Chapter 22
JILLIAN
“Am I underground / Or am I in too deep?”
— “When I’m Small” by Phantogram
Monday morning finds me at my desk in a state of despair.
I can’t focus. Every time I try, my brain yanks me back to the other night. It’s a sex flashback marathon that I didn’t want and never asked for, but boy, is it thorough.
Hands. Mouths. Nails raking bloody ribbons down The Masked Man’s back. His lips clamping over my center and sucking until I started quivering and drooling like I was being electrocuted.
I have to press my thighs together and wriggle in my chair to find a position that isn’t so anxiety-inducing.
My body is sore in places I forgot could be sore.
There’s a bite mark on my collarbone that I’m hiding under a turtleneck, and every time the fabric brushes against it, I’m transported to right back in that bed.
If that were all it was, it would be bad enough. But the part that really has me troubled is that it’s not the rough stuff that keeps replaying.
It’s the pause. That curious half-second where he sat on the edge of my bed and didn’t leave. Something cracked open in him and I saw it and he knew I saw it, and then he bolted before I could do what I do best: pry.
I keep picking at that moment the way you pick at a scab. What was he going to say? What would have happened if he’d stayed? What was passing through his mind in that short span?
And then my brain helpfully cuts back to the feeling of the wall against my bare back as he drove into me, and my whole body flushes hot at my desk in the middle of the goddamn newsroom.
I liked hurting him. I didn’t just tolerate it or go along with it; I dug in and wanted more. He said “again” and I didn’t hesitate. So what does that make me? Is the mask turning me into someone new, or is it just giving me permission to be who I’ve always been?
I don’t love either answer.
I blink and force myself to look at the screen again. The document is a Delaware corporate filing for one of Lazarev Global’s subsidiaries. It’s about as sexy as a tax return, and every bit as riveting.
“Pierce.”
I almost scream when I hear my name from two feet behind me.
Whirling around in my chair, I see that Doug is standing at the edge of my cubicle with a coffee in one hand and a pen behind his ear.
He doesn’t sit down. As he explained on my first day, sitting down means a conversation, and he doesn’t ever want a conversation.
Standing means he wants a status report and he wants it fast.
“Whatchyahave?” he asks in a single grunt as he works through the bite of cream cheese bagel in his mouth.
“Good morning to you, too, Doug,” I say with false cheer. “How was my holiday weekend? It was lovely, thank you so much for asking. Quite relaxing. And yours? Did you spend some nice time with the family?”
“Ex-wife had the kids, so I sat on the couch in my underwear and drank beer,” he retorts in a monotone. “Unless you’d like more nitty-gritty details, cut the bullshit and tell me where you’re at on your story.”
I shudder. Doug in his tighty-whities was not a visual image I ever cared to know more about. “You could’ve just said, Fine, thanks, you know.”
He gives me a squint-eyed scowl and somehow munches his bagel in a menacing way. Never before have cream cheese stains on a mustache been so intimidating.
“Right. Yes. Work.”
He nods. “Yes. Work. The thing I pay you to do.”
I minimize the Delaware filing and pull up the document I’ve been building. It’s a timeline, color-coded, cross-referenced, and yet still painfully full of holes.
“Okay,” I say. “So. To recap. The morgue attendant, Giovanni Ochoa, came to me originally because a set of remains came through the Queens ME’s office that flagged something for him.
Bones found at a construction site in Astoria.
The site was being excavated for a new development project.
Workers hit the remains and called it in. ”
Doug sips his coffee. “Remind me, how old are the remains?”
“Ochoa said the initial assessment put them at roughly fifteen to twenty years old. Which, on its own, fine. Lots of people died fifteen to twenty years ago.”
“But.”
“But—and this is a part I’m still trying to flesh out, so bear with me while I hand-wave you through the still-unclear bits—somehow, Ochoa gets the idea in his head that this has to do with the Lazarev family.”
Doug nods. “And since Lukas and Kir are still among the living, that means the bones can only belong to…”
I nod back to confirm he’s on the right track. “Elena Lazareva, yes. Lukas Lazarev’s wife. She died eighteen years ago. The official story is that she was ill. But they sure weren’t interested in expanding on the details.”
“Foul play is still a big leap in logic, though,” he warns.
“Yeah, of course. I was hoping Ochoa would give me some more details there when we met. But since he ghosted me, I’m gonna have to get my hands on his report another way.”
Doug licks crumbs off his thumb as he thinks. “So your theory is that the bones in Astoria belong to Elena Lazareva, meaning someone whacked her and dumped the body.”
“I don’t have enough to call it a theory yet,” I correct. “It’s a suspicion. The timeline fits. And the fact that Ochoa disappeared right after he started dropping names like ‘Lazarev’ around fits, too.”
“That’s a lot of ‘fits’ and not a lot of proof,” he says dubiously. “You got dental records? DNA? Anything from the ME’s office directly?”
