Page 22 of Dressed to Kill
I'd been here a hundred times, but never with a hangover this bad.
The girl at the front desk waved me through without looking up from her monitor. I went down the hall past the conference rooms and the kitchen where somebody had brewed coffee that smelled better than what I'd been drinking at home, and I caught a sound from behind the door of the small interview room at the back of the floor. A man was sobbing and pleading quietly in Russian.
I kept walking. Not my problem this morning. Pavel handled the back room on Tuesdays, and Pavel was thorough. The poor bastard in there was going to be late for whatever he had planned for lunch.
I stopped outside the corner office and tried to make my face look presentable.
It wasn't working. My split knuckle was throbbing under the bandage I'd put on it that morning. I'd missed a patch under my jaw with the razor. The shirt was clean. The suit was the one Fin had told me didn't fit, and now I couldn't put it on without thinking about that, which was a hell of a thing to do to a man before nine in the morning.
I knocked.
"Come."
Nikita was at his desk with a stack of files in front of him, a teacup on a coaster, and a fountain pen in his hand, signing something. He looked older than he had a month ago. The man was sixty-two and held court like he was forty, and most days you couldn't tell the difference, but today you could. He didn't look up.
"Sit, Aleksi."
I sat. Nikita kept signing while I waited. He was making a point, and I was letting him make it. That was how this worked. Twenty years of working for the man and I still got the chair and the silence and the fountain pen scratching like I was a juniorassociate who needed reminding. The vory ran on hierarchy and Nikita ran the vory.
He finished the page, capped the pen, and looked up. "You look like shit."
"Good morning to you, too."
"How is your hand?"
I glanced down. The bandage was bleeding through. I hadn't noticed. "Fine."
"Mm." He set the pen down on the blotter and lined it up parallel to the edge. "Tell me about the workroom."
So, we were doing it that way. Straight to it. Fine. I'd been ready for that on the drive over. I'd rehearsed the brief twice in my head and a third time out loud in the elevator. I gave it to him clean. The count, the placement, the time of death, the ledger Dmitri had pulled, the manifests, the wiped phone. Eleven women. Three men by the door. Mr. K hours gone.
He listened without moving. When I was done, he picked up his teacup and held it without drinking. "You sat on the Keystone intelligence for less than twenty-four hours, and Mr. K moved inside that window."
"Yes."
"Who knew, Aleksi?"
"Me. Gregori. Dmitri. Pavel and his analysts after the brief. Your office."
"My office."
"You. Tatty. Whoever in this building you told."
He set the teacup down. "I told no one."
"Then it's narrower than it looks."
"It's narrow either way." He pulled a folder out of the stack and slid it across the desk. I didn't open it. "Pavel has been working it overnight. He's flagged three names. None of them are people I want to be wrong about. So we will be careful. We will watch."
"Understood."
He tapped the folder with one finger. The signet ring on his hand was the only piece of jewelry he wore, aside from his wedding ring, old gold worn smooth at the edges. He'd put it on the morning Simeon's body went into the ground, and he'd worn it every day since. Whatever it had meant to Simeon, it meant double on Nikita's hand because Nikita had taken it the hard way.
"There's also the Scotsman."
There it was. Five minutes and thirty seconds in. I'd given him three more minutes on the over.
"Fin's not a candidate."
