Page 37 of Patch

“That’s what I thought you said. Well, shit.”

Nineteen years since anybody had spoken it in that room.

Slider hadn’t moved. He was three chairs down with his hands flat on the wood and his jaw doing something slow.

Gunner slid the second sheet.

Younger man. Unremarkable on purpose. Mid-height, lean, plain clothes that cost money, a face you can’t describe ten minutes after looking at it. The only thing that stayed with you was how still he was, and that was in a photograph.

“Kirill Popov,” Gunner said. “Nephew. Thirty-five.”

“That’d make him what, sixteen,” Brazil said. “Back then.”

“Sixteen, and six thousand miles from any of it. He lived in Grigori’s house in Russia. He didn’t get on that plane, and when his uncle didn’t come home there was nobody left over there telling a teenager what he could and couldn’t have.”

“So why’s he here?” Fox asked.

“Because what his uncle built doesn’t travel.” Gunner tapped the sheet. “Grigori moved women. That takes people in two countries who’ll look the other way, and every one of Grigori’s died in Mississippi or got picked up after. The kid inherited a name and no machine. So he found something that does travel.”

“Drugs.”

“Paper. He found out you can buy anesthesia in this country with a form and a federal number, and there’s about four thousand feed stores between here and Arkansas that already have both.” Gunner shrugged. “He’s not running his uncle’s business. He’s running the one his uncle’s business taught him to look for.”

Fox looked at the door and gave one nod, and Brazil got up and went out without needing to be told who to bring.

* * *

Vasha came in about three minutes later in jeans and a sweater with her hair pulled back, and she didn’t sit down.

Fox slid the photograph across the table to her. She looked at it. Her throat moved once. That’s the whole tell that woman has ever had, and she’s had nineteen years to work on it, and she still can’t get that one.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Fox said. “Do you know him?”

“Yes.”

“Vasha.”

“I said yes.” She put one finger on the corner of the photograph and turned it maybe ten degrees, like she wanted a different angle on it. “This is Kirill. He is fatter in the face now. He was a thin boy.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He was sixteen. I was eighteen. This was in Russia, in his uncle’s house, where they kept me.” Her accent had come up in it, the way it does. “He was always in the room. Do you understand what I say? Not in the conversation. In the room. Sitting in a chair by the door with a book he was not reading, and the men would talk in front of him because he was a child, and he would say nothing at all for two hours.”

“Listening,” Gunner said.

“Learning.” She looked up. “There is a difference. Grigori taught nobody anything. He did not sit down with that boy and explain the business. He did not have to. Kirill simply took it, in pieces, over years, out of a chair by the door.”

Slider still hadn’t said one word.

The room stayed very quiet.

“Vasha,” I said. “Is he like his uncle?”

She thought about that longer than I expected her to.

“No,” she said. “That is the thing I want you to understand, so listen to me. Grigori was a loud man. He enjoyed himself. He wanted people to be afraid in front of him where he could watch it happening.” Her mouth went hard. “This one will not enjoy anything. He does not want you afraid. He wants you to not think about him at all. He will do the smallest thing that solves his problem, and if the smallest thing is a woman disappearing, then that is what it will be, and it will not be personal, and he will not think about it again.”