Page 9 of Roma King
“Miss Llewelyn, right? I’m Detective Holmes.”
“Please. Call me Zara.” I surprise myself with my cool, calm tone; I’m neither cool nor calm, but the timbre of my voice belies my anxiety. Shaking Detective Holmes’s hand, I move further into the room so Roger can sit behind his desk. The detective and I take seats beside one another, and the fresh bite of spearmint hits the back of my nose—he must have just spit out his gum.
“You’re probably wondering why I’ve come all the way down here to bother you,” Detective Holmes says. “Mr. Walker tells me you’re about to finish up for the day, so I won’t keep you for long. I just had a couple of questions I wanted to ask you about a call you got on Tuesday. Would that be okay?”
I nod. My pulse inexplicably pounds at my temples.
“A little boy. He wanted medical help for his brother. Do you remember the call?”
I don’t blink. It feels like something terribly important is about to happen, and I’ll miss it if I blink. “Yeah, I do. He was very distressed. I believe his brother was actually dead, but I’m not sure...”
Holmes nods. “The EMTs recorded him as D.O.A. Drug overdose. They originally thought it was accidental, but we’ve since come to the conclusion that it probably wasn’t. There was a struggle. A number of items were stolen from the house. A substantial amount of money from a safe in the pool house.”
“I’m sorry? Pool house?”
“Yeah. The safe was wide open when the parents got home, but they insist Jamie, the deceased kid, didn’t know the combination.”
I try to process this piece of information, but the words slide out of my head like butter off a hot knife. I’m still stuck on the wordspool house.I’ve been picturing Corey in a dirty, messy one bed apartment without power or heat. Turns out Corey lives somewhere that has a pool house, which makes no sense to me, because little boys who live in places like that are watched over twenty-four seven. They have loving parents who work hard and get paid well. They don’t wake up in the middle of the night, alone, to find that their brother has been killed.
“Mr. and Mrs. Petrov arrived home from St. Bart’s late on Wednesday. They’ve hired a slew of lawyers to handle ‘the situation’ as they’re calling it, so it’s impossible to get a straight answer out of them, but we’re trying to get ahead of this thi—”
“I’m sorry.” I frown, angling my head to one side as I stare at the detective. “Did you just say…Petrov?”
A knowing, weary look flickers over Detective Holmes’s face. “You’ve heard the name then.”
I have. Everyone has. The Petrov family are notorious in Spokane. Their name began cropping up five years ago, when the family first moved into town and opened up a Russian restaurant. No one believed the place would last long. There was no Russian community to speak of here, and while people are generally adventurous and like to try new things, it seemed unlikely that they’d continue to frequent a restaurant that served strange and unusual dishes that no one could really pronounce.
The restaurant succeeded, however, and soon the Petrov family were opening up laundromats, and florists, and liquor stores, and autobody shops. They flourished, at a time when everyone else seemed to be struggling to make ends meet, in a town that didn’t really need any more laundromats, or florists, or liquor stores, and autobody shops, and slowly a general concern began to creep in at the corners of people’s minds.
Everyone knows the Petrovs are connected to the Russian mafia in some way. It’s an unspoken fact that no one really wants to talk about. Talking about it means that it’s real. That the men you saw entering the laundromat at two in the morning, wearing five thousand dollar suits, their hair slicked back, eyes hidden behind expensive sunglasses, did not go in there to launder theirclothes.
“They’ve managed to keep Jamie’s death out of the news for the time being, but it won’t be long before the story leaks,” Detective Holmes continues. “All hell’s gonna break loose, and we want to try and get ahead of this thing.”
Folding my hands in my lap, then separating them, placing a palm on either knee, I look him dead in the eye. “All right. I don’t know how I’m going to be of any help but ask away. I’ll do my best.”
The detective gives me another brief smile. “As you’re obviously aware, all emergency calls are recorded and saved to a shared drive within each dispatch command. They’re saved to an external server, too, just in case. In this instance, it seems both copies of Corey’s 911 call have somehow been…corrupted.” His voiced sours at the end of his sentence—clearly, he doesn’t believe this at all. He believes something else happened, and he isn’t happy about it.
“Was there no written transcript?” I ask.
Detective Holmes pulls a face. “Apparently, it’s beenmisplaced. If you could give me a rundown of the call as best you can, I believe it’d be very helpful to us at this point,” Detective Holmes says.
It’s unheard of that a recorded call might be erased or damaged. It just doesn’t happen. There are so many safe guards in place to prevent such a loss that I’m frankly astonished by what he’s telling me right now. But for the written transcript to have gone missing as well? Something is definitely not right here. “Uh…okay. Sure. Well…” I cast my mind back and replay the call from the moment it connected to the moment it disconnected, and then I relay that information to Detective Holmes.
“I know he said he was scared, Zara, but did heseemscared? Did he sound terrified?”
“I mean…frightened, yes. Scared for his brother. But not terrified.”
“And did he mention if he’d spoken to this other man who showed up at the house?”
“No, he didn’t. He just said that his brother had told him to go to his room. He didn’t say if he knew the man who was there, or if he’d had any direct interaction with him.”
Disappointment rolls of the detective. “Did he say if the man was still there at the house when he called?”
“I asked, and he said no, it was just him and his brother.”
“Right. And you heard no other sound in the background?”
“No.”
