“The feds can be a real bother sometimes,” Boldt said.

“Indeed they can.”

“Counterfeit caviar?” Boldt asked. “Seriously?”

“Paddlefish eggs,” the general answered. “Gravely serious. We never heard about it until your Fish and Wildlife service discovered them bearing our label. Paddlefish, at four dollars an ounce, mixed in with our eighty-dollar Beluga. Like cutting cocaine with powdered milk.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Boldt said. “About either.”

“I am the victim here. But because I am Russian, I must be big mafia guy.” His attempt to come off as an innocent bordered on comical.

“Paddlefish eggs.”

“Bearing my label. Perhaps, when this small problem is resolved, we can work out an arrangement that is mutually satisfying.”

“The most I can do is look into it.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. The right motivation, it’s amazing what a man can do.”

“This late in the week,” Boldt reminded, “I’m unlikely to make much headway.”

“What a shame. For a moment there I thought we had a real connection.”

A knock on the glass window where LaMoia held a pack of cigarettes to the glass. Proletarskie.

The general saw this as well. “Russian brand. We import them along with half a dozen others.”

“Alekseevich smokes this brand,” Boldt said.

“Malina smoke? I do not think so. Too athletic.”

“Sell a lot of this brand, do you?”

“Enough to justify importing it,” Svengrad replied. “The kids at the raves. The colleges. They love Russian cigarettes. Much stronger. They make Camels look like Virginia Slims.”

“How many cartons, cases, a week?”

“You bring a warrant, I’ll gladly turn over this information. Otherwise, no reason to let my competitors know my numbers.”

“I’m not your competitor,” Boldt said.

“Sure you are.”

Boldt understood the general’s tactics then: gun and run. He struck an area of Boldt’s vulnerability, the video, and then came back with his own needs-the lockdown of his caviar-and then got defensive when his cigarettes came into play. Boldt might have enjoyed this more had Liz not been directly involved.

“You like birds, Lieutenant?”

“The winged variety?” Boldt asked, wondering what came next.

“The magpie will watch the same bird nest for hours. Must seem like forever, a brain that small. Patient like a saint. The mother bird leaves that nest, even for a moment, and the magpie eats her eggs. Right there in the nest.”

Boldt felt a warmth run through him, like he’d peed in his pants. He pictured the yellow yolk spread around the bird’s nest the same way the blood had been spilled around the cabin. Svengrad made sure his message was received. “You like art, Lieutenant?”

“Some.”

“I collect WPA-era charcoals. It’s a seller’s market right now. Smart time to watch for forgeries.” Svengrad sat on the word-an elephant on an egg. “The limitation of imitation,” he said. “It’s good of you to have stopped by.”

Dismissed, Boldt thought he meant to say.

Back in the Jetta, Boldt loosened his tie.

LaMoia said, “It’s not so much the salty taste that bothers me, but the way they pop between your teeth.”

“Smelling like low tide doesn’t help,” Boldt said.

“So what happened after I was excused?”

“I had to do that.”

“I understand,” LaMoia said, but his voice betrayed him.

“He wasn’t going to threaten me in front of someone.”

“And did he?”

“Not exactly, no. He wanted to cut a deal: his import business back for the video of Liz and Hayes.”

“Damn,” LaMoia said. He pulled the Jetta out onto wet streets. The sky this time of year was worse than a leaking faucet.

“His caviar business is important to him. We can assume that’s where the seventeen million came from in the first place: some undeclared profits.”

“You think it was his money?”

“I think it was. But his main message was a story about magpies.”

“What-pies?”

“Birds. He took the long way around to explain to me that the Hayes crime scene, the cabin, is a cheap imitation. His guys turned their backs, and somebody took Hayes.”

“You buy that?”

“There’s a second interpretation. This may just be me being paranoid.”

LaMoia waited.

“Liz and I drove the kids out to Kathy’s-my sister’s-in the middle of the night, Tuesday night. We literally took them out of our nest. Maybe I blew it. Maybe we were followed. Maybe he’s warning me not to try to move them again or he’ll take action the next time. Maybe he doesn’t know where they are and he’s looking for me to panic and lead him to them. We both know the Russians have a reputation of working the family when the going gets tough.” Boldt recalled an unsolved child murder, and the suspicion of Russian involvement.

“Holy shit,” LaMoia breathed.

“That’s why I’m likely to make a call asking about the possibility of lifting this lockdown. And I’m going to talk to Bernie about cross-comparing every single piece of evidence from that cabin against Danny Foreman’s crime scene. I think what just happened in there was that Yasmani Svengrad confessed to us that Alekseevich is our guy, but that he didn’t do Hayes at the cabin. My bet is, Svengrad wants Hayes as badly as, or worse than, we do.”

“The merger. The deadline.”

“That’s it,” Boldt said, but his main thought was that this still put Liz squarely in the center.

FOURTEEN

LIZ COULDN’T SPEND TIME IN the house with the kids gone. She’d left for work earlier than usual, wrung out by waiting for the phone to ring and by the eerie silence of an empty home. Lou called with an invitation to lunch. It hit her hard because they were both too busy for such extravagances, which meant this had to be of the utmost importance. It also occurred to her that she was probably the last person in the world her husband wanted to sit down to lunch with, and this both broke her heart and made her all the more curious and fearful of his reasons.

Somewhat typical of Lou, he chose Bateman’s, a semi-underground lunch joint that made the freshest turkey sandwiches in the city but at the expense of atmosphere. She walked to the cafeteria, despite a light mist in the air that others might have called rain, not only aware of, but glad for, the man and woman in trench coats who followed behind her. Bobbie Gaynes and Mark Heiman were both familiar faces to her-and yet seeing them surprised her, for they were among the very best of Lou’s detectives. By assigning these two to watch her, Lou sent her a message, intended or not, of just how serious he took the threat to her safety. As the three of them reached the restaurant, Gaynes peeled off and crossed the street, entering a mystery bookshop from where she would watch Bateman’s and any activity on the street. Heiman followed inside and ate at a table nearby, a cell phone/walkie-talkie on the table in plain view.

But not too nearby. Lou wanted his privacy. After moving through the line, they took a table well away from Heiman, so the detective couldn’t overhear.

Liz worked on a bowl of chili, picking out chunks of meat and setting them on the plate. Lou deconstructed a turkey and cranberry on wheat and dug into it with a plastic fork. It struck her that neither of them could simply eat what had been served.

He spoke in the practiced voice of a man used to talking in the third row of a courtroom while the trial was under way. “You and I have barely had five minutes to catch up.” His tone suggested apology and so she braced for more bad news. Not the kids, she thought, presuming he would not wait for a lunch meeting if whatever it was had to do with them. Lou pushed some cranberry jelly onto a piece of white meat and ate the combination. He washed it down with hot tea.

“We don’t know how it all fits together, or for that matter, even if it all fits together, but there are some things you need to know.” He told her about the blood evidence at the cabin, and how forensics would be the clincher, but that he couldn’t say exactly what had gone on out there. He warned her that if her latent fingerprints surfaced, they would have to deal with it, that such a discovery might signal the end of their keeping the affair secret, and that he wanted her prepared for that eventuality.