Ashen Rayne (Shadowlands Book 1) (18 page)

Smoak turned back and cuddled under the woman’s hair. She found the woman’s ear and whispered, “I’d rather gouge my own eyes out with a spoon.”

The woman reared back in surprise and Smoak moved. She snapped two of the man’s fingers in a casual gesture and kicked the other one in the knee with a six-inch heel. Both men cried out in pain and surprise, buying her more time. She head butted the woman in front of her, breaking the woman’s nose. Smoak ignored the blood spray that darkened her hair and jumped to her feet. A kick to the woman’s throat sent her into oblivion’s embrace, and Smoak was up and running before death had even registered the guard’s fate. Her second kick caught the standing guard in the stomach sending him crashing into a table where he lay still.

Behind her, the seated guard was trying to bring his MP7 around. Smoak grabbed the weapon and dragged him forward by the strap. Her knee met him on the way down, sending his nose into his forebrain and killing him instantly.

The skirmish was over in a handful of seconds. She pushed his body aside and spun, surveying the rest of the club. Chaos hadn’t yet crawled through the room, but was skirting the edge. Most of the dancers were still moving to the loud music, only one or two had noticed the carnage taking place in the shadows, but it was only a matter of time before the screaming started and things really got interesting.

Smoak kicked off the ridiculous heels and ran, her hair flying behind her. She leapt and skidded over another table on her rear, both legs kicking out at the guards seated on the other side. Her powerful strike caught the first one in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. Her other kick crushed the second man’s windpipe, sending him to meet the ferryman.

With precious seconds ticking away, Smoak scooped a glass off the table and smashed it into the gasping thug’s head. She knew he was down and done, and she was moving again before his last breath gurgled in his throat. She vaulted over the purple leather booth and ran toward where the redheaded woman was being manhandled by a grey haired man and a Russian gun thug. The thug turned toward her and leveled his MP7, his finger on the trigger. Smoak dropped and slid across the floor, stopping when she was between his legs. Her palm strike hit him in the crotch, and he howled, doubling over in pain. She then rolled backwards, extending her legs into a kick that hit him in the chin, making his teeth bite through his tongue in a shower of blood and broken bone.

She ended the maneuver on her feet, fists at the ready. She pushed the bleeding guard away and reached for the woman, but by then, another brute had joined the fray. He grabbed the redhead’s arm and yanked, almost pulling her out of Smoak’s grip. She followed and pushed the redhead into the guard, causing him to stumble. He let go of the woman to catch himself on the edge of the stage and Smoak pulled, spinning the stunned woman around to land in a chair behind her.

“Stay there,” Smoak said without looking.

The remaining two guards approached, silenced MP7s in their hands.

“Don’t move!” someone in the shadows barked.

Smoak raised her hands and watched the two guards move closer.

“She is a fine piece of property,” another voice called.

A third joined in. “If she can be tamed. Mr. Radic, I believe she has killed most of your men.”

The guards got too close. Smoak grabbed the stunned guard to her right and yanked him to his feet. He staggered in front of her, and she pushed him into the two armed guards. Their weapons spat silenced death, mincing his body in a dance of carnage only a horror fan could enjoy. When he finally dropped to the ground, Smoak stood beneath the lights, her bare skin spattered with his blood. The men’s eyes widened in surprise and reached for spare magazines; the bullets may as well have been in Moscow. Smoak stepped forward and lashed out in a flurry of kicks and strikes that left both men staggering. In the silence, she jerked a blade from one man’s belt and used it to slit his throat before jamming it up to the hilt in the other man’s eye. The two men dropped, and she glared around the room, daring anyone to move. No one did.

Smoak turned to tend to the redhead, and though she had, by some miracle, been missed by the hail of bullets, the woman hadn’t been so lucky. Blood mingled with her hair, making her face a matted mess. Smoak’s hand trembled as she pulled the hair away from the woman’s eyes. Blank green orbs stared back at her.

Ashley glared at the TTY screen in frustration.

It wasn’t Rayne or Blaze, but it could have been their sister.

“Did anyone see you?” Ashley asked.

