I nearly groaned when I realized Grinkov was going to stick close behind me. I wobbled once as I moved past Dutch and I saw his hand jerk toward me. Reflexively and with supreme effort I tilted away from him and back toward Grinkov, who caught me under the arm and helped to steady me as we made our way into the living room. Once I was on the couch, I sat down and inhaled several deep breaths.
Dutch got me some ice wrapped in a dish towel and handed that to Grinkov, who sat next to me and placed it behind my head. The cool compress was so welcome I could have wept. “Thank you,” I whispered.
“Does it hurt much?” Grinkov asked me.
I gave a tiny nod. “It’s a killer.”
“Rick,” Grinkov said, his tone once again testy. “You must have some pain medicine. Get her something to help with the headache.”
I heard Dutch shuffling around in the kitchen and then down the hallway to our bedroom. He came back out shortly and I opened my eyes to see him hand me a glass of water and the pill. “Who mugged you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I got knocked on the head, and when I came to, my wallet was missing.”
Throb, throb, throb went Dutch’s temple. “Huh,” he grunted.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you home?” Grinkov asked me, and I could tell he clearly didn’t want to leave me in the dispassionate company of Rick Des Vries.
“I can take her,” Dutch said quickly. “After all, she and I still need to go over some of the details for the auction.”
Grinkov sighed like he didn’t like that idea, but he let it go, thank God. Getting to his feet, he looked down at me. “Please call me later to let me know you’re feeling better,” he said.
I forced a small smile. “Absolutely. And thank you again for the ride.”
Grinkov then turned to the elevator and we all heard his phone give a beep. He pulled it out of his pocket and read the display before turning back to us. “It’s a text from Boklovich. He has heard from his contact in possession of the drone. They will be attending the auction.”
I resisted the urge to look at Dutch, afraid my emotions would give us away. “Great,” I said. “I look forward to seeing who will get the highest price.”
Grinkov smiled devilishly. “Yes,” he said. “It should be a very successful event.”
The moment the doors closed behind Grinkov, Dutch was at my side. “Jesus!” he said, pulling away the ice pack and parting my hair to look at the lump on the back of my head.
I hissed as he fussed around back there. “Easy, cowboy,” I whispered.
He kissed my cheek and eased my head back against the cushion, looking critically at me again. “I think you have a concussion.”
“Yep,” I said, closing my eyes again and just praying that eventually the world would stop spinning.
“I’m calling Frost and having him send the doctor over.”
“Good idea.”
Dutch moved off the couch, and while he was dialing the phone, I asked, “Where is Frost anyway?”
“Out looking for Mandy.” Frost must have come on the line then because Dutch began speaking fast and furious to him. In short order I learned that Frost had located Mandy and was bringing her back to the condo, and by the sound of it, the trip home wasn’t going smoothly. Frost also assured Dutch that he would send the doctor right over.
The kindly man appeared at our door not ten minutes later, and when he sat down in front of me, he said, “You two seem to attract more than your fair share of trouble.”
“Tell me about it,” I said to him.
He told me to follow his penlight, which I had a heck of a time doing, and asked me several random questions like, “What is today’s date?”
“Aww, man,” I said honestly, “I don’t remember. Since I’ve been on this mission, I haven’t really looked at a calendar. I know it’s sometime in May, right?”
The doctor smirked. “What’s your birthday?”
“December twenty-ninth.” I eyed Dutch humorously. “See? Even with a concussion I can remember it. How come you can’t?”
“I forgot it
one
time,” he replied with a laugh.
“Who is the prime minister of Canada?”
“Beats the heck out of me,” I said.
At this point Frost came in handcuffed to Mandy, who was pulling and tugging and beating on him like crazy. “I
hate
you!” she screeched.
In spite of the awful pain in my head I couldn’t help but smirk at him in an “I told you so” way.
The doctor had turned his attention away from me and he seemed somewhat alarmed by the commotion. “Doc,” Frost asked him in exasperation. “Can you
do
something with her?”
The good doctor blinked. “Like what, Agent Frost?”
