He dropped the slip of paper in my lap. “Thanks.”
I looked up to where he was still standing. “You’ve got your guilty face on. What did you do?”
“I’m going to tell you something and you’re going to want to get mad. Instead, all I want to hear is ‘Thank you, Taverner.’ Is that clear?”
“As the proverbial crystal. Spill it.”
“I tailed Galina from the scala this morning.”
“Goddammit,” I started. He folded his arms over his chest, and waited. I clapped my mouth shut. “Go on,” I said through tight lips.
“She went to the train station. Just her and another woman. Shorter with a black bob. They left Venice.”
“Theyleft?” Mary Alice was incredulous.
“They left,” Taverner confirmed.
“Maybe it was a blind,” Nat suggested. “Maybe they knew they were being followed and went to the train station to lay a false trail.”
“Not likely,” I said flatly. I might have been pissed, but I could still admit that Taverner was the best tracker I’d ever met. His idea of a fun day out was to choose someone at random and follow them for hours without being detected. He was a ghost.
Helen shook her head. “I don’t get it. Why would they just leave without finishing the job? They know we’re here and Venice is a small city. With the proper resources, they could find us.”
The $64,000 question. Why would Galina abandon the chance to settle a blood feud with the women who killed her father and brother? It didn’t make sense. Unless—
“She had to,” I said suddenly. “The only reason she’d leave is if she didn’t have a choice. The Balkan deal.” I turned to Taverner. “Did you see which train she got on?”
“Slow train to Trieste,” he said. He paused, giving me an expectant look.
“Thank you, Taverner,” I said with exaggerated sweetness. He grinned and went back to the kitchen. The slip of paper was still lying in my lap. I skimmed it before handing it over to Minka. “Can you do anything with this?”
She gave me a pitying look. “Please. I am the queen of the rodeo.”
Mary Alice cocked her head. “Queen of the rodeo?”
“She heard the phrase ‘not my first rodeo’ and decided she has been around long enough and knows so much she must be the queen,” I explained. I turned back to Minka. “Just get us her emails, please.”
“Not my circus, not my monkeys,” she said airily.
“That isn’t how you use that one,” I reminded her.
She shrugged. “Whatever.”
I turned back to the others. “What other threads can we pull to get to Galina?”
“I still say I can torture him. Gently,” Nat suggested.
“Let’s call that Plan B, dear,” Helen told her.
“I’m on it,” I said with a sigh. I punched in Naomi’s number, prepared to eat a little crow considering how I’d hung up on her the last time. I wasn’t expecting her to pick up and immediately break the connection. I redialed, and she answered, sounding harried.
“Naomi, how nice to hear your voice. I hope you’re notholding a grudge and that’s why you just hung up on me,” I said, slowing my Texas drawl to cold-molasses speed.
I heard a sigh puffing down the line. “Sorry about that. I am in the office, juggling three phones and somehow managed to change my calendar to Arabic, which I can’t read, so I’m having a bitch of a time figuring out how to change it back.”
“Where’s Lyndsay?” No woman could have it all, but Naomi came damned close thanks to her husband’s efforts at home and Lyndsay’s at the office. One of them wiped baby butt and braided hair, the other one took dictation and kept her calendar in order. I just hoped they never got mixed up.
“Vacation,” she said shortly. “Her sister’s getting married and she’s the maid of honor. Seafoam green taffeta,” she added before I could ask.