Chapter 5
ALEXSEI
Even though Misha and I had a penthouse apartment not far from the mansion that Luka and Gabriella called home, he wanted to visit often. Particularly when Lev would be there too.
I wasn’t in the mood to be there when I could run into Raisa because I didn’t have any news for her about Kalina yet.
Still, I couldn’t blame my son. It was nice to be surrounded by family, by people who’d have our backs.
When I brought him there after school, I couldn’t help but wonder if Kalina was alone or surrounded by others.
If she was with her brother and Yusef. If she was out on her own.
Raisa had disappeared with Lev for almost eight years. Maybe her cousin was simply doing the same thing.
We entered the mansion, and the questions clung to me.
Is she dead?
Alive?
It was my job to find out, no matter how challenging it would be to search for her. The noises of the children meeting up in the living room was the soundtrack to happy times, but these questions about Kalina’s whereabouts dragged me down into a funk that I couldn’t shake.
Misha didn’t notice. He ran off to find Andre and to check on what the babies were doing today.
Before I could track where, exactly, he dashed off to in the big house, my phone rang.
Please, please don’t be Raisa. I didn’t want to let her down with a negative answer about the progress of finding Kalina.
It wasn’t her, though.
Simon’s name showed on the notification bar. I didn’t hesitate to answer.
“A call just came in to Raisa’s old number.” He didn’t bother with greetings, ever.
I perked up immediately, eager to see this as a good thing. A positive lead. Something.
“The number to the old cell phone she had before she came to be with Ivan?” I asked.
“The very one. We tracked it when she arrived, but it’s been in the background all the time. I only happened to charge it and turn it back on recently, since you’ve put me on this case.”
“Where did the call come from?”
“I’m texting you the coordinates now,” he replied.
I was already on the move, hurrying to leave. I’d only just gotten here with Misha, but if this was a lead, if that call to Raisa’s old phone was a call from Kalina, I had to go and investigate.
“If it’s not someone who’s still alive from the Petrovs, then maybe it’s her,” Simon said.
My thoughts exactly.
I was just trying to be careful to keep it as a thought, not a hope. It wouldn’t do me—or anyone else—well if I allowed my hopes to get too high.
Adrenaline snaked through me regardless. Simon hung up with a final guarantee that he would track me and update me on whether the phone used to call Raisa’s old number had moved.
Off the call with him, I caught Allan’s eye as I rushed to the door.
Even though he was a retired soldier, he never lost his edge. Now officially Luka’s personal assistant, he lived in the mansion and helped us all however he could. From babysitting to arranging a hit.
“Trouble?” he asked mildly, if not boredly. Nothing could get him flustered, too used to a lifetime of faithfully serving the Dubinin Family.
“Not yet,” I replied, not stopping. He walked with me, not needing to be told that I wanted him to assist without having to say so. “Get a room prepared in case this is a lead on Ms. Boranov. I’ll take Niko with me,” I said, referencing one of the guards posted outside.
Allan nodded and backed up, ready to do as I told him. “We’ll keep Misha preoccupied,” he said.
Outside, Niko didn’t hesitate or ask questions either. He jumped into my car, riding shotgun as I sped toward the coordinates Simon had sent me. On the way, I filled him in on what we were rushing toward.
“Central Park?” he said with a raise of his brows.
I shrugged. “It’s probably a fucking burner phone tossed into a garbage can.” The blinking dot on the map Simon had sent me hadn’t moved yet.
The drive to the location took longer than I wanted it to. Traffic snarled our route. Icy roads proved that every driver out there was prone to be an idiot and cause too many fender benders.
“Maybe it would be faster to park here,” Niko suggested.
I nodded, not too full of myself to scorn a lower-ranking man’s advice. “My only concern is if she needs to be physically carried to safety,” I admitted.
This would be a longer trek back to the car at the curb.
“Are you thinking she might be a druggie living on the streets?” Niko asked as he briskly walked with me toward the location of the phone.
“It crossed my mind,” I replied. The same as I had to consider if she was dead. Or sick. Any kind of fate could have met Raisa’s cousin, but deep down, I wanted to believe that it wasn’t too late to save her.
At the sight of the homeless trudging through the park, it was very easy to see why Niko might’ve asked that.
Several men and women pushed shopping carts and dollies packed with trash and junk that they’d move from one shanty to another.
