What in the hell is she up to?
He watched as Angie shifted her attention to a male seated at the rear of the establishment. The male was in his late fifties and had a newspaper. He held Angie’s gaze across the restaurant. An odd chill of familiarity washed through Maddocks. He leaned closer to the screen.
“Can you zoom in on that guy, there, at the back?” he said quickly to the techs as he pointed to the screen.
As they narrowed in, Angie got up from the bar and made for the exit. The man came instantly to his feet. He folded his newspaper and headed toward the bar, carrying the folded paper in his hand. Angie exited the club doors. The chill in Maddocks turned to ice. The man walked with a very slight limp, like one leg was shorter than the other, and it canted him slightly to the left. Maddocks tried to swallow. The man was the right height, the right build. Except he wore no wig this time. It was him. Sophia Tarasov’s killer. The man who’d posed as a doctor. His image from the hospital CCTV footage had been burned into Maddocks’s brain. Every instinct in his body screamed that this was the guy. The hit man. The same killer suspected of having tortured and killed the Russian interpreter.
Angie had walked right into a lion’s den.
Maddocks’s gaze shot to the monitor showing exterior footage. Angie was walking down the road, past the parking lot, hair blowing in the wet wind, streetlights glinting in the rain.
His attention whipped back to the interior footage. The male was asking something of the woman behind the bar. She looked scared. From her pocket she extracted the piece of paper Angie had given her. She showed it to the man.
The man pointed to it and said something. The woman’s body language screamed fear. Subservience. She reached for a cell phone on the shelf behind her. She returned to the counter. The man jabbed at the note with his index finger. She focused on the piece of paper as she punched a number into the phone.
“Closer,” Maddocks said, voice thick. “Zoom in more. Onto that note.”
The bar woman’s hands were shaking. The man stepped in front of the camera’s line of view. His shift in position afforded Maddocks a clear view of the headline on the top part of the folded newspaper in the man’s hand.
Angel’s Cradle Child from ’86 Identified as Victoria Cop
A smaller subhead read:
Officer’s DNA a match to floating child’s foot
Maddocks swung his attention back to the monitor of the exterior. He watched as Angie stopped, answered her phone. She nodded as she spoke, checked her watch, then killed the call. Maddocks switched his gaze to the footage feeding from the inside of the club. The bartender ended her call, too. The outside feed showed Angie turning around and starting back toward the club. But when she reached the parking lot, she crossed through it, threading her way among the stationary vehicles as she headed toward the alley that led to the rear of the club building.
Maddocks could barely breathe. He watched as the male with the newspaper left the bar counter and made for the restaurant exit.
The man headed out the door. The exterior camera picked him up outside. Maddocks scrutinized his gait, the way he held his head, moved his arms, the roll of his shoulders. He was even more certain—this was their hit man. The suspect entered the parking lot and approached a black Audi gleaming with rain. He opened the driver’s side door, got in. The running lights flared on as he started the engine. He reversed out of his parking spot and drove the Audi around to the alley at the rear of the club.
“Can you read the plate?” Maddocks snapped at the surveillance tech in front of the monitors. “Zoom in on that Audi plate.”
“Can’t see it,” the surveillance guy said. “The dumpster on the sidewalk is obscuring line of sight.” Maddocks’s phone rang. It was Takumi.
“ETA five minutes,” Takumi said. “Waiting for visual confirmation of the convoy on your end.”
Maddocks’s gaze flicked to the screen showing exterior footage of the dimly lit back alley. Angie came suddenly into view around the back corner of the building. She stopped in dark shadows and looked around as if waiting to meet someone. It happened so fast Maddocks barely saw. The Audi drove into the alley behind Angie just as the bartender stepped out of the club’s back alley door.
The bar woman waved and called to Angie, distracting Angie as the Audi door opened behind her. Angie went toward the bar woman. The woman started talking to Angie as the man came out of the car and slipped into the blackness of shadow along the wall. Maddocks could no longer make out his shape. Tension lashed through him. Where in the hell is he?
A dark movement loomed out of the shadows and came up behind Angie as she conversed with the barkeeper—the man. He flung his arm around Angie’s neck, squeezed, and jabbed something in her back. Angie stilled, and then her whole body jerked in wild spasms as if she’d been shocked.
“Fuck!” said one of the surveillance cops. “Did you just see that? Did you see what he did?”
“Stun gun,” said the second officer. “He used a fucking stun gun on that woman.”
Maddocks stared in mute horror as Tarasov’s killer dragged Angie’s limp body back toward the Audi, its engine still running and puffing white exhaust fumes into the air. The bar woman went back inside.
“There it is!” the tech said, pointing to another monitor. “The convoy. Lead SUV and one bringing up the rear. Two trucks. Atlantis Imports on the sides. We have a visual. We have a visual.”
The lead SUV turned into the parking lot and drove around toward the back of the club. The rest of the convoy followed. Maddocks couldn’t wait. The killer was pulling out of the opposite end of the alley in his Audi. He was going to exit on the far side of the club. Angie was inside that car.
“Get that damn Audi plate—there—there, you can see it now!” The Audi came around the far side of the building, and light fell on it as it turned into the street.
“Sir—the convoy—”
“Yes, you watch the convoy,” Maddocks said to the officer who’d just spoken. He addressed the tech next. “You, zoom into that goddamn plate before we lose that vehicle.”
The tech obeyed the order. The Audi plate zoomed into view under the streetlight. Maddocks committed the registration to memory as he reached for his work phone and made another call, this time to Sergeant Eden, who was stationed back in the incident room.
“I need a plate run.” He gave Eden the registration.
As he waited on the line, he said to the team, “Tell me when all the females from the trucks have been taken inside—all thirty-two, count ’em.”