Swift Edge (17 page)

“I’m Charlotte Swift. Call me Charlie. Hop in.”

She reached for the door with a leather-gloved hand and slid onto the seat. “Thank you for coming.”

“Don’t you have any luggage?” I asked, scanning the sidewalk for a suitcase or duffel bag.

“No. I didn’t take the time.” A faint Russian accent lent a charming lilt to her voice. “I have necessities in here.” She patted her purse, a messenger-style bag that might hold a toothbrush, a bikini—not much use in Colorado in January—and a change of undies but not much else.

I put the car in gear, swerved around a taxi, and headed for the airport exit.

Irena stayed quiet the couple of minutes it took me to get clear of the terminal traffic. “Where is my Dmitri?” she asked as we passed the rust-colored metal statues of a mounted brave near a bison. A real pronghorn grazed nearby.

“I was hoping you might have some ideas about that,” I said. “What prompted you to come to Colorado Springs?”

She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “My sister has been brutally attacked and my son is missing and you can ask me that?”

“So, Yuliya Bobrova is your sister?” Boyce Edgerton had been right; Bobrova was Dmitri’s aunt.

“Yes. She is the oldest and I am the youngest of eight. We were not close, but when I came to America with Stuart, she was very supportive. She was still in Michigan then, and she helped me adjust.”

“Do you want to go by the hospital?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Dmitri’s.”

“I don’t know if we’ll be able to get in,” I said.

In answer, she pulled a key from her pocket. The brassy color glinted in the sunlight pouring through the car windows. She turned her head to look out the side window at the stores and businesses lining Powers Boulevard and I debated whether or not to tell her about Boyce. I decided to keep his murder to myself for the time being. She was already worried about her son—hearing that his friend had been shot might goose her into hysterics.

Pulling into the still-empty parking lot at Westhaven, I had barely stopped the car when Irena jumped out and ran to the front door of Dmitri’s unit. She slid the key home with a trembling hand and pushed into the foyer, calling, “Dmitri!”

I was half a step behind her and almost gasped as I entered. The disarray that had greeted me the other day was gone; in fact, everything was gone. The sofa, the TV, the DVDs, the red pillow—gone. I turned in a circle while Irena dashed up the stairs. Who had cleaned the place out? And why? I wandered into the kitchen and opened a couple of drawers at random. Empty. Not even an old takeout menu or a paper clip wedged into a drawer seam.

“He’s not here,” Irena called from the top of the stairs.

“The condo didn’t look like this when I was here Thursday,” I told her, returning to the empty living room.

Irena plodded down the stairs, one weary step at a time. “I am so worried.” She sat on the next-to-last step and dropped her face into her hands, elbows propped on her knees.

I joined her. “Do you want to go somewhere else to talk? A Starbucks or a restaurant?” She shook her head, not looking up, and I gave in, sliding my back down the entryway wall until my butt hit the cold wood floor. “What do you think is going on with Dmitri?” I asked.

She looked up after a moment, dug the heels of her hands into her eyes, and then met my gaze. “He called me this morning.”

“He did? Then he’s alive!”

She nodded. “He told me I might be in danger, told me to leave my house and spend a couple of nights in a hotel or with a friend.”

Instead of which, she’d come straight to Colorado Springs, leaping from the sinking boat into the crocodile-infested river, I suspected.

She read my expression. “He is my only son. Of course I am going to try to help him.”

“Did he say why you were in danger?”

“No. He said he had some business to sort out and then everything would get back to normal.”

Somehow, I didn’t think we were talking about skating business. Even the most cutthroat, Tonya Harding–esque competitor would draw the line at threatening a skater’s mother, I felt sure. “You’re his mom,” I said, “and you probably know him better than anyone.”

“I do,” she said fiercely.

“So what’s he mixed up in?”

She bristled. “What makes you think he’s ‘mixed up’ in anything?”

I just looked at her. After a moment, she squirmed, then pulled off the knit cap and ran her fingers through her hair. I stayed silent. Finally, she burst out, “You have to understand that ice-skating is a very expensive sport.”

“I know.”

“Training and competing at the level Dmitri does can cost a hundred thousand dollars a year.”

I was going to ask about sponsors, but I didn’t want to derail her, so I said, “That must be hard.”

