“Luka,” Melissa said with a sigh that was only partially an act. Getting the runaround from a suspect was never fun, but in this instance, she could hear the tick of the clock in the back of her head. Every second wasted was another second Toly lost. “You just told us that your brother was a mechanic.” She slapped down a glossy, blown-up photo of the exterior of the house Morozov was renting under a fake name, its acid-eaten brick, and trailing ivy, and plethora of windows, swags of silk curtains visible at the edges. “What the hell do you think he was doing working in a place like this?”
His gaze skittered to the mirror, then to the door, rather than the photo. He shrugged.
Melissa tapped the image, hard enough to startle him, and said, “Look at the picture, please. This is where we arrested you. This house here. And you say you were picking up yourmechanicbrother there. Fromwork. Help us make sense of that, Luka.”
Playing good cop, Rob said, “Hey, maybe it was after his brother got off work.” To Luka: “Yeah? He went to a buddy’s house and wanted you to meet him there?”
Luka glanced between them, fast and fearful like a tweaking mouse. He wet his dry lips, reached for the Coke they’d given him, then thought better of it and wiped his hands down the legs of his jeans instead. “Yes. That.” His accent was thick, but he could understand them perfectly, and communicate effectively. His intake paperwork listed his occupation as house painter, and a few quick calls had confirmed it. He worked for a contractor in Queens who’d been more than a little pissed to be a man short for the day. They’d impounded Luka’s car, too: a 99 Honda rattletrap full of fast food wrappers and a few packets of rolling paper in the glove box, but no weapons.
“Nah,” Melissa said. “Try again. We found your brother in the back room slapping around the merchandise girls.”
He paled and shrank back, biting at his lip.
She heaved another showy sigh, and leaned toward the tape recorder button. “Detective Melissa Dixon, pausing the interview.” Pressed the button as she watched Luka slide down in his chair, hands tucked into his armpits, petrified. Because this was the point in an interview when a dirty cop busted out the night stick, or ground a perp’s face into the tabletop.
Melissa smiled at him, watched surprise touch his face, and spoke in a low voice. “Listen: I don’t give a shit about the drugs in your car, and for what it’s worth, I do think you walked into that house without knowing what the hell was happening inside it. You were just as shocked as us to know your brother was running girls, right?”
She watched hope flare in his eyes, a tiny spark of it, but then he did his best to look indifferent. “Yes.” He was curious, wondering if they might let him off the hook, but obviously reluctant to throw his brother to the wolves. Looking at him, and looking at the brother, she had a sense he hadn’t been agoodbig brother to a scrawny, scared, sniveling kid like Luka.
Rob said, “Luka, your brother’s in big trouble. I think you know that, and I think that’s why you look like you’re about to wet your pants, my dude. Butyouaren’t in trouble – at least, not if you cooperate with us.”
The spark of hope flared brighter, harder to disguise. He shifted in his seat. “How do I know I can trust you? This could be a trap.”
“Your brother led you into a trap when he had you show up at the house,” Melissa said. “You know who lives there, don’t you? Who your brother works for?”
Fear, then. His gaze darted toward the door again.
“Luka,” Melissa said, as gently as she could manage with that clock ticking in the back of your head. “You weren’t supposed to be there last night, were you? You weren’t really invited? Huh?”
Look to her, to Rob, to the door again.
“Look, man,” Rob said, “if you want us to help you get outta here, you’ve got to work with us, and fast, before our captain overrides us and decides to charge you for looking so twitchy.”
Luka blew out a breath, wiped his face with both hands – they came away glistening with sweat – and said, “Okay, okay. I…” He hesitated a long moment. Rested his fingertips on the edge of the table and studied them.
It took every ounce of self-control not to slap the table and shout at him to hurry the fuck up. But Melissa waited.
Rob went so far as to say, “It’s cool. Take your time.”
A deep breath, and they finally started getting somewhere. Luka said, “I wasn’t supposed to be there. He never calls me – Aleks – when he needs a ride. It’s always one of his friends. But he called last night, and he sounded…” Headshake. “He was drunk. Maybe high, too. I met some of his new friends, once, at the garage. He’d started taking ‘private jobs,’ he called them, working on cars on site, instead of the ones who came into the garage. His boss, I think, hooked him up with rich men who wanted to pay in cash to have their fancy cars worked on.”
She traded a look with Rob, and got a lift of an eyebrow.
Melissa pulled another photo from her stack and laid it in front of him, a slightly-blurred, but unmistakeable glimpse of Morozov’s cherry, gleaming black ’72 Mustang Cobra. “Cars like that?”
Luka’s throat jumped as he swallowed, but he nodded. In a near whisper: “He wasn’t supposed to tell me, but he was drunk, so…that’s the Pakhan’s car. Misha.”
“Pakhan of what?” she pressed.
He sent her a haunted look, a man speaking of ghosts and legends. “The Kozlov bratva.”
Twenty more minutes of painful conversation, more reassurances on their parts that Luka wasn’t going to get shanked by the bratva in jail – poor bastard; they had no control over what happened next – and Melissa found herself in the now-familiar confines of the ladies room, dialing Maverick.
“I sure hope,” she said when he answered, “that you and the boys don’t air your dirty laundry in front of every random drug dealer and pizza man who crosses your path.”
She swore sheheardhim blink before he said, “I like to think we’re more careful than that.”
“I don’t know how much it helps, but I’ve got two pieces of information. One: there’s definitely a schism in the bratva.”
