Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
At least twenty origami figures sat on the dining room table. A Frog. An elephant, swans, cats, eagles, and butterflies. Kyle put another fold in the rhinoceros he’d been working on, waiting for the soothing effect to kick in. It didn’t.
“Kyle.” His mother rested a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong? You’ve been at this for over an hour.”
“It’s nothing, Ma,” he lied, patting her hand. “Just some shi—stuff I have to work through.”
Elaina Gates sighed, then dropped a kiss on the top of his head.
She knew him well enough to understand whatever was bugging him was more than just nothing.
Being the wonderful mother she’d always been to him and his brothers, she also knew when not to push too hard.
For all the reasons he loved her, that one was near the top of the list.
“Okay,” she said. “Gina and Jack should be here any minute. Deke’s on his way.” She went back into the kitchen.
The rich smells of lasagna and garlic bread wafted into the room.
Normally, family dinners were on Sunday nights, but between flying out to Chicago to talk to the AUSA there and following up on leads about Yuri’s location, he couldn’t make it last night.
None of the leads on Yuri had panned out.
It was like he’d disappeared into the bowels of New York City, and that bugged him more than anything.
As highly trained as the other agents watching Victoria around the clock were, he worried they wouldn’t be prepared for the level of cunning and violence that flowed through Yuri’s blood like a drug.
He wanted to be out there with them. Hell, he wanted to be standing no more than six feet from Victoria twenty-four seven, guarding her door with an M4 submachine gun.
As strong as she was emotionally now, she’d be no physical match for Yuri.
He tossed the rhinoceros onto the stack unfinished and pressed his fingers to his forehead.
Working nonstop for the last two weeks with little or no sleep was taking its toll, but he wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop until he got enough evidence to put Yuri and Nikolai Lebedev back in prison.
That meant getting a search warrant for the Chicago lake property.
The probable cause he needed was building, but he wasn’t there yet.
They didn’t even have justification for wiretaps.
Those bodies were in that lake; he knew it in his gut.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan wouldn’t budge on one point: unless Victoria’s information led to Yuri’s and Lebedev’s arrests for kidnapping and murder, at a minimum she’d be charged with money laundering. She could be looking at twenty years.
His guts threatened to somersault right out of his mouth. As amazing as his mother’s cooking was, he didn’t know if he could eat a single bite.
“Dammit!” He pounded the table with his fist.
“What did that table ever do to you?” Jack came in and sat, eying the stack of origami. “I see.”
“Yeah.” His brother did see. It was like that with all of them. Their mother always said their brains were connected by an invisible wire.
“Hiya, Kyle.” Gina swept in carrying a stack of magazines. “Have you heard from Lance?”
“Nope.” Little bro was still MIA, God knew where.
Gina’s lips twisted into a frown Jack had once told him was cute enough to get him to do just about anything she wanted.
That kind of love was rare. There’d been a time he’d thought—hoped—it was the kind he and Victoria had.
For now, his personal feelings had to take a back seat to keeping her out of prison.
Gina looked at him, then back at Jack. “I think I’ll go into the kitchen and show your mom these magazines.”
“Good idea, sweetie.” Jack winked at his fiancé.
Despite his mood, Kyle couldn’t stop a corner of his mouth from lifting.
The two of them had their own invisible wire.
Gina understood his terse brother like no other.
Though they weren’t married yet, she was already part of the family and had quickly become the daughter his mother had always wanted.
Already, they had their heads together at the kitchen table, flipping through the magazines.
Jack hitched his thumb in their direction and snorted. “Wedding stuff.”
“Figured that.” Tonight was a wedding-planning dinner meeting. Despite the gravity of what Kyle was dealing with, other peoples’ lives went on, and he wanted to be there for his brothers.
“I hear the flyover didn’t help,” Jack said.
“Total bust.” Kyle shoved a hand through his hair.
The turn-and-burn to Chicago had also included hooking up with an FBI air unit to fly over the lake property.