She jerked her head down hard once. “Yes. So you cannot blame Dmitri for taking advantage when opportunity presented itself.”

“What kind of opportunity?” From the way her eyes slid away from mine, I knew we weren’t talking about a mutual fund.

“As a caterer with the run of people’s kitchens, he found that sometimes he had access to … to certain documents. So many people, especially well-off couples, seem to have those built-in desks in their kitchens, and they leave papers there—bills, investment statements, and the like.”

“So Dmitri helped himself to customers’ financial data and then—what? Stole their identities?”

“No!” Her slender brows drew together, cutting a deep groove over her nose. “If he came across credit card data, he would … borrow it.”

Hah! Just as I’d guessed when I’d studied the receipts from Dmitri’s pockets. I love being right. I considered Irena.

Her affront when I accused Dmitri of identity theft seemed disingenuous; credit card fraud—excuse me, “borrowing”—was equally low, not to mention equally felonious. I bit back my sarcasm and said, “So how does that lead to you being in danger?”

She bit her lower lip, showing small, crooked teeth with a gray cast. Communist dental health at its finest. “I don’t know,” she said.

She was lying. I eyed her averted profile as she gazed out the window to the parking lot. Time to bring out the big guns. “A friend of Dmitri’s was killed today,” I said.

She gasped and slewed around to face me. “What? Not Dara?”

Shaking my head, I said, “No. A man he worked with, Boyce Edgerton.”

“Boyce?”

“You knew him?”

“Dmitri mentioned him once or twice, I think. You said … ‘killed’?”

“Shot. Now, don’t you think you should tell me what you know, before someone else—maybe Dmitri—ends up like Boyce?”

Agitated, she rose from the step and paced the empty living room. At the far end, near the kitchen, she whirled to face me. “He got caught.”

“Who?”

“Dmitri.”

“Recently?”

She shook her head rapidly. “No. Months ago.”

“So why don’t the cops have a record of it? Why isn’t he in jail?”

“The man who caught him didn’t turn him in. He made him a deal.”

Her story smelled worse than a fish market in a heat wave. “Really? Dmitri agreed to ‘go forth and sin no more’ and the man turned him loose?” I wished I had phrased it differently; my religious upbringing pops up at odd moments.

“Not exactly.”

Slamming my hand on the floor so hard it stung my palm, I pushed to my feet. Irena looked startled. “The time for pussyfooting around this is past, Irena,” I said, striding toward her. “A man’s been killed. Your sister’s in the hospital. It’s clear your son is no Boy Scout, that he’s mixed up in something criminal. So spit it out!”

Backing up a step, her eyes fixed on me as if she thought I was going to beat the truth out of her, she held up her hands placatingly. “The man made a deal with Dmitri. He knew who Dmitri was, knew he skated internationally. He suggested that he could let Dmitri walk away if Dmitri would agree to occasionally carry small packages for him on his trips.”

“So Dmitri became a drug smuggler?” I asked incredulously.

“No, it wasn’t drugs,” Irena said. “The man swore it would never be drugs. Dmitri wouldn’t do that.”

Right. Like it’s smart to take the word of a man who blackmails you. I arched my eyebrows skeptically but only said, “Who is this man?”

“I don’t know.”

At my disbelieving look, she said, “I don’t! Dmitri said it was safer for me not to know.”

That sounded barely plausible, so I let it drop. “So Dmitri started couriering something—not drugs—and all of a sudden this archvillain—let’s call him Mr. X—decides to start offing Dmitri’s friends and relatives?” I shook my head. “I think you’re leaving out a few pieces of the story, Irena.”

Glaring at me, cheeks flushed a becoming red, Irena spat, “It’s none of your business. I should never have called you back, but you sounded … I thought maybe you could help Dmitri. Just forget it!”

She stalked toward the door, brushing past me roughly enough to knock me a little off balance. She jerked the door open, her gaze on a cell phone she pulled from her jacket pocket.

She wouldn’t get far without a car. “Where are you—”

A bullet zinged past Irena Fane and buried itself in the staircase.

20

Irena Fane shrieked and dropped the phone. Diving at the door, I slammed it shut and locked it in a single motion. I scooped up the cell phone and dialed 911 as glass exploded from the front window, fanning out in a deadly burst of sparkling shards. That was going to cost Fane his security deposit. I felt stinging cuts open up on my face and arms. Luckily, my eyes seemed unaffected. I blinked rapidly as Irena screamed again and put her hands over her ears. I grabbed her hand. “C’mon.”

