Where Evil Waits (27 page)

H
APPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU,
happy birthday to you…”

Sasha sang to himself, humming when the words got tiring, which was after about ten seconds, but keeping the tune going. He wanted his father to hear.

The stable was ready. He’d scrubbed it clean, raked the stonedust in the arena, and freshened the bedding in each stall. Stuck his father’s chair at the mouth of the large lobby so he could watch it all happening. He took down every nameplate and wiped it free of dust, then—making sure his father was watching—tied a balloon to each one before hanging it back on the proper stall.

“How did I do,
nana
?” he asked, turning to his father. “It looks good, yes?”

Sasha smiled. It looked more than good. It was perfect.

“An exact replica of Montgomery Manor—at least, as exact as I could remember. I spent years drawing the plans and re-drawing, calculating measurements in my head.” He scoffed. Not much else to do in prison. “I got this land for a song, though the money doesn’t matter, does it? There’s plenty of that. I went to four different architects before I found one who was willing to recreate this exact
design, then overpaid a builder to get it done in a hurry. After all, I’d already found an Evie and was anxious to get started. Well, her full name was Evelyn, but that was close enough. Just a slight derivation. Like Alexander and Sasha.”

His father seemed to be struggling to breathe.

“Oh, Papa, what’s the matter?” He shook his head, making a
tsk
sound. “Those nurses at the home don’t think you understand anything. But you do, don’t you?” He walked over to the wheelchair and crouched to his haunches, right in front of his father, using illogically tender movements to straighten the dark blue throw over his father’s knees and tug his pajama collar straight. He looked up at the gaping eyes and mouth. “Your Stefan could have never done this. All that brilliance he inherited from your gene pool, and yet who’s the genius now?”

He rolled his father’s chair down the wide aisle to the eighth stall—the supersize one that had once housed the mare named Guapa. In the middle of the stall gaped a hole deep enough to hold a body.

“I’ll bet you’re wondering what I’m going to do here, aren’t you,
nana
?” He strode over to the wheelchair, enjoying his father’s horror. “You remember, the princess of Montgomery Manor? You told me I was a fool for wanting her, just like I was an imbecile at my school work and that baseball was the waste of a brain. You said when I tried to touch her I ruined everything.” The anger started to pop in the back of his mind, little bubbles of memory that burst in his brain. He shook his head to try to scatter them. They didn’t matter anymore.

“I didn’t understand, did I, Papa? And you wouldn’t tell me. That was part of the deal with Old Man Montgomery, wasn’t it? That I couldn’t know the truth.” He got
in Dmitri’s face again. “Well, I do know the truth now. And soon, so will Kara. Tonight, she’ll get an invitation she won’t be able to refuse. Your cute little nurse, Sarah, will take care of that, just as soon as she goes into your room to change your bedsheets.”

A throb started at the back of his skull but he smothered it. Don’t let it take over. Not yet, not now, when he was so close.

He took one last look about, then spun his father’s wheelchair around, wheeled him through the stall corridor, and pulled the chair upstairs, backward, one step at a time, into the viewing balcony for the arena. He turned the chair away from the arena and instead aimed his father toward the lobby and stall aisles. From there, he would be able to see everything that happened.

“There,” he said, putting on the brake of the wheelchair. He straightened his father’s blanket and hat, and took a step back. “I have to leave you for a little while,
nana
. There’s something I need to do to make sure Kara cooperates.” He pulled an iPhone from his pocket, the one belonging to Aidan. He hadn’t dared to put the battery in for fear they might be looking for it. Now, it wouldn’t matter if they used it to find him. He wanted them to. He expected them to.

“Enjoy the show, Papa.”

A
LEXANDER
(S
ASHA
) R
ODIN.

Luke studied the files. Rodin had been killing people in the area surrounding Atlanta for more than a year, and yet they couldn’t find a single fucking sign of him. No driver’s license, no employment, no car title, no renter’s agreement or mortgage. The man had come to Atlanta and disappeared.

Busy killing people representing Kara’s fifteenth birthday party. Sick bastard.

