In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(49)

“So you’re convinced?” Sveti asked. “You’re so sure that what I remember is just a hallucination?”

Val looked pained. “Sveti, we must examine every possible—”

“Then examine the possibility that what I told you is what actually happened.” Her voice rang out, challenging them. “I invite you to examine that, all of you. Please. Do me that courtesy.”

Val nodded. “Very well, let us examine it,” he said. “Go through it again now, from the very top. Every last tiny detail.”

So Sveti went through the whole thing, just as she’d told it to Sam, just as she’d told it to Tenly and Horvath. Not missing a beat or a detail.

After she concluded, they all stared at one another, at a loss.

“So the Ukrainian hired at least one snakehead for this job,” Sveti concluded. “I don’t know why, but that’s what happened.”

“Tell me again about the photo,” Tam said.

“I displayed it in my TED talk,” Sveti said. “A picture of my father, too. Remember the photo that arrived in the mail after she died, with the poem snippets on the back? The one she sent like a postcard?”

“Let’s see them,” Nick said.

Sveti reached for her tablet and pulled up the first one, tapping to enlarge it. “She sent me the JPEG by e-mail, too. In the very last batch of pictures she ever sent me.”

She pushed the tablet to the middle of the table. Everyone leaned to study it. Sam waited a decent interval, then spun the tablet a quarter turn. Sveti’s mother had been a stunner. No surprise there. Blonde, but the full, sexy mouth, the stubborn set of the jaw, the elegant nose, the winged brows, the big, haunting eyes, all were echoed in Sveti’s face.

But other than being a compelling portrait of a beautiful woman on a rocky, unidentifiable hillside, he saw nothing about the photo that could be significant to anyone but Sveti.

Sveti tapped on the tablet once again. “This was the other one that I had up on the same screen. This is my father.”

Sam took a quick look before pushing it back toward the others. Sergei had passed on Sveti’s amazing cheekbones. Handsome guy, dark and slit-eyed, crow’s-feet wrinkled up in a feral grin. He looked tough. There were two other men, lifting their glasses in a toast. The shot had been snapped from inside a house, looking out through a window.

Becca pointed, her mouth tight. “That’s Zhoglo.”

Nick squeezed her shoulders. “Dead and gone.”

“He haunts me, though,” she said. “The bastard.”

Sam leaned to examine the mafiya vor’s swollen, grinning face, then the younger guy. “How about that guy?” Sam asked. “Who’s he?”

“I don’t know,” Sveti said. “And there’s no one left to ask.”

Yeah, that was the thing exactly. No one wanted to say it, but there it sat, begging to be said. There was no one left to ask, and nothing left to ask about, because everyone associated with this old story was dead and gone. The phantom torturer had been asking questions about Sveti’s unresolved psychological issues. Nothing that was relevant or current. He didn’t know a gentle way to say it, so he kept his mouth shut. Let some other poor fool point it out.

“Your mother took this?” he asked, indicating the photo.

Sveti nodded. “She was a gifted photographer.”

“Here are the pictures by Sveti’s bed!” Rachel popped up suddenly. “The ones in the gold frame! I ran and got them.” She held up the hinged frame triumphantly. Her eyes sparkled with excitement.

“We’ve talked about eavesdropping, baby,” Tam said sharply.

Rachel shrugged. “If it’s about Sveti, I need to know about it.”

“We looked at these pictures already, sweetheart, on Sveti’s tablet, but thank you anyway,” Becca told her gently.

Sam took the photo frame from Rachel’s hand and examined it. They were, in fact, the same ones Sveti had just shown them, but these had been trimmed to fit the frames. The shot of Sveti’s mother was cut to half its original size, and something was scrawled in Cyrillic script over the top, with a couple of numbers below. The one of Sergei was trimmed, too, the third man cut away, but Zhoglo still smirked in it, his bulbous goblin face positioned right over Sergei Ardov’s shoulder.

“You keep a picture of Vadim Zhoglo by your bed?” Sam said.

Sveti frowned. “No, I keep a picture of my father by my bed,” she said stiffly. “It’s the only one I have where he’s smiling.”

“His murderer is smiling, too. Doesn’t that bug you?”

Sveti shrugged. “You have to take the bad with the good, if you want to salvage anything.”

“You lie in your bed at night and let that monster leer at you?” he asked, incredulous. “And that doesn’t hurt you?”

“Back off!” she snapped. “Maybe it does, I don’t know, but I’m used to things hurting. I don’t even notice.”

It made him furious that Sveti should be so used to things being painful that something so f*cking crazy horrible as having Zhoglo’s ugly mug enshrined on her bedside table should just slip right past her. Unnoticed, among all the other crazy horrible things.

“That needs to change,” he announced. He unhooked the lever in the back that held the picture in place, and the chunk of cardboard picture backing fell out, along with the picture.