“Well, we’ll find out when we catch them.”
He knew the basics of their getaway: the girls had taken the black Escalade that belonged to one of the Russians and driven to the Bronxville train station. There they had dumped the vehicle and—at least this was what everyone seemed to believe—gotten on the last train going into Manhattan. Whether they had gotten off at Grand Central or 125th Street or any of the stops after Bronxville right now was anyone’s guess, but everyone seemed to presume they had gone all the way to Forty-second Street. And from there? At the moment, they had disappeared. They could have hopped a subway in Grand Central in any direction or taken a cab to any borough—even one of the airports, where, if they had the right sort of help, they might be boarding an airplane right now. They were believed to have two handguns, since both of the dead Russians’ holsters were empty, and thus considered very dangerous. Kristin’s carving knife was gone, too, though it was hard to conceal something that large, and so one of the officers at the police station had suggested that the girls had probably thrown it away at some point during their getaway.
“This might be a naive question,” he asked Patricia now.
“Go ahead.”
“If they were sex slaves…and we didn’t know that…are we in legal trouble?”
“Question for a lawyer. But what you didn’t know doesn’t matter to the law.”
“And we didn’t pay for sex. We paid for what I guess is called ‘exotic dancing.’ At least that’s what I think we did.”
“So the sex was just because you guys are so irresistible?”
“I’m just saying, it wasn’t prostitution—or it wasn’t supposed to be.”
“Again: answer’s above my pay grade.”
“Can I ask one more thing?”
“Given how impressively unhelpful I have been, I can’t see why you would want to. But, please, go ahead.”
“If the Russians were holding the girls as…”
“Sex slaves,” she said, finishing the sentence for him. “Two words. Only hard to say them if you might have one in your house—or as a daughter.”
“Sex slaves. I get it. If the girls were prisoners like that, hadn’t they the right to kill their captors?”
“You really think that’s how the judicial system works? Smart investment banker like you?”
He ran one of his hands through his hair. “Got it.”
“Life’s not an Xbox game.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s not.”
“Besides: those two girls are a lot better off if we find them first.”
“First?”
“Before their—and please hear the sarcasm in my voice—managers. Bosses. I don’t know who those two dudes on ice are. Their wallets are gone. I’m sure the IDs in those wallets would have been false anyway. Completely made up.”
“Couldn’t you figure out who they are by their DNA?”
“You’ve watched too many cop dramas on TV. CODIS only helps if we have their DNA on file. Unless they have criminal records, there’s no reason to believe we would.”
“Same with the two girls?”
“That’s right. Which is too bad for them. Because those two corpses the M.E. will autopsy in the morning? They weren’t working alone. And even if they were pretty low on the food chain, there are still going to be some seriously pissed-off people out there who want those girls back: either they’ll want to put them back to work because they are just so incredibly lucrative or they’ll want to kill them. And if I were a betting woman, I would bet the latter. They’ll want to make sure their other girls don’t think for one second they can get away with this sort of…disobedience. Let’s face it: as lucrative as those girls might have been, they’re still just a commodity. They’re just not all that hard to replace.”
He finished the last of his water and stood up. He took a step and stumbled, nearly falling into the credenza. He held up his hands for Patricia. “Not drunk,” he said. “At least not…anymore.”
“Just clumsy?”
“I am clumsy. I really am. You would not believe the ridiculous things I’ve done in my life,” he said, recalling the Audi as it rolled backward down his driveway. “But just now? That was just me being…”
“Shaken?”
“Yeah. Shaken.” He knew he had to call Kristin and tell her to remain at her mother’s. Tell her that he’d join her there. He had to tell her that she couldn’t come home. And in a few hours—he would wait until eight-thirty as a courtesy, but not a second later—he would call his lawyer, Bill O’Connell. The very idea that he needed Bill for something like this caused his stomach once more to lurch, and he made a mental note to try and recall every single thing he had said at the police station. God, how drunk had he been that he hadn’t called Bill right away?
“One more thing,” the detective said.
“Yes?”
She tilted her head toward the top of the breakfront. “You will need to take your cat with you.”
He glanced up at Cassandra. Sure enough, she was still watching them.
“Okay. Sure. Of course.”