Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Alissa

By the time that I woke up the next morning, my fundraiser had gathered a total of one hundred and five thousand dollars. I had no idea who was making the donations, none of them were people I had ever heard of, though a few had Russian names.

It was incredible. That was more money than I would take home in two years. There would be a tax bite taken out of it, of course, but still, this was life changing.

I was still doing my work around the building—thankfully, the parts had arrived so now I just had to wait for the maintenance operator to fix two sinks and change out an oven in another apartment—while putting in a full day for my accounting clients. It was amazing how much more energy and focus I had without the constant pressure of wondering how I would afford things distracting me.

The only frustration was that I still hadn’t found a private investigator. Only a few had answered my calls or returned my messages. Most of the ones I had gotten to talk to had been too busy to pick up a new client, or they were unwilling to take such a case.

One had even confessed, “Look, I feel for you, I do, but investigating a potential kidnapping ring is way above my pay grade. I mostly follow cheating husbands around with my camera.”

I wasn’t discouraged, but I was a little disgusted with the cowardice. The guy who had made the confession had a deep, rumbling voice like he was the size of a small truck, but face any actual risks? Save any actual lives? That was a cop’s job.

But the cops weren’t doing their damn jobs. They expected she was dead. They didn’t care about the evidence, or the bigger picture, or her life, or my life. We were nothing to them but a nuisance who had refused to go away. Once this was all over, I was definitely going to expose them. I may do it on my way out of Chicago, but I’d do it.

I was just finishing crossing another investigator’s name off my list when my phone rang. I jumped a little and saw another unknown number.

I hesitated. There was a good chance that this was just Alan, sauced up and deciding that being an asshole to me again was a good use of his time. What the hell was with guys who decided they hated a woman and responded by pestering her instead of cutting her out of their lives? Men like that seemed to have the brains of five-year-old pigtail-pullers, acting like annoying, combative little pricks while at the same time desperate for a woman’s attention.

I answered the call on the off chance it wasn’t him. “Hello?”

“Alissa?”

I froze. That voice. I knew it! I had even dreamed of it recently, murmuring in my ear in the midst of passion. “Dimitri?” I asked breathlessly.

“Ah, good, this is the right number. Yes, it is I. This must come as a surprise.”

“That’s an understatement,” I managed after a moment. I felt lightheaded. What was I going to tell him? How was I going to say it? Hi, Dimitri, long time no talk. By the way, we have a daughter together. Except she’s been missing for almost a year, and the police are being useless. No, I was definitely going to have to come up with something less blunt. “What’s going on? How did you get my number?”

“You posted it on your donation site,” he said gently, and I felt a lump form in my throat. He knows. He knows already that my baby is missing.

“O-oh.” I swallowed hard. “Well, it’s good to hear from you. Why are you calling?”

“It’s about your daughter,” he ventured, and I heard just the tiniest hesitation in his voice. “You see, a friend of mine donated and told me about your site, that you were looking for a PI. I checked it out and realized that it was you. I’ve already donated, but I was wondering if you’ve found an investigator yet.”

That explained the Russian names.

“No, I haven’t,” I said hurriedly. “None of the ones who had time for me wanted to take on a potential rescue mission, especially if the police aren’t involved.”

He scoffed. “The police. Hands tied by budgets, caseloads, politics. I’m not surprised they’re being useless.”

“Why are you asking?” I tried not to hope he was offering help. I hoped anyway.

“Well, I’ve transitioned out of private security. I have a private investigator’s license now, and an office in your area. If you wanted to meet—”

My heart leaped. “Hell yes, I want to meet!” Then I realized how that sounded. “Um, I mean, yes, I’d like to talk about the case with you.” Holy crap, I must have sounded like the thirstiest woman on the planet for a moment there.

He chuckled in that low, sexy way that I remembered, and I shivered and clenched my thighs together. How had he gotten so good at that? Or was he unaware of what he did to me while barely even trying? “Good, good. I think I can be of some help to you. When is a good time for you to come by my office?”

