Page 62 of The Bratva's Innocent Sold Bride
There was a pause as Josef figured out he was now speaking with me. He immediately apologized. I should have asked him about his injuries, but all I could focus on was finding CJ.
“What happened?” I urged.
“We got a message from Garik. At least we thought it was Garik. Something…” he coughed, groaning. “Sorry, got shot in the side. Hurts to talk. He needed more guns on the scene, and fast. We were the closest.”
“What about CJ?”
“She said you were five minutes away, and showed us a text from you. We told her to lock the door and stay in the back until you arrived, then alerted the driver to stand guard outside.”
“He’s dead,” I said. It hadn’t been confirmed, but I’d seen pictures of the inside of his car.
“Fuck,” Josef said, then. “What happened? When we got jumped, I thought it had to do with whatever was going down with Garik.” He took a deep breath, groaning again. “I think Ilariy’s dead too. Took a shot straight to the chest.”
“It was a setup,” I said, wondering how Anatoli could have faked messages from me and Garik. CJ probably could have explained it to me, but she’d been fooled too, into believing I was on my way. “They took my wife.”
He apologized again, sounding like he wished he’d been the one to take the bullet to the heart. As pissed as I was, it sounded like they hadn’t actually screwed up. CJ still had an armed guard with her and was locked in her office. The kidnapper must have killed the driver and hidden the car as soon as the guards left.
But how did the attacker get into the office? The place was locked up tight, no sign of breaking and entering. Unless… my heart went cold even as it raced.
“Boss,” Josef said, his voice growing weak. “I think she found something.”
“Okay,” I told him. “Rest now.”
“Sorry for fucking up. If they’d let me out of here, I could help.”
I ended the call after telling him he didn’t need to worry, we had it covered, even though we were hitting dead end after dead end. He was barely clinging onto life, from what it sounded like, and his partner and CJ’s driver were dead. If he hadn’t been fooled, it was likely he would have been overpowered.
But what about the office appearing like nothing untoward had happened there? It left a lump of icy terror in my stomach. What if Anatoli had gotten in somehow and killed her immediately, calmly turning off the lights and locking up after himself?
It took me half the normal time to get back to the office park, whipping down side streets and making some fairly baddriving decisions in my haste to make sure my imagination was running away with me. There was no way he’d kill her. No fucking way.
The office was deserted, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I didn't find her there. No sign of a struggle or that she’d been hurt in any way. Which brought up a whole new slew of questions to plague me.
Could she have gone willingly? Did she set the entire thing up herself? I dismissed that out of hand, but what if Anatoli had offered her something she found difficult to refuse, like her silence for protection or perhaps even her freedom? Pain knifed through my gut, even as I was relieved that she might still be unharmed.
Could I blame her for taking such a deal? Anatoli was much more cunning and experienced at disappearing than her father. Maybe he’d offered Gordon protection as well. As if grinding salt into a wound, the man I’d sent to view the office building’s camera feed called me.
“I’m looking at it right now, Sarge,” he said, still pretending to be a police officer, probably in the offices a few hundred yards away. He explained what he saw. CJ spoke to an unidentified man for a moment before opening the door and rushing off with him, dog in tow. No violence, no sign of her being under duress.
It could have meant anything. She could have been tricked somehow, like the guards were. But how? My wife was naive, but one of the smartest people I knew. The only logical explanation was just what the camera showed. She went willingly.
I shoved the pain aside, slamming a door on useless conjecture. None of it was helpful in finding CJ, and that was mytop priority. It didn’t matter if she was tricked or not; Anatoli was a crazed killer who wanted to destroy everything that was mine. She wasn’t safe as long as she was with him.
I went over the conversation with Josef again. There was something I had dismissed at first, but even with every word he spoke causing him pain, he felt it was important.
She found something. Something new about Anatoli, or even his alter ego, Terrence? Sitting down, I fired up her computer, but there were so many files I didn’t know where to start. I spent months trying to track Anatoli down, and she had found all this in a matter of days. I had a feeling the answers I needed were in those files somewhere, and I needed them fast. Everything was dated, and I began to work backwards from the most recent.
I hit pay dirt almost immediately, finding a new list of properties that Anatoli owned. CJ had highlighted the ones in Moscow, but it was the ones that were closer to home that I was interested in. Closing that file, the next one was nothing but a series of somewhat familiar numbers. It took me a second to realize it was a long list of GPS coordinates, many of them repeated as I studied them closely.
Delta was currently at my house, getting his best people to work on finding out what we could from the city’s cameras. I called him, staring at those numbers.
“Still nothing new, Boss,” he said by way of a greeting. “We’re cycling through the cameras in the neighbor—”
“Don’t worry about that for a minute,” I interrupted. “You know that thing CJ used to get into Anatoli’s phone?”
“Yeah, pretty clever little program. I’ve already tried tracking him through that, though. He’s got his phone off or using a different one by now.”
“Okay, but I’m looking at a whole list of timestamped GPS coordinates. Could she have found a way to do it with the phone off?”