Luke forced himself to stay with the paper, learning everything he could. As soon as they had his name, the investigation seemed to put on running shoes. Mike took what Kara had told them and headed to the field office to meet with the SAC and address the task force. Luke and Kara stayed at Montiel’s lodge and delved into the Rodins’ history, using Bureau-backed computers that allowed Luke a level of security clearance capable of accessing almost anything. He found the elder Rodin almost right away, through immigration records: Dmitri and his wife Darya had emigrated from a village near Moscow in 1974, more than forty years ago. He was a mathematician and
she a physicist, and they’d had one son named Stefan. Employment landed them at Montgomery Manor in ’76, where Sasha was born and where they worked as menial laborers, despite the fact that they were both highly educated.

They left on the night of Kara’s fifteenth birthday.

Luke managed to access some school records: Stefan was the perfect, straight-A student; Sasha struggled. Luke made a mental note of this, but couldn’t wrench sibling rivalry into a vengeful murder spree against Kara seventeen years later. Not unless—

“Did you know his brother?” Luke asked.

She shook her head. “I didn’t even know he had one.”

And he hadn’t, at least not by the time Kara would have been old enough to remember. Luke kept digging and found that Stefan Rodin had contracted spinal meningitis when he was twelve. He died, leaving Sasha the only child.

There wasn’t much more of interest until Sasha turned eighteen: He landed a minor league baseball contract. It ended after only two years, among rumors of ill-will between players and even accusations of assault, but there were no charges filed. Sasha went back home to Virginia, and a few weeks later, Kara Montgomery had a fifteenth birthday bash.

“I don’t know what happened to him after that,” Kara said, rubbing a crease between her eyes. “We never saw them again.”

But just then, the laptop dinged. Luke opened a message from Mike at headquarters: R
APE/ASSAULT OF
M
ARTI
D
ELANEY,
S
KOKIE,
IL 1998—U.S. P
ENITENTIARY AT
M
ARION,
I
LLINOIS.
R
ELEASED
M
AR 2012
.

“Jesus,” Luke said, typing as fast as his fingers would
go. He looked up the name Marti Delaney and found coverage of the stories right away. Two years after leaving Virginia—when Kara was off at “boarding school” with a swollen belly, Sasha Rodin had raped and beaten Delaney to within an inch of her life.

He clicked on a photo of the victim, taken after the trial had ended, and his heart stood still. Kara sucked in a breath.

“That could be you,” Luke said. “Before Maddie re-did your hair and makeup. Jesus, Kara, that woman could be you.”

She stared at it and Luke called the research office. “Get in touch with Skokie,” he said. “We need to know what Sasha Rodin was doing there in 1998 and every detail you can scrounge up about the rape that put him in prison. Have someone get with prison officials. As far as I can tell, Rodin served his entire sentence, which means someone didn’t want to see him paroled. Find out who. Find out why. Find out what he ate for breakfast every morning and how many times a day he peed.”

He hung up, for the first time realizing how quickly things had changed. The SAC had put seven agents at Mike’s disposal. Two of them were charged with finding missing persons in the past year whose first names were Matthew, Jessica, and Laura. One, a Matthew, had already been identified from police reports in Nashville, about four hours away. An agent had been sent to talk to his family and find out if he’d owned a tiger-eye ring, but no one doubted it. It was only a matter of time before the other two owners of the gifts would be discovered as missing persons as well, now that they had names to look for. Everything had changed.

It was a far cry from the speed with which things
progressed in Luke’s world. In his cases, time was measured in months and years: months of creating, backing up, and memorizing a deep-cover story; months of taking baby steps to insinuate yourself into an organization, then more baby steps to pass all their tests and become integral to their operation; years of recording conversations, running deals, getting to know the players, documenting procedures, and making sure the Federal Attorneys had a record of every conversation, every dollar, every ounce, and every phone call, so no one slipped away.

Like Collado.

Luke looked at his watch: 2:08 in the afternoon. Burke had brought Gene Montiel to meet with Collado—alone—claiming Luke Varón was in the sack with a hot little number from The Parthenon and refused to be disturbed. They’d provided pictures of Luke walking with Kara on the front path of The Parthenon, his hand laid possessively on the small of her back, and more of him crowding her against the Escalade in a dark parking lot by the lake, engaged in a thoroughly convincing public display of affection. Burke complained to Collado that Varón wasn’t playing fair, swearing he’d have his turn at the girl named Krista as soon as Varón resurfaced. Apparently, it had been played well: Collado settled for confirming all the deliveries through Burke and Montiel and gave the order to ship out.