“I don’t know, sedate her or something?”
“No!” Mandy shouted, tugging and pulling and hitting poor Frost for all she was worth.
Dutch stood abruptly and moved menacingly over to her. He didn’t put up with crap like that. Mandy took one look at him and cowered, shielding her face as she cried, “Wait! I’m so sorry! Please,
please
don’t hit me!”
Every single person in the room stopped to suck in a breath. “Oh, man,” I whispered as Mandy crouched low and held up both her arms, trying to cover her face and her head, while she shivered pathetically from head to toe like a frightened puppy.
Dutch immediately backed off, and the look on his face told me flat out that he was disgusted by the character he was being forced to portray. Frost dug into his pocket and extracted the key to the handcuffs. In short order he had Mandy out of them and gently guided her over to the opposite side of the room, where he placed a blanket over her legs and switched on the television. She continued to shiver and cower for long after that, but at least she’d settled down.
The doctor went back to examining me, concluding that my concussion was likely mild but severe enough that he wanted me to consider getting a CT scan, which I refused. He then prescribed bed rest and a pain pill every eight hours as needed, and told both Dutch and Frost to call him if I began showing signs of confusion, disorientation, or if I began vomiting; much the same as he told them about me only a few days before, and Dutch a few days before that.
Dutch moved my legs onto the ottoman and brought a blanket from the bedroom, then replaced the ice pack behind my head with a fresh compress. During all this he also brought Frost up to speed on what had happened to me at Eaton Centre, and about Grinkov escorting me home.
“How did Grinkov find you at Eaton Centre of all places?” Frost asked.
“He called me right after I dropped Mandy at the nail salon. He wanted to have lunch and I told him I was there shopping. I don’t know why he decided to come find me, but he did.”
Dutch eyed me coolly for a minute but didn’t say anything, and I sure as heck didn’t add anything more to the explanation, as I could clearly see the vein in his temple throbbing again. Instead I decided to change the subject. “Where’d you find Mandy?”
“Same place you left her,” Frost said, looking over his shoulder at her as she watched a
Friends
rerun. “She was still running around Eaton Centre like a wild child.”
That surprised me. “When she took off, I had no idea where she’d gone. I assumed she’d hightail it out of the shopping area as fast as she could.”
“When you called us to tell us that Mandy was missing, I didn’t know exactly where you’d gone shopping, so I put a trace on the credit card I gave you. There was a charge at a nail salon located at Eaton Centre, and a few minutes later one at Coach, then another at Michael Kors and on and on. Basically we just followed the bread crumbs.”
“Wow,” I said. “What’d she buy?”
“What
didn’t
she buy? In an hour she’d rung up fifteen thousand in purchases.” Frost glared at Mandy, who was totally oblivious to anything but the TV.
I barely managed to stifle a laugh. “Where is all the stuff?”
“Being returned,” Frost said. “And how’d you lose sight of her, anyway?”
It was my turn to look guilty. “I dropped her at the nail salon while I went to get Dutch some sunglasses.”
“Why do I need sunglasses?” he asked.
I pointed him to my purse, because I remembered the glasses I’d purchased were thankfully still in my bag. “I wanted to get you the same kind Des Vries wore in the video that Frost showed me this morning. I figured your excuse could be that you’re trying to hide the bruises around your eyes, and if that Arab guy shows up and sees you in the same sunglasses, he might not wonder so much why you look a little different than the man he remembers meeting with three years ago.”
Dutch poked through my purse and lifted out the small bag from Neiman’s. As he held them up, he took note of the tag and whistled. “These were expensive, Edgar.”
“Des Vries wouldn’t be seen in anything cheap,” I assured him.
“No,” he said. “What I mean is, the person who mugged you took your wallet and your stun gun while leaving behind a pair of three-hundred-dollar sunglasses?”
“Someone’s definitely after you, Cooper,” Frost said in a way that sent a chill down my spine.
“Maybe it was just a mugger who didn’t have time to grab the sunglasses before Maks and his butler showed up,” I argued, wanting that to be the case but knowing in my bones that Dutch and Frost were right. Someone had my number and wanted me out of the way.
