Kills Well with Others (Killers of a Certain Age #2)

Chapter Sixteen

We made it back to the farmhouse by the next afternoon, having taken a roundabout return trip via Tunisia. Mary Alice picked up a few souvenirs in the Tunis airport, and after we’d eaten a late lunch, she presented Taverner, Minka, and Akiko with leather slippers and packets of dates.

“It was slippers or stuffed camels,” she said as she pitted a few dates and tossed them to the cats. They didn’t eat them, but batted them around as we talked.

“So,” Akiko said, propping her elbows on the table, “what did you learn? Did Pasha Lazarov have a secret wife? A business partner? Is Auntie Evgenia an octogenarian Octopussy and she set her acrobatic minions on you?”

“None of the above,” Helen told her. “But Billie discovered proof that the whole Lazarov clan has been keeping a secret.” She paused and looked at me, and I retrieved the photograph I’d lifted.

“According to Aunt Evgenia, the woman in the picture is Pasha’s sister, Galina.”

Akiko blinked. “The dead girl?”

“One and the same,” I told her. Taverner was ostentatiously quiet. He just ladled out stew and sliced bread and filled glasses with fizzy water spiked with thimbles of murta arba, the Sardinian liqueur of choice made from myrtle. But there was an alertness about him that meant he was listening to every word and thinking hard.

“But why did your organization tell you Galina died in the car accident with her mother?” Akiko asked.

“It could have been an honest mistake,” Helen explained. “Our Provenance department keeps track of thousands— millions —of people at a time, and this information would have been logged before the databases were digitized. Back then it was just old-school newspaper clipping and paper filing. The accident happened in the south of France and the details in the local newspaper were probably sketchy, maybe incomplete. Someone in Provenance would have cut out the mention of the accident and filed it away. Simple human error, end of story.”

“Or,” Natalie said slowly, “the Lazarovs deliberately concealed the fact that Galina survived. Think about it—we killed Boris and even though we did a bang-up job of making it appear to be an accident, there would have always been at least a suspicion of a deliberate assassination when you’re talking about a guy like that. Then Irina Lazarov’s car goes off a cliff.”

“But we didn’t do that,” Mary Alice pointed out.

Natalie rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what we did or didn’t do. It only matters what they think we did. If they were suspicious about Boris’s death, Irina’s crash, no matter how accidental, is only going to spook the family further. So if you’re Aunt Evgenia, your sister is dead and her kids are possibly in danger. Maybe the local reporter got it wrong or maybe Aunt Evgenia suggested that he get it wrong on purpose. She could have even slipped him some francs to make sure of it, keep Galina off the radar of whoever might have been targeting her family.”

“She couldn’t have known for sure that Boris had been assassinated or that Irina’s crash was just a tragic mistake,” Helen mused. “But Russians are nothing if not paranoid. Letting people think Galina was dead was a good way of keeping her safe.”

“Why not protect Pasha?” Mary Alice challenged. “If the Lazarovs believed they were being picked off, Pasha would have been just as much a target as Galina.”

“He was already almost grown,” Akiko put in. “Maybe he wasn’t under Aunt Evgenia’s thumb. Galina was still a kid.”

“A kid who’s all grown up and playing games with us,” I said, tapping the photograph.

“What did the aunt tell you about her?” Taverner asked quietly.

I shrugged. “Evgenia said she was a bad seed, and maybe she is. That would certainly fit with torching Benscombe. But I don’t know. The behavior she described could have just been that of a grieving kid. Galina visits and brings her cookies, but I don’t think they’re close.”

“Any idea where she is?” Akiko asked.

I shook my head. “Auntie Evgenia is not exactly a reliable witness these days.”

“She’s nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake,” Natalie put in helpfully.

“She is struggling with dementia,” Mary Alice corrected.

“She did say that Galina loves opera—and opera singers. She used a particularly foul Russian word to describe her. Other than that, no leads,” I said.

As the words left my mouth, I realized it was a lie. I stuttered to a stop so quickly, the others stared.

“What is it?” Mary Alice asked.