With the Open Fields Doctrine, anything visible to the naked eye would have been admissible as evidence.
“The acreage is still vacant. As expected, no heat signatures. Those bodies would be nothing but cold bones by now. The only way to know what’s at the bottom of that lake is with a search warrant. ”
“Fourth Amendment rights can be sticky, even with open fields.” Jack nodded. “Did you meet with a judge up there?”
“That’s a no-go, too. For now.” He picked up a purple square of paper, intending to start a new figure but tossed it back on the table.
“Deke found an old bank account in the FinCen report tying Lebedev to the property. I went to the city’s tax office and confirmed he’s paying taxes on the property, but it’s from a new bank account.
Lebedev opened it after he got out of prison.
Before that account was opened, taxes were being paid by someone we can’t tie to Lebedev or Yuri.
The judge doesn’t see the connection to the new bank account and our old investigation. ”
“So,” Jack said, “he wants fresh PC, or he won’t give you a warrant.”
“Exactly,” Kyle agreed. “We’re squeezing every CI we’ve got.
Other than Mike’s CI saying he heard through the grapevine the bodies are at the bottom of a lake, we’ve got nothing.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office doesn’t want to risk pushing a judge to give us a warrant, then having anything we find tossed out for questionable probable cause. ”
“He’s not wrong,” Jack said.
Yeah. Kyle knew that. Didn’t make it sit any better, though.
The front door opened and slammed shut.
“Yo,” Deke shouted. “I’m here.”
“You’re late,” his mother shouted back.
“Sorry, Ma.” Deke gave his mother a big, wet, smacking smooch on the cheek.
“You’re forgiven.” She patted his cheek like he was still ten years old, then went back to looking at magazines with Gina.
A minute later, Deke came into the dining room holding three open bottles of beer and handed them out. “Salut.”
After they’d clinked bottles, Kyle took a long, cold slug. “Thanks for all the long hours,” he said to his brothers.
“Always,” Deke said between sips. “Any word from Lance?”
“No.” Kyle and Jack responded simultaneously.
“Gina’s gonna kill him,” Jack said. “If he shows up for the wedding it will be the first time she meets him. If he doesn’t show, the first time she does meet him, she’ll kill him for being a no-show pain in the ass.”
“Amen to that, and God help Lance.” Deke held up his bottle, and they clinked again. “My money’s on her tying his balls into a knot.”
Jack chuckled and lifted his gaze to where their mother and Gina were still hunkered down at the kitchen table. “That’s a distinct possibility.”
Not for the first time that night, Kyle’s heart ached with more emotion than he thought possible.
He wanted what his brother and Gina had.
The love, the laugher, and everything else.
Maybe it wasn’t in the cards for him. Could be he still didn’t deserve the joys of his own family again.
If only Victoria didn’t occupy every waking moment of every day.
Gina came in and pulled cloth napkins from the buffet drawer. “I need to set the dinner table, and Mom wants your input on the seating chart.” As a unit, they stood. “Kyle, why don’t you stay and help me? Jack and Deke can handle the seating stuff.”
He scooped up the origami figures and tossed them on the buffet.
Setting the table with Gina reminded him of another night, nearly a year ago on the day he first met Gina.
Ironically, they’d talked about Victoria.
Not specifically, but Gina had figured out there’d been something between them.
She was the Wonder Woman of intuitive powers.
“So,” she said, glancing at him as she laid out the napkins, “how’s Victoria, the woman you brought to your self-defense class last month? I haven’t seen her there since. And did you buy her a briefcase? Did she like it?”
“I did, and she did.” As he took dinner plates from the hutch, he chuckled. Getting his brothers out of the room was all part of her plan. “As for class, she’s been busy.”
“You’ve all been busy lately. I’ve barely seen my fiancé in the last two weeks, and when he does come home, he falls right into bed.” She shook her head and made a tsking sound. “Jack’s been no fun at all lately.”
