I was already on the move, hurrying to leave. I’d only just gotten here with Misha, but if this was a lead, if that call to Raisa’s old phone was a call from Kalina, I had to go and investigate.
“If it’s not someone who’s still alive from the Petrovs, then maybe it’s her,” Simon said.
My thoughts exactly.
I was just trying to be careful to keep it as a thought, not a hope. It wouldn’t do me—or anyone else—well if I allowed my hopes to get too high.
Adrenaline snaked through me regardless. Simon hung up with a final guarantee that he would track me and update me on whether the phone used to call Raisa’s old number had moved.
Off the call with him, I caught Allan’s eye as I rushed to the door.
Even though he was a retired soldier, he never lost his edge. Now officially Luka’s personal assistant, he lived in the mansion and helped us all however he could. From babysitting to arranging a hit.
“Trouble?” he asked mildly, if not boredly. Nothing could get him flustered, too used to a lifetime of faithfully serving the Dubinin Family.
“Not yet,” I replied, not stopping. He walked with me, not needing to be told that I wanted him to assist without having to say so. “Get a room prepared in case this is a lead on Ms. Boranov. I’ll take Niko with me,” I said, referencing one of the guards posted outside.
Allan nodded and backed up, ready to do as I told him. “We’ll keep Misha preoccupied,” he said.
Outside, Niko didn’t hesitate or ask questions either. He jumped into my car, riding shotgun as I sped toward the coordinates Simon had sent me. On the way, I filled him in on what we were rushing toward.
“Central Park?” he said with a raise of his brows.
I shrugged. “It’s probably a fucking burner phone tossed into a garbage can.” The blinking dot on the map Simon had sent me hadn’t moved yet.
The drive to the location took longer than I wanted it to. Traffic snarled our route. Icy roads proved that every driver out there was prone to be an idiot and cause too many fender benders.
“Maybe it would be faster to park here,” Niko suggested.
I nodded, not too full of myself to scorn a lower-ranking man’s advice. “My only concern is if she needs to be physically carried to safety,” I admitted.
This would be a longer trek back to the car at the curb.
“Are you thinking she might be a druggie living on the streets?” Niko asked as he briskly walked with me toward the location of the phone.
“It crossed my mind,” I replied. The same as I had to consider if she was dead. Or sick. Any kind of fate could have met Raisa’s cousin, but deep down, I wanted to believe that it wasn’t too late to save her.
At the sight of the homeless trudging through the park, it was very easy to see why Niko might’ve asked that. Several men and women pushed shopping carts and dollies packed with trash and junk that they’d move from one shanty to another. Most of the time, they blended into the background. Sometimes, we had todisguise ourselves as people on the street to get closer to targets. I knew a few of them out there were likely members of the damn NYPD undercover as well.
But in these temperatures?
In the extreme cold like this?
If Kalina had been out here for a while in this sort of weather, she couldn’t be doing well. Biting chills nipped at my face, and I resisted the urge to slow down and rub my hands together to warm them up. No one could survive like this.
Reaching the spot where the phone call had come from, I spun in a circle to scan the area.
Snowy banks lined the paths. Intersecting strips of pavement had been de-iced, leading to an open area that would be packed with walkers and runners in the warmer months. Multiple bike stands and concrete seating surfaces would let visitors enjoy the city’s biggest public park.
Now, only a bench was cleared of snow, with a homeless woman lying on it.
“There.” Niko tipped his chin at the woman, realizing that the blinking dot on the map suggested the phone had come from her.
She looked too old and large to be Kalina. Raisa said her distant cousin would be twenty-six now. Slim, short, blonde, blue-eyed.
Unmoving like a frozen heap on the bench, this woman was thick around the waist, tall, with a gnarly mat of wiry gray and white hair poking out from beneath a ratty beanie.
I nodded at Niko since he was already approaching. He kept his hand near his side, in case he needed to reach for his gun. I did the same, waiting to see if this woman was alive, if she’d called Raisa, if she had any clue who had.
