“You killed my wife. And you’re going to make me execute you because somehow you think you have cards yet to play. You think you can talk your way out of this. You’ve misjudged the situation.”
“Don’t you turn this around. If you kill me, that’s on your conscience. Don’t you believe for one second that this is my doing. You want to kill an innocent man, that’s on you, not me. I had nothing to do with your wife’s death. Kroll worked jobs for Reece Whitton. I had no part in what happened to your wife.”
“You ordered it.”
“Where’s your proof? You want to believe it’s true, but that’s not proof. Kroll’s dead. Whitton’s dead. That recording never mentions my name. You have nothing except what you believe to be true. No prosecutor in the world would buy what you’re selling.”
“You’re right,” I say as I go back to drilling. “No prosecutor would buy this, but this isn’t going to a prosecutor. You’ll never see the inside of a courtroom. You’re running out of time.”
“And you’re running out of bluffs. You have nothing.”
“I have Anastasia,” I say.
“You’re going to believe the word of a whore?”
“Whore? She’s Reece Whitton’s wife. You say you barely remember Whitton, yet you feel comfortable calling Mrs. Whitton a whore? Why is that?”
Mikhail goes silent again.
“Your lies are falling apart, Mikhail,” I say.
“You think you know something, don’t you?” he says with a slight shiver in his voice. “You think you’ve figured it all out, but you don’t know shit. You’ve got it all backward. You’re being played, and you can’t see it.”
I hear his words, but they fall numb on my ears. It’s all a game to him. He’s still trying to get in my head. I’m sore, and I’m tired. I haven’t the energy to care about his bullshit anymore. I break through to the lake in hole number six, and I watch the water fill it up. The sun is growing weak in the west, and my shadow is growing long. I have two more holes to drill and only enough sunlight for one.
CHAPTER 35
Snowflakes attacked my headlights and windshield, obscuring the edges of Interstate 35 as we headed north. Ana hadn’t spoken to me since my breakdown by the streetlight. That was at least an hour ago, and we hadn’t even made it as far as Forest Lake yet, a drive that, on a clear day, takes under thirty minutes. I stayed in the passing lane but got bottled up behind those less intrepid drivers who preferred to jam up my lane as opposed to getting the hell out of my way. I was glad to have the all-wheel drive of the Durango, but I really missed my strobe lights.
I figured that Mikhail had a good hour’s lead, maybe more depending on how soon after the strip-club ruckus he’d hit the road. He might have even gotten enough of a head start to be in front of the storm and the cluster-fuck of bad drivers stacked up in front of me.
A gap opened up as a minivan reconsidered its lane choice and moved over behind a semi. I eased on the gas, bringing the Durango up to thirty-five miles per hour. A cloud of white rose up behind the semi next to me, and I disappeared into the cloud, blind to everything except the truck’s running lights to my right.
I felt the cushion of thick snow against my tires as I pushed the limits of safety. The truck encroached into my lane enough that it put me on the shoulder where a ridge of plowed snow hip-checked me into a slide. I twisted a few degrees clockwise and then another few degrees counterclockwise before regaining control.
“We won’t get there if we’re dead,” Ana said. She was holding onto the door handle with both hands.
I maintained my death grip on the steering wheel and slowly moved past the truck.
“You should give me the battery for my phone. When you crash, I don’t want to have to dig through the pockets of a dead man to call for help.”
“No offense, but I’ve only known you for a couple hours. It takes me a little longer than that to sum up a stranger.”
“Have I done anything to make you not trust me?”
“Other than try and kill a man? I guess not.”
“And yet only one of us succeeded on that score.”
I looked at her to see if she was serious or joking. In the dark I couldn’t tell.
“You don’t trust me,” she said. “I understand that. I am, in your eyes, one of them. You think that my life with Mikhail and Reece ties me to their actions. They killed my sister. How could I be a part of that?”
“I don’t know what you’re a part of, Ana. I don’t know much of anything. You say you’re an innocent bystander; I’ll buy that for now. But there’s too much gray area.”
“It is not gray. I want Zoya’s killer stopped. You want that too. This is not gray.”
She had no idea about Jenni and the real purpose behind our mission. I thought about telling her. That would have been the fair thing to do. Here she was, risking her life in a car that had nearly fishtailed underneath the back tire of a semi, and she still thought this was about arresting Mikhail for the death of her sister. I opened my mouth, fully intending to tell her the truth, but I couldn’t. Instead, I decided to fill in some of those gray areas.
“Tell me about your life with Mikhail and Reece. How does a girl from Belarus come to find herself in Minneapolis with a tattoo behind her ear?”
My words came out harsher than I wanted, and in my periphery I could see Ana retreat into her seat. I didn’t expect her to answer. It was a dickish move on my part. I may as well have come right out and asked her what made her a whore.
I pulled in behind a convoy of travelers moving at a sluggish but consistent speed. “Slow and steady wins the race,” I muttered under my breath.
“It’s not the strip club,” Ana said. “That’s what you might think, but it’s not. It’s the cleaning company.”
“The cleaning company?” I said.
“Mikhail owns a cleaning company as well as the strip club. He has some legitimate contracts to clean offices and houses. He runs the prostitution out of that company.”
“And you worked for his . . . cleaning company?”
Ana pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins—cocooning herself as best she could around the seat belt. “I was a seventeen-year-old girl in Lida, my home in Belarus, when I met a man. He said that he could get me a job in Canada cleaning homes and offices. He said that after a few months, he could get me to the United States. He promised that once I got to America, I could do anything. He said that I was beautiful.”
Ana turned toward the window as she slipped deeper into her past.
“I wanted, very much, to come to America. You don’t know what it was like in Belarus. My father left us after Zoya was born. My mother did her best, but we had very little. We lived in a basement apartment. Pipes ran across the ceiling and dripped water onto our beds and shook with noise all night. We had no money. I wanted to help. I wanted to come to America to earn money to help my mother.”
“Was that Mikhail who came to you in Belarus?”
“No. It was an associate, a man whose job it was to get the girls to Canada. I moved to Toronto and began cleaning offices. It was a good job. I made more money than I could ever have made in Lida.”