Wherever She Goes(36)

According to my research, Zima is only twenty-seven. He looks older, though. There’s no uncertainty in his gaze, no hesitation. He’s the king of his pride, surveying the watering hole while his lionesses and hyenas all jockey for his attention.

Seeing him up close does not answer the question of whether or not he’s Brandon’s father. Brandon takes after his mother, and Zima looks like the photo I saw—good-looking white guy with dark blond hair and blue eyes. Brandon is also white, blond, and blue-eyed. So is—was—Kim.

But this is still Denis Zima. The reason I’m here. Now what?

I have no idea. I don’t know what I was hoping for—that I’d see him and notice some secret mark that proved he was Brandon’s father? Hell, I hadn’t seen such a mark on the boy, so how would I find the same one on Zima?

I didn’t know why I came here. Now I don’t know why I’m staying here. Desperation, I guess. Desperation and frustration, and the sense that this was the next logical step and that if I showed up here tonight, all would be revealed to me.

Forget what I hoped to find. What can I find, now that I’m here? What am I looking for?

Brandon.

I am following a trail to Brandon. To a lost boy that no one else knows is lost.

Kim Mikhailov is dead. After years of hiding her son from the world, she has been murdered, her son gone. And the boy’s potential father just happens to be in Chicago at the same time. That must mean something..

I slip into a back hall. I’m looking for an office. Looking for a computer. There’s bound to be one, and there’s unlikely to be anyone working on it at this time of night.

Find an office computer and search it for anything useful. I’d love to find emails or documents telling me where Zima is staying—and possibly keeping Brandon—but I’ll settle for any useful tidbits. A computer always has those.

I establish the layout of the building quickly. That’s one thing Ruben taught me. When breaking into a place, don’t go straight for the goods, even if you know where they are. Look around and get a mental map. Note exits. Note hiding spots. Note areas that might contain unexpected treasure . . . or dangers.

The first floor is the club itself. There’s also a small kitchen. Nothing huge—this is a place that serves food because it doesn’t want you leaving if you get peckish, not because it wants you coming for dinner. There’s a basement. I’m going to guess that’s storage. There’s also a second story, with stairs around the back. That’s the most likely spot to find an office.

I don’t just walk around opening doors. There are people here, staff zipping up and down the corridors. Staff who will be quick to point me back to the dance floor. Still, I do know how to do this. These skills don’t come from Ruben. We only ever broke into empty houses. I learned this part from, well, from playing video games.

I’ve always been fond of first-person shooters, and I’m not the kind of player who blasts her way through to a goal. I approach the task with care, favoring stealth over force. Games like that offer an endless array of almost-empty buildings with the quest target hidden in the middle, requiring the player to pass umpteen guards who are, apparently, assigned to patrol one hall and only one hall. Which means that I’m very good at scoping out an area, finding every hiding spot, and then leapfrogging from one to the next while avoiding that gun-toting commando . . . or eagle-eyed server.

I make it upstairs without being spotted. It’s not a full level—the club takes up part with its high ceiling. From the top of the stairs, it’s dark, and I see and hear nothing.

I check doors as I walk. There’s a lounge area. An empty room with construction equipment. And then a locked door. It’s a simple lock, intended to keep people from accidentally wandering in. I open it with a credit card.

Right inside the door, a dead bolt waits on the floor, along with a cordless screwdriver. That makes me chuckle. It seems that someone did foresee the need for more security . . . they just haven’t quite gotten to it yet.

This is indeed the office. Filing cabinets. Two desks. One desktop computer. I check the cabinets first. Empty. Then I flip through a stack of papers on the desk. Purchase orders and work orders. On to the computer.

It’s password-protected, which would take time to crack, if I didn’t check under the keyboard and find the password there. Hey, it’s a new office, new computer . . . it’s easy to forget these things. To their credit, they’ve used a complex password, one of random letters and numbers. Good for security; lousy for remembering.

I enter the password. The desktop opens, and I go straight to the contact list. I find an entry for Zima. I make note of his cell phone number and email address. That’s when I remember the two unidentified numbers on Kim’s phone record, the one with no answer and the one out of service. I pull those up on my cell and punch them into the desktop computer for full file-system search. No match.

I zip through email, but the computer belongs to whoever is playing office manager, and it’s clean. Clean in the sense that there’s nothing incriminating. It’s all business.

I type in Kim’s names, real and fake. A global document search brings up nothing.

I try “Brandon.” I do get matches, but only because that’s the surname of a contractor.

Next I go into the trash—the computer’s trash bin, that is. Nothing.