“Maybe nothing—but, shit .” I got up and went for my bag, rummaging for the things I’d thrown in as we were packing on the ferry. I’d been in such a hurry, I hadn’t really clocked it at the time, but there it was—the diary I’d taken from Pasha’s nightstand. I don’t know why it ended up in my tote. Suppressed guilt, maybe? Knowing I’d need to come clean to the others at some point about screwing up the mission by taking it? Or maybe I really was just getting sloppy in my old age. In any case, I flicked it open, looking for anything that might give us a clue. I skimmed entries for all the expected appointments—tailor, dentist, shoemaker, jeweler, hatmaker. His whole life was a series of services designed to make him polished and presentable. All he was missing was a Build-A-Bear checkup for his teddy.

But then I flipped another page and there it was, a chain of symbols Pasha had jotted down the week before, on the date Lilian Flanders had been murdered. A string of numbers, thirteen of them, beginning with a 7 he’d written backwards.

And then I realized exactly what it was.

I held up the diary as I went back to the table. “There might be something in here.”

Helen took the planner and studied it. “Smythson,” she said, eyeing the watermark on the Nile blue paper. “Very nice.”

“Your day planner?” Nat asked.

“Not mine. Pasha Lazarov’s. I lifted it from his stateroom when I did the hit.”

Mary Alice stared. “You stole from him?” There was no mistaking the judgment in her voice.

“Yes. I’d just made the hit and was going back through the stateroom when I saw the diary. I thought it might have something useful in it, so I was flipping through when I heard a noise on the stairs. My exit was cut off and I had to move quick.”

“That doesn’t explain why the diary went with you,” Helen said, handing it back to me like it was a piece of dirty laundry.

“Because it was still in my hand and I got spooked,” I told her. “At least that’s what I thought at the time. But now I think I might have taken it because I knew what these numbers were. Subconsciously, I mean.”

“We have rules about that sort of thing for a reason,” Helen said coldly.

“I know, Helen.”

She looked at me hard for a long moment, and I realized she was truly pissed. But that was not a now problem, I decided. It was more important to dig out whatever information we could from the planner.

“Look.” I flipped the diary to the correct page to show the others. “The day Lilian Flanders was killed in Maine, Pasha has a note in his diary.” I pointed to the string of numbers.

Mary Alice peered through her bifocals. “It could be a phone number, but that doesn’t make sense. The seven at the start is backwards.”

“Because it isn’t a seven,” I said grimly. “Pasha was Bulgarian which means his first alphabet was Cyrillic.”

“Is a G ,” Minka said, pointing her fork at the page for emphasis.

“Exactly,” I said. “I think Galina killed Lilian Flanders.”

They were quiet a minute, and the only sound was one of the cats washing itself.

Nat broke the silence. “It’s possible. She would have just as much motive as Pasha.”

“And it explains the itchy feeling I had about Pasha’s involvement. He didn’t feel like the killer because he wasn’t,” I said.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Mary Alice counseled. “They could have been in on it together. Otherwise why was Pasha even in the States?”

“Good point,” Akiko said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. There are way too many unanswered questions. But look.” I pointed to the planner again. “The day after Lilian’s death, there’s a notation about a flight to London. We know it wasn’t for Pasha, he didn’t fly.”

“Galina,” Nat said. “That puts her in the vicinity a week later when Benscombe was burned.” She pointed to the string of numbers behind the Cyrillic G in the first notation. “But what are the rest of those numbers for?”

“It’s a phone number,” Taverner said quietly. “Venetian.”

“How do you know that?” Mary Alice asked.

He launched into a story about a blissful year he spent exploring all the bakeries and bacari of the city, just as my phone rang.

“Naomi,” I said to the room at large. I slipped onto the front porch and answered. In the background was the shrieking jingle of a kids’ show and the sound of a toddler squealing with laughter.

“Where are you now?” I asked. “Chuck E. Cheese?”

“I’m at home and I have exactly two minutes until she gets bored with Peppa Pig and I have to go. You want to spend it arguing or you want to know what I dug up?”

“What do you know?”

“You should probably sit down,” she started.

“So you can tell me Galina Lazarov is alive?”

There was silence on her end except for Peppa. “You want to tell me how you know that?”

“We paid Aunt Evgenia a visit. Switzerland is nice this time of year. You should go.”

“I’ll be damned. You’re wasted in Acquisitions. They should have put you in Provenance.”

“Do I seem like a desk job kind of person, Naomi?”

“Do I?” she shot back. She sighed. “Look, I’m sorry. We should have caught the information about Galina but it got overlooked.”