We pounded up the stairs as another bullet thunked into the wall where the television had stood. When I’d searched the condo a couple of days ago I’d been happy to see that the place was largely deserted during business hours. Now, I wished for a coffee klatch of at-home neighbors to tackle the unknown shooter and/or summon the police. The 911 operator was still squawking from the phone in my hand, and I shouted the address at her as Irena and I ran, adding, “Shots fired!”

Irena and I dashed through the door of Dmitri’s bedroom—also denuded of furnishings—and slammed it behind us. I turned the lock in the knob. Of one accord, we ran to the window as the sound of splintering wood drifted from downstairs. The shooter was kicking down the door. It might take him a couple of minutes to breach the front door, but the flimsy bedroom door would give him no trouble at all.

“It’s too far,” Irena gasped, looking down at the inhospitable mix of landscape rock and old snow a long way below us.

“Up,” I said. “We have to go up.”

An eave overhung the window, sticking out far enough to make for an awkward grab.

“I can’t,” Irena said, leaning out the window and twisting at the waist to survey the roofline.

“I’ll hold you,” I said, thrusting the cell phone into my pocket.

Another gunshot rang out, and I thought our determined attacker must have given up on the whole kick-the-door-in idea and resorted to shooting out the lock. The sound propelled Irena onto the windowsill. I held her feet as she scootched out backward until her weight rested on her thighs and she could reach up and grab hold of the eave. With one hand gripping the edge, she swung her other forearm up and over. I slowly eased her legs out the window as she pulled herself up until her whole torso disappeared from view. Luckily, she had a decent amount of upper body strength, either from her skating days or because she trained with weights. She got one knee over the lip of the roof and quickly pulled her legs up and out of sight. I heard her footsteps above me as I settled myself on the sill.

I knew immediately that this was going to be next to impossible without someone to brace me. Reaching for the eave with one hand, I felt myself slipping backward and quickly grabbed the sill again.
Bang!
The front door slammed into the wall, making the whole condo shudder. Footsteps thudded on the stairs, and I knew the shooter would be on me in a second. Quickly standing, I repositioned myself on my stomach with my legs hanging out the window. Slithering backward, scraping my stomach and arms against the sill, I lowered myself until I was hanging by my fingertips, my body pressed against the splintery siding of the condo. Police sirens sounded surprisingly close by.

I was losing sensation in my fingers, and my arms trembled with the strain of holding my weight. I looked back over my shoulder at the inhospitable terrain below. Should I drop or hope the shooter overlooked me? It wasn’t
that
far down, not like leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge or the Empire State Building. I mean, a serious suicide wouldn’t pick this as her jumping-off point. I had about decided to risk a broken leg by letting go when I heard a foot slam into the bedroom door, which popped open, whacking the wall and probably leaving a hole.

A patrol car squealed around the corner into the parking lot, running Code Three with its lights flashing and siren blaring. The footsteps headed for the window halted, then reversed, and relief sagged through me. “Help!” I yelled as those anonymous footsteps bounded down the stairs. I struggled to pull myself up, but I didn’t have enough strength left in my arms to manage it. My shoulders screamed. Damn.

“Drop your weapon,” an authoritative voice commanded.

Relief whistled through me. The police had caught the shooter.

“And come down from there,” the cop added.

What? I looked over my shoulder again, feeling my fingers beginning to slip. A lone uniformed cop stood almost directly below me, gun held steady in two hands, pointed at me. “You have got to be kidding me,” I yelled. “I don’t have a weapon, the guy ran out the front, and if you don’t move right now, I might fall on you.” With my luck, they’d charge me with assaulting a police officer. “Help me!”

Another cop came running up, assessed the situation, and disappeared around the front of the condo. In a minute, strong hands grasped my wrists and he hauled me up and in. “Thank you,” I gasped. Leaning against the wall, I tried to flex my cramped fingers. No go.

“What happened here?” the cop asked. A burly twenty-something with a lumpy nose, he maintained a calm expression as I filled him in. His name tag said
GRADNEY
, and he took notes with tiny, precise capital letters.