Chapter Fifteen
Owen stared at the Tsarina’s cold cup of coffee. “She’s lying.”
“Really?” Jessalyn squatted over a splotch of blood and mopped it up with a rag. “Remarkable conclusion, Officer.”
“I don’t mean she’s lying about being here under false pretenses. That much is obvious.” He looked around. What had the Tsarina seen that had made her do that fret-fret-fret thing with her fingers? All the gallery held were spot-lit paintings on the walls and sculptures on podiums. “I mean she’s lying about that Facebook page. It isn’t hers.”
Jessalyn gawped. It irritated him. “Didn’t you see her face? She was scared shitless.”
“Because she was caught.”
No. She was afraid. The image there, the Sleeping Beauty, it had horrified her. He’d seen it in her enlarged eyes. Heard it in the tiny breath she’d inhaled, the way it had whistled.
“So then why didn’t she say something?” Jessalyn rose, the wash water in her bucket sloshing and tinted light pink.
“Would you say something?” He looked away from the bucket, from Natasha Nikoslav’s blood. “To two total strangers?”
“If I was that scared? Maybe. Unless…think she’s covering for somebody?”
“The ‘cousin’ you mean? Why? Sex or money?”
“What about love, cynic?”
Love? An image of Sondra crawled through his memory: handcuffs on her wrists, resentment on her face. “Love,” he conceded, and checked his phone.
No missed calls, no new texts. He put it away. “You were going to tell me about the cousin before the Tsarina surprised us by inviting herself over.”
Jessalyn laughed, then “Jakob Michael Nikoslav,” she announced in a lamely affected Slavic accent. “Shows up in the Okanagan wearing Armani when every other man here wears Levis and…well, Levis.”
He listened.
“He called me Elayna.”
“So?” He shrugged. “He’d just met you. He messed up.”
She lifted a brow. “Follow me, Officer Brophy.”
He trailed her to where the elegance of the gallery conceded to the antithesis of silk walls and glossed floors; in the back room paint was spattered on concrete and everything smelled like turpentine. “Jeez.” She dumped her wash bucket into a muck sink then promptly propped the back door open. “We’ll get high in here.”
Sondra’s devil’s grin whistled in, whistled out.
“Owen Brophy,” Jessalyn moved then, to a covered canvas, grabbed the edge of the sheet. “Meet Elayna Chandler.”
The sheet hissed as she yanked it off and….Greedy eyes. It was the first thought that struck him as he faced the portrait, the woman there. Her eyes. So hungry. Unsatisfied. The rest of her (albeit circa 1985), was lovely, even wholesome, but those eyes…. Gluttonous, he thought and Sondra invaded his mind yet again.
And again he cast her away.
Jessalyn watched him. “Thoughts on my mother?” Her twisted smile let him know that her artist’s eye was attuned to his misgivings. “I paint what I see,” she added. “Even though sometimes it’s not the most flattering angle.” She tossed the sheet over the portrait again. “G’night, Elayna.”
Owen suppressed a rogue chill, for it was like she’d just blinded the woman on the canvas.
And Jessalyn flicked a brow at his obvious unease. “Here’s the bigger question,” she said, and reclaimed the wash bucket, stowed it under the sink. “How could Jakob Michael Nikoslav, a stranger who couldn’t have been much more than an infant when Elayna died, how does he know her?”
Owen shook his head, gaze revisiting the sheet over the canvas. It reminded him of a ghostly cloak from an old horror movie, one that covered a piece of furniture in an abandoned old mansion.
“Or, more importantly,” Jessalyn continued, “since there’s no real way Nikoslav could know Elayna—why has he made it his business to find out about her?”
He pulled his gaze from the sheet. “Because you’re an artist and he’s a collector? Maybe he hasn’t researched her, he’s researched you. You are a bit of a celebrity.”
She scoffed. “That doesn’t explain Natasha’s Facebook page.”
