A series of links to news stories populated her laptop screen, among them references to a mythological method of murder called the Colombian necktie. She ignored those links and clicked on a CBC news story out of Montreal. Last summer the naked and badly bruised body of an unidentified female had been discovered in a vacant lot with her tongue excised. She was a dancer employed by a Russian nightclub with known mob connections. There was speculation that the woman’s murder had been a mob hit, the excised tongue sending some kind of warning. Angie searched deeper for more news on this homicide, but she found nothing more in the media. Granted, her search was cursory, but on the surface it appeared that no arrests had been made, and there was no coverage of the body ever having been identified.
She drummed her fingers on the desk. If this task force that Maddocks had been detailed to was top-level clearance, and if this missing-tongue murder fell under that task force purview, it was likely that further details—like a barcode tattoo, perhaps—would have been withheld from the media.
“The library will shutting in ten minutes. If everyone could please proceed with their books to checkout . . .”
Urgency crackled through her. She could pursue this from her hotel later, but she was unable to stop.
Follow Belkin’s legal counsel.
Hurriedly she typed, DEFENSE COUNSEL MILO BELKIN.
Angie clicked open the first news link in the search results—a news story covering Belkin’s drug bust trial. His defense counsel was Viktor Abramov of the firm Abramov, Maizel, and Dietch.
She typed into the search field, ABRAMOV MAIZEL DIETCH.
Surprise whipped through her as the results populated her screen. The same counsel had defended Belkin’s drug bust co-accused, Semyon Zagorsky. The firm, it appeared, was infamous for its defense of alleged Russian mobsters in high-profile trials in Montreal and in other parts of the country, including Vancouver.
Lawyers for the Russian mob? Is that what Maddocks was telling me? That Belkin and Zagorsky were known members of Russian organized crime, and their thug connections on the outside might have burned Zagorsky’s paraplegic victim to death?
Hurriedly, Angie typed, VIKTOR ABRAMOV. She narrowed the search field to the eighties and nineties. She clicked open a 1991 digitized news article from the East Side Weekly on an exotic dancer’s “mistake.”
Club Orange B Dancer Retracts Rape Allegations
EAST VANCOUVER: Days before East Vancouver resident Milo Belkin was due in court on sexual assault and battery charges, exotic dancer Nadia Moss told reporters that she had mistakenly identified her attacker, who raped and badly beat her with a baseball bat—breaking her nose, cheekbone, arm, and leg, and leaving her for dead in an alley near the club at which she worked. Moss had been due to take the stand at Belkin’s trial when she retracted her statement to police. East Van activists had taken up Moss’s cause and provided her with pro-bono counsel.
Vancouver police, however, are not looking for new suspects, said VPD media liaison Leanne Benton.
Moss, who is slowly recovering from her injuries, now works as a bar manager at Club Orange B. She told reporters she is thankful to her employers, who stood by her and who offered her a position that would help her recover fully from her injuries.
Belkin’s counsel, Viktor Abramov, said that his client has always maintained his innocence and is grateful that Moss had the courage to come forward and admit her error.
Angie frowned. A club promotion for Nadia Moss as payoff for withdrawing her assault and rape charges? She typed, SQUAMISH GAS EXPLOSION FIRE, DEATH.
Top of the list was a recent Vancouver Province article. She clicked it open and read.
Couple Die in House Fire
SQUAMISH: Firefighters responded to a blaze in the Valleycliffe subdivision in the early hours of Wednesday morning. A 9-1-1 call was received at 3:10 a.m. after residents in Eagle Street heard an explosion, then looked out of their windows to see the property of Stirling and Elaine Harrison fully engulfed in flames. The badly burned bodies of the Harrison couple were discovered in the aftermath of the blaze. Arson investigators were called in, but so far Squamish fire chief Eddie Beam is saying that it looks like a tragic accident.
A witness who tried to enter the burning house said he’d seen Elaine Harrison out on her lawn earlier, but she’d reentered the burning building in a bid to save her paraplegic husband.
Angie typed STIRLING HARRISON into the search field. Her heart kicked at what came up—articles referencing the November 20 drug bust twenty-five years ago and the arrests of Milo Belkin and his associate Semyon Zagorsky.
Stirling Harrison had indeed been the innocent bystander who’d caught a ricocheting .22 slug in the back, which had put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
“The library doors are closing . . .”
Angie scanned quickly through the articles, heat prickling over her skin as she read. Shortly after receiving the news that her husband would never walk again and that he would lose his high-paying job as a BC Hydro technician who worked at high elevations repairing and maintaining the province’s hydro towers, Elaine Harrison tearfully vowed to a journalist that she and her husband, a young father, would give the most powerful of victim impact statements at Semyon Zagorsky’s sentencing. Zagorsky was the one, she’d told the reporter, who’d been shooting the .22 pistol in the East Vancouver gun battle.
Elaine Harrison had additionally promised that she would push her husband’s wheelchair into every single parole board hearing that Zagorsky ever qualified for—and she and her husband would both make it known to the parole board how Zagorsky had destroyed their livelihood and their family as they’d known it.
Angie searched deeper, then froze.
Semyon Zagorsky was currently incarcerated at Kelvin Maximum Security Institution in the BC interior. He was up for a parole board hearing in two days. And this time, his victims—Stirling and Elaine Harrison—would not be present to object. Because they were dead.
Angie punched in the name SEMYON ZAGORSKY.
A news photo from the time of his arrest took shape on her monitor.
Her heart beat in her throat. She stared at the image. Could not breathe. A high-pitched ringing began in her ears, and her vision narrowed, a halo of blackness closing in as she swirled down, down, down . . . into that dark place of her childhood where Alex had taken her with hypnosis. Suddenly she was there again, among the giant cedars, running on sunlight, upon dandelions, salt wind through her long hair, her dress billowing like a tent in the breeze. Glimpses of blue ocean between the trunks. Little shoes ahead of her—she was chasing them. Legs, white under a pink dress with frills, pumped ahead of her, darting through the emerald grass.
“Mila!” she called. “Stop, Mila, wait. . .” A tinkle of childish laughter. “Berries, berries, blackberries . . . baskets . . . two little kittens . . .”