“Overlooked? Naomi, that’s a pretty mild word for a pretty significant fuckup.”

She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “The file on Galina was thin—too thin.”

“Wait, you keep actual files?”

“There are two sets of files,” she explained. “We mostly work from digital databases these days, but on older subjects, some of the material may only be available in hard copy, especially if they died before we got around to digitizing. And yes, those files are real—old-school manila. I went to the physical archives in our deep-storage facility to find Galina’s dossier. Like I said, it was sketchy. All it had was the information that she’d been killed in the car accident with her mother. I pulled Irina Dashkova’s file too, and there was a copy of her death certificate, but nothing in Galina’s, just a newspaper obituary and you can buy those. So I started to wonder if—”

“If Galina survived the crash and that’s why there was no death certificate in her file,” I finished.

“Exactly. I ran some searches on the big database and found a mention of a ‘Galina Dashkova’ who would be the right age. That’s when I realized that after her mother’s death, Galina must have gone to live with her aunt and taken Evgenia’s surname. Operating on that theory, I was able to find a few more things—records of a student by that name at a boarding school in the Spanish Pyrenees, one or two property transactions. Nothing that would stand out as suspicious.”

“Then why was Galina Dashkova in the database at all?” I asked.

“As a footnote,” Naomi said dryly. “When she was younger, she was occasionally photographed on the arm of a shady businessman or two.”

“What business?”

“Nothing we’d be interested in targeting,” Naomi replied. “Mostly art dealers who don’t mind a little fuzzy provenance on the pieces they move. A small-time coke distributor. A third-tier oligarch who dated her for two weeks and dumped her for a Moldovan supermodel. Nobody who was going to put her on the map, career-wise.”

“Sounds like she had her fingers in lots of little pies,” I mused. “Tell me, was she ever a footnote in her brother’s dossier?”

Naomi cleared her throat. “There may have been a mention of her as a possible business associate.”

My fingers tightened around the phone. “And nobody made the connection between Galina Dashkova and Pasha Lazarov, whose dead sister was named Galina and whose mother was a Dashkova?”

“Somehow that detail slipped past whoever was following up on the Lazarov kids. Our mistake.”

“The kind of mistake that gets people killed,” I reminded her. There was silence for a minute and I sighed into it. “Never mind. Just tell me you know something helpful now. We need to find her.”

“She’s almost as elusive as her brother,” Naomi said. “I can tell you the city where she lives. It’s—”

“Venice,” I cut in.

“Stop doing that! How—”

There was no point in concealing the truth. “I have Pasha Lazarov’s planner. There’s a phone number in it, and we think it’s hers. We’ve identified it as Venetian. That doesn’t tell us if she’s still there or where to find her if she is.”

Naomi’s voice was cool. “You have Pasha Lazarov’s planner. A planner I assume he didn’t just hand you out of the goodness of his heart.”

“No, I took it from his nightstand after I killed him.”

“You should have sent that directly to us,” Naomi said.

“You mean to you . This mission is off the books, remember? You can’t send us into the field with half-assed intel for a job that doesn’t even officially exist and then come at me for not following protocol,” I shot back. Then I stopped talking and waited. Technically, Naomi was right. I should never have lifted the planner, and the first thing I should have done after reaching England was arrange for it to be couriered to her. But Naomi had committed her fair share of missteps in this little fandango and I wasn’t about to be hung out to dry when mistakes in the Provenance files had nearly gotten us killed.

Naomi must have decided to pick her battles, because she let the subject go. Temporarily, no doubt. I was sure she was just filing the subject of the planner away for a come-to-Jesus meeting down the road.

“I do have something else that might help,” Naomi said. “It’s not much, but she’s an opera fan.”

“I know that too,” I told her.

“Well, do you know she has a thing for baritones? She works hard to keep her name and photo out of the papers and press releases, but I found a few discreet mentions. Fundraisers, opening nights. She takes on protégés, usually young men. Her latest is named Wolfgang Praetorius, a Bavarian baritone. Say that three times fast.” She was clearly trying to lighten the mood, but I wasn’t having it.

“Naomi,” I said in a warning tone.

“Sorry. Bottom line is, the baritone is your best lead. Galina likes to pave the way for her little opera babies, so she’s probably got something lined up for this one.”