True. “Have you ran the names Jakob and Natasha Nikoslav past the Lieutenant?”
“No. And I will, but don’t hold your breath, Owen. C.C. may be my Dad but he is still a cop: always happy to get information. But when it comes to giving it…?”
Christ, he knew that drill.
“And when he does share he’s not always truthful. Her, for instance.” She directed an elbow back to the ghostly covered Elayna. “He’s made her sound like something out of a fairytale—pun intended—but what do you see when you look in those eyes?”
Gluttony. Greed. Sondra. “I…” He cleared his throat. “I see a woman with secrets.”
“Yeah? Well, I see a self-centered bitch. So who knows what she was once up to—or with who.”
Jesus. This was her mother.
And again her artist’s eye was on target. “If you’re expecting sentiment, Owen, don’t. Elayna died in childbirth.”
“For you?”
“Yeah. So C.C., or your Lieutenant if we must, was both Mom and Dad to me. Elayna’s nothing more than a myth he’s created. And nonetheless…I still see what I see.”
“You see what you see,” he echoed. “Yet you’re telling me you didn’t see fear with Natasha today?” He wouldn’t call her Tsarina in front of Jessalyn again. The unkindness in the treble of her laugh when he’d said it the first time…well, it had awakened that unwanted shard of guilt.
Yet now she looked troubled. “Yes,” she said. “I did see it. Maybe…maybe I just didn’t want to.”
Why the hell did that make him feel relieved? “So then is she an accomplice or a dupe?” he asked. “The fairytale connection can’t possibly be a coincidence.”
She nodded. “And not only that, but she didn’t run to her cousin’s shop when she left here.”
Oh?
Jessalyn shrugged. “I know the place he’s leased is that way.” Up went the elbow again, her curious way of pointing. “But I could see her through the window—she ran into the park.”
“Huh.” His brows climbed. “You’d think someone who’d just been found out would beat a path to her partner.”
“Or away from him if he’s the one scaring her.”
Jakob Nikoslav. He needed to meet this guy. “What does Rob think of him?”
“Robbie…” Jessalyn blew out a breath. “Robbie thinks what he always thinks: that no one should be convicted without a trial.”
That was Rob. Owen smiled. “How’d he ever end up with a cop’s kid?”
She lifted her nose and again he had to admit that sometimes she was cute. “He needs me,” she said.
Ha! Who needed who? Seemed to him she needed Rob—his buddy gave her a kinder, gentler take on the world than the one she grew up with. Christ. His grin dwindled. If he and Sondra had kids, how warped would their world view be? He didn’t want to think about it. “But you are going to tell him I plan to look into the Nikoslavs, right?”
She frowned and clamped her lips shut. He scowled. Goddamn it, cute or not, she could be a brat. “Jessalyn, you’re putting me in a position here.”
“He worries.”
He sighed. “Okay, here’s the deal: I’ll dig, but if I find out anything I am telling your husband.”
“And if you find nothing?”
“Then this can stay between you and me.”
Her little face glowed like a beacon and it made him laugh. He could never imagine being attracted to someone like Jessalyn Chandler-Haslom—but he could totally see why his buddy fell hard for her. “I gotta go.” He tweaked her nose. “Your Robbie thinks I’m doing the tile on the rental and he needs me back at the development ASAP. But I’ll find time to make some calls.”
He was beginning to take the back roads as recklessly as Steve, who lit a smoke when he arrived at the job site. “I just got back from starting on the tile you avoided this morning,” said his brother. “You’re welcome.”Owen pulled a face. Steve squinted. “Looked like a knife fight went down in that bathroom.”
“Oh?” His mind flashed to the stabbed Sleeping Beauty. Fairytales often end violently. “That right?”
“Yeah. You met the woman who lives there yet?”
“Uh-huh. Couple times.”
Steve nodded. “She came home with a nose bleed that made it look like she’d been stabbed. I scared the crap out of her because she wasn’t expecting me. Felt bad.” Another drag, more squinting. “She’s good looking.”
