Chapter 38
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
Kirill
“Peter’s on,” Kolya told me. We were on the rooftop of the building where Lucy and I had our first breakthrough date.
“Fuck it, let’s do this,” I told De Lucci. The rooftop was the only acceptable location where the bosses from different organizations agreed to talk without fear of being recorded.
“Is Moretti on?” I asked Kolya.
“He just signed in.” Moretti and his wife returned to Chicago after Lucy came out of the coma. After all, both the Chicago Italian mob and the New York Russian mafia declared war on the Moscow mob. The ports were still closed to shipments coming from Peter, and he was feeling the pressure.
The elevator door dinged open and fucking Trevor Hayes walked in.
“What the fuck is he doing here?”
De Lucci raised a brow. “We need quick intel to double-check what Peter tells us, especially since none of us here is good at this shit and you still have to replace your engineer.”
“Fine.” I nodded to Kolya to let the communication through.
When Peter’s face came on, he immediately said, “This has gone on long enough. What do you want from me to open the ports?”
“You tell me, Peter. You’re the one who killed one of my most experienced deep fake engineers.”
“I had to find out if the video someone sent me was fake.”
“What video?”
“Sending it to all of you now.”
The drop was immediate and started to play. What the fuck? Someone else was there at Viktor’s traffic stop.
“You have no idea who sent this?” I demanded.
“Nyet. Someone is messing with us, but that video clearly shows Lucy shooting Viktor in self-defense.”
“As if self-defense mattered to you,” I sneered.
“I had my hacker go through Viktor’s communications.” His face turned red with fury. “He didn’t accidentally kill Davenport like you and he told me. My brother did it deliberately.”
“Tying him down and overdosing him with heroin would do that,” I told him. “Didn’t I warn you Viktor was deliberately fucking up your operations here? But would you believe me, hmm?”
“He was after control of your bratva and mine,” he said.
“Oh, but wasn’t that the reason you sent him here? To undermine me? That’s why you brushed off my warnings in the first place. You double-crossed me.”
“Hear me now: I did not go after your wife, and I promise I never will. And I will swear on my children’s lives, I did not hurt Anya either.
She is a child of the bratva. Both you and she lied to me, but I couldn’t say I wouldn’t have done the same if I were given such an opportunity…
but my blood betraying me? I cannot forgive that. ”
“So what now?”
“Clean slate?”
I chuckled darkly. “You owe me an engineer.”
“And I will never come after your bratva anymore or your wife.”
I glanced at De Lucci. He shrugged. “He wasn’t the one who hurt Lucy, and that’s all I care about. The men who did it are dead, and so is your—”
I narrowed my eyes at him. If he said mistress, my fist was going to break his jaw.
“—Anya Davenport.”
“Someone is cleaning up,” Moretti, who’d been quiet this whole time, concluded slowly. “We still have an enemy.”
Peter nodded. “Viktor’s accomplice. I’ll continue digging.”
We cut the feed. De Lucci, Kolya, and I just stood there, lost in contemplation. It had to be someone with money.
“Does Maksim care to control the bratva?” De Lucci asked.
“My brother?” I shook my head. “No. I’ve been trying to get him more involved.”
“Ivan? You don’t see eye to eye.”
“Ivan is many things, but weakening our bratva is not one of them.”
“Jeremiah King?”
“All he’s after are the shares,” I said grimly. “He doesn’t want to rock the boat by messing it up with Aralina.”
“His brother, then?”
“He’s someone we could look into—”
“Fuck,” Trevor muttered.
All three of us swung our gazes toward him. He had his laptop set on a low barrier wall, and his fingers were flying furiously over the keyboard.
“What?”
“Lucy had been interested in the relationship between the Kings and the Zahkarovs.”
“We already know that...Chloe—”
“Yes. But now that I’ve removed Peter from Anya’s list of suspects and entered the Kings, my probability outcomes yielded a theory.”
He prefaced what he was about to say by relaying to us the FBI’s profile of the Mistress Strangler.
“We hacked into King Industries’ servers and were able to trace Jeremiah King’s Mercedes that night. His car was parked in an underground garage close to Davenport’s mansion.”
Chills crawled up my spine.
“I’ve also compared the autopsy reports of Anya Davenport's murder to previous Mistress Strangler killings.” He brought up a split screen of strangle marks.
“Prior to the ones last year, nine Mistress Strangler killings occurred in the tri-State area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, with the last one occurring five years ago. Yes, right around the time Duncan and Esther King died in a car accident. The stranglings bore similar ligature marks attributed to asphyxiation by rope. The one last year. The one blamed on Kolya…” Trevor pointed to the screen on the right.
“Has more bruising and marks that point to asphyxial death where the perpetrator used his hands. But what’s more telling is how the word whore was carved into the victim’s skin.
The ones five years prior were delivered while the victim was alive. ”
He flipped the screen to the word whore carved on the stomach. The ones from the original cases were neatly carved with the same strokes.
“So the victims were carved first before strangulation?” De Lucci asked. By this time, the three of us were riveted on Trevor’s screen. “Did I get that right?”
“Correct. The autopsies of the victims revealed clotting and a chemical that confirmed it. Also, how the characters were formed was deliberate. The perpetrator considered it an art. Now, in the killings last year, there was an absence of clotting, which suggested it was done postmortem. The word was in all caps, and the way it was carved suggested an afterthought with no skill whatsoever. That was why the authorities were leaning more toward a copycat than the real Mistress Strangler and why the FBI is especially interested in Anya’s case. ”
“So are you saying that the original Mistress Strangler might have been the one who killed Anya?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Trevor said. “Or…we have a more meticulous copycat.”
A sickening sensation sank heavily in my gut. I turned to Kolya. “Find out where Aralina is and have her on lockdown in the house. And do not, under any circumstances, allow Jeremiah King near her.”
I switched my other phone on and found frantic messages from Sato.
“What the fuck?” Dom growled in disbelief, adding to my escalating anxiety. He’d been staring at his phone before scowling at me. “My soldier said that Theodore King was at Jabbin’ Java.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck! I was already calling Sato.
“Pakhan.”
“Is Lucy with you?”
“She’s in King’s car.”
My head exploded. “Which fucking King? Theodore, right?”
“Yes,” he answered as if out of breath. Then he added, “Neither Aralina nor her security is answering our calls.”
How could I have fucking missed this?
I was already striding to the elevator. “I’m on my way. Drop me a location of where you are now and the destination.” I ended the call and I wanted nothing better than to smash my phone. “Goddammit, Lucy,” I growled. “God fucking dammit.”
Frustration with my wife and worry for her and my sister wrapped around my chest in a vise. Flashbacks of Lucy’s broken body in the car, of Aralina in the hospital after barely surviving the house fire were like a horror film on repeat in my head. It was a wonder I could breathe and think clearly.
I was never going to let my wife out of my sight again.
I glared at De Lucci. “Your sister is going to send me into an early grave.”
And when I got my hands on her, I was going to buy an island, lock her in a mansion, and throw away the keys.