Brainy-BOOM! Page 5

  “Over there,” I said, pointing at the only other door in the garage. It was on the far wall, and it had a keypad too. I strode over and punched in 10-13-69. Nothing happened.

  “01-23-71,” Molly said, pointing up at the lintel of the doorjamb.

  I punched in that combination and opened the door. A pinewood-paneled elevator big enough for four people stood empty in front of us.

  I held up my hand. “Wait a sec’.”

  Reaching into my backpack, I pulled out the spray bottle of luminol Janet had given me. Legally, she would never be able to use any evidence of blood spatter I discovered, but if the tests were positive, she would have proof that a murder had been committed.

  I left Molly in the garage and closed the door. I sprayed the walls and the industrial brown carpet covering the floor of the elevator to check for traces of blood. I turned out the lights. A faint blue glow appeared on the carpet near the front of the elevator.

  I swabbed the area with two Q-tips and put them in a baggy. The killer had dragged Zhukov’s body into the elevator, probably by pulling on his feet. This would position his head near the front where I found the bloodstains.

  I turned the elevator’s lights back on and opened the door. Molly faced me. Her eyes were wide open, her lips forming a nearly perfect oval.

  Before I could say anything, I heard the reason for the terrified look on her face. The clickety-clack of high heels echoed on the cement steps behind us. The lights on the stairway had come on.

  Uh-oh!

  22

  Before Molly could speak, I grabbed her arm and yanked her into the elevator. The garage room’s automatic lights went off as I pulled the outside elevator door shut.

  On the elevator wall to my right were two unmarked buttons, one on top of the other. I jabbed at the upper one several times and waited as the elevator door slowly closed.

  Hurry up!

  The elevator jerked a couple of times and finally ascended.

  “Whadda we do?” Molly whispered.

  “We hide somewhere,” I whispered back.

  “Where?”

  “It can’t be in the bathroom.”

  “He has a bathroom in his office?”

  “A big one, but that’s where the killer hid when I came in the first time. If she’s here to see if she left any evidence behind, that’ll be the first place she might check.”

  “The killer’s a woman?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s possible the woman had her pimp with her and he was the shooter.”

  “It sounded like a woman’s high heels. I didn’t hear any other footsteps. Maybe she came back by herself.”

  “Or she acted alone and she’s the killer.”

  The elevator jerked to a stop, and the door slid open. We faced a second door with a waist-high button in the middle. I pushed it, and a door opened into Zhukov’s office.

  The last time I was here, the room was dark except for the light from the three computer screens and the windows. It was again. I took out a small flashlight from my backpack and turned it on. Molly followed me into the shadowy room.

  Reaching back into the elevator, I punched the down button and stepped back. The door slid closed, and I heard the elevator descend. The large picture of Leningrad covered the other side of the hidden elevator door. I pushed it closed.

  Using the flashlight to guide us, I sprinted toward the kitchen. Opening the door, I looked over my shoulder, expecting to find Molly close behind me. She wasn’t. She stood by Zhukov’s desk, staring at the screen savers on his computers.

  “Molly, what are you doing?” I said, waving at her. “Get in here.”

  “But I’ve seen these pictures before.”

  “Which isn’t going to help us right now. If the lady coming up in the elevator has a weapon with her, you’re going to be stuck in the middle of a gunfight.”

  “Oh, right.”

  She ran toward me and made six steps before she did a “Tina,” catching her high heels in the carpet and doing a full face plant. She shook her head and tried to stand up. I heard the elevator begin to ascend.

  Adrenaline surged through my system. I ran back, put the flashlight between my teeth, grabbed her arms, and dragged her toward the kitchen. As we reached it, the elevator stopped.

  I heard a click.

  The intruder had arrived.

  23

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw the picture of Leningrad opening toward us.

  Hurry up!

  Dragging Molly into the kitchen, I quickly closed the door and spit out my flashlight. She sat up and opened her mouth to speak, but I put my right hand over her lips to stop her.

  “Do not say anything,” I whispered. “Someone is in the next room. Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  I removed my hand.

  “But...” she began.

  I whipped my hand back over her mouth and frantically shook my head back and forth.

  “Quiet,” I whispered.

  “Oh, right,” she mumbled through my fingers.

  I helped her up and grabbed my flashlight. I turned it off and put it back into my backpack. I walked to the door to listen. I heard the clicking of a computer keyboard.

  What is going on in there?

