Chapter 16
Sixteen
Something rustled. In the first moment of panic, I was sure it was a mouse. Or maybe a rat. Something big.
It didn’t take much more than another second before I realized that I was hearing bed clothes. Blankets. Sheets. Something like that.
Then a light came on.
My eyes had gotten so used to the dark that for several seconds I wasn’t able to see anything. Finally, as my pupils adjusted, I could squint around at my surroundings.
A room, roughly twelve by twelve feet or so.
Maybe a little less. Institutional green.
Plain to the point of looking like a prison cell.
Two bunk beds, one on each side of the room, with a chest of drawers between.
Four drawers. And three Russian girls, long blond hair falling over their scantily clad charms, sitting up.
The top bunk on the left was empty, and I had a pretty good idea who used to sleep there.
I tried a smile. “Hello.”
They stared at me. And stared at Rachel, slumped on the floor. Finally, one of them said, in accented English, “What happened?”
To Rachel, I assumed. “They hit her.”
She glanced at the other two. All three of them slithered out of their beds and gathered around Rachel.
A second later, they had dragged her to the nearest bunk and laid her out.
One of them checked her pulse and said a couple of words in Russian.
Or Ukrainian or Belarusian or wherever they were from.
The spokesperson had hair that was a little more honey than the others’, and while they were all pretty, her face was heart-shaped and sweet. “Her pulse is strong,” she told me. “She’ll wake up soon.”
Good. At least we wouldn’t be stuck in here with a corpse.
“My name is Gina,” I said. “I came here to find out what happened to my… um… son.”
My purse was in the car, with my cell phone in it. Smart move, Gina. Not only didn’t I have a picture of Zachary to show them, I had no way of calling for help, either.
Next time I was going sleuthing in the dark, I’d definitely stick my phone in my pocket.
Although, given the circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to keep it anyway. The bad guys would have taken it before they shoved me in here. So it was a moot point.
“His name is Zachary,” I added. “He came to Stella’s last night. Not tonight. Yesterday night. He has red hair, like mine.”
I put a hand to it. I wasn’t sure how much they understood, so it was best to keep things simple. Only one of them seemed to be comfortable communicating with me. Perhaps the others didn’t speak English well enough. Or at all.
If they were in the US doing what I thought they were in the US doing, that probably didn’t matter.
“I spoke to him,” the girl with the honey-colored hair said.
“You’re Tatiana?”
She nodded. “It was only a few words. He didn’t… he wasn’t…” She flushed. “Yuri took me away for a customer.”
Right. I could read between the lines on that one. Zachary wasn’t there to buy sex, and other men were, and she was expected to take care of them.
“He wanted to know about Anastasia,” she added.
I wandered over to sit down on the bunk next to Rachel’s feet. “Anastasia used to be one of you?”
She nodded, and sat down opposite. The two other girls swarmed up to the bunk above her head, and curled up, listening. It was possible they understood more than they could communicate, so I kept my questions simple. “How did you end up here?”
A shadow crossed her face. “Newspaper ad. Modeling.”
I glanced up at the top bunk. “You two, as well?”
They both nodded, so at least they’d understood that much.
“And Anastasia?”
“Anastasia is smart,” Tatiana said. “She knew it wasn’t modeling. But she wanted to come to America.” After a second she shrugged, “Everyone wants to come to America.”
The land of opportunity. Or at least the land of more opportunity than Russia.
“But when you got here, it wasn’t modeling?”
They shook their heads. “Stella’s,” Tatiana said. “Dancing. And taking care of the customers.”
She glanced up at the other two and back at me. “They told us after three years, we can stop working. But we don’t think we believe them.”
I wouldn’t believe them, either. “What happened to Anastasia?”
One of the girls on the top bunk said something, and Tatiana nodded. “She said she would get away,” she told me. “That she would escape, and then she’d come back and help us. But she hasn’t.”
“How long ago did she escape?”
They conferred for a moment. “Three days,” Tatiana said.
So probably the night before I’d seen her in Crieve Hall. “How?”
The glanced at each other again. “Her father helped her,” Tatiana said.
“Excuse me?”
It probably wasn’t a smart thing to say, because it made Tatiana think she’d pronounced something wrong. She said it again, more slowly and clearly. “Her father helped her.”
“I heard you,” I said. “She had a father? Here?”
