Nat broke the silence. “It’s possible. She would have just as much motive as Pasha.”
“And it explains the itchy feeling I had about Pasha’s involvement. He didn’t feel like the killer because he wasn’t,” I said.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Mary Alice counseled. “They could have been in on it together. Otherwise why was Pasha even in the States?”
“Good point,” Akiko said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. There are way too many unanswered questions. But look.” I pointed to the planner again. “The day after Lilian’s death, there’s a notation about a flight to London. We know it wasn’t for Pasha, he didn’t fly.”
“Galina,” Nat said. “That puts her in the vicinity a weeklater when Benscombe was burned.” She pointed to the string of numbers behind the CyrillicGin the first notation. “But what are the rest of those numbers for?”
“It’s a phone number,” Taverner said quietly. “Venetian.”
“How do you know that?” Mary Alice asked.
He launched into a story about a blissful year he spent exploring all the bakeries and bacari of the city, just as my phone rang.
“Naomi,” I said to the room at large. I slipped onto the front porch and answered. In the background was the shrieking jingle of a kids’ show and the sound of a toddler squealing with laughter.
“Where are you now?” I asked. “Chuck E. Cheese?”
“I’m at home and I have exactly two minutes until she gets bored with Peppa Pig and I have to go. You want to spend it arguing or you want to know what I dug up?”
“What do you know?”
“You should probably sit down,” she started.
“So you can tell me Galina Lazarov is alive?”
There was silence on her end except for Peppa. “You want to tell me how you know that?”
“We paid Aunt Evgenia a visit. Switzerland is nice this time of year. You should go.”
“I’ll be damned. You’re wasted in Acquisitions. They should have put you in Provenance.”
“Do I seem like a desk job kind of person, Naomi?”
“Do I?” she shot back. She sighed. “Look, I’m sorry. We should have caught the information about Galina but it got overlooked.”
“Overlooked? Naomi, that’s a pretty mild word for a pretty significant fuckup.”
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “The file on Galina was thin—too thin.”
“Wait, you keep actual files?”
“There are two sets of files,” she explained. “We mostly work from digital databases these days, but on older subjects, some of the material may only be available in hard copy, especially if they died before we got around to digitizing. And yes, those files are real—old-school manila. I went to the physical archives in our deep-storage facility to find Galina’s dossier. Like I said, it was sketchy. All it had was the information that she’d been killed in the car accident with her mother. I pulled Irina Dashkova’s file too, and there was a copy of her death certificate, but nothing in Galina’s, just a newspaper obituary and you can buy those. So I started to wonder if—”
“If Galina survived the crash and that’s why there was no death certificate in her file,” I finished.
“Exactly. I ran some searches on the big database and found a mention of a ‘Galina Dashkova’ who would be the right age. That’s when I realized that after her mother’s death, Galina must have gone to live with her aunt and taken Evgenia’s surname. Operating on that theory, I was able to find a few more things—records of a student by that name at a boarding school in the Spanish Pyrenees, one or two property transactions. Nothing that would stand out as suspicious.”
“Then why was Galina Dashkova in the database at all?” I asked.
“As a footnote,” Naomi said dryly. “When she was younger,she was occasionally photographed on the arm of a shady businessman or two.”
“What business?”
“Nothing we’d be interested in targeting,” Naomi replied. “Mostly art dealers who don’t mind a little fuzzy provenance on the pieces they move. A small-time coke distributor. A third-tier oligarch who dated her for two weeks and dumped her for a Moldovan supermodel. Nobody who was going to put her on the map, career-wise.”