Page 89 of King’s Ransom

‘They didn’t?’ I said.

‘No, they waited till our engagement was announced and then they called me.’

‘Only now the price was twelve million dollars,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And I paid again.’

‘So what about the last payment, the three-million-dollar one? Why lower the price?’ I asked.

‘That’s the thing, I know nothing about that final payment. It went out of my account without my knowledge. It was done to frame me,’ she said.

I leaned back in my chair, thinking.

When you’re a private detective, you learn to gauge people.

Gauge when they’re lying and when they’re telling the truth.

Looking at Yasmina Ivanova in that drab prison conference room—deprived of her expensive clothes, publicly abandoned by her super-rich husband—I tried to make that assessment of her.

It’s never easy to admit to someone that you made a sex tape, let alone multiple sex tapes with multiple dudes.

I also recalled meeting her on December 21st, after I’d saved her little boy in the elevator shaft.

Two things that she’d done had struck me.

First, I remembered how she’d slapped the insurance guy, Quinn McCade, after he hadn’t paid the ransom that had been demanded for her son in time.

And second, she’d thanked me.

Not only that, she’d said she owed me a debt, one that she would not forget.

‘Mr Speedman—’ she said.

Georgy cut her off in Russian. ‘Yasmina, proshu proshcheniya on Doctor Speedman.’

‘I’m sorry, Doctor Speedman,’ Yasmina corrected herself. ‘My life is in ruins. My husband is divorcing me. He’s locked me out of our bank accounts. I have almost no money. No attorney in New York will represent me, which is why I have my cousin, Georgy, helping me, and he only got his law degree from community college in July. The media mocks me. The world thinks I am conniving suka.’

I cocked my head at the unfamiliar word.

‘Bitch,’ Georgy said helpfully.

Yasmina said, ‘My friends will not return my calls and I cannot see my children, my little Alexei and my sweet Katya.

‘Aristo is an incredibly successful man, but as a father, he is—how you say—neglectful, inattentive. He has many children and he knows nothing of Alexei’s or Katya’s loves and joys. Sometimes he forgets their birthdays.

‘I am no angel. I have done things in my youth that I am not proud of. But I did not do this! Please, take my case.’

I looked hard at her.

December 21st had been a truly strange day.

Everything had happened so fast and, if I stopped to think about it all, many things about that day had not yet been resolved.

Audrey was still in a coma.

The QuantumSpeed-7 code-breaking chip had not been found.

And, for my own part, I still wondered about the mysterious man in the superintendent’s white coveralls I’d glimpsed on the 98th floor, which had led to the discovery of Katya in the garbage chute (for which Trey Hooper had claimed the credit).