“Jeezus, come on, please! Give me something. Because there is no way in hell I’m going to just stand down now without a more compelling reason, Maddocks.”
Another curse. A beat of silence. Then he said quietly, “This will be in the media—public knowledge—a couple in Squamish burned to death in a house fire three nights ago. The fire is thought to have been caused by a propane line explosion.” He paused. “The deceased male was a paraplegic named Stirling Harrison. He was the innocent bystander who was injured in the 1993 Belkin drug shoot-out.” Another pause. “Follow Belkin’s legal counsel.”
Her mind hustled to join these disparate pieces into a cohesive picture, but she couldn’t. Not yet. But she could look this stuff up.
“Look, I know you, Angie. I know that you want to resist, to march to your own drum here, but I’m sticking my neck out. I’m telling you this because . . .” He swore again, viciously this time. “Because I think I’m coming to love you, okay? And I care, dammit. I want you around and in my life—I want to find you safely in Victoria when I get back. I want you around after your probation. I want to . . . to share”—his voice caught, turned hoarse—“spring, summer with you, Angie, get those kayaks out. Get out onto the water—work on the old boat, have barbecues on the deck, have you and Ginny there with me. I want to spend fall and next winter with you, dammit. I want a normal relationship when things settle down. I want us to see if this can work. And you need to stay alive.”
Shock slammed through her. Emotion pricked into her eyes.
His dream. The one he’s been trying to salvage. His old wooden boat, family . . . his vision of sailing up the coast. He wants me in it.
“Be there for me, okay? I’m here for you.”
Angie couldn’t speak—her voice was choked in a ball in her throat.
“I trust you,” he said quietly. “I trust you’ll do the right thing.”
I could screw up his career if I act on something privileged that he told me.
She pressed her hand over her mouth. She didn’t know how to handle this. His words, so rough with emotion, had come out of the blue, and they were dizzying and they stole all her breath and she couldn’t think. They stripped her to the core. A maelstrom of feelings burned in her chest—fondness, fear, sadness, ferocity. “I . . . I’ve got to go, Maddocks,” she said quickly and hung up.
Angie stood there, rain streaming down the windows as the sky grew blacker and lower and an evening mist crept in. A precipice—she felt as though she were balanced at the very edge of a cliff and below her was a black maw and she was being asked to lean in, and to let herself fall into that unknown.
Trust me.
He wasn’t just talking about the case. He’d asked her to take a leap, and she didn’t know if she could. Or even who she wanted to be. Whether she could be anyone at all if she did not have knowledge of who she really was. Her very sense of self-identity had been ripped out from under her when she’d learned that she’d been abandoned in that cradle, and then again when she’d been told that she’d had a twin. How could she love him, wholly, if she herself was broken?
She had to find her other half—her twin—first. She had to seek and define that dark shadow that haunted her whenever she looked in the mirror—the owner of that little lost foot.
An old rhyme came to mind, as it had before, usually after she’d hit the sex club on the hunt for an anonymous lay.
Fractured face
in the mirror,
you are my disgrace,
a sinner.
No. Not a sinner in the mirror. My sister. My missing half. My DNA. Out there somewhere.
Rain lashed suddenly against the library windows, and wind whistled through the building pillars outside. In the sound of the wind she heard the small voice whispering again.
Come . . . come playum dum grove. Help. Help me, Roksana.
Maddocks glared at his reflection in the hotel bathroom mirror, his hands braced on the vanity, his burner cell lying in front of him next to the basin, the television murmuring in the next room. He’d left the station to come and call Angie in privacy. He’d said stuff he hadn’t intended to. The words, feelings, had just come out of his mouth, almost of their own volition, and now they could not be put back or unheard. And while he hadn’t meant to say them, he meant them—he could not handle losing her, being responsible for not warning her. Like Takumi had not warned him of the dangers facing Sophia Tarasov and the other barcode girls.
But was it enough?
Would he regret not being harsher, more forcible? Giving her more information? Or less? Would he pay for not reporting to Operation Aegis what he knew from Angie—that Milo Belkin was connected to the 1986 cradle case and the disappearance of a little Polish girl, a twin whose foot had been found in Tsawwassen last week? And that Angie Pallorino and her sister and their mother might have been victims of Russian human trafficking involving Belkin and his accomplices?
Would it come back to bite him that he’d not reported to Aegis that Angie had visited with that inmate?
He dragged both his hands over his head, reminding himself that Belkin had been incarcerated for decades. It was unlikely that he was actively linked to anything directly relating to the Aegis investigation. It was simply his connection to organized criminals that put her in jeopardy—the fact the mob looked after their own and might have killed Stirling Harrison and his wife to do so.
And if Pietrikowski got his act together, the DNA from Voight’s old case files would soon lead him to Belkin anyway.
Maddocks just had to trust that Angie would listen to him—that she’d see the links in the clues he’d given, see the danger, and shut up and sit tight.
CHAPTER 41
A female voice sounded through the library intercom. “The Vancouver Library will be closing in twenty minutes. If everyone could please finish off . . .”
But Angie barely heard. A dog with a bone now, she tuned out the woman’s voice and quickly punched into a search engine a series of keywords: HOMICIDE, SEX WORKERS, TONGUES CUT.
She hit ENTER.