“Sorry about that.” He really was.
Because of their close bond, his brothers had been busting their asses for him on this case. And for Victoria. But Gina was a strong woman and completely in love with his brother. Their relationship would survive long hours away from home.
He began taking out glasses from the hutch. Raised voices and laughter came from the kitchen.
“Victoria is the woman we talked about last year.” Gina pulled out silverware from a drawer and faced him across the table. “Isn’t she?”
He paused a beat before setting down a glass. “Yes.” The conversation with her about Victoria hadn’t been specific. Just that he’d known a woman—a friend—who’d been a victim of domestic abuse.
“You said it was complicated. Is it still complicated?”
“More so now than ever.” He hadn’t seen or spoken with her directly in more than two weeks. He couldn’t, not without losing focus on the most important thing in his life: keeping her out of prison. “She did something a long time ago. Something illegal.”
“Intentionally?” Her forehead furrowed as she came around the table. “That doesn’t sound like the woman I met, and I doubt you would have had feelings for someone with bad intentions. Besides,” she added, giving him a sly look, “surely you recall how many laws I broke.”
The quip had him smiling.
Last year, Jack had caught Gina and her friends breaking into Mafia mobsters’ homes like stealthy ninjas, stealing their illegally obtained cash and secretly giving the money to a local women’s shelter.
“Point taken,” he admitted, but this was a little different, not that he could get into the details. “She took something critical to a criminal investigation and never told me or anyone else in the FBI. She could have but didn’t. I vouched for her, and she lied.”
“A lie by omission, but a lie nevertheless,” Gina said. “Assuming deep down she’s a good person, there must have been an equally good reason she never told you. I understand that hurt you, but is it possible she didn’t have a choice?”
Kyle put down the glass he’d been holding and rested his hands on the table.
“That’s what she said, and I know you’re right.
” He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for her, essentially being Yuri’s slave, forced to do whatever he ordered her to—like keep a ledger and hide cash for him—or risk getting hit.
That was how abusers controlled their victims. With fear.
The only reason she’d kept the ledger for Yuri was out of fear—the same reason she’d never come forward with it.
Gina was right.
It pricked deeply that she hadn’t trusted him, scoring a jagged hole in his heart.
Then again, she had to be hurting because he hadn’t believed in her enough not to go ballistic when he’d learned the truth.
Maybe she should have turned the ledger over years ago, but the more he thought about it, her reason for not doing it was still the same.
Fear. Coming forward with the ledger and the money would have been like a gopher poking its head out of a hole in a flat desert.
Anyone could have found her. Including Yuri.
Gina rested a hand on his shoulder. “You loved her even then. Didn’t you?”
Did he? Love hadn’t been a part of his life for so long, he wasn’t sure he’d know it again if it smacked him in the face.
He missed Victoria. Missed making love with her, laughing with her.
He adored her, respected her, applauded her courage and how she’d miraculously managed to build a new life from the ashes of her old one.
In many ways, she was his hero. In his gut, he knew the answer to Gina’s question but still couldn’t say it out loud.
“I’ve seen the two of you together,” she said softly. “Only once, but it was enough. So what’s really holding you back? Is it because you can’t forgive her for what she’s done?”
“No.” He shook his head, grinding his teeth as he struggled to keep his heart from breaking. “I lost my wife and child. I can’t go through that again.”
There it was. When he’d opened his heart and soul to Victoria, he never imagined he could lose her to the legal system.
She’d be alive, but her life and her freedom would be taken away by the very agency he worked for.
Back then, she’d had no one to turn to, and he’d left her alone.
Ten years later, he’d done it again. “God, I fucked up.”
“You deserve to be happy.” Gina’s eyes filled with tears, and crap. His did, too. “You both do, so maybe it’s not too late to fix that.”
Maybe it wasn’t. Either way, he had to try to make this right. Before it was too late.