“Found by campers…after ten years in the woods?”
“Maybe. This wild boy, he was big news up north. He made a stir on the social media. They had a name for him. I don’t remember. The investigator described him, asked if it could be Keith.” Her voice reduces to a whisper. “But I lied and I told him no. I made up a story about a birthmark. It was wrong of me to lie, but no good could have come from reuniting Don Knutson and Keith. It seemed the most harmful thing in the world for them both. God help me, that is the decision that I made. But blood brothers, that’s different. I could see how your friends grieved for their brother. Ronson was against me getting involved, you see.”
“I’m so glad you called. So glad, so grateful. Do you remember the name of the investigator?”
“He gave me a card. Quickly. Do you have a pen?”
“Yes.” I motion to Aleksio. He grabs a pen and looks around for a piece of paper. My eyes fall to the folders he’d shoved off the desk. I’m thinking he could write on one of those. That’s when I catch sight of a familiar name on one of the tabs. Vanessa Nikolla.
I stiffen.
What’s he doing with a file on my mother? He moved it when we came in…and it seemed strange. What is he hiding from me?
“Okay,” he says, pen poised over a notepad.
I study the file discreetly while Aleksio takes down the information Lila gives. The folder looks old. Official. There’s a routing grid on the outside of it with initials.
Lila is going on about what she knows. “The investigator was older. Very sickly,” she says. She tells us all she knows. “I hope that those boys find their brother. That they can heal. I could see the resemblance.”
I thank her and click off. Aleksio kisses me. “Thank you!” Then he yells for Viktor.
“You should thank Lila.”
Viktor bounds in with two of his guys. “What’s wrong?”
Aleksio goes to him, full of emotion. “Kiro might be alive.”
Chapter Twenty
Aleksio
I leave Mira at the house with Tito watching her. She seems willing to stay, at least long enough to see this Kiro lead through—I think she’s as interested in seeing him alive as I am. Still, I tell Tito he can’t let her leave.
Viktor and Yuri and I drive through the night, racing to reach the investigator. Karl Hawthorne. He’s in some sort of nursing facility in northern Wisconsin.
I drive. Viktor is unusually silent in the passenger seat, consumed by whatever is on his phone. He’s not doing anything on it, just staring at it. Not even scrolling.
His lip where I hit him seems to have gotten fatter overnight, but his eye looks better. But it’s something more. He looks…distraught. I do a double-take. It’s not an emotion I’m used to seeing on Viktor.
“What the fuck are you watching? Are you finding something new?”
“Nothing new,” he says.
We found the story about the wild boy Lila was talking about pretty easily. He did make a stir on social media around two years ago. Nobody ever got a photo of him, but crews were camped out. They even gave him a name—Savage Adonis. There was a lot of media hunger for a handsome wild boy until it was determined to be a hoax. But what if it wasn’t?
Nobody got a picture, but this investigator—this Karl Hawthorne—maybe he saw him.
“Then what’s so interesting on there?”
“Nothing,” he says. It’s what he said the last time I asked.
“It’s obviously something,” I say.
“Valhalla feed,” he says.
“Is something happening at Valhalla?”
“Nah,” he says.
I frown. I don’t know why he should be so interested in that feed. It’s just cameras trained on captive girls in rooms. Men bid on them. Basically, they sit there for long stretches of time looking unhappy. We checked it out at Konstantin’s place.
“Is the bidding heating up? Is somebody trying to outbid you?”
“No.”
I take another look at him. Viktor is not usually an emotional man except when he’s going full attack dog for the family, but there’s definitely something happening with him. Something strangely vulnerable about him now.
Is something about the Valhalla gig is cracking through those five-foot-thick stone walls of his?
He’s seen more blood and gore and injustice in his life than the most battle-hardened soldier—why let Valhalla affect him?
“Are they revealing the secrets of the universe through interpretive dance?”
He just grunts.
Fine. I suppose it’s good that he’s invested.
We pull up to the senior complex at around ten in the morning. It’s beige-and-white concrete block. It smells of coffee, sausage, and Lysol, and the nurse at the desk tells us that Hawthorne’s daughter needs to okay all visits.
I lean on the desk and smile. “His daughter okays this one, trust me.”
“I sincerely doubt it. She hasn’t okayed a visit in over a year,” the nurse says.
I look over at Viktor, and Viktor looks at Yuri, and Yuri pulls aside his jacket, revealing his .357. “She okays it,” I say softly.
A look of fear comes over her, but she still doesn’t do anything.
An orderly appears now, sensing a problem. He’s young and thick and pale, and when he sees Yuri’s gun he goes for his phone, but I pull out my own piece, letting it hang down by my side. “We just have a few questions.” Gently I take the orderly’s phone. “Nobody gets hurt. Let’s get a room number.”
The nurse straightens. She doesn’t want to give it. Looking to be a hero.
Viktor goes around the desk and picks up a photo of the nurse with two dogs. “Nice dogs,” he says. “Are they at your house right now—” He reads off her nametag. “—Donna Fleishcher?”
Threatening dogs. Only Viktor.
“We just have questions,” I say. “We need information he has on a missing-person case, and then we’ll leave. We’d go through the daughter if we had time, but this is an urgent matter.”
“Are you the cops?” she asks.
I get where this is going. Afterwards, if something goes wrong or if we actually kill Hawthorne, she can say that we told her we were police officers. “We’re law enforcement,” I tell her. Because in a way, we are.
Yuri stays up there with her, and we go with the orderly down the long hallway, through the dining room, and into a large sunroom. He points at an old man in a wheelchair. A rack above the chair holds bags of fluids that trail down to him. “That’s Karl.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“A lot,” the orderly says.
I nod my head at a chair next to the door. “You’re going to sit there and not talk to anybody while we have a private conversation.”
Karl has a bald head and bushy eyebrows; he’s dressed in a black sweatsuit, and he’s watching us, or specifically, watching my gun. Viktor and I leave the orderly sitting there and go over.
“Sig P229R,” he says, nodding down at my side. I’m surprised he can see it, no less get the make. But then, he was a P.I. “If I’da known it was that kind of party, huh?”