“No. Ochoa was my way into that, and Ochoa is gone. I’ve been trying to find another contact inside the office, but nobody wants to talk. The case file on those remains has gone quiet, too. It’s not showing up in any of the public databases I can access.”
Doug looks at me for a long moment. “Meaning someone buried it. Figuratively.”
“That’s what I think, yeah.”
“It’s promising,” he sighs. “I’ll give you that.
But it’s circumstantial as hell, Jill. Every single piece of this is secondhand from a source who’s now MIA.
You’ve got no records, no corroboration, no nada.
I think you need someone on the record. Even a ‘no comment’ from the right person is better than what you’ve got now, which is a whole lot of empty air and Hm, ain’t that strange? ”
I shrug. “Yeah, but who?”
“What about going straight to them?” he suggests. “Drop in unannounced at Lazarev Global. See what poor sucker you can corral into giving you some sort of interview. It’s standard operating procedure before you publish anything anyway. Might as well do it now and see what shakes loose.”
Is there anything worse than hearing your own half-baked ideas suggested back to you?
After all, this was originally my plan. I texted Doug about it last week, back when I was riding the high of actually making progress and feeling bold.
Request a sit-down with Kir Lazarev, maybe even Lukas himself. Poke the bear. See what happens.
Funny how a very odd weekend changes things. Suddenly, I don’t feel very sure of anything at all.
“I don’t think I’m ready for that yet,” I mumble.
Doug frowns. “You literally texted me about this. You wanted to go directly to Kir Lazarev.”
“I know what I texted.”
“So what changed?”
What changed. Excellent question. Well, Doug, the man who was sent to kill me for investigating this story has been climbing through my bedroom window every night and screwing me into various household surfaces, so I’d rather not accelerate the timeline on the part where his employers find out I’m still digging for dirt. That’s what changed.
Obviously, I don’t say any of that.
“I just think, if I tip them off too early, they’ll lawyer up and lock everything down,” I say instead.
“Right now, they don’t know how much I have.
The second I call their office and start asking about Elena Lazareva, that advantage disappears.
They’ll circle the wagons, scrub whatever they can scrub, and I’ll be trying to build a story against a legal team with unlimited resources. ”
Doug’s jowls quiver as he frowns.
“There’s also the Ochoa problem,” I add. “If they already made one person disappear for talking, what do you think happens when a Times reporter calls and starts asking the same questions he was asking?”
He scoffs. “You think they’d come after a journalist? That’s a different ballgame.”
“I think people who bury bodies in Astoria don’t make a whole lot of distinctions about who’s off-limits, Doug.”
He holds up a hand. “I hear you. I do. But you’re running out of runway, Jill.”
I open my mouth to argue, but he barrels right over me.
“And here’s the other thing. Brace yourself.
” He takes a long sip of coffee. “I know I threatened you with the Bartlett thing, but he actually beat me to the punch. Word has it he’s been sniffing around independently.
He hasn’t made the Lazarev connection. Not yet, at least. But he’s curious about the Astoria construction site.
Work has been halted there for weeks now and nobody’s saying why.
He’s asking questions and if he keeps it up, they’re bound to lead somewhere.
He doesn’t know what he’s looking at yet, but he’s not stupid. ”
I blanch white. “You’re kidding.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
He does not look like he’s kidding. He looks like a man with cream cheese in his mustache who is delivering very bad news with zero sugar-coating.
“If Bartlett backs into this story from the construction angle, it’s his,” Doug says emotionlessly. “That’s how it works. First person to file owns it. And he’s not going to sit on it the way you’ve been sitting on it.”
“I haven’t been sitting on it!” I protest. “I’ve been—”
“Doesn’t matter, don’t care.” He waves his hand to silence me again.
“You want to do your job well, which is very noble. But noble doesn’t get your byline on page one.
Movement does. I need to see you do something today that isn’t staring at Delaware incorporation documents like you’ll find a murder confession written between the lines. ”
I chew the inside of my cheek. As much as I hate it, he’s right.
“Go to Lazarev Global,” he reiterates. “This afternoon. Walk in the front door, ask for a meeting with whoever handles press, and start asking questions. You don’t have to tip your whole hand. Just enough to get a reaction.”
Glumly, I ask, “And if they stonewall me?”
“Then at least you tried, and I can tell the head honchos upstairs we’re actively reporting this thing. That’ll keep it in your court.”
I let out a long breath through my nose.
The thought of walking into the Lazarev building makes my skin prickle.
Not because of Lukas or Kir or whatever PR flack they’ll sic on me, but because somewhere out there is a man in a mask who was sent by those people to put me in the ground, and showing up at their front door is basically waving a flag that says, Hey, your hitman failed, want to try again?
But Doug isn’t wrong. Bartlett is a bloodhound. If he catches the scent, I’ll lose the whole thing.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll go this afternoon.”
“That’s my girl.”
I shiver from head to toe as yet another sex flashback wracks me from within. “Please never call me that again,” I mutter.
He snorts, salutes with his bagel, and walks away, leaving me with my thighs pressed together and a very bad feeling about how this afternoon is going to go.