He walked with her, obviously happy to be finished with us. We could hear him promising to send a copy of the report when it was complete, calling good-bye as he put his car ingear and headed down the drive. We waved, and I had a little trouble keeping Helen’s middle finger from going up.
“That little prick,” she said as his car turned onto the main road and disappeared from view.
Natalie gave her an admiring look as she joined us. “Did rooming with Billie on the ship expand your vocabulary?”
“No, I just don’t swear unless provoked. And he was provoking the shit out of me,” Helen said.
“I don’t think I can handle this version of Helen,” Mary Alice said.
“We’ve got bigger problems than Helen suddenly becoming fluent in profanity,” I said. My hand had been in my pocket, my fingers exploring the contours of the item wrapped in the handkerchief. I pulled out the bundle and opened it for the others. I already knew what I’d see. Lying on my palm was a small, obsidian wolf identical to the one retrieved from Lilian Flanders’s house.
“Holy shit,” Natalie breathed.
“I knew I hadn’t left those paint cans stacked up together,” Helen said triumphantly. “They were in the shed,” she added, pointing to the outbuilding on the far side of the garden.
“The lock was cut off the shed door,” Mary Alice informed us. She had a surprise hiding in her own pocket—a padlock whose hasp had been clipped neatly in two. “Found it in the shrubbery by the footpath.”
“But who would do this? Lazarov is dead.” Helen turned to me. “Heisdead, Billie?”
“Jesus, Helen. I think I’ve been doing this long enough toknow when I’ve killed somebody. Yes, he’s dead. I checked—twice.”
“Alright, no need to get testy,” she said in a wounded tone.
I reminded myself she’d had a pretty shitty night and waved her off. “Sorry.”
“Lazarov could have prearranged it,” Natalie ventured.
But I knew better. I shook my head. “He’s got somebody watching his back—and they know he’s dead.” I thought of my initial impressions about Lazarov, the idea that he was soft, maybe too soft to organize Lilian Flanders’s death. Grigory had stressed Pasha’s loner habits, but he’d been drunk as a cross-eyed skunk. What if therehadbeen someone?
I suggested as much to the others.
“Then why burn my house?” Helen demanded. “Why not just kill us outright?”
“They were able to get into the house and pile up the paint cans,” Mary Alice agreed. “It would have been even easier to leave a device on a delay and blow us all to atoms. Why torch the house before we’d even gotten here?”
“Because somebody likes games,” I said grimly. “And we may not be the only players.” I opened my emergency bag and took out a burner. “Time to make the call.”
Natalie shrugged. “I don’t have anybody I need to warn.”
“Minka,” I said. “I think she’s in Bali, and she’s probably safe, but check in with her anyway.”
Minka was a Ukrainian hacker a third our age, a bit of collateral damage I’d brought back from an assassination in Kiev. But she was old beyond her years, and I’d sent her off with an around-the-world ticket to have some adventures. Sofar she had hiked in Patagonia, spent a few months hanging out with surfers in Cape Town, and had tried twice to summit Kilimanjaro. I’d gotten a postcard at Christmas with a Balinese puppet on the front and a scribbled message on the back. I was surprised at how much I missed her. She’d saved our asses during our last mission, her biggest contribution being the creation of an app called Menopaws. She had populated it with animated cats and features for tracking days since our last periods and hot flashes. At least that’s what it looked like. In reality it had given us a way to message each other without using any of the usual apps—and no male security detail was going to look twice at a Siamese in a beret who wanted to talk about vaginal dryness. I’d asked her to make a few tweaks before she left, and I’d taken other precautions as well. We had been successful on that mission, but we’d also been damned lucky. Lady Luck didn’t always show up when you needed her.
Mary Alice plucked the phone out of Nat’s hand. She swore as she hit the “power” button and punched a series of numbers. “Akiko is going to kill me,” she muttered. Akiko must have answered then because Mary Alice’s voice was practically a purr. “Hey, honey. I’m safe, but I’m going to need you to do something—” She stepped away to finish breaking the news to Akiko that she was going to have to pack up two opinionated cats and head underground.
A few minutes later, Mary Alice returned looking like she’d just gone ten rounds with Holyfield in his prime. She handed me the phone and I keyed in a number. Taverner answered on the first ring, and he was enough of a pro not to bother with the preliminaries. “Where?”
“You know that small painting of an olive tree I hung in the kitchen? Take it down and punch open the plaster behind it. You’ll find a smartphone. Turn it on and look at the homepage.”
I heard the sound of breaking plaster and after a minute a muffled laugh. “It’s an app called Bread Daddy. There’s a dough man waving at me.”
“Open it,” I told him. Bread Daddy had been Minka’s brainchild. She’d used Taverner’s talents in the kitchen as her inspiration. The little dough figure resembled the Pillsbury one, but with a significant addition.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “It’s asking if I have trouble getting my loaf to rise. Does this thing have—Billie, is that a dough penis?”
“Yeah, it’s an erectile-dysfunction tracker,” I told him. “But it has a messaging function. Grab your go-bag and follow the instructions I left in the app. I’ll see you soon.”
“Understood.” There was a second of silence. “You okay?”