“Happy birthday, little ones!” The male voice stopped the scene dead. Everything went gray. Then out of the grayness the box came at her. Shoe box. Bound by a big pale-purple ribbon. Huge hands held it, hair on the backs of those hands. A crab drawing on the inside of one wrist. Pretty crab. Pale-blue crab, like a spider. And suddenly she was looking at the underwater footage on Jacob Anders’s live feed, and down from the corner swooped the octopus. Slammed over the Dungeness crab. Killed it and devoured it a mushrooming cloud of silt with sea lice scattering.
Fear closed a noose around Angie’s throat. Slowly, very slowly, she glanced up from the blue crab on white skin, all the way up. Into the eyes of the man who was offering her the box with the purple ribbon. Twinkly eyes. Blue like the crab. Bright blue. Friendly. Kind. She looked deep into the piercing, sparkling blue eyes . . . and right into the face that was staring out of her computer.
A hand slammed down on her shoulder. A voice boomed in her ears, inside her head. “For my Mila, and a matching pair for Roksana.” He had a smile so big and broad. It put warmth in her heart. But . . . all of a sudden she was running from him. Terror in her stomach. The forest and sunshine and ocean spiraling into a kaleidoscopic vortex, sucking her away . . . and she was in the snow . . . Running . . . She saw those shoes running in the snow . . . Home, home, home, got to get HOME . . . “Alex, get me HOME!”
Uciekaj, uciekaj! . . . Wskakuj do srodka, szybko! . . . Siedz cicho! A flash of silver, pain . . . Angie screamed . . .
“Ma’am. Ma’am.” The hand shook her shoulder harder. “Are you all right?”
She blinked. Her gaze shot up. It was the librarian. A young guy. Dark hair. Worry in his face. “Do you want me to call for help?”
“I . . . I, God, no.” She jerked to her feet. Her skin was wet. She could smell her own sweat, fear on herself. She slapped closed her laptop and started blindly gathering up her things. “I’m fine.”
“You screamed.”
“I . . . I’m so sorry.” She quickly slipped her laptop into her tote along with her notebooks and files. She shrugged the bag handle over her shoulder. “I’m really sorry. I must have fallen asleep and had a bad nightmare.” She scooped up her coat and hurried down the stairs, making for the library exit. She pushed out the doors, her face red-hot.
Once outside, she stopped and let the cool evening rain kiss her face and the winter wind pull at her hair. Inhaling a shaky breath, she wiped her sleeve across her mouth.
It was him. The man she’d seen under hypnosis. A man with a crab tattoo exactly the same as Milo Belkin’s, but on his wrist. It was Semyon Zagorsky who had given her—and maybe her sister—those shoes. As a gift. With a purple bow. Zagorsky, Belkin’s associate, knew who she was, too. He’d cared enough to give her presents. She’d liked his eyes. Had he been at the cradle with Belkin that night? The second male, perhaps? Or if he wasn’t, he had to know what had gone down, given his continued acquaintance with Belkin over the subsequent years—at least until the 1993 drug haul.
Could he be her father?
No way in hell was she not going to drive out to Kelvin first thing tomorrow. That man, mob links or not, was part of her past and could be her dad. She needed to look into his face. Into those blue eyes. And even if he told her nothing, maybe the sight of him would make her remember everything.
CHAPTER 42
“I know it’s late and a Saturday, but I’m also aware you’ve been waiting—” The voice that came over Angie’s phone was that of IDRU tech Kira Tranquada.
Angie’s hand tensed around her cell.
“It’s a match,” Tranquada said. “The child’s foot DNA is identical to yours, apart from the minor epigenetic variations consistent with those of a monozygotic twin.”
“No mistake?” Angie said.
“It’s not an adventitious match, no. We conducted detailed analysis that went beyond the accepted standard thirteen loci. We repeated the results with a second sample. There’s no mistake.”
Angie killed the call and stared out of her hotel room window. It was dark out. Through her reflection on the pane she could see lights from the yachts in Coal Harbour below. A sheen of rain glistened on the wings of wet floatplanes moored at the dock. Beyond, to the east, the lights of cargo vessels and tankers twinkled and played peekaboo with mist—the crews inside no doubt edgy for the port strike to be resolved so that they could enter and discharge their imports.
She’d known that when Tranquada called this would be the news. But still, the cold, hard scientific evidence dropped like a weight through Angie’s chest. A twin—who’d somehow ended up in the Salish Sea, possibly deep under water, just lying there on some seabed for years, decomposing, being consumed by sea life, her left foot finally disarticulating, the air in the small ROOAirPocket floating it up to the surface where the tides and wind and currents had bobbed it along on a journey . . . for how long? From where?
Had she suffered?
Had their mother suffered?
Who was Semyon Zagorsky to them all?
She swallowed and checked her watch. She’d already phoned the warden at Kelvin Maximum Security Institution and arranged to visit Zagorsky tomorrow. It was a six-hour drive into the interior where the prison was located. She’d need to start early. She was unsure what time she’d manage to return. She could drive back through the night if she had to, make the ferry at the crack of dawn on Monday, be in her uniform and at the MVPD station by nine.
This wasn’t about disregarding Maddocks’s warning, she told herself. This was about looking into the blue eyes of a man who could perhaps be her father, who might help her remember. Nothing in this world could stop Angie from doing this now—her need to know was too powerful. It was a fire consuming her.
She opened the minibar and took out a small bottle of cold white wine. She poured a glass and carried her drink back to the window. She raised it to her mirror image reflected in the dark pane. Here’s to you, Mila, my other half. I’m going to find you. I’m going to lay you to rest in a place where we both belong. I’ll find that place.
She sipped her wine as she watched Vancouver grow darker. And as it did, her reflection looking back at her grew more apparent. A stranger. A sister.
She had a sister.
Come . . . Comeum dum . . .
No matter the cost, no matter what she learned, the truth would be preferable to what she had now—silence. And ghosts.
Angie took another sip and jumped when her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She fished it out, cleared her throat. “Pallorino.”
“It’s Sergeant Vedder.”
She stilled. Her boss. Calling on a Saturday evening? The tone of his voice did not bode well. Nor did the fact he’d announced his rank. Slowly she set her wine glass down on the table in front of the window.
“What is it, Sarge?” she said quietly.
“Sometimes I think you want to self-destruct, Detective,” came his voice. He was angry, clearly angry. “You were on probation. Do you understand what that means? It means a period of detention from which you can be released subject to good behavior under supervision. I went to bat for you, d’you know that? I argued for your continued employment while others at the MVPD wanted you gone. All you had to do was report to that desk for a period of twelve months. You haven’t even lasted one day. I stuck my neck out for this?”