Ed Kovacs - The Russian Bride

Dennis visibly relaxed and, smiling again, flicked his cigarette. “Sounds like your late husband, Howard, taught you well.”

Suddenly, Irene’s L-rods, made from pot metal similar to coat hangers, pointed sharply to the ground. “Found it. Could you mark it, sweetheart?” Irene asked Lily.

Irene reached into a nylon pouch slung across her chest, retrieved a small pink plastic surveyor’s flag on a metal rod, and gave it to Lily, who inserted it into the ground under Irene’s L-rods. Irene concentrated her efforts on this area now, and soon a line of pink surveyor’s flags bifurcated part of the property.

“That’s good enough,” called out Dennis as he crossed toward the Yukon. “You have earned your money, Irene. We can easily determine the path of the cable now. Come here before the rain starts.”

“I thought you wanted to know how deep it’s buried.”

“Oh, yes, of course! Sorry.”

Irene handed her L-rods to Lily and then removed from her pouch a quartz crystal on a silver chain. She stood over one of the pink flags and held out the pendulum in her right hand. “Right for yes, left for no, thank you,” whispered Irene, with her eyes closed. Then in a normal voice she said, “Is the cable buried between one and ten feet deep?”

Lily watched with obvious interest as the crystal quickly spun left. The young woman squinted, looking more closely, as if trying to catch Irene manipulating the movement of the stone.

“Is the cable buried between ten and twenty feet deep?”

This time the crystal spun to the right. “I’m going to go with a hunch,” Irene said to Lily as she grasped the crystal to make it still again. “Is the cable buried at fifteen feet deep?”

The pendulum spun wildly to the right. “Fifteen feet deep it is, then. Seems awfully deep for a cable,” said Irene, shaking her head as she put the pendulum away.

“Let’s go. The rain is almost here,” said Lily.

As Lily gently took Irene’s arm and helped her walk the twenty yards to the SUV, Dennis opened the rear doors, retrieved a large black plastic tarp, and spread it onto the ground next to the rear of the Yukon.

“Can you stand on the tarp and use your dowsing rods to see if there’s something there?” asked Lily.

“What am I looking for?”

“Just tell me if you get any sense of something. This will only take a moment, and then we are finished.”

Irene thought the request a bit odd, but the size of the tarp was so small, it would indeed only take a moment. She held out the L-rods and slowly stepped onto the black tarp.

“I know dowsers who can locate crashed airplane sites, dowsers who find gold, silver… and buried treasure.”

“We just wanted you to find the cable, I promise you that,” assured Dennis.

She had no real reason to doubt him. But after taking a few short steps, she stopped. “I almost feel like Howard is trying to warn me about—”

Irene turned to face Lily and saw the sweet young lady holding a handgun that was pointed right at her. There was a black tube attached to the end of the gun barrel, and Irene heard several very soft sounds come from the gun before her world went black as the tarp.

The seventy-eight-year-old fell perfectly onto the center of the plastic sheet. Her swollen ankles would never bother her again.

“Did you hear what she said? She said her dead husband was trying to warn her, and that was exactly when I pulled my weapon.”

“Just a coincidence,” said Dennis, sizing up the fresh corpse, the easy smile gone from his face. “How deep did she say the cable was?”

“Fifteen feet.”

“That sounds right. This old babushka must weigh a hundred kilos,” he said disdainfully.

And with that, Dennis rolled her up into the tarp, and he and Lily grunted as they lifted Irene’s body into the back of the Yukon.

Dennis closed the doors and then barked commands in Russian into a two-way radio. Lily crossed over to the pink surveyor’s flags and replaced them all with small chunks of broken concrete painted to match the brown earth.

In less than a minute, a Ford F-350 pickup towing a backhoe on a trailer and carrying three men appeared over a slight rise and drove up to the Yukon.

“Get the camouflage netting up first,” yelled Dennis, speaking in his native tongue of Russian to the workers. “Dig down to exactly fourteen feet. We work in between passes of the spy satellites.”

The Bennings family home sat on a hillock just off narrow and winding Carbon Canyon Road in Chino Hills, California. Chino Hills was once a rustic ranch community in the southwest corner of San Bernardino County that went somewhat upscale with the influx of moneyed Chinese American and Chinese immigrant householders, and it’s part of the smog-choked Los Angeles megalopolis that consumes a good chunk of Southern California. When the traffic gods are smiling, the drive to downtown L.A. only takes forty minutes.

Thirty-one-year-old Staci Bennings sat in her late father’s airy home office on a pleasant spring morning, but her view out the windows was of a muddy brownish gray pall clinging to the horizon like a judgment that couldn’t be expunged. To be sure, there was blue sky, but Staci would have to crane her neck at least 45 degrees to see it. She appeared to be lost in thought, staring out the windows.

The home office was decorated with all kinds of aviation memorabilia: models of commercial jets painted in the old TWA paint scheme occupied bookcase shelves; an airline captain’s hat sat next to a U.S. Air Force officer’s hat; and the control wheel from a 747 rested on the desk next to the PC where Staci sat. She shifted her gaze to the computer monitor, clicked on a different Web page, and twisted her troubled countenance into an angry scowl. Tall, slender, and very capable, Staci was the kind of person who usually wore a smile, not a frown; the sour look on her high-cheekboned, elegant face was like a clanging alarm, and her mood was not due to the dirty air tainting the skyline.

“From the look on your face, this is not good,” said Staci’s mother, Gina, weakly. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

Staci clicked on yet another Web page, then locked her gaze on her mother. “It’s called identity theft, Mom. Some thief has hacked your life; the bank accounts are drained, your credit cards are maxed, new credit lines have been opened… I mean, wow, this is not good. I was just thinking about what I need to do first.”

In frustration, Staci blew air from her mouth upward, causing some of the bangs of her shoulder-length brown hair highlighted with blond to flutter.

“New credit lines? Oh, my lord…” Gina Bennings put a hand on her chest and swayed slightly.

“Mom, sit down,” said Staci, springing to her feet and crossing quickly to Gina. She eased her into a chair. “It’s a mess right now, but I can take care of it. Don’t worry, the banks, the credit card companies will make good on the money. I promise.”

Gina Bennings had been an Italian fashion model thirty-eight years ago when she married her late husband, Tommy, an American citizen and commercial airline pilot. She gave up her catwalk career in Milan to be a wife and mother, giving birth to and raising three children in Southern California. But when her husband and youngest son died in a plane crash four years ago, she snapped. She had a nervous breakdown from which she never fully recovered. She also physically let herself go to seed, and she looked older than her age of sixty. Gina couldn’t even take good care of herself anymore, so Staci had been living with her and attending to her needs while at the same time stepping in to help run the family aviation business.