arrested. You’re welcome, by the way.”
I drove into the alley behind my house and into my garage, parking beside the Durango that used to be Jenni’s car. Like everything else of hers, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. I shut the garage door and headed toward the house, with Anastasia following me.
“This is your house?”
I’m sure she meant her question to come across as small talk, but it landed on my ear with a hint of judgment. It was a hovel compared to her fine home in Kenwood. I felt a tinge of embarrassment as I walked her past the garbage cans outside of my back door.
No woman had been inside of my house since Jenni died, and I couldn’t help but feel disloyal, regardless of the circumstances. We walked through the kitchen and into the living room, where Anastasia took a seat on my couch, sitting in the exact spot where Jenni liked to sit.
I handed Anastasia a tissue to touch away the tears on her cheeks.
“Thank you for getting me out of there,” she whispered.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “I was only trying to keep things from getting out of hand. Besides, I couldn’t let you go in there and kill your husband. I’m a cop. It’s kind of my job.”
Anastasia stopped crying and looked at me, her eyes searching mine, as if looking for an answer to a question that she hadn’t yet asked. “You think I went there to kill my husband? To kill Reece?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No. I went there to kill Mikhail.”
CHAPTER 30
Mikhail. Two days ago, that name meant nothing to me. Now, it meant a great deal. Mikhail will kill me. That’s what Zoya said.
“Mikhail was at the club?” I asked. “He was there?”
Anastasia looked at me as if I should already know the answer. “Of course he was there,” she said. “He owns the club.”
“Mikhail who? What’s his last name?”
“Mikhail Vetrov.”
“Stay here.” I ran up the steps to my lair and fired up my laptop. Once awake, I typed in “Caviar Gentlemen’s Club” and went to news articles. The first hit was a story of a shooting outside of the Caviar from two years ago. I scrolled down the article, looking for a picture. I wanted to see the man’s face. Finding none, I skimmed the story and came to a small paragraph stating that the owner of the Caviar, a man named Michael Vetter, had refused to comment on the story. I found no mention of named Mikhail Vetrov.
I brought the laptop down to show Anastasia my find. She sat on my couch, back rigid, knees together, hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. It struck me, in that moment, just how out of place she seemed, sitting where Jenni used to sit: too young, too pretty, her hair too dark, her lips too red, her eyes too blue. She had a vibrancy that stood in stark contrast to the gray and the dust that had settled throughout my house over the years—a color portrait leaning against a pallid wall.
I sat down beside her. “It says here that the owner of the Caviar is a man named Michael Vetter.”
“Yes, he is Michael Vetter, but he is also Mikhail Vetrov. He is from Belarus, like me, but he came here when he was a very young boy. He lives in two worlds. In one, he is Michael Vetter, a businessman, respected. But to people from his other world, people like me, he is Mikhail.”
I typed “Michael Vetter” and “Caviar” into Google and pulled up a screen full of pictures. At the top of the page was a face I recognized, the man I saw standing on the balcony just before I whisked Anastasia outside.
I pointed at the picture. “Mikhail?” I asked.
She nodded.
“His father was a bad man,” she said. “They came here to escape many other bad men. One day, the men from Minsk found Mikhail’s father. They killed him. Mikhail told me this story. He said that he was eighteen when they killed his father. Those men had a business proposition for Mikhail. Lots of money.”
“Mikhail confided in you? You were close?”
Anastasia faced ahead, staring at nothing in particular as she considered my question. Then she swallowed hard and said, “I belong to Mikhail . . . or at least I used to. Now I belong to Reece.”
“You belong to . . . ?”
“Mikhail brought me here when I was seventeen. He paid for my travel. He . . . he took care of me. I was his girl. And then I became his . . . I worked for Mikhail.”
“You were his prostitute?”
“Yes.”
“And your sister, Zoya? Did she also work for Mikhail?”
“She wasn’t supposed to. He promised me—”
“She had a tattoo on her neck—the symbol of the ruble.”
Anastasia continued to stare straight ahead, as if she hadn’t heard me. I waited patiently. I could tell that she wanted to talk to me. I could also tell that her words came at a great personal cost, each revelation having to be wrenched up from some dark place deep inside of her. Then she lifted her hair back on the right side of her neck, exposing a small ruble tattoo behind her ear.
“You said that Mikhail gave you to Whitton?”
“Yes. Mikhail struck a bargain with Reece. I was part of that bargain. One day Mikhail came to me and said that from that day forward, I belonged to Reece Whitton. That was all there was to it.”
“Anastasia, tell me about this bargain. What did Mikhail get out of it?”
She took a moment to size me up, her eyes staring into mine as if something deep behind my irises could tell her whether she could trust me. In the end I must have passed scrutiny, because she leaned back with a measure of self-satisfaction in her expression and said, “You have never heard of Mikhail before today, is that correct?”
“That is true.”
“Yet he has been operating in this city for years. How is that possible? How can he do the business he does and never come to the attention of the police?”
“Whitton is covering for him.”
“Who better to have as a partner than the man who would be in charge of the investigation—the man who made the decisions about who got attention and who got ignored?”
“And you were the price for Whitton’s loyalty.”
“I was only part of the deal. You’ve seen his house?”
“Not the kind of thing most cops can afford.”
“I was a mere token in that deal.”
“But you married Whitton.”
Anastasia’s eyes flashed with a sudden hatred. “I am his property,” she said. “I am his payment—his reward. I am not a wife. I am a possession, and he treats me as such—no, he treats me worse than a possession. Me he hurts.”