“She knows the business. Hell, she was my top girl. She has the client list. That’s all hers now. She’s the one who kept the thing running.”
“How do the women get here? Who brings them here? That’s you, not Ana.”
“It used to be me, yes, but not anymore. Ana knows all my contacts.”
“What was Whitton’s role?”
“Whitton was a customer. He used to come into the club and get hammered, then hit on the girls—offer them money or whatever. He was trying to get freebies in exchange for protection. He used to grab their tits and say that a cop can’t do that if he was going to arrest them.”
“So how’d he start working for you?”
“It was Ana’s idea. She convinced me that we should take him up on his offer. Blackmail him. She went with him, got video doing some twisted shit. Ana really is a brilliant actress.”
“You blackmailed him?”
“Less than you think. He was already ripe for the picking. We made him a partner.”
“We?”
“Ana didn’t tell you? She was a part of this from the very beginning.”
“You’re lying again,” I say.
Mikhail smiled like someone who just got the punchline of a dirty joke. “She’s gotten to you.”
“Swing and a miss, Mikhail.”
“You think she’s innocent. Hell, she ran the girls. Whitton kept an ear out for police interference, let us know if anyone was sniffing around the setup. If things got hot, we’d shut down for a while until things cooled off again. In exchange, he’d get a nice payment every month.”
“So you admit, you’re a pimp. All this pretending to be a legitimate businessman was a waste of my time.”
“That’s the thing, Rupert. I used to be a pimp. They took that all away from me. I haven’t been in charge of that for years.”
“Poor Mikhail.”
“No, I swear on my mother’s life. I swear on anything you want. They pushed me out. Whitton and Ana came to me and said that they didn’t need me anymore. They had my contacts in Canada and Belarus. They had Reece inside the police to watch things. Ana ran the girls for me anyway, so why did they need me? They told me that they were taking over the operation and that they would pay me what I had been paying to Whitton. I would be the front man for the cleaning company, but Ana took over day-to-day operations.”
“You had the video of Whitton. If he turned on you, you could destroy him.”
“No, I couldn’t. Don’t you see? Without Ana on my side, what good would that footage be? If Ana says it’s an act—a married couple doing some role-playing—it becomes worthless. It’s a husband and wife getting a little dark. That’s all.”
“Why are you lying?” I ask. My head hurts. My whole body hurts. The hunger in my stomach burns, and my arms feel as thin as button thread. I turn the auger, but I’m not sure it’s digging down.
“I’m not lying. I swear, I haven’t been the boss of the operation for years.”
“You’re going to make me kill you, aren’t you?”
“No! I’m telling you the truth.”
“In a little while, you’re going to change your story again, and you’re going to beg me to forgive you. You’ll add a little more to your confession—who knows, maybe the next story will be the truth. But it won’t matter; it’ll be too late. Every time you make up another lie, you force my hand. I’ll have no choice, because you’ve given me no choice. In the end, you’ll repent and swear that you’re a changed man, that you’ll never harm anyone again. But I won’t believe you. You’re giving me no choice.”
“I’m not lying! You don’t have to kill me. I wasn’t the one who killed your wife. Ana did it. It was Ana who ordered the hit. Ana was the boss.”
I stop drilling, clench my fists, and scream, “GOD DAMMIT, SHUT UP!”
The lake goes silent except for the wind. The sun has closed its eyes to my little undertaking, and to the east, a full moon slips out from behind the billow of clouds, its light dressing the snowy surface of the lake in a sparkle of blue. Not far away, expanding ice sends up a moan, which almost makes me think that the lake itself is baying. Such a beautiful night for such an ugly endeavor. I’m almost through to the lake on hole number seven. I start turning the auger again.
“You can’t kill me,” Mikhail says. “I’m not the one you want. Ana killed your wife. She’s the one who ordered it. I didn’t know about it until after the fact. I only knew about it because they told me.”
“They told you about it?”
“I swear. I told them both to get out. I didn’t want anything to do with no murder. That’s why I didn’t know what you were talking about. They never told me the details. I never knew who they murdered. All they said was they had to kill a social worker because one of the girls was running her mouth. That’s all I knew. I swear to God.”
I break through to the lake. I only have one hole left to drill. I take a moment to chip ice from the tops of earlier holes, which have frozen over. As I do so, I lay Mikhail’s latest story over what I already know. He’s done a pretty good job of filling in blanks and explaining things, but, as with all lies, there are still gaps, mistakes. His fast thinking failed to account for one big flaw: if Ana was behind all of this, why would she kill her sister? Also, he doesn’t know what Ana told me that morning. I will tell him soon, and by then, it will be too late.
CHAPTER 38
Ana managed to fall asleep around two in the morning, and slept through my stopping for gas in Duluth; I paid in cash, of course. I let her sleep until I turned onto the Gunflint Trail, heading west out of Grand Marais.
“Where are we?” she asked, in a groggy voice.
“Gunflint Trail.”
She rubbed her eyes and looked around as if to get her bearings, but there were no landmarks to speak of. The trail, a two-lane blacktop road, snaked west for sixty miles into the heart of the Superior National Forest, running more or less parallel to the Canadian border. Driving Gunflint was akin to passing through a tunnel. Pine and birch rose like walls of a canyon on either side of us. And with the snow choking the headlights and the dark sky pressing down from above, the whole world seemed as small as the inside of a boxcar. At times I felt dizzy and a little claustrophobic.
“It is a long way down this road,” Ana said. She leaned up against the dash, her gaze scanning the reach of my headlights.
I could see the impression of tire tracks under the new snow. There were tracks going in both directions, so I knew that we weren’t the only ones crazy enough to challenge the storm. Somewhere under my tires were the tracks laid down by Mikhail—unless he had the good sense to pull over at a motel. I would know soon enough.
“What am I looking for?” I asked.
“It is a small path. It will go this way.” She swam her hand to the right.
“Are there any signs?”
“I think so, but I can’t remember. I’ve only been there two times.”