I took a deep, shivery breath to try to calm myself, but my whole body vibrated with pent-up energy suddenly. “Well, depends on where it is. I could come over right away, if you want.”

“The sooner, the better. The police have already wasted enough of your time.” His voice was warm, understanding, but with a fierce undertone of protectiveness. I felt a warm flush run all through me.

He gave me the address and we hung up. I put every scrap of information I had gathered about Michelle’s disappearance and the other missing girls, as well as the Ivanovs, on a thumb drive, and set out right away.

It was late enough in the morning that the last patches of ice had melted back into broad puddles with crackled edges. I avoided them, wary of slipping in my haste to get to my car and get over to Dimitri’s office. I couldn’t believe my good luck. Not only had he noticed the fundraiser, but he had linked it to me, donated generously, and now he was willing to take the risky job of actually tracking Michelle down. Kind of ironic that I’d end up paying his retainer in his own money. But whatever worked. I was just super glad he was so willing to help me.

The wind was high again, pushing cars around on the slicker parts of the road, making them rock uncomfortably otherwise. I drove carefully in this crazy weather, Alan used to say I drove like an old woman, but he had nearly gotten us into two crashes in four months thanks to aggressive driving and stubbornness.

***

Dimitri’s office was in an old brick building at the end of a dead-end street lined with dormant maples. The temperature was already dropping again as I slipped inside, under a sky the color of lead. It would snow again soon, somewhere in the back of my head I worried about the drive home. But then I pushed it out of my mind. Today’s reunion intrigued me, excited me, and gave me hope.

If Dimitri was as competent on the detective beat as he was in the sack, my daughter was as good as found.I mounted the steps carefully, holding up the hood of my coat with one hand.

The lobby was narrow and high-ceilinged, with airlock doors at either end, keeping the cold and drafts out. My footsteps echoed as I walked along looking for the right door. A directory sent me climbing the stairs to the second floor, which was just as deserted as the first. I wondered about that until I saw a waiting area on the second floor. The quiet made me nervous, but I was probably just imagining things. Besides, I definitely had something akin to stage fright as I walked up to Dimitri’s door.

I knocked on the door, and a moment later, heard a heavy footstep beyond. The door opened, and for the first time in almost six years, Dimitri was looming over me again.

He smiled when he saw me. “Alissa. It is good to see you again.” He held out his hands and I clasped them before I even thought about it. “Come in.”

His hands were warm and leathery-smooth and sent their heat into my small, chilly fingers so fast that it stung. He led me through the door into a small office with a leather couch, an aquarium full of guppies, and a desk with two chairs sitting across from one another. “It seems to be getting chilly outside again. May I take your coat?”

I shrugged out of it, sighing a little with relief as the room’s warmth hit my skin. My little apartment was always cold, no matter how well I sealed the windows or placed space heaters. I wanted to move some place better, but in this market, there was nothing else I could afford. Especially with the deal I got for doing repairs around the building.

“Thanks,” I sighed as he hung up my winter coat. If he noticed its threadbare bottom edge, he didn’t comment on it. “And thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Well, the problem certainly seems urgent enough. So. Let’s catch up for a bit, then I’ll dive into the case with you. How have you been?”

“Uh, well, after we parted ways, I had a couple of good years. Michelle was born, I got my CPA license, and I found a place we could live that gave me a break on rent for doing repairs. I even got a job right after getting my license. Things were looking up. Then somebody took Michelle from her daycare in broad daylight. Those idiots who ran it just handed my baby over to this woman who claimed she was my sister without checking or calling me. Michelle wasn’t even the first they’d lost, the bastards!”

My voice broke a little on the last word as he led me to the couch and sat me down. “So you called the police.”

“Yes, I went through all the proper channels, did everything I was supposed to do.” I swallowed hard, struggling to keep my tears in. “But the police never found her. I don’t even think they tried that hard.”

