Blood Trust (27 page)

“Now,” Annika said.

Naomi slipped the nylon line from the metal cleat, then stepped on board. The moment she did so, Annika pushed the throttle and the boat nosed its way out of the slip, angling toward the thick greenery of the island. Naomi picked her way forward and stood beside Annika, in much the same position Peter had stood beside the unknown man yesterday morning.

The trip took no more than five minutes. The sun was a hazy ellipse, partially obscured by a low-lying cloudbank. As was the case the morning before, there was no other boat traffic. The water lay serenely blank, an opaque sheet intent on keeping its secrets safe.

Annika tied up the poodle, who obediently lay down, sighed, and went to sleep. They disembarked onto the island, Naomi in her sensible shoes, Annika in bare feet. The sun was fully up now and the day was growing warmer. Naomi noticed that Annika did not take off her raincoat. Possibly this was where she’d stashed her .25.

Annika struck out to their left and Naomi followed. They skirted the shoreline, heading toward the eastern point of the island, but, almost immediately, Annika turned inland. Naomi tried to focus her mind on the island’s shape. There were no buildings, only a memorial to Teddy Roosevelt near the opposite shore. Otherwise, all was wilderness. They picked their way through the underbrush, beneath heavy branches. The smell of damp earth and decaying leaves was everywhere. The sky vanished; they were enclosed in deep, cool shade, as if in the shadow of a monstrous edifice.

At length, they broke out onto a boardwalk of whitish planks, walking due south until Annika turned onto a right-hand branch. This took them on a short walk to a platform that overlooked a finger of muddy water and, beyond, a thick swath of uninterrupted forest that composed the bulk of the island. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere, no movement save for the twittering birds flitting from tree to tree.

Looking around, Naomi could see nothing she would not expect to find on such an expedition. “This is where Pete went yesterday?”

“Possibly.” Annika stared off to their right.

Naomi followed her gaze, but could find no anomaly. “Who took him here, Annika? Who was driving that boat?”

“I hope you’re not averse to getting your feet wet,” Annika said as she stepped off the platform onto a protruding root, and from there down into the water. The hem of her raincoat caused ripples to expand out from where she stood, knee-deep.

Kicking off her shoes, Naomi grabbed on to the bole of the tree and swung down from the root, which was slippery, skinned now from Annika’s weight, to the water herself. As soon as she was down, Annika picked her way north, up the narrow channel. The bottom was soft and mucky, and mud squelched between Naomi’s toes. The water was surprisingly warm, thick as chowder. What was she stirring up with each footfall? she wondered. Tiny whirlpools of little fish and decayed leaves wove around her ankles, turning the brackish water ruddy. A sudden shadow overhead caused her to duck, and she heard a bird call, as if mocking her.

“Come on!” Annika called from up ahead. “Don’t get lost!” Her voice was oddly flat, echoless, as if they had entered a strange and unknowable place where the natural laws of science didn’t apply.

Naomi moved on, picking up her pace as best she could, but the footing had become unstable, the muck under her feet shifting and sliding as it deepened. Several times she stumbled and had to grab an overhanging branch to keep herself from pitching headlong into the water. She realized that the water was neither cold nor warm, but seemed to be the same temperature as her body.

Up ahead, she could see a flicker of Annika’s raincoat, like the scales of a reptile moving slowly and inexorably toward its goal. Now she used the branches to drag herself forward, relying on her arms rather than her legs for locomotion, as if she were a chimpanzee.

Maneuvering around a small bend to the right, she stopped. Annika was standing with one foot on the low bank. One leg was raised. The raincoat had parted, sliding off the knee, revealing a section of naked thigh. What did or didn’t Annika have under that raincoat? Naomi wondered briefly.

“Closer,” Annika said, beckoning Naomi forward.

When Naomi came up behind her, she saw that Annika had been digging in the muck. She had uncovered something. Stooping down, she cupped her hands and threw water on it. A pale and shining patch shone through as the mud and leaf detritus slid off.

It was part of a hand.

Heart in her throat, Naomi saw again the splatter of blood on the old wooden boards deep beneath the streets of Chinatown, and tears shattered on her cheeks. Annika moved out of the way as she crouched down, unmindful of the water and the mud. Using her bare hands she swept away more of the earth. The body had been buried in the V-shaped gap between two massive tree roots, a hammocky space.

The hand was small, the fingers delicate, so Naomi knew this was a young girl. She dug almost frantically now, tearing a nail, then another, not caring. All she could think of was uncovering the girl’s face, as if she were still alive and, unburied, could be made to breathe again, to live, instead of being yet another victim of these slave traders.

A brow came first, then the heartbreakingly beautiful swell of a cheekbone. She gasped to see the nose fractured, bruised and swollen to almost twice its size. At this point, the lack of decomposition brought home to her that the girl had been killed very recently, possibly within the last forty-eight hours, though only a coroner could tell for certain.

This was all on the right side of the face. As she brushed clean the left side, her fingertips felt for the telltale fracture, this one of the left eye socket. And there it was, just as it had been with Billy and the two men in Twilight.

“Same MO, same perp,” she murmured to herself.

“That’s right,” Annika said from right behind her.

Then an arm encircled her throat, the pad of a thumb pressed against the bone just below her left eye.

And she heard Annika’s voice so intimate in her ear as the pressure increased.

“This is how it’s done.”

S
IXTEEN

“S
OMEONE IS
feeding her information,” McKinsey said in a hushed voice.

“Naomi is a smart girl,” Henry Carson said. “I told you that from the get-go.”

“Shit, she’s not that smart.”

“It’s a mistake to underestimate her.”

