Death of a Russian Doll Read online

  The blade broke as I tried to saw through the rope, and I had to stop and change it, but within ten minutes he was hopping on his bare feet in the snow and gathering his boots and clothing.

  “Come in and get warm,” I told him, picking up his pricy equipment bag.

  When we were both in the back room, I pulled the door to the shop closed and called my father at the station.

  “Keep him there,” Dad said. “And lock the doors. Stay out of sight and keep the shop closed until I tell you. I might not be able to get there right away. We got a situation going—wait, does he need medical attention?”

  I pulled the phone away from my face and addressed Kelley. “Do you need medical attention?”

  He was still shivering, but he shook his head and went for the coffeepot.

  “He says no,” I said into the phone.

  “Okay, then stay right there. Promise me?”

  “I promise.”

  I set open a folding chair and made Kelley sit in it while I poured the coffee for him, then helped him steady both hands around the cup. I walked through the shop to make sure no customers had come in when I was distracted, then I locked the door and flipped the sign to “closed.” Taking a moment to scan the street, I was a bit unnerved to see Pastor Pete strolling on the sidewalk with his neck craned in my direction.

  A shiver ran up my spine. Was he watching the shop? Or did he have something to do with the attack on Kelley? Maybe he was back to finish the job. Or maybe he was just walking down the street. No crime in that. Dad was right, though. I needed to stay out of sight, even if only to stop fueling the paranoia.

  I sprinted through the shop and ran up to the apartment to grab my Lego Movie blanket (yes, it’s awesome) for Kelley. He clutched it tightly around himself. I even bumped up the thermostat a couple of degrees.

  When the shivering stopped, I pulled open another chair and sat opposite him.

  “Thanks, you might have saved my life.” He took a long sip of the coffee. “Although, I was working on the ropes. I probably could have gotten myself out, eventually.”

  Yeah, right. “How long were you strung up like that?”

  “I don’t know. What time is it now?”

  I checked my cell. “Ten after seven.”

  He rocked a little in his chair. “Two hours. Maybe three. I’m still a little hazy how it all happened.”

  “What do you mean? What did happen?”

  “I was surveilling the back of the shops, and I had just gone behind your dumpster to, well, you know.”

  “I know what?”

  “Relieve myself.”

  “You’ve been peeing behind our dumpster?”

  “Everybody pees.”

  “But not behind our dumpster.”

  “Liz, it’s a stakeout. All cops—”

  “Don’t go telling me I wouldn’t understand peeing because it’s a cop thing, all right? Because I might have to hit you. My father’s been a cop longer than you’ve been alive, and he doesn’t go around peeing behind people’s dumpsters.”

  “Oh, yeah? You ask him about stakeouts. I’ll bet he’s peed behind plenty of dumpsters. Now, do you want to hear the story or not?”

  I bit back a sharp retort and calmed my voice to the point it sounded like a harried nanny pushed past her patience. “Yes, Lionel. Please tell me the story.”

  “Fine. I had just finished, you know, and I swore I saw a bit of light coming from the back door of the barber shop. Just a sliver, like a door opening or closing. Then it went dark.”

  “Someone turned the light off?” I said. “Or closed the door?” Good heavens, Lionel was right about the criminal returning to the scene of the crime.

  “I mean someone conked me on the head.” He reached up and gingerly touched the back of his head.

  “Lionel.” I jumped up and examined the spot he pointed out, and sure enough, he had quite a goose egg already. I pulled out my cell phone.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Remember your training,” I said. “All head wounds get checked out. Especially if you lost consciousness.”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  “But you just said everything went dark.”

  “Dark, hazy, blurry. But I was awake. It’s almost all better now.”

  “I’m still calling you an ambulance.”

  I made the call, answered a few questions, looked deeply into Lionel’s eyes to examine his pupils to see if they were unnaturally dilated, and waited for help to arrive.

  “So you didn’t see who it was?” I asked.

