He thinks he’s found the girls. They’re in that hospital.
The tall skinny detective in the ugly bomber jacket and combat boots stops to light a cigarette. The boss cop—the taller one with pitch-black hair and pale skin, the one he’s been tracking—is dressed in a classy wool coat. Behind them come two women. The man knows that the dark-haired woman is a Russian interpreter because the detectives waited for her to arrive before going inside earlier, and once they were inside, he’d jimmied open the car she arrived in. In her glove compartment he found business cards with her address and photo. He fingers one of these cards now as his gaze settles on the second woman, committing her to memory. Blonde. Short. Athletic build. He doesn’t know who she is. She arrived later. The group converses outside the hospital entrance for a few minutes while the skinny cop grabs a few fast drags on his cigarette, exhaling in a cloud of smoke and condensation. They start down the stairs. The skinny guy drops his smoke, grinds it out with his boot, then picks it up again and puts it in a bag. Drawing up his collar, skinny cop follows his boss-partner to an Impala parked in the lot. The two women go separate ways.
He lights a cigarette of his own—the skinny detective’s smoking has given him the urge. The Impala pulls out of the lot and turns down the street. He continues to wait in his nondescript sedan, his plates carefully obscured with splattered mud. His skill, his art, is patience. Discretion. Even in the face of a ticking clock and pressing urgency. He gets big money for completed jobs. This is a big job.
For this job he’s been told to send a message. He never questions why. He never feels stress or emotion. He only takes pride in a contract neatly executed.
When the interpreter drives out of the lot in her little blue Yaris, he extinguishes his cigarette carefully in his ashtray and starts his own ignition. He puts his car into gear and drives slowly behind the interpreter’s vehicle, his tires crackling on the wet streets as he holds a safe distance.
CHAPTER 18
A pixielike woman with purple hair and a white lab coat poked her head out of the lab door and peered at Angie. “Our receptionist is not in yet.”
Angie felt hot and bothered in her uniform as she stood holding her evidence box in the reception area of Anders Forensics, the firm that Dr. Sunni Padachaya had recommended. Her arm ached. Traffic up the peninsula had been a beast. And urgency nipped at her—she still needed to make it back to Victoria before her 11:00 a.m. start, or she’d have a black mark against her on day one of her probation. This nine-to-five noose was going to suck even more than she’d imagined.
“I’m here for Dr. Jacob Anders,” she said. “He’s expecting me—I called earlier.”
“Oh, you’re Angie Pallorino?” the pixie said, eyeing her beat uniform.
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t expecting a police officer.”
“Right.”
“Jacob is through this way.” She led Angie down a sterile concrete corridor lined with vast windows that overlooked a bay ruffled with whitecaps. The building smelled new. It also reeked of money. Sunni had said Dr. Jacob Anders would be pricey when Angie had reached her by phone early this morning. Sunni had personally vouched that Anders was one of the best in the business—a newly relocated British expat with a breadth of LE-related experience abroad and in North America. He’d also contracted in the past to the FBI and the RCMP as well as other police organizations.
The purple-haired lab pixie opened a door. “His office is through this way. Go ahead.”
Angie carried her box into an office suite walled with smoked glass. Here, too, expansive windows looked out over the gunmetal-gray bay. A glass-and-chrome desk was positioned in front of the windows. No chair behind it, only one in front of it. Shelves of books lined one wall. Another wall hosted a bank of monitors and a large smart screen. Several of the monitors showed what appeared to be live black-and-white surveillance footage from inside his labs and the exterior perimeter of the building. One screen displayed what seemed to be an underwater feed filming a whitish object trapped beneath a curved cage. There was no one in the room.
“Hello? Dr. Anders?”
“Detective Pallorino, welcome,” came a deep and resonant voice. Holding her box in front of her, Angie swiveled around to the source of the sound. From behind a partition appeared a man in a wheelchair. Surprise rippled through Angie as she was forced to lower her gaze to the man’s face. He wheeled forward and proffered his hand. “Please, call me Jacob.” His accent was British, the kind Angie associated with upper class and sophistication.
Angie balanced her box on her left hip and shook the man’s hand. His grasp was firm, calculated. It brought to mind the resoluteness of a surgeon coupled with a pianist’s sensitivity. Everything about him whispered paradox, from his overt physical disability, to the power he seemed to exude, to the intelligence and kindness in his gray eyes. Angie judged Jacob Anders to be in his late forties, possibly early fifties given the silver that flecked the dark hair at his temples and the lines that bracketed his strong mouth. Movie-star handsome but just slightly off-center in a way she could not immediately articulate. His assuredness made her square her shoulders.
“Thank you for meeting with me at such short notice,” she said.
He appraised her, taking in her uniform, clearly shaping a question in his mind for which she did not feel like providing an answer.
“Take a seat,” he said. “You can place your box on the desk over there. How can I help you?”
“You come highly recommended by Sunni Padachaya, with whom I work at the MVPD lab,” Angie said as she set her box on the glass surface. Anders wheeled himself around to the other side of his desk while she lowered herself into the chair in front of it.
“Sunni’s a good friend of mine,” he said. “We met at a forensics conference in Brussels many years back and have kept up a connection ever since.”