She gripped his arm. “Please, don’t go. Not yet. You gave me and Mila those shoes—little high-tops. Lilac. You wrapped them in boxes with purple bows. We liked you, Semy, I remember. Yet you chased us with guns and knives across that street in Vancouver. You took my mother and sister—”
“I was a guardian,” he said very quietly, his eyes still tracking around the room, watching everything. Worried. “Your protector. It was not supposed to go that way. She made it happen. It was her fault that she and Mila were killed. After that . . . there was nothing I could do to save her or Mila.” He paused, then said almost in a whisper, “You were the lucky one, Roksi—the one who got away from him. Ana could save only one of you that night. And it was close. Too close. She almost lost you both. It was a stupid move.” He pushed himself to his feet, looked down at her. “Now go home, please, and stop looking. Because if he knows that you came here, and that you are searching for him, he will kill you.” He turned to leave.
“No, wait!” She leaped up and grabbed his arm. A guard stepped out of the observation room. Angie quickly withdrew her hand. The guard held back. “Who will kill me?”
He looked down into her face—he was very tall, a colossus of a man. Russian in genetics and culture perhaps, but not in accent. Her brain raced. She had to run background checks on Semy, look for any information she could find on this man—his past residences, acquaintances, friends, family. She needed to find them all, talk to them.
“You have to stop,” he repeated. “Promise me you will stop looking.”
“I will not. I can’t. I will find him, Semy—whoever he is—with or without you. Because I’m starting to remember things that are guiding me forward,” she said. “I remember you. I recall you giving us those shoes. I remember the look in your eyes when you handed me the box—it was kind, gentle. It made me happy inside. And now one of those little lilac shoes you gave us has floated up with the remains of Mila’s foot inside. The RCMP have opened an investigation, and they’ve already tied it to the cradle case in ’86 and to me. They know my DNA matches Mila’s, that she had a twin. Which means the cradle case has been reopened, and the old evidence from that case is being retested using new science. The fingerprints from the case have already led me to Milo Belkin, and the RCMP are close behind. So don’t think your people on the outside can shut me up by firebombing my house and burning me to death like they did with your victim, Stirling Harrison—”
He blanched. Angie bit back the rest of her words as it struck her.
He doesn’t know. Shit! I should have kept my mouth shut. The mob connection to the Harrison fire is privileged. It came from Maddocks.
Angie immediately tried to switch direction. “And if you didn’t kill my mother and sister, you better say who did, or you will go down for it. Murder times two. Two consecutive life sentences. You might as well write off that imminent probation hearing, because you’re going to die in here, Semy.”
He leaned down, bringing his mouth close to her ear. “Be careful, Roksi. Be very careful,” he whispered. Then he turned and made for the door. “Guard! Get me out of here!”
“Who is he?” Angie yelled after him. “Who wants to kill me?” The guard who’d stepped out of the observation room earlier went forward to assist the inmate demanding to leave the visiting area. “Who was my father, goddammit!”
He exited.
The door shut behind him.
A female officer appeared from the observation room and came to her assistance. Angie was shaking.
The man who killed my mother and Mila is alive. He is out there.
And he doesn’t want me looking.
CHAPTER 47
Semyon Zagorsky dials a number from the inmates’ phone at the bottom of the stairs in the medium-security range. As he waits for his call to pick up, that cold, coiled thing that he felt awakening from hibernation when he saw the little ROOAirPocket on TV rises inside his belly like a cobra ready to strike.
It isn’t a coincidence.
It’s real.
The past has come back to claim me, and now I face a terrible choice.
He’s a man being led to the gallows as his call is connected.
“Mila?” he says quietly into the receiver at the sound of his daughter’s voice. His head bends in toward the phone booth so others won’t hear him. “Can you put Livvy on to talk to me?”
He just wants to hear his four-year-old granddaughter’s voice. Hearing her sweet, innocent voice will enable him to make the decision he knows he must but can’t. Just can’t.
“Gampy!”
Emotion sparks through Semy’s chest. He closes his eyes, fisting the receiver. His brow touches against the metal box that shields the phone. He takes a moment to marshal control of his body.
“Livvy—” His voice cracks nevertheless. In his mind he can see them—the twins—as if it were yesterday. Two little kittens, Ana called them, running, running down to the clearing in the forest, their laughter a rare slice of sunshine that tinkled like the pure sound of freedom and goodness itself. The little shoes . . . little lilac shoes running through the snow. The other one with bare feet. Ana had no time to put on Roksana’s shoes. She’d fled with Roksi on her hip, her free hand gripping onto Mila, whom she’d dragged behind her. Her sweater was marked with cum from the two men she’d let use her so that she could lull them into complacency, escape to that cradle another sex worker had told her was down the alley between the hospital and the cathedral.
He sent Livvy—his own granddaughter—shoes for her fourth birthday. He can’t say why. He can’t say why he named his own daughter Mila, either. Possibly it was a desperate attempt to keep little Mila’s memory alive, to honor the child who’d been murdered in front of his very eyes. Possibly it was because of the guilt that haunted him like his own shadow. If he hadn’t cared so much for Ana, she wouldn’t have been able to dupe them all with her attempt to escape that night—her desperate bid to save her children from her own fate, from working as sex slaves for the rest of their lives.
Roksana was right. He’d loved the twins. Like a father. It was him who made sure they got out sometimes to play in the sunlight and sea air. It was him who sneaked Ana out of the room when the twins’ father was away.
“Did . . . did you get your present, Livvy?” he managed to say.
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you like them?”
“Make me run fast, Gampy!”
Not fast enough. Little Mila’s lilac high-tops did not move her fast enough that Christmas Eve. They did not save her while her sister screamed in pain and terror as her face was cut in the struggle to tear her away from the cradle.
“Are you going to come out and visit us soon, Gampy? Mommy says you might come one day soon now.”
He swallows hard.