  “They must have come on foot, because I didn’t hear anyone drive up, and there had to be more than one of them to get the jump on me like that.” He sat up straighter. “You know what this means, don’t you. I was right! It had to be the Russians.”

  “Did anyone speak? With an accent or in another language?”

  “No, I only saw the one guy. And he never said a word.”

  “You just told me you didn’t see anyone.”

  “I didn’t make out anyone. He had on one of those ski masks that covers the whole face. But I remember the eyes. Deep, piercing, Russian eyes. If I ever see those eyes again, I’ll know.”

  * * *

  I texted Dad to update him that Kelley was on his way to the hospital and then did a poor job of cooling my heels in the closed shop. I jumped every time someone jiggled the handle trying the front door, but otherwise I hung out in the back room, peering through the small, square window in the steel door, trying to see if the police had arrived yet. And pacing. I did a lot of pacing.

  Why had I promised my father I wouldn’t leave the shop? Now I was more curious to see if someone had broken into the barber shop and what they might have done there. And if they might still be inside!

  Then again, I’d already seen Pastor Pete rubbernecking the shop. Who else might be lurking nearby? Perhaps Dad’s advice to lock the doors and stay out of sight was prudent. As if on cue, someone—hopefully an impatient customer—banged on the front door. Too bad honoring my promise to stay safely out of sight kept me in the dark about what might be happening just next door.

  During one of my trips back and forth across the small room, I noticed Kelley’s bag of gadgets still by the door. But it wouldn’t be right to go through his things.

  Then again …

  Kelley had gone through our stock at the toy show last year without our permission. And he’d kept me waiting unnecessarily when he promised I could watch the video tape. Add the fact that he’d sent me to senior speed dating—not to mention the dumpster-peeing incident. I was pretty sure he owed me the chance to see if something in the bag could help figure out what was going on next door.

  One of the first things I came across was the camera with a long flexible tube—the one that looked like something you could use for a do-it-yourself colonoscopy. I found the on switch and a Bluetooth button. Within minutes, my phone asked if I wanted to connect with the endoscope—at least now I knew what to call it. As soon as I clicked “yes,” images appeared on my phone.

  The next step was finding the right-sized hole. I went back into our still incomplete comic book room and knelt down next to the roughed-in electrical outlet. There was a little space on the side, and after a few tries, the camera went through.

  It took me a while to figure out how to manipulate the camera to see anything, but eventually I was able to scan the room and even record the video scan to my phone.

  I saw only the new, smaller back storage room of the barber shop, but it had obviously been ransacked. Bottles, tubes, and tubs of pricy hair product had been pushed onto the floor. I could read some of the labels, not that I knew what they did. Hair food. Pomade. Primer. Masques. Shields. Vitalizer. Soother. (Maybe those two could duke it out.) And hair bonding glue. Glue?

  The only item I could have picked out of a lineup was the single aerosol can of Aqua Net. My mother always had one or two of the exact same cans of hairspray sitting on t
he bathroom vanity.

  I couldn’t see around the door to get a glimpse of the rest of the shop, but I suspected it was torn apart too.

  Someone had been looking for something. Money? Drugs?

  Once I saw everything I could, I pulled back the endoscope so that I imagined it was flush with the other side of the wall. No sense alerting anyone to the fact that I was just on the other side of the drywall. I pushed myself off the ground and dragged a chair into the room, so I could continue to monitor any developments in the barber shop—at least in the store room of the barber shop.

  I realized I must have left the apartment door open, probably when I came down with the blanket, because Othello wandered into the comic room. He checked out the endoscope, still jutting from the electrical outlet, giving it a sniff, then a rub with his cheek.

  I picked him up. “Sorry, fella. That’s gotta go back to Lionel Kelley.”

  After the brief distraction, I glanced back at my cell phone to see if anything had changed.