“I don’t think so,” Dutch said, and I could tell he was weighing the argument to get me bumped off the case. “I think this might be the same guy who tried to strangle you, and possibly even the same person that took out Viktor.”
“But we don’t know for sure,” I insisted. There was no way I was going to let Dutch use this as an excuse to go in by himself. I’d never see him again; of that I was certain. “I mean, the pattern is a little off, don’t you think?”
“No,” said Frost. “What’re you getting at?”
“Well, to Dutch’s point, if this is the same guy who first tried to include me in the murder of Kozahkov and his bodyguards, then tried to strangle me, why only bump me on the head? Why not kill me with the same gun he used to kill Viktor?”
I could tell that stumped both of them, and I used that momentum to further my argument. “It’s almost as if the violence against me is being subdued on purpose. Don’t get me wrong, guys—my head is killing me, but it wasn’t a lethal blow by any measure. If the goal had been to kill me, then that’s what should have happened. Instead, someone merely conked me on the head, then sifted through my purse and took my wallet. No assassin is going to knock someone out and sort through their personals in a crowded parking garage for cripe’s sake! Trust me, this isn’t an assassin. It’s simply a thief who took advantage of me when I was alone, distracted, and vulnerable, and maybe he already had a pair of expensive sunglasses, or maybe he just didn’t have time to grab them too.”
Dutch and Frost exchanged a long look, and I could tell I’d managed to put a little bit of doubt into their theory. Finally, Frost said, “Fine. You can stay on the mission, but you’re done going anywhere alone. And I don’t care if Grinkov really wants to have you over for dinner again—the answer to him will be, ‘After the auction,’ you got that?”
I nodded obediently, even though the action hurt. “Got it.”
Dutch’s lips pressed together in a tight seal and he said nothing more. Instead, he turned on his heel and headed to the bedroom.
A
while later Dutch joined us again and began cooking dinner. I was feeling less woozy and Mandy was peacefully watching TV, while Frost checked in with HQ. When he got off the phone, he didn’t look happy. “There’s been a development,” he said, coming over to sit in the chair opposite me.
“What?” Dutch asked from his place at the stove.
“We’ve found Oksana Fedotova.”
Dutch turned around, his brow raised. “The one we think was involved with the drone pilot and had a possible connection to Kozahkov?”
Frost nodded.
“Is she talking?” Dutch asked.
Frost shook his head. “She’s dead. Her body was found in her car parked at long-term parking near the airport. She had a ticket to Toronto in her purse and two big suitcases full of clothes in the trunk.”
I swallowed hard. “How long had she been dead?”
“At least a week,” Frost said. “Maybe longer.”
“How was she killed?” I pressed.
“Strangled,” Frost told me.
“With a shoelace?” Dutch asked, and I knew why he was asking.
Frost shrugged. “Hard to say,” he said. “Decomp barely allowed the ligature marks to appear, but her hyoid’s been broken and no other obvious signs of trauma were found, so someone used something like that to take her out.”
Dutch turned back to stir his sauce, but even from the couch I could hear him sigh heavily.
“So we’ve come to another dead end,” I said, belatedly regretting the pun.
“We have,” said Frost.
At that moment, Dutch’s cell chimed and he pulled it out of his pocket to check the text. We all waited for him to tell us what it said, and finally he picked his head up and addressed us. “That’s Grinkov. The auction is set. We leave for B.C. on his private jet tomorrow at noon.”
T
hat night I sat in the bedroom feeling much better physically, although I still had to suffer through the coming-to-Jesus meeting that Dutch and Frost were having with Mandy out in the kitchen. And trust me when I tell you that it was a very LOUD coming-to-Jesus meeting.
From what I could overhear, Mandy was still really miffed at the fact that Frost had taken away all her purchases, and Frost and Dutch were attempting to remind her of her arrangement with the United States government.
“What you fail to understand, Mandy,” Frost was saying, “is that if you screw this up for us, it’s not just Agent Rivers and Ms. Cooper whose lives will be at risk, but your own too.”