  I reached out to open the kitchen door enough to see what was happening. Before I could do it, a light unexpectedly came on behind me. I whirled around. Molly stood in front of one of the two Viking refrigerators. She held the door open. I snapped my fingers at her. She turned to me and shrugged her shoulders. I pantomimed shutting the door. She did and the light went out.

  I turned back to the kitchen door and could still hear the clicking of the computer board keys. I opened the door a sliver, enough to see that the intruder was a woman. She was alone and had flipped on the desk lamp.

  She was small and slender, almost petite. She had thick, long black hair. Large designer sunglasses had to make it hard for her to see in the dim room light, but they also hid her eyes and masked much of her face. Her face was white, possibly from makeup, and she wore bright red lipstick.

  She had on latex gloves and worked at the middle computer. I watched as she inserted a flash drive and began downloading the contents from the hard drive. While she waited, she opened up the other two computers. She scanned the screens but didn’t put a flash drive in either one of those machines.

  While the middle computer continued to download the contents of its hard drive, she picked up a large handbag and walked to the bathroom to the left of the fireplace. She took out a bottle and rags from the bag.

  I closed the door, pulled the Glock out of my backpack, and turned back to Molly. I pointed with the gun to my right to indicate that the intruder was in the room to our right. If she was the killer and came into the kitchen, my only option was to try and stop her before she shot us.

  I opened the door and peeked out. The sound of running water meant only one thing. She was cleaning the bathroom to destroy any evidence that she had previously been in there.

  24

  When the woman finished cleaning the bathroom, she walked back to Zhukov’s desk. She removed the flash drive and shut down all three computers. She picked up a different bottle from her purse and sprayed the chair and desk.

  She did the same thing to the carpet that led from Zhukov’s chair to the elevator. She shut off the desk lamp. A faint blue glow appeared on the carpet in front of the elevator. She turned on the lamp and cleaned that area and then the desk and chair.

  I thought I saw her begin to turn toward me, so I closed the door and waited with my ear to the wood and the Glock in my hand. The only sound I heard was my rapidly increasing pulse pounding in my ears.

  I heard a click and peeked out. I watched her pull back the Leningrad picture/door, step back, shut off the lamp, and step onto the elevator.

  With the computers and desk lamp shut off, the room was totally dark, but I was able to get a good look at her from the lights in the elevator. For
the first time, I observed her muscular legs, which were made more impressive by the heels she wore.

  They were mine.

  “Gosh, check that out,” Molly said. She stood behind me looking over the top of my head.

  “Check what out?”

  “Her shoes. They’re like the ones I helped you pick out.”

  “They are the ones you helped me pick out.”

  The woman closed the Leningrad picture/door. I heard the noise of the elevator door closing. The sound of the elevator moving indicated she was leaving.

  Finally.

  I turned on my flashlight and used it as we walked into the dark main office. I snapped on the desk lamp and turned off my flashlight.

  “How did she get your shoes?” Molly asked.

  “After I found Zhukov’s body, I tried to get out of here, but I did a faceplant on the carpet just like you did. I couldn’t run in those stupid high heels, so I left them.”

  “And she stole them.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Why would she wear them here?”

  “If she leaves any imprints on the thick carpet from the shoes, or any trace particles from the soles, it will come from my shoes and not hers.”

  “Then the CSI guys will hunt for you and not her.”

  “That’s probably her plan.” I handed Molly a pair of latex gloves. “Put these on.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “They don’t go with my outfit.”

  “Humor me. This is a potential crime scene. We don’t want to leave our fingerprints.” I took several Handi Wipes out of my backpack. “Wipe down anything you touched in the kitchen.”

  While she did her assignment, I went into the bathroom. The odor of industrial strength cleaning solution made my eyes water and my nose sting. I was glad the odors no longer triggered one of my PTSD attacks, something that had plagued me since I was blown up chasing a story in Arlington, Virginia.

  Any evidence that had been in the bathroom was gone. I opened the bathroom cabinets, hoping she had missed something, but I stopped when I heard a noise that sounded like the squeaking of metal springs. This was followed by a loud thump on the floor in the office.

  Now what’s going on?

  25

  Molly stood next to the couch in front of the fireplace. She had thrown the cushions on the carpet and opened a foldout bed. The sheets were wrinkled.

  “How did you find this?” I asked, pointing at the bed.

