“So she coulda died Friday,” Leo said as he stood a safe distance behind Kjel. The old homicide cop never got too close to a DB if he could help it. “When her car bust through that barrier and came down that bank?”
“Yeah,” Kjel said, leaning closer to the body. “But I don’t see a corpse with a slit throat and no shoes driving that Yaris through any fucking barrier.” He pointed to a small, circular, reddish-black wound, purulent-looking, on the inside of the woman’s wrist. “What’s do you reckon that is, Doc? Burn, maybe?”
O’Hagan drew back the sleeve, revealing more marks of similar shape along the tender white flesh of the decedent’s inner arm. “Consistent with cigarette burns.” Her hand stilled. Kjel saw it at the same time.
“Shit,” he whispered.
The interpreter was missing a pinkie finger and a ring finger on her right hand.
“Cut clean off above the knuckles.” He glanced up at Leo. “Looks like she was tortured. And resisted. And he had to burn her and take more than one finger.” He fell silent, thinking.
The barcode girl. Sophia Tarasov—that’s who the interpreter’s killer wanted. That’s how he’d known where to find the girls in the hospital and how he’d known which one had talked to Maddocks. And this innocent civilian had fought with her life to keep the information from him. To keep Tarasov safe. But she’d lost. They’d all lost.
He wiped water from his face with his sleeve. “Better get her into your morgue, stat, Doc, because my bets is this body is gonna be snatched off your table like Tarasov was.”
He came to his feet. They watched in silence, rain drumming and plopping on water and mud as the body was bagged and carefully placed into the litter basket, and the body guys slipped and staggered up the steep grassy bank with their cargo.
Jack-O wiggled inside his pouch. Kjel opened up his zipper and peered in. “Okay, ol’ boy, I’ll take yous for a pee as soon as we gets outta here.”
As they started up the bank, O’Hagan held Kjel back and said quietly, “What’s the deal with Angie?”
“I dunno,” he said. “All’s I heard is she got axed.” He glanced up at Leo, who was grabbing fistfuls of slimy grass as he tried to haul his fat hairy ass up the bank.
CHAPTER 50
Maddocks set his triple-shot coffee on his desk in the Surrey incident room and shrugged out of his jacket. He draped it over the back of the chair. He had not been able to sleep. Angie was not taking his calls, which was bad news. He was about to phone the MVPD social media desk to check on her when his cell rang.
He grabbed it. Caller ID showed Holgersen, not Angie.
“Yeah?” he said, connecting his call as he took a seat and reached for his coffee.
“Divers found her body—the Russian interpreter.”
Maddocks stilled his coffee midway to his mouth.
“What?”
“Yep—she’s dead. She never did make it across the island to go watching storms or nothing. They pulled her little Yaris outta Duck Lake off the highway on the way to Sooke yesterday. Divers found her body this morning. Like mud soup, that water.”
“She went off the road?”
“Murdered, by all appearances—throat cut clean across, almost down to the spinal column.” A pause. “She was tortured, boss—cigarette burns and two fingers cut off.”
Maddocks swallowed and slowly set his coffee cup down. “Tarasov’s killer,” he said quietly. “That’s how he got to her. That’s how he found her. Through the interpreter.”
“That would be my working hypothesis. He followed the interpreter, forced her to phone her office with some ruse about going away for the weekend, then tortured her for info on the barcodes.”
“How did he find the interpreter in the first place?”
“Figure he’s been watching us, boss. Them Russians gotta know we gots their barcode merch. I reckon they’s been tailing our investigation to find where we stashed the girls. O’Hagan’s waiting on word from you. She wants confirmation that this one is hers, or if once you pass on this news to your task force they’re gonna be nabbing the DB off her table like they did Tarasov.”
Ice seeped into his veins. He rubbed his brow and glanced up at where Takumi was talking to another officer across the room. “Dot every i and cross every bloody t, Holgersen, because you’re right. The moment I pass this on to Takumi, it’s outta your hands. They’re going to want everything you got.”
“Yous getting anywheres over there in Surrey, then?”
“Moving forward. Any witnesses yet? Anything that places our Tarasov suspect near, or with, the interpreter?”
“Nothing so far. Your task force has all the CCTV footage from the hospital, so we can’t go looking there to see if the interpreter was followed after she left the Tarasov interview with us.”
“I’ll get that hospital footage pulled up on this end.” Maddocks’s gaze shot to the incident room door as it was flung suddenly open. Rollins from Project Gateway burst into the room, two officers hot on his heels. Takumi waved them over. They all bent heads in urgent conversation. Takumi reached fast for a phone, placed a call. Something was going down.
“I gotta go. Tell me quick, is Jack-O okay?”
“Ol’ Master Jack ain’t wanna go back to you, boss. Living the high life here.” He hesitated. “Pallorino good?”
A jab of fear. “Why?”
“Because of what happened—”
“What happened?”
“She gots the guillotine. Vedder terminated her.”
Maddocks’s brain reeled. Fear sliced deeper. “You mean she’s not there? Not at the social media desk?”
“I thoughts you knew, boss.”
Christ. “Did Vedder—anyone—say anything about why she was terminated?”
“Mums the words here.”
“Call me stat if you hear anything.” Maddocks killed the call, took a gulp of tepid coffee, and surged to his feet. He went straight to Takumi and drew the man aside. He informed him about the Russian interpreter.