‘Good looking’? That was it? No scathing indictment of her quirks? Was Steve slipping?
“—although she should probably see a doc for the nose thing.”
Yeah. Probably.
“And she does a funny thing with her hands.” Steve fret-fret-fretted them just like the Tsarina.
“’Cause she’s nervous,” Owen replied.
“Nah.” Steve waved this off. “She’s worried, not nervous. She’s used to people treating her like shit.”
A lick of shame seared his face, but—“How the hell do you know that?”
Steve regarded him, fingers pinched on the filter of his smoke. “Because I know people, Mr. Policeman. And I didn’t have to go to cop school or climb down some rat hole to live with the shit of society in order to learn things.”
Owen let this slide.
Steve said “This Natasha—she was all uncertain when she talked to me. Like she was afraid she’d say the wrong thing and—”
“—and make you suspicious?”
“No, Officer. Make me mad. Somewhere in her past some prick’s used her as a punching bag. Guaranteed.” He tossed his smoke to the ground, smashed it under his boot. “She gave me these.” He lifted a bag set next to his thermos.
Cookies, dotted with chocolate chips and smeared with frosting.
“Want one? She said she just baked them yesterday.”
And did she wash a few down with coffee turned to syrup with cream and sugar? “I don’t eat crap.”
Steve grunted and stuck his hand in the bag, pulled a cookie out and stuffed it, whole, in his mouth. Chewing, he said “You might want to take a long, hard look at Natasha while she’s here. Maybe shave. Consider showering.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Because I look like I need a woman?”
“No, because you’ve got a woman. And she’s poison.”
Owen stared, unable to stop his jaw from dropping. He’d never told his family about Sondra. He’d never even implied there was a Sondra.
Steve snorted. “Jesus Christ, Owen. Didn’t I just say know people? Well, I sure as hell know my own brother. Whoever the piece of ass is who’s got you chasing your own tail might be someone you wanna put in your rear view mirror. Unless you like being the shit of society. Which I also know you don’t. Now get your shit together and get to work.” He rooted for another cookie, shoved it in his mouth, and stomped away.
Owen stomped too, and as he fastened a tool belt ’round his waist and hooked a nail gun to a compressor, he texted. Law enforcement was a small world and, between fastening plywood to floor joists, he shot inquiries to anyone he could think of who might know a cop covering Echo Creek, Alberta.
Turned out a guy in Narco knew an RCMP member who was friends with another cop posted out in a village named Viking, some forty k away from Echo Creek. Owen decided to place the call from in his car on a coffee break, cranking the air conditioning and chugging water. God, it was hot. He’d forgotten how the heat here at home was so different from out on the Sunshine Coast. There trade winds off the ocean cooled things off. Here the sun settled in the Okanagan Valley, baking and blistering everything even though, strictly speaking, it was still only spring. He trickled water down the back of his neck (maybe he should consider a haircut) and called the Albertan cop named Kinney—who answered with a voice garbled as if he were talking around a sandwich. Owen grimaced, but introduced himself, engaged in the obligatory pleasantries (during which Kinney confirmed he was eating a sandwich), then said “Echo Creek and a massage clinic called Head To Heal. Heard of it?”
A small pause was overtaken by the whine and zing of saws beyond Owen’s car. Then—“How does a cop from B.C. know if there’s been trouble at Head To Heal again?” asked Kinney.
Again? It was intriguing enough to roll with a bluff: “The owner, Natasha, is out here. She told me.”
“Oh for—” An expletive followed, then—“Can’t that woman just suck up the punk-assed pranks and scrub the damn eggs and tomatoes off her door?”
A knee-jerk retort—why the hell should she have to?—came straight from the ingénue cop he once used to be. What he said instead was “Why’s that place such a target, anyway?”