The cocaine had started moving at noon today. It was on its way to fifteen stations across the southeast and Federal Agents waited, backed by local police and SWAT and canines, at every site. Frank Collado had been in a tight net of security from the moment he shook Gene Montiel’s hand and stepped onto U.S. soil.

He was finished.

Hit man Luke Varón was finished.

Special Agent Lukas Mann was just beginning.

“You okay?”

Luke turned to see Kara regarding him. Yeah, he was okay. He put his hands on either side of her face and bent down, infusing his kiss with all the pent-up emotion that had gathered in his chest since Kara had summoned him to that alley. Such a short period of time, yet both of their lives had changed irrevocably. At least, Luke hoped both their lives had changed. He knew at least his had.

The front door opened and Hogan cursed. “Tell you what,” he said as Luke came up from the kiss. “When this is over, I’ll spring for you two to get a room.”

“We had a room,” Luke said. “You crashed it.”

Mike slid his briefcase onto the table and opened it in one motion. “The lab worked up the photo of Megan Kessler. She was sitting on a floor of sawdust and the walls at her back were rough-hewn pine.” He looked at Kara. “Sound familiar?”

“A horse stall,” she said.

“He’s got a stable somewhere. That’s where the stonedust in his van came from and that’s where he took Megan Kessler’s body. And you can bet that’s where the others are.”

“Oh, God.” Kara wrapped her arms around herself.

“What about the maps?” Luke asked.

“I’ve got them right here.” Mike spread them out. Luke, using a triangulation program, had entered all the locations where they knew Sasha had been. “Based on what we know, we think his home base is in this area.”

The computer program had highlighted a block in yellow. It included the entire metro-Atlanta area and the areas north and northwest of the city, from Marietta to
Canton. A legend identified each mark on the map: places he’d killed someone, places they’d found a body, places they knew he’d visited, places where he’d made a phone call or they’d gotten a signal from a dumped phone. Kara’s house and office had several hits; Luke’s burned-up house had one; there was the Mississippi cornfield, Penny Wolff’s house, the Floyd Correctional Institute, and the places Gibson had said they met. Rodin had driven fairly good distances to either find a victim or, in Penny’s case, to dispose of one, but otherwise, the north Atlanta area was his stomping grounds.

“Jesus, he’s close,” Luke said, and the nape of his neck prickled. He could
feel
him.

“When we know where the other victims came from, this yellow area will change some. But for now, this is what we have.”

“It’s a big area,” Kara said.

“But now we know Megan was in a stable,” Luke said. “We can ax a lot of this by focusing on that.”

“Done,” Mike said. “As soon as I got this information, I had someone start looking up stables in this yellow zone. It’s still too big an area to go door to door, but a few hours from now, they’ll have some places pinpointed.”

“Someplace that’s been bought or sold since he got out of prison,” Luke said.

“Right. And someplace that has an arena.” He looked at Kara. “You said stonedust isn’t used in stalls.”

Luke said, “What about Illinois?”

Mike put a hand on his lower back and stretched; here was a man who spent too many hours on planes and hunched over files. “He was supposed to be under mandatory supervised release after he got out of prison; he jumped. Probably typed Kara’s name into a people-search
engine and headed to Atlanta. But here’s the interesting thing: His father disappeared at the same time. He lived in Kentucky, where he’d picked up another job at a stable. His wife had died a couple years earlier. Sasha got released from prison and instead of participating in the release program, he disappeared. A week later, his father stopped showing up for work and quit paying rent and picking up his mail…”

“Ah, jeez,” Luke said. “Number twelve.”

The phone rang and they all looked at their cells. It was Mike’s: the SAC. Mike put it on speaker. “Agent Hogan, we found the victim named Laura. She was a mother of two who was headed to a friend’s wedding in Carrollton, Georgia. She never made it there.”

“Did the watch belong to her?”

“Checking. Carrollton’s only ninety minutes away; I’ve got the husband on his way in. But there’s also a call that came into police in Alpharetta a couple hours ago, and it wound its way around to us.”

“Who is it?”

“A staff member at the Mountain Ridge Nursing Home. She claims they have a patient there who might have been strangled with barbed wire.”