  “Well, see, if I came up here to have sex with the Russian guy, where would we do it?”

  Good question.

  “I don’t know.” I looked around. “Maybe on the desk?”

  “Looks good in a movie, but it kills your back.”

  “The carpet?”

  “No way. I hate having rug burns on my butt and back. And my knees? Forget it.”

  “He had to have a bed.”

  “For sure, and here it is.” She paused. “He was a little kinky.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  She pointed at the ceiling. I glanced up and saw my reflection in a large recessed mirror I hadn’t noticed before. Molly stared in the mirror and then ran her fingers through her hair and shook her head. She reached into her purse and put on fresh lipstick. Greg said she never passed up a chance to check herself out in a mirror, and he was right, even if it was on the ceiling.

  “Greg doesn’t like our ceiling mirror,” she continued.

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “He says I spend too much time watching myself while we’re doing it and I don’t concentrate.”

  “I can see where that might be a problem.”

  “Only for him, honey.”

  She opened my backpack and took out the bottle of luminol.

  “Now what are you doing?” I asked.

  “Gosh, don’t you ever watch CSI?” she asked.

  “We don’t watch much TV.”

  She sprayed the sheets. “I’m hunting for pecker tracks.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Pecker tracks. Guys don’t care what happens after they come. They fire away without thinking about what a mess they’re making. We can get DNA from this.”

  “I guess I missed the pecker track episode.”

  “It’s a good thing you brought me and not Cas or Linda. I don’t think they know much about this kind of stuff.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  I turned out the room lights. The sheets lit up like the Las Vegas strip.

  “He was a horny dude,” she said.

  “Obviously.”

  “Let’s strip the bed,” she said. “We can take these sheets with us and run the DNA through a cool machine with blinking lights and get the killer’s name and address.”

  She pulled the sheets off the mattress. I went into the bathroom and found fresh ones in the linen closet. We put the sheets on and wrinkled them up enough to make them appear to have been used.

  “The woman didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry when she was here,” I said. “If she took her time making sure she didn’t leave any evidence behind, why didn’t she take the sheets?”

  Molly stared at them. “Maybe she wasn’t in this bed last night.”

  “Or maybe her DNA isn’t in a database and she doesn’t care if it’s found on the sheets.”

  “Isn’t everyone’s DNA in a file somewhere? It sure is on all the cop shows.”

  “Hers would be, too, if she’s been arrested in the United States.”

  “But you don’t think it is.”

  “Maybe they imported her from Russia specifically for this job.”

  I folded Zhukov’s sheets and stuffed them into my backpack. We closed up the bed and replaced the cushions.

  26

  Preparing to leave, we stood in front of the Leningrad picture. I levered the money display switch. The door opened. I pushed the button to bring the elevator back up to us.

  I glanced at the computers to my left.

  Huh?

  “What did you tell me about finding the combination for the keypad to the door?” I asked.

  “I said the farmers told me most people can’t remember their computer passwords or combinations to locks, so they always write them down somewhere.”

  My heart did a somersault against my sternum. The killer just came into Zhukov’s office, and the first thing she did was download everything from his computer before she cleaned up any evidence.

  “Where would you hide the password for these computers?” I asked.

  She sat down behind Zhukov’s desk and swiveled back and forth in his chair as she inspected the area. She didn’t touch anything. She then swirled the chair around to face the windows. She pointed at the windowsill. “I would put it right there.”

  MW9151660D was printed on the windowsill.

  I sat down in front of the middle computer preparing to enter the password. The screen saver was a color family portrait picture of Zhukov, his wife Ellen, and two sons, Daniel and Ariel.

  “He’s kinda’ strange looking,” Molly said.

  “You mean the red hair?” I asked.

  “The red hair, the white skin, the pudgy body. No wonder he was paying for sex.”

  “This picture is an old one. His sons are married and have children of their own.”

  “He was a grandpa?”

  “Yep. He was seventy-four.”

  “No wonder he was kinky.”

  “Does being that age make you kinky?”

  “No, see, what I’m saying is that old guys aren’t usually into regular sex. They need something special to rev them up.”

  “Should I ask how you would know this?”

  “Before I met Greg, an older guy I hung out with when I was modeling told me a man can only have ten-thousand ejaculations in his lifetime. He said he regretted wasting so many of them when he wacked off as a teenager. He was down to his last couple of hundred and he didn’t want any mercy s
ex from his wife. He wanted something special.”