“Lolita Number One,” Buncy replied, nodding approvingly. “She’s proving to be a little camera shy, but we’ll get her. It’s like she’s got a spidey sense for avoiding our cameras. She might be the hottest of the bunch. Do you have a name?”

  Amy Archer.

  Walter hedged. “I questioned a man yesterday who said her name was Amelia Dyer, but I think that’s bogus.”

  “You called her Amy—that some kind of nickname?”

  Walter nodded.

  They wouldn’t understand.

  Buncy grunted, scribbled Amelia “Amy” Dyer on a piece of tape, and stuck it below her photo. “She’s connected to a homicide? That’s a shame. Girl like that will get pulled six ways to Sunday in prison.”

  Walter had no idea what Buncy meant by that but didn’t say anything.

  He went on. “We’ve been watching this place for a few months now. They were operating out of another brownstone on Wilmington before that. Three joined apartments downtown before that one…we got them at nine different locations over the past three years.”

  “Why haven’t you arrested them?”

  Buncy gave Wilson a sidelong glance, took another bite of his burrito, and spoke with his mouth half full. “We know what they’re doing. We know who they’re doing it with. We even have most of the hows figured out, but they’re damn careful. You got their phone number from a business card, right?”

  Walter nodded.

  “They print them in small lots, probably fifty or so. The numbers are only good for a couple weeks, then they rotate them out. The girls give their customers a new card after each visit, but they need to use it quick or the number goes bad. That helps keep the johns on the hook. Every time they get a new number, we need to get a new warrant. Makes that damn near impossible. By the time a judge comes through for us, the number is dead and they’ve moved on. We’ve only gotten lucky a handful of times and got one of those calls down on tape, and they’re real careful with what they say or respond to. Anything incriminating comes up, they hang up and burn the number. The calls themselves roll through a series of forwards worldwide. They bounce them through switches, which makes tracing a nightmare. At the moment, they’re answered here. But like I said, they move their base location, too. Girls are dispatched but the hanky-panky never happens here, so all we’ve got are them coming and going. That’s not a crime. Living here isn’t a crime. The crime part takes place behind closed doors at any number of hotels downtown.”

  “Why don’t you just send in an undercover and arrest them at the hotel? All I did was call the number from the bar at the Huntley, and they sent someone right over. I could have easily busted her when we got upstairs.”

  At the back of the van, Wilson chuckled.

  Buncy smiled at him. “That easy, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We follow them to the hotels, but we don’t have eyes and ears in the rooms. What little we’ve learned, we’ve had to shake out of johns we picked up on their way out,” Buncy explained. “If you’d managed to get your girl upstairs, she would have asked you for your driver’s license and phoned it in so they could run a background on you. She would have also asked you flat out if you were a cop. You answer no, and you venture into entrapment territory. You answer yes, and she’s gone. Background comes back with anything hokey, and she’s gone. You would have found she wouldn’t ask you for money. A voice on the phone would have told you how much and where in the room to leave it. Those words would never come out of her mouth. She may pick up the cash, but that’s not necessarily a crime. Neither is doing the deed with a stranger. The crime comes from all these moving parts, and only if a couple of them align just right. These people have been running this racket for a long time and are extremely cautious. They don’t let those parts align. We think it’s probably Russian mob pulling the strings. Maybe Italian, but it smells more Russian. No real proof either way, though. The girls are just players. Busting them doesn’t move the needle. They get ten more girls for every one we take off the board. We want to get the people running the operation, and that takes time. Gather evidence, build a case, wait for a break. That’s how this works.”

  Russian mob?

  Walter thought of the files still sitting on his kitchen counter.

  “Do you have any record of these girls going to the Four Seasons or the Edison this week?”

  “The Edison?” Buncy repeated with a hint of amusement in his voice. “These girls don’t cross over to that side of the tracks. They leave that neighborhood to the dime-store ho-hos. The Four Seasons, though…” His voice trailed off, and he looked at Wilson, who was thumbing through a notebook.

  Wilson’s index finger ran down a page. “Three trips to the Four Seasons yesterday.” He nodded up at the photographs. “Number one, three, and nine.”

  Number one was Amy, three was Willow. Number nine was a blond girl with high cheekbones, full lips, and bright-green eyes. She looked Eastern European.

  Walter said, “I’m going to need copies of whatever you have on those three.”

  Chapter

  34

  The following morning, Walter managed to get himself to work early, but not early enough. When the elevator doors opened on the homicide bullpen at just a little after seven, Brayman was already at his desk, coffee in one hand and the remains of a breakfast sandwich in the other. He looked up at Walter, studied the files in his arms with a wary eye, then looked back down at his desk.

  Walter crossed the room and set the folders down. Jackets on the three girls from the escort service were on top, the mob files were beneath, and all were marked with colorful Post-it tabs. “I think I’ve got something.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brayman muttered.

  He was reading the Detroit Herald, open to the crime beat section. The headline was a story about the body at the Four Seasons. “First a story on the Corktown body, now this. Do we need to have a conversation about talking to the press? You know, little things like, we don’t talk to the fucking press.”

  “I didn’t talk to anyone.”