Depends on what you mean by “see.” I doubt any of the girls are going to talk after being freed. The dancers were too busy running to see anything, and most of the scumbags are dead or on their way to jail. At most, one or two could make an accurate description and that’s pretty unlikely.

“It’s only a mercy that most witnesses don’t remember what they saw,” Ashley said. “What’s next? Go after Frulov?”

Frulov is dead
, Smoak replied.
I found him in his limo, someone gave him a new hole to breathe out of on their way out. They tried to make it look like suicide, but I’m not buying it.

“His suicide means the Feds will call it case closed and hand it back to Miami PD to mop up,” Ashley said. “Fantastic. Any more bad news?”

I think that about covers it,
Smoak said.
I do have some good news. One of the buyers dropped a name. Radic. It was his men I killed, not Frulov’s.

“I’ll run it and see if I can find anything. What are you going to do?” Ashley asked.

For now, I’m going to come in and get cleaned up. See you in a bit.

Smoak ended the call and Ashley leaned back, one hand rubbing her tired eyes. Every time they had a suspect, someone stepped from the darkness and eliminated him. This was way outside their usual casework. Most cases were resolved in a matter of hours, but this was something different, something darker. She hoped it wasn’t the beginning of a trend.

She ran her hands through her hair and got back to work. If Frulov was a dead end, they would need to find something else fast. A search of the name Radic turned up dozens of people across the country. It was a common name rooted in Croatia with fingers spread all over the world.

She tried a variety of other searches, including cross-referencing the name Radic with Frulov and found nothing that would connect the two. Even an INS search was useless. More than a dozen people named Radic had come into the country in the last week, any number of which could now be in Miami, but none of them appeared to have anything to do with Frulov or the skin trade.

She tapped her teeth and stared at the screen, letting her mind wander. After a few minutes, she reached forward and hacked into Frulov’s accounts. A handful had been frozen by the FBI, but others were still open, each with just a few cents left in them. When she traced the electronic transfers, she found they had all been moved to an account in the Greater Antilles, including a major deposit on Grand Cayman. Most of the accounts had no name associated with them. By law, the accounts were secure and anonymous to outsiders. But fifteen minutes of digging got her an electronic thumbprint used to authorize the transfers. The print belonged to Igor Frulov and was sent after his apparent suicide behind Goldfinger’s.

“So who’s body did they leave behind the club?” Ashley asked.

The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office was a large three-story structure made of brick and concrete, constructed in the late 1950s. Sometime in the eighties, an effort had been made to beautify the structure with a terracotta and concrete courtyard. It hadn’t helped much. Any way you looked at it, it was still a morgue with up to three hundred bodies stored in the coolers at any given moment. It was also a secured building with a variety of cameras, guards and security devices to make life exciting for would-be trespassers.

“Why don’t you just show them your military id?” Rock asked.

They had parked the Evade across the street from the examiner’s office and were watching it like a pair of hungry vultures over the last French fry.

Ashley shook her head. “Chandler won’t back me up on this one. As far as he’s concerned, it’s a done deal to be mopped up by the locals. If they call my bluff, I’ll be in trouble.”

She looked at the surrounding buildings and a sign down the street caught her attention. She smiled and pointed at it. “Hit the drive-thru, I think I have a plan.”

A few minutes later, she pushed through the doors of the medical examiner’s office, her military identification pinned to her shirt facing backwards and an armload of small coffees from a little place called DD. She carried her burden to the nearest door and kicked it with the toe of her shoe.

“Hey, can you buzz me in? I’m about to drop this!” she called.

The guard stood and opened the door, allowing Ashley to pass. Ashley smiled brightly and angled the tray of coffee toward the guard.

“Take one, they’re all black, but there is cream and sugar in the bag.”

“Thank you very much,” the guard said, taking a coffee and a handful of sugar.

“Thank you,” Ashley replied. “If I drop any more coffee I’m going to get my hiney chewed.”