They fell silent as the huge door to the National Cathedral opened and someone entered. An older woman walked down the central aisle, crossed herself before sliding into a pew halfway down. Her hands clasped and she bowed her head.

“Don’t be an idiot.” Carson’s whisper was nevertheless a harsh rebuke. “Find out what she knows.”

“That won’t be easy,” McKinsey said.

“If your assignment was easy,” Carson replied, “I’d have given it to a monkey.”

They kept still now as a priest appeared, crossed himself, then mounted the small dais to prepare the altar for the coming mass. They were seated on a pew in the last row; soon they would have to leave, but for the moment they were safe from prying eyes and ears.

“Listen, Peter, there’s another player in the field.”

McKinsey glanced at Carson for the first time. “Who?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t need you. Go forth and find out who it is.”

“And when I do?”

“Neutralize it,” Carson said.

The door behind them opened and they bowed their heads as another penitent made his way down the aisle. When he had found a pew, McKinsey said, “I’m sorry about your niece.”

Carson stared at the priest, arranging his fetishistic symbols on the altar. “There will be consequences.”

McKinsey bit his lip. He was dying for a cigarette. “It doesn’t alter our plans?”

“Not in the least.” Carson took a breath and let it out. “Time for you to go, Peter.”

“Yessir.”

Carson stayed some time after McKinsey left. He stared at the symbols of privilege and power affixed to the walls. The Catholic Church was on a slow and painful march to irrelevance, strangling on its own misdeeds. Before he left, he determined not to follow that path.

*   *   *

“Y
OU SEE
how it works?” Annika said. “You see how easy it is from this position to fracture the occipital bone?” She kept up the pressure just beneath Naomi’s left eye. “Both the zygomatic bone and, here, the foramen—the hole in the bone through which nerves and blood vessels pass—are vulnerable. Two deaths in one, one might say.”

She removed her arm and thumb, but Naomi’s heart could not stop racing. She had to hold down the reactive nausea that had risen up through her gut into her throat when Annika had come up behind her and locked her in the death grip the murderer had employed four times in the last thirty-six hours. An insane thought was still ricocheting like a pinball around her brain: Was Annika the murderer? She had killed Senator Berns; how many before him had she murdered?

Naomi swallowed heavily. Her eyes were tearing and her nose was running. Ignoring her own distress, she stared down at the head and hand of the young girl buried between the roots of the massive tree.

“Who is this?” Her voice was thick and her tongue seemed too large for her mouth. “Do you know her name?”

“Does it matter?”

Naomi whipped around. “Damn straight it matters.”

“Arjeta.” Annika was looking at Naomi, not the dead girl. “In Albanian, it means ‘golden life.’”

Naomi stood up. She felt light-headed. Her heart would not slow down. She tried to take deep breaths.

“You look pale,” Annika said. “Are you all right?”

What the hell do you care?
Naomi wanted to say, but she just nodded.

“Did you kill her?”

Now Annika’s eyes sought the corpse. “It’s so sad, isn’t it? Such a waste of life.”

Naomi’s hands curled into fists. “I asked you a question.”

“I have been trying to protect Arjeta.” Her gaze swung back to Naomi’s face. “I know her two sisters, Edon and Liridona. They’re younger than Arjeta. Edon has been taken, but so far Liridona, the youngest, has been spared.”

“Spared what?”

“Arjeta’s parents sold her to Xhafa’s people. All three sisters are both beautiful and desirable. Unless something drastic is done, I fear Liridona and Edon will suffer the same fate as their older sister.”

“The fate of so many,” Naomi said sadly.

“Yes, but these girls are special. Their beauty makes them tremendously valuable to people like the Xhafa brothers. But their value is now exponentially greater. They possess important knowledge regarding, I’m assuming, Arian Xhafa. But that’s just a stab in the dark. Liridona was interrupted in her last call to me and I haven’t been able to reach her since.”

“Where are they now?” Naomi asked.

“Liridona called me from Albania. Vlorë, where the family lives. She doesn’t know where Edon was taken, though I strongly suspect that it’s out of the country.”

Naomi pressed her hand against the bole of the tree to steady herself. “It’s a sickness, a disease.”

“What is?”

“Greed.”

“Greed and despair,” Annika said. “They’re epidemic.”

Naomi pulled out her cell phone.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you think? I’m calling this in.”

“Don’t.”

“Excuse me?” Naomi shook her head. “That sounded like an order.”

“Just a suggestion,” Annika said. “If you call it in, it will become public, and Mbreti will vanish into the shadows.”

Naomi put the cell up to her ear. “I have to do what I have to do.”

“Then you’ll never find him. This I can guarantee.”

Naomi looked off into the distance. The odor of Arjeta’s death clotted in her nostrils. Her pale, bony face haunted her. The line connected and she heard a querying voice in her ear, thin and electronic.

“These deaths will go on and on,” Annika said softly. “Is this what you want?”

Duty and desire, the two weights the cosmic scale held in balance, if not equilibrium, vied with each other for dominance.

At last, she took the phone away from her ear and killed the connection.

“All right,” she said to Annika. “Was it Mbreti who killed Arjeta? Was it Mbreti who tortured and killed Billy Warren, and the two men at Twilight?”

“No, not him, though he may have ordered it,” Annika said.

“Do you know the perp’s name?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The murderer.”

“Yes. A man named Blunt. I believe you’ve met him under the legend name of Willowicz.”

*   *   *

D
OLNA
Z
HELINO
was a tiny mountain village nestled in a finger of a valley dipping between two wooded hillsides high in the Korab mountains. At one end was a small watercourse, fed by the Vardar River; at the other was a wide, undulating, mostly cultivated valley, the gateway to Tetovo, Arian Xhafa’s stronghold fifteen miles to the northwest.