  A giant eyeball was staring back at me. And Lionel Kelley’s words echoed in my head:

  Deep, piercing Russian eyes.

  Chapter 20

  I pulled on the endoscope, and to my horror, the endoscope pulled back.

  Whoever was on the other side of the wall was playing tug-of-war with me. And just a minute earlier, I’d felt so clever. Now I could end up strung up half-naked in the alleyway. Or worse. How did the Russian mob dispose of people? Lionel Kelley would know.

  I dropped to the floor and crept out of that room, lest someone start shooting through the wall. After all, just drywall separated me from whomever was now in the barber shop, and anyone who watched HGTV knew you could just kick right through that.

  In the wider open space of the shop I felt more exposed, so I kept on crawling until I was hidden from view behind a display rack of building blocks. I strained to hear any sound above the pounding of blood in my ears. After about thirty seconds, my pulse was beginning to slow, then the pounding on the front door began again.

  Why was Dad taking so long to get here? I reached for my phone to call him again and realized that my cell was still in the comic book room.

  Could I make it to the shop phone? Not without being seen from the front windows.

  I wrung my hands trying to corral my panicked thoughts then looked around for anything that might be used as a weapon, or at least a deterrent.

  The glass case where we displayed our toy guns was at the end of the aisle. We’d had to keep them padlocked because many old toy guns were so realistic we worried they could get someone shot. In fact, Dad only sold them to serious collectors he knew would keep them secured. And I did still have the shop keys in my pocket.

  Careful to stay out of sight, I crab-walked over to the case, jiggled the key in the lock, and carefully and quietly eased away the padlock and lifted the hasp. Worried that someone from the street might see the lid of the case rise, I elevated it by infinitesimal increments. My arm muscles began to burn then trembled from the strain. When I’d raised the lid about four inches, I visualized the stock of the case, then made a quick reach for the Mattel Fanner 50, one of the most realistic cap guns ever made. Once I had the gun in hand, I let the lid fall closed, collapsed back against the display rack, and rubbed my aching arm.

  More urgent pounding at the door echoed through the shop.

  I examined the toy gun in my hand, ripped off the price tag, and practiced holding it.

  Why couldn’t I be content selling old toys? Now here I was: on the verge of confronting a possible killer with only a shop full of toys to protect me. If only Dad were here. But that thought left me shaky. Would they go after my father when he arrived?

  I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, but it was only Val, headed toward me. Then the cat, who normally had nothing to do with any of us unless maybe it was time to eat, lifted a paw to climb up on my lap. I pushed her away, but that just made her more determined. Moments later she extended all her claws trying to steady herself on my thighs.

  More sounds came from the door, but not the banging sound from earlier. This sound was even more terrifying: the sound of the lock clicking open followed by the bell over the door ringing. Then a few slow footsteps.

  I tried again to push Val off my lap, but she hissed in protest and dug in her claws even tighter.

  The footsteps stopped and I froze, trying not to breathe.

  For one brief moment I wondered if throwing Val at the intruder would be more effective than the toy gun, but I pushed aside the impulse. Despite her quirks, she was beginning to grow on me. So I let her rest on my lap while I picked up the cap gun and aimed it at the end of the aisle.

  More footsteps creaked. I swallowed hard, wondering who might soon round the corner of the aisle. A Russian mobster? Pastor Pete? Some other resourceful killer?

  I tabled my regrets for becoming involved in this case; anyone who could so easily enter locked doors, inflict terror, and disrupt so many lives needed to be stopped. I steadied the toy gun with two arms.

  But the face that peered around the corner was the rookie Jenkins, in uniform.

  “Whoa,” he said, lifting his hands. “You don’t want to do that.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Your father gave me the keys.”

  “Dad’s here?”

  Jenkins nodded. “Can you put down the gun?”

  “How do I know you’re telling me the truth? You seemed pretty anxious to kill me on the back of that snowmobile.”