She turned away and hurried off into the maze of offices and cubicles. As soon as she was out of the guard’s line of sight, she set the coffee down on a convenient desk and turned toward the back of the building. She passed through the technician’s offices and rounded the corner to the autopsy suites. The training room was in use and there were a number of students milling around outside. She smiled at them and kept walking as if she knew where she was going. On her way by, she bumped into a young man with a visitor’s badge hanging out of his pocket.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, bouncing off the student.

“No problem,” he replied with a smile.

Ashley smiled back and kept walking, the passkey hidden in her hand. A moment later, she buzzed herself through the door at the end of the corridor and proceeded toward the nearest set of coolers.

The morgue coolers were arranged in separate corridors, all controlled by a central desk in the middle. An older man sat behind the desk with a teacup in his hand. Ashley stepped up to the desk and smiled, her ill-gotten visitor’s pass now displayed on her shirt.

“Hi, I’m detective Francis Murphy, Miami police,” she said. “I’m here to take a look at the body of Igor Frulov. I think it was returned from Fort Lauderdale not too long ago.”

The technician looked at her over the rim of his spectacles. “That was quick. We just got him into the freezer a few minutes ago, you guys are getting more efficient.”

He rummaged around on his desk and handed up a clipboard. “Sign on line thirty-three. He’s to your left in freezer 42-1 unless you want him on a table. That will take a while. All the rooms are in use.”

Ashley did a close approximation of Frank Murphy’s signature and handed back the clipboard. “Thanks, I won’t need a table, this won’t take long.”

She smiled again and turned away, her stomach doing cartwheels. She’d decided long ago that freezer rooms were some of the most disturbing places on Earth. They’re clean, spotlessly so, and smell of cleaning products, so that wasn’t a problem. It was the odd feeling she got that made her stomach do aerobatic. The sensation of the dead surrounding the living is creepifying on the best of days, and Ashley hated it more than anything in the world.

She walked through the cooler room, her arms around her less for warmth than for the comfort it gave her against the corpses. It took her a few minutes to find Frulov’s drawer, and when she did, it took three tries for her to grip the handle.

Come on, girl, you’ve seen dozens of dead bodies. Get a hold of yourself,
she thought. But that tiny traitorous part of her brain spoke up,
Yeah, but they weren’t all staring at you.

She pulled the handle and the drawer opened, rolling on well-oiled casters. Inside was a black body bag, with Frulov’s name written on the tag. Ashley took a deep breath and unzipped the bag. She needn’t have worried about his eyes. The bullet had passed through the side of his head and exited out his face. There wasn’t much left that looked human.

Ashley glared at the damage and pulled on a pair of latex gloves from the box nearby.
Suicide my ass.

The man’s teeth were a jumble in his mouth, making dental identification all but impossible. She unzipped more of the bag and checked his fingers, not surprised that the prints were all but worn off. Any fingerprint comparison would be useless. In this instance, the police would have used his identification, location and any witness statements to identify the body. But Ashley knew another way. She made a face and used two fingers to roll the man’s head onto the side. She then took a close up photo of his ear. When she was satisfied that the image was clear, she zipped the bag shut, kicked the drawer closed and tossed her gloves into the garbage can.

Ten minutes later, she climbed into the back seat of the Evade, still feeling cold. Rock looked over the back seat and frowned.

“Are you all right, Miss Ashley?” he asked.

Ashley nodded. “Yes, I’m fine. I just hate morgues, they creep me the hell out. Let’s go.”

“Where?” Rock asked.

“Anywhere but here,” Ashley replied. “Somewhere warm with a decent Wi-Fi signal. I need to find a photo of Frulov’s ear.”

Rock’s brow creased with confusion, but he did what he was asked. Soon, they were parked on the sand facing the ocean, not too far from a beach bar’s Wi-Fi signal. Ashley watched the waves on the sand for some time before she turned her attention to finding an image of Frulov’s ear. It was a little known fact that the right technology could identify a person by their ear 97 percent of the time, making it just as accurate, though more difficult, than using fingerprints. The reality was that most body parts could be tracked back to the person given enough time and technology.