“No, they wouldn’t. Once, maybe, but time and again they seem to prove themselves as more of a hindrance than a help. They’ll come after you for driving too fast, but the brute you’re fleeing from gets a pass from them.”

That just made me think of Alan. “When it comes to some crimes, they often are the brutes.” Forty percent of married cops were domestic abusers. God, wish I’d known that before I took up with Alan. “But in my case, they hurt me most by being incompetent, apathetic, and lazy.”

“And so your daughter is still missing.” His smile had gone, expression now dark and thoughtful as he puttered over the electric kettle in the corner, making us tea.

“Yeah. And they’re about to give up the chase. The current lead detective thinks they’re wasting their time because she’s dead somewhere. I think he’s just convinced himself of that to excuse not finding her.”

“That may be,” he replied calmly. “Or he may genuinely believe it. Many kidnapped children do end up dead. However, given the way that she was taken, I suspect she is not.”

He brought me back a mug of steaming black tea. I warmed my hands around it gratefully as he sat down with his own mug and a plate of small cookies.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Most children who are killed in stranger abductions are taken by a pedophile, either opportunistically or as part of a planned hunt for a victim. He will kill the child afterward to prevent his victim from telling anyone what happened. There are also a small number of abductors who are mentally ill in some way, or desperate to be a parent, but they are much more likely to be peaceful, and those deaths are normally an accident. The other reasons children are taken include abduction for ransom, which we can rule out since you’re not wealthy and no communication was made by the kidnappers. Again, not in their best interests to kill the child. Finally, we have traffickers. And those, sadly, can be found in every major city in America, just like serial killers.”

“You think traffickers took her?”

“I’ll really have to have a look at the evidence to make more than educated guesses,” he admitted.

I nodded and dug in my pocket for the thumb drive, which I handed over. “Here you go. This is everything from the investigation that I could get my hands on, plus everything I found on my own.”

He nodded, and got his laptop, setting it on the coffee table in front of us and booting it up. He inserted the thumb drive and started going through the contents. “Wow. I’m guessing most of this information is your work?”

“Yeah. I figured that trying to find out whatever I could, would be a better use of my time than pacing or nagging the cops.” I gave him a sheepish little smile, and he let out that toe-curling chuckle again.

“You’re very dedicated. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” His smile crept back onto his lips as he kept reading. “So the police did not even consider investigating the Ivanovs?”

“They said they’d been cleared, but I don’t know if they did anything beyond basic questioning. It made me crazy. I just couldn’t get them to cooperate no matter what I showed them.” My throat tightened as I remembered all of those helpless, frustrating days.

“I see. Well, I suspect I should start there. Fortunately, I have many contacts locally who should be able to help me get to the bottom of this.”

I tried my tea, strong, tannic, smoky and unsweetened, a big hot cup of wake-up juice. Probably just what I needed, but I immediately wanted to ask for some sugar.

He laughed a little at my expression. “Here, let me get the jam.”

“Jam?”

“It’s a Russian tradition, my babushka used to do it the old way where you put the spoonful of jam in your mouth and suck the tea through, but I like to mix it in instead of honey. Is strawberry all right?”

“I’ve never tried.” But I hesitated only a second. “Um, sure.”

A big dollop of strawberry jam later, the tea was not only sweetened, but had a new note to its flavor, making it taste richer. “Okay, I get why you do this now.” I sipped appreciatively.

He finished stirring some into his own drink and nodded. “Yes, it’s far less boring than sugar.” He continued scrolling through the various files, pausing to eat one of the delicious spicy ginger cookies—pryaniki, he said they were called—then frowning thoughtfully now and again.

“Dimitri?”

He looked up. “Hmm?”

“You’re not just telling me that Michelle’s alive to keep me calm, are you?”

He smiled and laid his large hand over my small one, rubbing his thumb over the back in a way that both soothed me and sent a twinge of desire through me.

“No. I genuinely think I can get you your daughter back alive, Alissa. I think it was heartless for the police to tell you to give up hope, no matter what they believe. As soon as I can make it possible, you will have your child.”