“Thanks for almost nothing,” I told her as I hung up. I was certain I was going to feel bad about being short with her later. But she was a handy punching bag, and I made a note to send her something—maybe a muffin basket—as I went to join the others. I brought them up to speed and Minka started tapping away on her laptop.

She pulled up a profile of Wolfgang Praetorius and showed us a photo of a beefy blond youth. “He won a prize in Germany.” The piece was from a newspaper in Erlangen, confirming what Naomi had said about him being Bavarian.

“There’s no way his name is really Wolfgang Praetorius,” I said.

“Stage name,” Minka confirmed. “His real name is Walter Krebs.” She snickered.

“Definitely not a name you’d want to see up in lights,” Helen put in.

“There’s a Mr. Krabs joke in there somewhere,” Nat added.

“Where is he now?” I asked Minka.

She shrugged. “He has not updated his personal website recently and his social media game is weak. He should work on that if he wants to be famous. Maybe TikTok reels.”

Natalie took the phone and squinted at the picture. It was slightly blurred, as if emphasizing how youthful he was, how unformed. “Damn, Galina likes them young.” Nat studied the picture some more and raised her brows approvingly. “He’s a little Teutonic for my taste, but good for her.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said, plucking the phone out of her hand and giving it back to Minka.

“Which is?”

“We don’t have a good lead, just a Bavarian opera singer who might be anywhere and a Venetian phone number,” I told Nat.

“Let’s try it,” she said, pulling out her phone. She tapped the numbers in and put it on speaker. It made a series of odd beeps and clicks before a melodious woman’s voice told us in liquid Italian that the number was no longer in service.

“Not a surprise,” Mary Alice observed. “We already theorized that she’s the one who burned Benscombe and left the wolf for us and that she likely has eyes at the nursing home. She’d cover her tracks and ditch that phone.”

“Only if she knew we had the diary,” Helen put in. She’d been quiet for the last several minutes, thinking hard, it seemed. “Billie didn’t get the number from Aunt Evgenia, she got it from the diary she stole from Pasha Lazarov.”

“?‘Stole’ seems a little harsh,” Mary Alice said. “She didn’t lift it on purpose, and anyway how would Galina know that she’d taken it?”

“Exactly,” Nat put in loyally. “It’s not Billie’s fault.”

“Yes, it is,” I told them. “Helen’s right. Someone would have made an inventory, the butler, the bodyguard. And that inventory could have been sent to Galina from the ship. Pasha was a creature of habit. If the planner was missing from the inventory, it would have told her someone had been in his room.”

“But it could have been stolen by anyone,” Nat argued.

I held up a hand. “I don’t imagine Galina is the kind of woman who gives most folks the benefit of the doubt. She intended this to be some sort of nasty little game from the beginning—that’s why she left a calling card at the scene of Lilian’s murder. And when Pasha’s planner went missing, she would have suspected we were involved, and she’d have been right. I think that’s why she burned Benscombe.” I leveled my gaze at Helen. “I’m sorry, Helen.”

“That doesn’t bring my house back,” she said.

“No, it doesn’t. But we’ve got a job to do. You can hate me when it’s finished, okay?”

“Oh, I’m planning on it,” she told me, and there was a little flash of the cobra about her when she said it.

A stillness had settled, as if the room itself had been holding its breath. It wasn’t often that we squared off against each other and meant it, but this was one of those times. The silence might have stretched on forever, but Natalie spoke up in an artificially bright tone.

“So the number is out of service, but we have a lead. I say we go to Venice,” she said, looking around.

“We just go to Venice,” I repeated.

“Italy has opera,” Mary Alice said in a thoughtful voice. “The best in the world. Chances are, if Galina is pulling strings for her little toy, she’s gotten him in with a company somewhere like Venice or Milan. Starting our search in Venice isn’t the worst idea. If nothing else, it puts us closer to where we know she’s been.”

There was a chorus of agreement from the others.

“This just got a whole lot more complicated,” I said, suddenly tired. I started ticking items off by holding up fingers. “We have to get to Venice. We have to set up a safe house, do surveillance, and figure out how to take out Galina Lazarov—sorry, Dashkova. And I don’t have contacts there. Do you?”

I looked around the group but everybody just shrugged or shook their head.