Finding the ear turned out to be more challenging than she’d thought, however. Frulov kept himself out of the light as much as possible, which meant no pictures, not even publicity shots. Though he was a licensed medical doctor, he rarely, if ever practiced, leaving the work to more capable physicians while he took his cut and lurked in the lucrative shadow of organized crime.

After an hour of digging, she found a Scotland Yard photograph of Frulov taken under the name Ilijia Kronen and ran the comparison to the one she’d taken. Three times, it came up negative, no matter which search she tried. The person in the cooler was most likely not Igor Frulov, Ilijia Kronen or any of the other half dozen names Frulov had used over the last twenty-five years. The question was, who was the corpsicle, and where the hell was Frulov?

Out of curiosity, she checked Frulov’s other assets. Thanks to the FBI,
Sanctuary
and all his other material goods had been seized by the Marshal’s Service. It was only by sheer luck he’d gotten most of his money into offshore accounts. It would take days, if ever, for the feds to lock down those accounts. It was a good bet they wouldn’t bother, as far as they were concerned, he was dead and the case was closed.

You’re still here
, Ashley thought.
No way did you get out of the country yet,
and we’re going to find you.

She tapped her teeth with one nail and stared at her tablet. Airplanes were out, at least until he got a new passport and the heat died down a little. It would take a day or two for everyone to get the memo that he was supposedly dead. Cars and commercial ocean liners were out for the same reason. And there was nothing that said he was fleeing the country anyway. He had a good thing going. This was only a minor hiccup in an otherwise illustrious criminal career, and Frulov had more than enough money in offshore accounts to start his business up again in a matter of days.

She pulled up the picture of “Faux Frulov” again. At a glance, the man was the spitting image of the real Frulov. Same height, weight, hairstyle, hair color—he could have been Igor’s brother, if he’d had one.

She stared a few minutes longer then smiled.

“Rock, would you get me a soda from the bar?” she asked. “This might take a little longer than I’d thought.”

Smoak sat on her bike for a long time, watching the distant marina. She had seen the marshals come and seize
Sanctuary
as well as a pair of Cadillacs and four jet skis, and she hadn’t moved the whole time. After an hour, she started the bike and turned back toward Miami. She didn’t really know where she was going, but wasn’t surprised when she found herself outside of Blaze’s apartment. The Honda was parked on the street outside, so she made her way up to the fourth floor and knocked.

When Blaze didn’t answer right away, she turned to leave. The door opened behind her and she heard Blaze gasp.

“Kam? Honey, are you okay?”

Smoak turned and remembered the dried blood in her hair. “Yeah…the blood isn’t mine. Can I come in?”

“Of course, come on,” Blaze replied.

She took Smoak by the hand and half-dragged her into the apartment and to one of the sofas. She then closed the door and Smoak heard her put something in the microwave.

“What happened?” Blaze asked, sitting next to Smoak.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time again,” Smoak replied. “And someone died.”

“Did you get hurt?” Blaze asked.

Smoak shook her head. “Not really. A few bumps and bruises, nothing to worry about.”

Blaze frowned. “Kam, you don’t seem like yourself. I saw you after you killed that nutso sniper, and you weren’t like this. Talk to me.”

Smoak looked at Blaze and took a breath. “I thought it was you.”

“What?” Blaze asked.

“The girl who died,” Smoak replied. “When I first saw her lying there I thought it was you, and I freaked. I just shut down.”

Blaze pulled Smoak into her arms and kissed her cheek. “I’m sorry, honey. But you know it wasn’t me. I’m here safe and sound, and I know you did whatever you could to save her.”

Smoak frowned and picked at the blood in her hair. “You’re taking this awful easy.”

Blaze laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m not. But the last thing you need right now is me freaking out because my new girlfriend is covered in someone else’s blood. You can freak now, and I’ll go off the deep end later.”

Smoak smiled and kissed Blaze with gentle lips. “Thank you, B.”

“You’re welcome. I was going to make you some hot chocolate, but maybe a shower would help more,” Blaze said.

“I should go—”

“—take a shower,” Blaze finished. “You aren’t leaving this apartment until you’re clean and yourself again. You can use my bathroom, and I’ll get you some fresh clothes.”