Most of the time, they blended into the background.
Sometimes, we had to disguise ourselves as people on the street to get closer to targets.
I knew a few of them out there were likely members of the damn NYPD undercover as well.
But in these temperatures?
In the extreme cold like this?
If Kalina had been out here for a while in this sort of weather, she couldn’t be doing well. Biting chills nipped at my face, and I resisted the urge to slow down and rub my hands together to warm them up. No one could survive like this.
Reaching the spot where the phone call had come from, I spun in a circle to scan the area.
Snowy banks lined the paths. Intersecting strips of pavement had been de-iced, leading to an open area that would be packed with walkers and runners in the warmer months. Multiple bike stands and concrete seating surfaces would let visitors enjoy the city’s biggest public park.
Now, only a bench was cleared of snow, with a homeless woman lying on it.
“There.” Niko tipped his chin at the woman, realizing that the blinking dot on the map suggested the phone had come from her.
She looked too old and large to be Kalina. Raisa said her distant cousin would be twenty-six now. Slim, short, blonde, blue-eyed.
Unmoving like a frozen heap on the bench, this woman was thick around the waist, tall, with a gnarly mat of wiry gray and white hair poking out from beneath a ratty beanie.
I nodded at Niko since he was already approaching. He kept his hand near his side, in case he needed to reach for his gun. I did the same, waiting to see if this woman was alive, if she’d called Raisa, if she had any clue who had.
With a loud shriek, she woke as Niko shook her shoulder.
Incoherent warnings to back off, that the sky was falling, and that a chicken was coming to eat her left her cracked lips as she hurried and scrambled to stand.
Warding Niko back with wild waves of her arms, she stared at both of us like a crazed woman, spooked no doubt from being woken by a stranger but also the delusions and hallucinations in her mind.
“We only want to help,” I said in the calmest and firmest voice that I could manage, holding my hand out.
“Help.” She went still and narrowed her eyes. “Help. Help. Help.” It sounded like a bird cooing.
“Yes. Help.”
She bobbed her head, nodding rapidly as she reached into the pile of her things she’d stacked behind her head as a pillow on the bench. “She help. Help. Help.”
Niko glanced at me, cautious. We both stayed alert, watching her as she pulled out an old model of a flip phone.
“Did you call for help on that phone?” I asked, pointing at it.
Just as quickly as she had nodded, she shook her head.
“Do you know who called for help on that phone?”
Once more, she bobbed her head in a rush of nods. “Help. Help. Help.” A crazed smile crossed over her face as she gathered her things and began pushing a cart.
At first, I worried she was walking away. As she kept chanting that cooing repeat of help, it seemed more like she was guiding us somewhere else in the park.
Niko and I followed. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but I was losing hope that this was a lead. Maybe she’d dialed a random number, just using the phone as a toy.
Moments later, though, when another bench came into view, I changed my mind.
Lightly covered with snow, this bench looked the same as the one this woman had been sleeping on.
Another person lay here, too. A smaller, shorter person.
Maybe it was just someone sleeping.
Or dead.
With stark awareness of how hard life could be, I was sure that many homeless perished out here in the cold.
“Help. Help. Help.” The grizzly old woman kept chanting like a bird as we walked toward the bench.
I didn’t know if she intended to show us something or if this was a delusional pastime in her addled mind. Nothing else was out here this way. Just the bench with a prone person under blankets. Hell, maybe it wasn’t a person but strategically placed bags to resemble the shape of a human.
Niko approached it first, still keeping a lookout as I lingered by the woman. So far, she was the only tentative link to Raisa’s old number being called.
“Alexsei. Here!” Niko reached the person, pulling back a blanket from where a face might be. Whatever he saw had to be a sign of hope. That limited peek gave him such an optimistic tone.
Something that sounded like success.
I jogged forward, ignoring the older woman as I joined Niko. He continued to pull back layers of filthy blankets. It was a young woman lying there. She was so pale, so still, that at the first glance, I was confident she was dead, no longer among the living but a corpse.
Maybe she had blue eyes. I wouldn’t know until she opened them. If she opened them. Hinged on the hope this could be Kalina, I watched as Niko put two fingers under her nose.
“She’s alive,” he reported. “She’s breathing.”
I nodded at Niko.