  “Well, they’ve got all the details here. Our names, a description of the vic. They even mention the aneurysm and how the body was moved and repositioned. The reporter might as well have been holding your hand.”

  “Me? How do I know you didn’t talk?”

  “Because I don’t talk to the press. Ever. I know better.”

  Walter felt his face burn. “Man, you are a complete ass, you know that?”

  “Yeah, I’m the ass.” Brayman shook his head. He remained still for a moment, then slowly got up from his chair with the newspaper in hand. “Captain wants to see us.”

  “He’s here already? About what?”

  Nadler.

  The near DUI.

  My drinking.

  The list was growing.

  Why couldn’t they just drop the bullshit and let him do his job?

  “Now, O’Brien.”

  Walter scooped up the files. He’d show them what he found. Then nothing else would matter. They’d forget all this other high school bullshit.

  Captain Hazlett was sitting in his chair behind his desk, his hands folded over his own copy of the Herald. He looked up at Walter as he came in, his face blank. “Close the door.”

  Walter shouldered the door shut, then set his folders on top of the captain’s desk.

  Brayman was standing off to the right, leaning partially against the wall. He eyed the files and exchanged a quick look with Hazlett but said nothing.

  Walter cleared his throat. “I think I’ve got a bead on our unknown woman from the hotel. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I’ve got a link.”

  The captain’s eyes narrowed. “O’Brien, I—”

  Walter cut him off. “Have either of you ever heard the name Sergei Turgenev?”

  Neither man said anything.

  Walter shuffled through the files, found Turgenev, and spread the contents across the captain’s desk. “Turgenev is Russian mob. Hard-core, old-school. He operates out of the back of a drugstore on the east end. There’s a small pocket of immigrants there. I spoke to some guys in Vice last night, and—”

  “You talked to Vice?” Hazlett interrupted. “Who in Vice?”

  “Buncy and Wilson. They told me Turgenev has his hands in a number of local operations, but two of them jumped out—Elite Escorts, on the upper end of town, and a series of pimps he runs around Arlington and Edgewater near where our first vic was found. He offers ‘protection’ for the pimps and their girls in exchange for a piece of their take.” From the folders, Walter pulled out the witness statement from the manager at the Edison as well as the photograph taken from the surveillance camera at the Four Seasons. He set them both side by side on the desk. “We’ve got a girl at the Edison, most likely the last person to see our vic alive. And we’ve got another at the Four Seasons, same thing. Two girls, most likely pros, but from very different worlds. Both with a single connection.”

  “Turgenev,” Hazlett muttered.

  “Exactly. I found a number of links between those two operations, with Turgenev in the middle. Turns out if one of the pimps gets a girl who can cut it uptown, Turgenev throws the pimp a bonus and places the girl with Elite Escorts. If one of the girls at Elite isn’t earning enough or is at the tail end of her career, they bust her down to the Arlington area. The point is, these girls go back and forth depending on their earning potential. Both businesses feed each other.”

  “How does that connect to our vics?” Brayman asked. “What’s the motive?”

  “I think they were hits.”

  “Hits? Seriously?”

  “I think the Russian mob wanted these people dead, and they used one of Turgenev’s girls to do it.”

  Brayman looked like he was on the verge of laughing. “What, like some femme fatale? A female assassin?”

  Walter ignored him. “All three were murdered; we just don’t know how yet. I’d be willing to bet if we dig, we’ll find that the victims all have a connection to Turgenev. Maybe they worked for him. Maybe whatever they did for him led to some type of exposure to something toxic, and that exposure is what caused the cancer, the aneurysm. These illnesses that look natural. Maybe he had them killed to keep them from talking to anyone about it.”

  Captain Hazlett leaned back in his chair. “And what, the woman at the bus depot was one of Turgenev’s girls?”

  Walter nodded. “Probably running, and they caught up with her.” He looked at Brayman. “We talked about that, remember? Her death looked hasty. Something quick to shut her down. At a bus depot, no less. Oh, she was running for sure. Somebody took her out.”

  Hazlett looked over at Brayman. “You two talked about all this?”

  Brayman just raised his palms, shook his head, and said nothing.

  Walter let everything sink in before pulling another file from the stack and setting it in front of Hazlett. “I think this is our girl.”

  Hazlett leaned forward and read the name on the tab of the folder. “Amy Archer.” He said the name slowly before settling back in his chair.

  Walter didn’t want it to be Amy, but his gut told him he was right. He couldn’t hold back now. She was the missing piece. It explained why she was pretending to be someone else, too.

  He went on. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with this case. It’s an older one, goes back six years. Nadler and I found Amy Archer in an apartment with a dead man named Alvin Schalk. At the time, it looked like Schalk had abducted her and she killed him trying to get away. But the evidence doesn’t add up. We found blood on the mattress there, some rope. We figured Schalk tied her up and tortured her, but the blood came back as a match for him, not her. She was in the wind long before any of this was discovered. The detective on the case, Freddie Weeden…I don’t know if he just dropped the ball or was sloppy, but he never followed up on her.” Walter patted the folder. “Half the information in his report is wrong. Her description is all off. Maybe he got it mixed up with another case or something. I don’t know, I shouldn’t make excuses for him. If anyone was looking for Archer based on Weeden’s report, though, they’d never find her. Then I got lucky and spotted her on the street a few days ago.”

