Page 31
I open my laptop and pull up Arkady’s file on the Gary casino. Three directors on the official paperwork, all nobodies. One silent partner, behind two layers of shell companies, whose name Arkady found in the end anyway.
Pyotr Selin. Oleg Rusakov’s brother-in-law. Sixty-one. A gray, careful man. He ran Rusakov’s money for twenty years without once being photographed doing anything interesting.
Arkady sent four pictures. I turn the laptop around.
Galana looks at the first one for less than a second.
“That’s him,” she says.
In the photograph, Selin is getting out of a car outside a restaurant in Lincoln Park. His left hand is on the door. There’s a gold ring on his little finger.
I zoom in. It’s a stag.
That gives me the man who paid Riddings for the house. Rusakov’s money, through Rusakov’s family, exactly as I thought. I still don’t have the man inside. I don’t have whoever handed Selin the July rotation and walked him through the front door without a call from the gate.
“Geoff,” Galana says.
She’s sitting with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, staring at the cold fireplace. Outside, the sky’s gone dark. The lake is invisible except for the line of white where the waves break against the wall.
“He walked Selin in,” she says. “He didn’t call up from the gate. That’s the rule. Papa made it the rule after Mama died. Nobody gets through the gate without a call to the house. Not even Viktor.”
“It’s not enough,” I tell her gently. “He’s head of security. He could say Yaroslav told him to bring Selin straight in.”
“Papa would never...”
“I know. But it’s not proof.”
She goes quiet. I watch her thinking. It’s a strange thing to watch. She doesn’t fidget. She doesn’t talk it through out loud the way Evaria does, or chew on a pen like Zhenya. She goes very still and very far away, and her eyes move slightly from side to side, like she’s reading something written on the inside of her own head.
“The storm,” she says suddenly.
“What storm?”
“In May. There was a huge storm. Thunder, hail, the power flickered twice.” She turns to look at me. “What night did the system go dark?”
I already know. But I check it anyway, because she’s watching me. “May the nineteenth. eleven fourteen p.m.”
“That was the night of the storm,” she says. “I know it was, because it was Eva’s twenty-fifth birthday and the power went out right when we were doing the cake. Milana screamed. Papa thought someone was shooting at the house.”
“Galana...”
“I made soup for the gatehouse,” she says. “Because of the storm. Because they’d be cold. Borscht, a big pot. I took it out at about ten, before it got really bad.” She swallows. “And Geoff was there. In the gatehouse. On his own.”
My skin goes cold.
“He never works nights,” she says. “He hasn’t done a night shift in years. He’s the head, he doesn’t have to. But he was there. And the two men who should have been on shift weren’t. When I asked where they were, he said he’d sent them home because of the storm. He said he’d cover it himself.” Her voice goes very small. “He took the soup.”
Brenner logged into Riddings’s system at eleven fourteen. Brenner, who should have been nowhere near the property. Brenner, who needed someone at the gate to let him in and look the other way for eleven minutes.
“And in August,” Galana says, more steadily now, “on the twenty-eighth, I took sandwiches out at night like I always do. And Geoff was there again. On his own again. He sent the night men home that night too. Both nights, Caleb. The night the system went dark and the night that man came to see Papa.”
I’m staring at her.
“And he bought a boat,” she adds. “In July. He showed me pictures on his phone. A big one, white, for Lake Michigan. He said his cousin in Odessa died and left him money.” She looks at me. “But he told me when I was twelve that he didn’t have any family left. That they all died in the nineties. I remember, because I made him a cake for Christmas that year, so he wouldn’t be lonely.”
Nobody else would know that. Nobody else would remember.
I sit there on the floor and look at my wife.