She nodded. “She sent a letter to him. We distracted Yuri and Konstantin and she pretended to run away, but all she really wanted was to put a letter in the mailbox.” Her face darkened. “They hit her when they got her back, but they didn’t realize the letter was there.”
“And Anastasia’s father got it? And came to the club?”
“Two times,” Tatiana said. “First to meet her. To make sure she was...” She trailed off, searching for the words.
I nodded. “To make sure she was who she said she was.”
She lit up. “Yes.”
“And he believed her?” This had to be Steven.
I had no idea how he’d ended up with a Russian daughter that it seemed neither he nor Diana had known about.
Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d helped her just because she needed help, whether she was his daughter or not. But we had to be talking about Steven.
“He helped her,” Tatiana said. “He came back. He paid for thirty minutes with Anastasia. Olga,” she glanced up above her head at the two girls perched there, “broke the fire alarm in the club. There was water pouring down, and people screaming and running. Anastasia and her father got away.”
Good for Steven. Although it might have done more good if he’d gone to the police when he first met Anastasia and heard her story. That might have saved all the girls, and not just one.
But it explained a lot of what was going on. “I guess when Zachary—my… um… son—came to the club asking about Anastasia, the two goons—” What had she called them? “—Yuri and Konstantin probably thought he knew more than he did?”
“He had seen Anastasia,” Tatiana said. “They wanted to know where she was.”
Of course they did. Having her on the loose would be a threat to them.
And Zachary had probably told them what they wanted to know. Given that they were beating him up, I wouldn’t blame him.
Had they then gone back to Araminta’s house, where Zachary had seen Anastasia, and found her and Steven there?
If they had, they had stashed them somewhere else. Anastasia and Steven were nowhere in this house. Unless there was a part of it I hadn’t seen yet. And I didn’t think there was.
Of course, they could both be dead. But then Yuri and Konstantin would be looking at a much bigger mess than they were looking at now. They hadn’t killed anyone yet. Not as far as I knew.
Next to me, Rachel groaned, and I turned to her. “Finally.”
She blinked, her eyes unfocused. It took several seconds for her to recognize me. Or put my name with my face. Or process that I was there. Something. “Gina?”
I nodded. “We’re in the basement of the split level. Yuri and Konstantin knocked you out and dragged you inside.”
She looked blank, and I added, “Do you remember following the sedan from the nightclub?”
She tried to nod, and winced. “Yes. We went to check out the house.” She lifted a hand to check the back of her head, and her face twisted. “Ow.”
“Sorry,” I said.
She tried to raise herself on one elbow and seemed to think better of it. “How come you’re not flat on your back?”
“I don’t think they hit me as hard as they hit you,” I said. “Or one guy didn’t hit as hard as the other guy. I got lucky. I’ve been awake for most of it.”
If you could call it lucky. My head still hurt, and had been hurting since they hit me. Rachel had only woken up to the pain now.
She looked around, moving mostly just her eyes. They lingered on the low window high on the wall. “Basement room?”
I nodded. “Looks like they boarded up the window.” That was why we hadn’t been able to see even a strip of light when we were outside. A thick sheet of plywood was nailed to the window frame all the way around. With a lot of nails.
“What are we going to do?” She decided to try to sit up again. I gave her a hand, and managed to haul her upright. She slumped against the wall, but at least she was awake and mostly aware.
“We hadn’t gotten to that part yet,” I said. “Turns out the Russian girl really was Steven’s daughter. Or so it seems. He helped her get away from the guys who run the club. They brought her and these other three girls—” I gestured to them, “here from Russia to work at Stella’s.”
Rachel nodded.
“They beat up Zachary because he’d seen Anastasia and they wanted to know what he knew about her. But we don’t know whether they have found Anastasia and Steven or not.”
One of the girls said something, and Tatiana nodded. “They would have told us if they found Anastasia. They would want us to know that we can’t get away. That they’ll find us.”
Good point. “They probably don’t have them, then,” I told Rachel.
“But they have us,” she responded.
And of course they did.
She added, “What are they going to do with us?”
I had no idea. It wasn’t as if they could make us work in the club, the way the girls did. And I didn’t like to consider any of the alternatives.
“We probably won’t be here long,” I said, trying to inject some optimism I wasn’t feeling into my voice.
“We’ve been here more than a month,” Tatiana told me.