Taverner tipped his chair back, whistling. I whipped my head around. “Do you have something to add, Taverner?”

He took his time, lacing his hands behind his head and drawing out the moment like the drama queen he was. “Oh, I was just thinking of my friend Signora Bevilacqua. Lovely older woman. She owns several properties dotted around the lagoon. She rents them out on VRBO for a bit of extra cash. Did I mention she owes me a favor?”

“How big of a favor?” I asked through clenched teeth.

“Enormous,” he said with a shit-eating grin. “Her daughter was married to a Sicilian mafioso and in the course of assassinating him, I made sure her daughter was safely returned to her parents in Venice. I spent a wonderful fortnight skiing with them in Torino. I still have her grandmother’s recipe for risotto al nero di seppia. You remember that dish, Billie. I cooked it for you over that one remarkable weekend in 1983.” His eyes were fairly dancing—with malice or mischief I couldn’t quite tell. Probably both.

Mary Alice looked to where the cats were still batting the dates around. “Then I suppose we’d better pack up and make tracks. Looks like we’re off to Venice, kids.”

—

By the time Taverner reached the signora—who as it turned out was actually a contessa—and made the necessary arrangements, it was too late to leave that night. We made a plan to head out in time to catch the first ferry from Olbia straight to Livorno. From there it was a four-hour train ride to Venice. If our luck held, we’d all be settled into our lodgings in the Campo Santa Margherita by dinnertime—Minka, Akiko, and Taverner included. Minka stayed up late to forge passports for the cats, but everybody else turned in. I stepped outside to look at the stars. In the distance, a nuraghe, one of the Bronze Age towers that dotted the Sardinian landscape, punctuated the horizon. Overhead, the sky was a peculiar, oily shade of black, sometimes slicked with blue or green or purple. Here and there smudges of white showed the edges of the galaxy and spots of silver hung like Christmas ornaments.

I heard a step behind me and I kept my back turned, rummaging in my pocket for a packet of cigarettes.

“I saw no Way—The Heavens were stitched—

I felt the Columns close—

The Earth reversed her Hemispheres—

I touched the Universe—

And back it slid—and I alone—

A Speck upon a Ball—

Went out upon Circumference—

Beyond the Dip of Bell—”

“Nice,” I told Taverner. “Dr. Seuss?”

“Emily Dickinson, you philistine,” he said, flicking open his lighter. He didn’t smoke, but I did, so he always carried a lighter. I’m sure somebody would find that romantic. He touched the flame to the tip of my cigarette and I pulled in a deep breath.

“Do you plan on sulking the whole trip or just until Venice?”

I blew the smoke out into rings that brushed his face. “I haven’t decided yet.”

He smiled in the darkness, but it was humorless, a baring of the teeth. “You can’t stand it, can you?”

“What?”

“That you, just occasionally, might need someone else.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I didn’t need him, but that seemed childish. So I said nothing at all, and that seemed even more juvenile.

“My god, you can’t bring yourself to even say it,” he said.

“Why should I? You seem to enjoy saying it enough for the both of us.” I took another drag on the cigarette, but it didn’t taste as good as it usually did.

“And what’s wrong with that?” he demanded. “Do you realize how seldom it happens? Relying on someone else doesn’t make you weak.”

“It’s not a sign of strength,” I countered.

“You are the strongest woman I have ever known,” he said solemnly. “I could live a thousand lifetimes and no one would ever compare to you. And if you just once in a decade or two let me do something for you, the world wouldn’t come screeching to a halt.”

I stayed silent again, and his shoulders drooped a little.

“We are in a relationship, Billie. At least I thought we were.”

“We are,” I admitted. “But it’s never going to be the kind of relationship you need it to be.”

“You don’t know what I need,” he shot back.

“You need a woman who is helpless enough to let you play the hero,” I replied. “And that’s not me.”

His eyes fairly bugged out of his head and he opened his mouth a few times before shutting it with a snap. I smoked half the cigarette while I waited for him to answer.

“I don’t need to play the hero,” he said finally, in a calm, resigned voice. “But I can’t be with someone who won’t ever let her guard down enough to trust me.”

“I trust you—” I began, but he reached into his pocket for the lighter.

“You don’t. But someday you’ll have to decide to start.”

He pushed the lighter into my hand and walked away.

As exits went, it was a pretty good one.