Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

The bedrooms, not surprisingly, are where the action is. In the first one I enter, the drawers have all been pulled out of the dresser. The bed has been moved, too, no longer aligned with the heavy impressions on the carpet.

But they didn’t whip everything out from the drawers willy-nilly or flip the bed over. They didn’t ransack the place. They were searching, but they were planning on tidying up afterward. They were hoping for an in-and-out without any sign they’d been there.

They were being careful.

On the floor is a garbage bag containing clothes and papers and effects. I leaf through the items. They are women’s clothes.

I work quickly, combing over the bedroom, looking for anything else that might belong to my Jane Doe, anything they hadn’t already tossed in the garbage bag.

No, I remind myself, not Jane Doe. Evie, LaTisha’s mother said. She went by Evie. Evie-rhymes-with-Chevy.

Then I head to the next bedroom, where there is another garbage bag, this one empty. Apparently they hadn’t yet found anything in this bedroom. I check for myself and find nothing. This was obviously Shiv’s bedroom, whether he slept here or used it for some other purpose.

So I return to the first bedroom and pick up the garbage bag, look through it again. Some paper with handwriting, clothes, a bottle of women’s cologne, a hairbrush.

They weren’t squatters or crackheads. They weren’t common thieves. They were looking for the same thing I am.

They were trying to remove any evidence of Evie from this house.

Chapter 59

IT’S A start. Now let’s see how much of a start.

The overnight at SOS is quiet. We don’t have much in terms of round-the-clock staff, because we aren’t a normal police district. We don’t punch a clock. We don’t stay in one neighborhood. We go wherever the action is, and we work whatever hours necessary. Only a few detectives and officers are in the squad room when I enter.

I find the room with the POD footage and start working the desktop, searching for the POD camera at Van Buren and Kolmar. I’m not great with this stuff, but the techies are all long gone for the day.

It takes me a while, but I finally find the right camera. I click on the recorded footage for today. Fast-forward through a lot of nothing, a few people walking along sidewalks, one couple making out, all but ripping each other’s clothes off. Some car traffic. Mostly an empty intersection at that time of night, in that part of town.

There. The two men, sprinting south down Kolmar, then pivoting, turning onto Van Buren, running right toward the camera.

I lean forward, squint. Black-and-white, grainy, the usual.

But I have their faces. Maybe not enough for facial recognition. But I have them.

The first one is white, a small frame, thick hair that seems dark. Young, I’d say, maybe early to midtwenties. The second one, the one who shot at me—also Caucasian, much taller, solid but trim, his hair buzzed short, looking behind him to gauge my progress, running with a handgun in his left hand.

I pause the recording so I won’t be forced to see myself showing up a few moments later, out of shape and winded, catching my breath at the corner.

I rewind and replay. Are they Russian? Could be. Definitely could pass for eastern European. Too hard to tell. Probably too blurry to get facial rec with them.

But if I see them again, I’ll recognize them.

I open the garbage bag I took from the house. The clothes don’t tell me much, though I see price tags on a couple of items, which tells me that Shiv probably bought Evie some clothes to wear. Makes sense. If I’m right and she escaped from the traffickers, she didn’t exactly have time to pack a suitcase.

The only thing I find that could be remotely identifying is a piece of paper with some handwriting on it.

A fost eliberat acum trei luni.

Locatia lui e necunoscuta.

I don’t know the language, much less the translation.

On the desktop, I minimize the POD footage and pull up the internet. I type in the words from this note. Several websites cascade down the screen, all of them in a foreign language, most of them beginning with the familiar “www” but ending not with “.gov” or “.com” but with “.ro,” which I don’t recognize. But it doesn’t take long to figure it out. These are Romanian web pages.

A spike of adrenaline. Evie was from Romania.

I pull up an online Romanian-to-English translator and type in the words scribbled on the note. The translation to English:

He was released three months ago. His location is unknown.

I write that down on a notepad. Okay. Now I just have to figure out who “he” is and what he was released from. Prison? Some government facility?

With nothing else to go on from the trash bag, I head to the inventory room, which is closed this time of night. I can’t get in without an officer signing evidence in and out. It’ll have to wait till tomorrow.

My phone buzzes. I don’t recognize the number.

“Officer Harney?”

Close enough. “That’s me.”

“I’m sorry to call so late. This is Angela Dupree.”

“Oh, you’re fast.” It was only around four hours earlier that we spoke.

“Well, once we talked, I couldn’t really think of anything else.”

“Sorry about that.”

“I looked through some old papers. I think I found the name of the company that my late husband was worried about. It was called KB Investors Group. He called it KBIG. He didn’t want them to invest in the Stratton project. He vetoed them.”

“Vetoed them?”

“He was in charge of due diligence. He had to say yay or nay. I didn’t know a lot about what he did, but that much I understood. He said no to KBIG, and his partners were upset.”

And they wouldn’t have been the only ones upset.

The folks at KBIG, kicked out of a major deal by Nathan Stofer, might not have been so happy, either.

Chapter 60

I LAY it out in the family room, the results from a good night.

Name: Evie

Probably from Romania

Loved one/friend recently released from…prison?

Stratton International Hotel and Tower

KB Investors Group (KBIG)

Nathan Stofer, murdered

Antoine Stonewald, convicted of his murder

Laid out like that, it doesn’t sound like much. Still, I reduced the haystack considerably today.

“Well, you had a busy day,” Patti says into my earbuds as I pace my family room, giving her the update on my evening. “What should worry you is, how did these guys know you’ve been searching that house for info on the Jane Doe?”

“Evie,” I say. “She has a name.”

“Evie, fine, but listen to what I’m saying. Someone tipped them off, Billy. You check out the house this morning, and later that same day, they’re in there trying to scrub the place of any trace of her? That’s not a coincidence.”

“You’re thinking Carla,” I say.

“Of course. Who else?”

“Plenty of others. I checked out the key from inventory to search the house. Any cop could’ve found that out. But listen, that’s assuming a cop tipped off these guys. I’m not sure of that at all.”

“Who else?” she says again.

“If I’m right about this,” I say, “and this shooting was all about Evie and not Shiv, then she must have escaped from them. They found her and killed her before she could go to the police, or the FBI, or whoever. But they don’t know what Evie took with her, Patti. For all they know, she had information that could bring down their entire organization. They’d want it. They could have been staking out the house, waiting for their opportunity. They could’ve seen me go in this morning and waited for nightfall to go in and look for themselves.”