  Hazlett and Brayman exchanged another glance. Rather than look through the information Walter had laid out, Brayman looked down at his shoes.

  Hazlett said, “You found her? Amy Archer?”

  Walter nodded. “She’s working for Elite Escorts now. For Sergei Turgenev. Using the name Amelia Dyer.”

  Hazlett considered all of this. He was quiet for a long time. Finally, he groaned, reached into his desk drawer, and took out a pile of reports of his own. “This isn’t the first time you’ve found Amy Archer, is it.”

  A statement. Not a question.

  Chapter

  35

  Walter recognized the topmost report. He probably still had a copy of it somewhere buried in a box back at his apartment. “That’s not what you think,” he said defensively.

  “No?” Hazlett replied. “Because I think it’s a restraining order. You know why I think that? Because it says Restraining Order across the top in big blocky letters, and a judge signed it down here at the bottom, all official-like. See?”

  Hazlett turned the document around and tapped at the signature.

  “That was five years ago. Almost six.”

  “It was right after she ran,” Hazlett said. “I read all that crap before I signed your papers and agreed to take you into Homicide. I know all about that case. The whole damn department knows. Weeden used to bring it up whenever we bullshitted about his unsolveds. How he cut a break to a rookie, some young punk named O’Brien who let a girl get the better of him. Gave him the slip. That’s not the part that irked him, though. Mistakes happen. We all get that. What bugged him is you couldn’t keep your hands out of the investigation. Wasn’t even your job, but you kept nosing around. You bugged some kid so damn much his mother felt the need to take out a restraining order against you.” Hazlett tapped the document again, harder this time. “A Black mother, in a shitty part of town, felt the need to go to the police, file a report, and go to court, all to keep you away from her kid. Do you have any idea how bad you need to fuck up to get a Black mother in the projects to ask the cops for help? To trust the system?”

  “That kid knew Archer was in there with Schalk,” Walter said. “He told us Schalk had a girl in there. He knew who was in that apartment, knew what was going on in there, and he could have helped us find her.”

  “It wasn’t your job,” Hazlett repeated flatly.

  “That kid saw who came and went. He could tell us whether Schalk had Archer tied up in there or the other way around.”

  “That kid is dead,” Hazlett said. “Died of pulmonary atresia five years ago. Heart valve problem.”

  Walter felt a lump grow in his stomach. He hadn’t known that.

  Brayman took a step closer to the desk. “Nadler says you have a thing for her. You’ve never been able to let that one go.”

  “It’s not like that,” Walter said dismissively.

  Hazlett moved the restraining order aside and showed Walter a stack of fax cover sheets. “How do you explain all these?”

  Walter said nothing.

  Hazlett spread them out across the desk. “You faxed your own BOLO out to half the precincts in the state. There must be fifty of them here, and these are just the ones Weeden found. He bitched about this for a month, said you didn’t even get the girl’s physical description right.”

  “That’s not true—Weeden’s the one who had it wrong!”

  Hazlett continued. “He said you completely muffed it and that was why she got away. Anyone looking for her had the details all wrong. Another cop does this, and they’d get bounced. Lucky for you, Nadler had your back and smoothed things over, kept Weeden from filing a formal complaint against you.”

  Walter told himself to stay calm. “Go down to records and pull the report. Weeden listed her as a blonde with green eyes. She was a brunette with gray eyes.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen his report,” Hazlett fired back. “You don’t think he showed it to me? He worked for me. You know what else I’ve seen? Statements from other officers on the scene. Every damn one of them contradicting you. Got to be a joke around here, one nobody told you because you were the butt of that joke. You need to hear it, though, if you’ve got any kind of future here, at least in my department. It’s been years. We all think you’ve finally dropped it, given up the chase. And why wouldn’t you? Got a promotion. New partner. New focus…Perfect time to start fresh, right? That’s watercooler talk. That was all rookie crap, a long time ago. Old news. Then Nadler calls me yesterday, says you called him the night before from some club, drunk off your ass, with eyes on some girl you swore was Archer. That’s obviously bad. Can’t get worse, right? But it does, because he unloads a confession on me, tells me how you used to see Archer everywhere—on the street, at the store, bars at night, running in the park—some ghost you spotted more often than your own reflection.

  “He tells me how he kept all this under wraps because underneath it all you’re a good cop. Said he cut you slack because you grew up a foster kid and managed to make something of yourself. Told himself that for all those years the two of you were partnered up. Didn’t want to make things harder on you by ticking the wrong box in your jacket. So I gotta wonder—how bad of a fuck-up did I make by giving you a desk in my department?”

  “I haven’t—”

  Hazlett shook his head and glared at the folders on his desk. “And now this bullshit? You’re going to try and tie her to this investigation? I should pull your shield right now.”

  The phone on Hazlett’s desk began to ring. He made no move to answer it, just let the shrill clatter echo over the three silent men for six rings before he finally scooped up the receiver.