Kinney didn’t reply and the choir of saws grated again, harshly chewing up silence. Owen was about to repeat himself when, at last, “Because people are superstitious.”
“About massage clinics?” This he issued lightly, but that word—superstitious—prickled the damp hair on his nape. ‘Superstitious’ lived in the same camp as folklore, did it not? And as fairytales?
“Ever work in a community where the locals have been since the pioneer days, Officer Brophy?” asked Kinney.
“No.” Vancouver’s ever-growing population consisted of residents whose roots in the city were often as shallow as the ports in the harbor. “Vancouver’s about as cosmopolitan as it gets.”
“Yeah, well Echo Creek’s not. And sometimes people with long ties to the Old Country and culture…well, let’s just say they’re wary in a way maybe the rest of us should be.”
Owen sat back, squinted. Was it his imagination, or did Kinney seem to be scratching up awful close to what felt like bigotry? Or…was he just pissed off that a small-town cop seemed to be excusing a harassment crime like vandalism—when that was probably the only thing of substance he had to investigate? Lazy bastard, he thought and “What makes locals so superstitious that they throw eggs and rocks at Natasha?”
“Rocks? She said rocks? I know damn well no one’s thrown a rock at her in months.”
Jesus Christ, they really did throw rocks? He’d been embellishing to try to tease out more info. What the hell kind of backward prairie hicks were these people—including Kinney—out in the Tsarina’s ‘eastern Alberta’?
‘Help me’, her voice answered, out of memory’s ear, what he’d been so sure she’d said to him back in the gallery. Yet when he’d looked at her, her lips had not moved so he’d chalked it up to an over-active imagination. But now…? Now he chased away the same shudder he’d felt when he’d first thought he’d heard her. He reached out, flicked his A/C down to low.
Kinney said “Grab Natasha Nikoslav’s hand, Officer Brophy. Then call me back. Tell me why you think people are prickly.”
What the hell did that mean? And why did it conjure an image of the Tsarina’s eyes, wide and scared? “I was taught as a kid never to grab a woman,” he returned, dry. “A message reinforced back when I was in the Academy.”
A sour bit of silence ensued and all Owen heard was the odd zing of a nail gun. Then— “Second Kings, Chapter Seventeen, Verse Thirteen—heard of it Officer Brophy?”
“Unless it’s in the Criminal Code of Canada, then probably no.” Still he used his finger and, in the dust on his dashboard, wrote 2 Kings 17:13.
Kinney grunted. “And incidentally, Natasha Nikoslav hardly leaves her house—but there is one person she follows like a lost cur.”
Now the Tsarina was a dog? This too pricked his temper.
“She out there in B.C. with her cousin?”
“Yeah.” Owen straightened. “Why?”
“Scoff at the Bible, Brophy, but tell me this: d’you think murder’s evil?”
What the hell—evil? And the Bible? Who the hell were the Feds recruiting these days? Priests? “You trying to say that Jakob Nikoslav—”
“—Antonovich! Jakob Michael’s legal name is Antonovich, and yeah, I’m saying Google Echo Creek Suicide. Then tell me how anyone offs themselves that way.”
Echo Creek Suicide. He noted this too.
“Not that the son of a bitch was ever charged. Or even arrested. Helps when papa was a special consultant to the RCMP.”
“Wait. Whose papa? Natasha’s or—”
“Natasha’s?” Kinney’s laugh sounded a lot like the grating saws outside. “She was a teen mama’s mistake. No one even knows who her daddy is. I’m talking about Antonovich. Mihajlo Antonovich. That was Jakob’s father.”
‘Was’. Meaning deceased. And Mah-HAY-lo. Dammit, when he was a beat cop he’d always carried a notebook. Mah-HAY-lo. He wrote this too in the dust. “What sort of consultant was he?”
Kinney snorted. “Read your Bible, Officer Brophy. Then do yourself a favor: steer around the Nikoslavs, not beside them.” He hung up.