  “Look,” he said, eyeing the gun, “sorry about that. We were out all night looking for you, and I might have been a little agitated. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Liz!” Dad called from the door.

  “Back here!”

  Jenkins retreated into the shadows when Dad rounded the corner. “She pulled a gun on me.”

  Dad rolled his eyes and took the toy from my hands. “It’s a cap gun. And it’s not even loaded. Liz …”

  “I didn’t know who came in.”

  Dad turned to Jenkins. “You didn’t announce yourself? Police?”

  Jenkins hung his head.

  Dad wagged a finger at him. “Would have served you right if she’d shot you.” He held out a hand and helped me up before leaning in closer. “You and I will talk about this later.” He stepped back. “And am I right in thinking that little camera was your doing?”

  I could feel my cheeks flame. “You said not to leave the shop.”

  He rolled his eyes and turned to Jenkins. “Let’s get the photographer in there and start taking some new pictures.”

  Jenkins seemed happy to hightail it out of the shop.

  Dad leaned closer. “What were you thinking?”

  “About the camera or the cap gun?”

  “Let’s start with the camera.”

  “I was thinking that I wanted to see what was going on, just to be that fly on the wall. And then I noticed that Lionel Kelley left his equipment.”

  “And if the killer was in there and caught you, you’d be one dead fly. Not to mention, if Jenkins had been following his training, he might have shot you.” Despite the seriousness of his tone, the corner of his mouth betrayed his amusement. “I should put you over my knee and give you the swat you deserve.”

  I groaned. “What gave me away?”

  “When you pushed the camera through, you left drywall dust on the floor.” He scratched his chin. “You know how to make a pest of yourself.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “How could I be? Jenkins needed to be taken down a peg.”

  “You’re talking about the man who’d be happy to see me arrested for murder.”

  “Won’t come to that. I’d quit first.”

  “Then nothing would be stopping him, would it?”

  “Take heart, kiddo. I don’t think there’s any need to start trying on orange jumpsuits. There was a huge break in the case today. First time that it feels like we’re mak
ing any headway.”

  “Really? Was this the ‘situation’ you mentioned on the phone?”

  “Yes, that shyster the sisters hired finally showed his face. When he actually talked with Anechka, he decided it would be better for her to cooperate with authorities, especially when her drug test came back positive for opiates. It may have been impressed upon her that an undocumented illegal alien drug abuser who wouldn’t cooperate with police would soon find herself on a slow boat back to Russia.”

  “So she talked?”

  “Sang like Ethel Merman. Turns out she wanted to make a break from her employers and move up here with Marya. Only when she gave notice, the people who smuggled her into the country got nervous she was about to blow the whistle on their whole operation. They intimated that they had friends high up in the government. If Anechka either came back to work or paid them off, they’d ‘find’ her paperwork and she’d be free to stay. But if she blabbed, they’d turn her over to immigration and she’d be deported. Marya figured the cabin would be a good place to hide her.”

  “Will she be deported?”

  “Maybe. Eventually. But in the meantime, I’m going to want her as a witness, and so will the FBI, the DEA, and ICE. We had a whole boatload of alphabet soup involved in this. And police in two states.”

  “Did Anechka say any more about what Marya was up to or who might have killed her? Could it be the Russians? I’ll never live it down if Lionel Kelley was right about that.”

  “Anechka was mostly locked up in that cabin detoxing,” Dad said. “Marya tried to handle the situation, maybe paying off the traffickers—we’re still trying to work that out. But she didn’t share with her sister much of what she was doing.”

  “Anechka wouldn’t have liked it if she found out her baby sister was dealing drugs.”

  A shadow fell over Dad’s face. “That’s where it gets a little strange. Anechka admits that Marya supplied her with oxycontin, trying to wean her off the drug by tapering off the dosage gradually.”

  “That rings true,” I said. “Ken’s sisters told me that Marya had tried to do the same thing before. The addiction kept Anechka dependent on her employers.”