Wherever She Goes(33)

I know how to use this piece of metal to my advantage, how to stalk the Web for my prey with every tool at my disposal. Image recognition is my best friend today. Here is this picture of a fifteen-year-old girl. Find me more like it.

The tool I’m using isn’t a free Web service either. A couple of years ago, I saw a news piece about a “suburban housewife” who’d been exposed as a former drug mule by a partner in crime stumbling over her photo online. That sparked a fresh wave of my paranoia, and I’d gone through a period of obsessively checking for my photo online, untagging it on Facebook and so on. I found the best photo-recognition software available, and I still have access to it.

Even that entails wading through photos of blond girls until I have to make a pit stop at a pharmacy for eye drops. There is something about Kim’s face that sets it apart, though, things I hadn’t fully processed when I first met her. Wide-spaced eyes. A widow’s peak. A nose that’s just a little crooked, as if it’s been reset. A tooth chipped and never repaired.

I excavate the mountain of near hits and find Kim Mikhailov at the bottom, in an advertisement for “barely-legal exotic dancers” in LA. At the time, she’d been sixteen, wearing enough makeup that men could tell themselves she was older, but they’d know better.

I then find her in another photo, dated six months later, when she’d have just turned seventeen. She’s under the arm of a guy who looks about twenty. She’s dressed in a sheath dress that barely covers her top or bottom, and the photo catches her tugging down the back. I see marks on her arm now, but there’s no drugged-out vacancy behind those eyes. Instead, there’s a wide-eyed . . . Not innocence. I didn’t see that in her even at sixteen.

This look is one that’s staring wide-eyed at the world, feeling it stare back and not enjoying the sensation. She’s ducked down into the man’s arm, taking shelter there. He’s well-dressed, sleek-haired, looking very pleased with himself.

The photo appears on an old Facebook page for a defunct club. There’s no name attached to either Kim or her date. It’s just part of a series of photos taken at the opening celebrations. But when I search on the guy’s face, I get an exact copy of this photo on a personal Facebook page, a private one that I have to hack to access. There the same photo has a caption: “The boss & his girl, looking fine.”

Dig, dig, dig. Find the connection. Endlessly chase those connections.

The guy who owns this page once worked for the young man with Kim, and the fact that he called her the boss’s “girl” suggests she was more than a casual date.

I find the answer with less work than I would have expected . . . because the guy who owns the Facebook profile once worked for the club where Kim danced. That club had been owned by two guys. One of them died years ago of a drug overdose. The other’s name is Denis Zima. He’s the one in the photo with Kim.

It doesn’t take much research to learn that Zima wasn’t just an entrepreneurial nineteen-year-old with the cash to open a strip club. He’s the son of a guy with links to the Russian mob. He started the club with a friend from high school—the one who died of an overdose. That club, where Kim worked, closed a year later, and Zima started a chain of nightclubs without the strippers and underage girls.

I’m not sure this gets me anywhere new. Yes, Denis Zima seems to have been Kim’s boyfriend at the right time to make him a candidate for Brandon’s daddy. And he’s definitely a shady character. But that’s for the police to investigate.

I’m about to close my browser when I see the results of my last search, looking for more information on Denis Zima and his clubs. My gaze catches on the third listing from the top, the search engine picking up my current location and highlighting results that might interest me most.

It’s an advertisement announcing the opening of Zima’s fifth club, Zodiac Five. Right here in Chicago. While it’s been operating for the past week, it hasn’t had an official grand opening. That’s tonight.



I do not make plans to go to the Zodiac Five grand opening. That would be crazy. I am not—I am rarely crazy.

The point is that, according to the article, Zima is in town for the opening. Coincidence that he’s here around the same time his ex was murdered? I have no idea. I’ll leave that to the police. I’ll let them know about Zima when I give them Kim’s name. That doesn’t stop me from periodically pausing my searches to look for any progress on the murder case, hoping that I’ll see something new. That I’ll find proof the police have followed my lead and identified the murdered woman, at least as Kim Mason. When I don’t, I’m frustrated, and it only furthers my fear that Officer Jackson blocked my tip.

It doesn’t help that Jackson has left two more increasingly terse “Call me back” messages. Before I leave Chicago, though, I make a call of my own, after hunting down a pay phone. I dial the Oxford Police Department tip line. This time, I don’t bother with the preamble.

“Your dead woman is Kimberly Mikhailov,” I say. “She’s been living here as Kim Mason. She’s originally from Cedar Rapids, and she has a son named—”

“Please hold.”

“What? No. You don’t understand. I know the identity of the woman shot in Harris Park this week. Her name—”

The phone is ringing, my words unheard. I wait, seething. I understand Oxford is a small city, but putting a tipster on hold is unbelievably—