“I’m pretty sure Steven’s suffered enough.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you think he’ll come crawling back?”
I shrugged. “He can ring the doorbell and see if I answer, just like everybody else.”
CHAPTER 41
Georgia showed up at my door the next morning with bags under her eyes and a box of glazed donuts under her arm. Apparently, she’d been at the station with Steven all night.
I put on a pot of coffee as she filled me in. The DA had offered Theresa a plea bargain: everything she knew about Feliks and his operation—and her association with it—in exchange for a lesser charge. She probably wouldn’t keep her real estate license, but she’d never spend a night in prison. Theresa’s decision had been easy, and she’d stayed through the night giving her deposition.
Georgia and I took our coffee and donuts into the living room. It would be easier to have this conversation side by side on the couch, rather than across a table. That way, I wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes. She sank into the cushion beside me, sipping her coffee as she shared what she knew around a mouthful of donut.
According to what she’d read in Theresa’s statement, Feliks had hired Theresa to find a plot of land. He’d told her he only wanted a lease, and she was never made aware of its intended purpose, only that he needed to bury something for a short period of time. She had assumed he was hiding drugs, and claimed she would never have agreed to let Feliks use the farm if she had known he’d intended to hide bodies there. She’d agreed to let Feliks rent the fallow field for a few months in exchange for a large sum of cash, the first deposit of which Steven had found in her underwear drawer.
Steven had assumed Theresa and Feliks were having an affair. And he hadn’t been wrong. Theresa did, in fact, have an alibi for her whereabouts the night Harris Mickler was murdered. She had been consummating her agreement with Feliks over champagne in the back of his limo at the sod farm, which was how Nick had come to discover the soil and sod caked in the limo’s undercarriage. According to the ME’s initial report, Harris was probably buried that night, the other four victims a few days after that, and Andrei Borovkov as recently as thirty-six hours ago. All but one had been shot at close range.
Harris’s death, Georgia explained, would take some time to sort out. But Feliks was expected to be charged with all six counts.
I picked at the edge of my donut. “What does Nick think happened?”
“The going theory is that Andrei was contracted to kill the first five victims for Feliks, and then Feliks had Andrei killed to cover his tracks. Andrei had been careless lately. Too many arrests and too many headlines made him a liability to Feliks’s operation. Feliks probably wanted him gone. So he used him for a few quick jobs, then buried him with the rest of the trash.
“Nick’s guessing Feliks never planned to exhume and move the bodies. Most likely, he’d planned to just leave them there, assuming they’d never be found.” Georgia popped a huge chunk of donut into her mouth. Mine turned to a dry ball against my tongue.
“What’s Feliks saying?” This was the sticky part. If Feliks admitted to killing the four unnamed men they’d found, but claimed he was innocent of Harris’s and Andrei’s murders, would the police believe him and open a new investigation? Or would they assume he was lying?
“Feliks hasn’t made a statement yet. His lawyers are being cautious, taking time to come up with a game plan. With Theresa’s deposition and testimony, Feliks is going to have a hard time walking away from this. As far as Nick can tell, every victim in that hole had a direct connection to Feliks’s organization.”
“What was Harris Mickler’s?”
“Money laundering. Apparently, he was one hell of an accountant, but he must have done something to piss Feliks off.” Feliks must not have told them about the stolen key and his missing money. Why would he? It would only provide the police with a motive to use against him.
“Did they ever find his wife?”
Georgia snorted around her donut. “They tore that field apart last night and never found her. Ironically enough, she called into the station early this morning after seeing the news. She said she’d left town, afraid for her own safety because she suspected the mob might have been behind Harris’s death. She said she’d received a death threat at her house and she’d been too afraid to say anything to the police, because she didn’t believe they could protect her. OCN sent someone over to her house to check out her claim, and sure enough, they found a knife mark in her back door, exactly where she told them to look. Apparently, her story checks out. Once she saw Feliks had been arrested and Andrei was dead, she said she finally felt safe enough to come out of hiding.”