“Is Steven here?”
Her eyes flickered.I didn’t need the nod to figure out that he was.
“My name is Gina.This is my house.”I let that sink in for a second before I added, “I’m going to call for Steven, OK?”
She didn’t nod, but she didn’t shoot me, either.I put my head back.“Steven!”
At first there was nothing.Then a scramble from the next room, and Steven’s voice.“Anastasia?!”
The door opened and slammed against the wall next door.The fake impressionist painting that David’s decorator had insisted on hanging on the wall in here quivered.Steven thundered down the hall and skidded into the room, straight into Rachel, whom he knocked several steps forward.The two of them clung to one another to stay upright.
There was a beat.
“Oh,” Steven said.“Gina.I can explain.”
“I’d like to hear that,” I said, “but perhaps a little later?Could you tell your daughter to put the gun down first?”
“Oh.”This time he flushed, and looked, for a second, ridiculously like Zachary.“Anastasia…” He went off into Russian.Apparently he spoke it well enough that they could communicate.
It took a minute or so, and then the gun disappeared into the sheets.I don’t think Anastasia was entirely comfortable, though, and I was pretty sure she kept a hand on it out of sight.But it was nice to be able to lower my hands again.
“I should let you know,” I said, slowly and clearly, to both of them, “that Konstantin and Yuri were arrested last night.ICE and Metro police ran a joint sting operation that ended with Konstantin and Yuri in the prison and the other three Russian girls getting rescued.”
Anastasia said something.Steven nodded.“We were getting around to that.I just wanted to make sure that Anastasia was safe first.”
“I guess she really is your daughter?”
“We haven’t done any testing,” Steven said, “but she seems to be.I knew her mother back when.And she has my eyes.”
She did.A dark slate blue, tilted up at the corners.
“Diana will be relieved.”
Steven looked confused.“What…?”And then he looked disgusted.“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“You might have told her what was going on,” I said mildly.“I mean, what was she supposed to think?”
“Not that I’d cheat on her with someone young enough to be my daughter!”
“In justice to her, she didn’t think that.When she first asked me to look into it, it was just because she thought you were acting weird.”
Steven admitted that he probably had been acting weird.“It isn’t every day a man gets a letter from a grown daughter he never knew he had, saying she needs help escaping from human traffickers.”
No, it isn’t.“Tatiana told me how you got her out of there.That one of the other girls hit the fire alarm and the two of you got away in the confusion.And Araminta Tucker said that you contacted her about her house for rent.”
Steven nodded.“There was a notice on the bulletin board at the university.I figured we’d be safe trying to find a place for Anastasia that way.I couldn’t take her home with me.I didn’t want to put Diana in danger, and anyway, I wanted to be sure…”
He trailed off.I nodded.
“Would you like to explain what happened the other day?”I glanced from Steven to Anastasia and back.“I followed you from the university to Araminta’s house.And then the neighbor, Mrs.Grimshaw, got worried because I was parked on the street, so she called the police, and Mendoza showed up…”
“She guessed the truth,” Anastasia said from the bed.She spoke English about as well as Tatiana, it turned out.Maybe even a bit better.“She asked me to come to her house for tea.And she asked a lot of questions.I told her a little bit, and she guessed the rest.”
So when Griselda Grimshaw had been muttering darkly about the X-files—unless Mendoza had been joking about that—she hadn’t been talking about space aliens, but illegal aliens.That made a lot more sense.
“What happened?”Had Griselda threatened to betray Anastasia, and so Anastasia shot her?
The girl took a breath.“Your car was there.Big and black.”
