thought so, considering you wouldn’t let go of his arm.”
“Did you feel it? It’s a really nice arm.” Kristy sighed. “My trainer has arms like that.”
“You still holding that crush? Dan has nice arms. You need to go out with Dan.”
“I can’t.” She pouted. “We work together.”
“He’s nuts about you and has been for years. And you love the geeky kind.”
“Can we talk about you and George-who-should-not-be-named-George some more?”
“Why shouldn’t he be named George?”
“He doesn’t look like a George.” Kristy finally stopped bouncing. “No offense to the Georges of the world, but he just doesn’t look like one. I don’t know, there was something…”
CDespite her bubbly appearance, Kristy had a very keen eye for detail. Natalie’s instincts tripped again. “What?”
Kristy said, “That’s not his name.”
Which was the same thing she’d thought before she’d been distracted by Mr. Attractive Suit and Witty Banter. She’d caught the hesitation before he introduced himself. Was he telling the truth about having an unusual name? Or covering something else? “You know, there was something—”
“Ugh!” Kristy cut her off. “We’re reading too much into this. What possible reason would he have to lie about his name? We need to stop being so suspicious about everything, Nat. We’re both starting to get paranoid. It’s this business, I tell you. And this case.”
“It’s not paranoia if they’re actually after you,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s go watch things explode.”
She was up until three that morning again. Natalie knew it wasn’t healthy, but she had spent the entire movie distracted by her week. The weird trip to Boca, the memory loss, the case…
This case.
It was eating at her. She stared at the list of names again.
Consuela Castillo
Alma Florez
Ana Romero
Reina Ortiz
Maria Covarubias
And those were only the ones who had identities. Most of the bodies dumped out in the desert they were still trying to identify. The ones with ID on them were from the odd cache of nine bodies that had been found north of Brawley. She glanced through the notes she’d taken about the five girls.
Born in Guadalajara. No criminal record.
Born in Guanajuato. No criminal record.
Born in Monterrey. No criminal record.
“Reina did, though,” Natalie whispered as she paged through her notes. Reina Ortiz had been arrested for public disruption outside a club in Ensenada last summer. The club was named Bar El Ruso, a nightspot she’d never heard of before, but then, she had friends who were far more familiar with Ensenada than she was. She fired off a quick e-mail to her friend Manuel, hoping he’d get back to her in the morning.
“El Ruso, El Ruso…” Why did it sound familiar?
She shuffled through the stack of papers, chasing a memory. “Got it, got it, got it! Sticky note. Where’s the sticky note?” She could see it in her mind. It had been on a bright green sticky note. The name. She knew she’d heard that name before.
“Ah ha!” Natalie pulled out the paper. It was just peeking out of the edge of one pile, attached to another file from a girl who’d been found near Imperial, one of the few the Border Patrol had been able to identify. She was twenty-two, another Tijuana native who had found her way to Ensenada. Lourdes Miranda had been on the outs with her family, but her younger brother did tell the police she had been working at a bar in Ensenada and sending money to her parents to help pay the bills.
“Bar El Ruso,” she said, skimming over the file.
Tacked onto the first sticky note was another one in yellow. A name she’d jotted down, but Natalie didn’t remember why. She had to get more organized.
Ivan Balankin. For some
reason, simply reading the name to herself made her slightly ill.
Ch=">Iv“Who are you, Ivan?” She hoped Manuel got back to her quickly. “And what do you have to do with Bar El Ruso and these girls’ deaths?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Baojia thought he had perfected patience in the previous 129 years, but his brother-in-law was trying it.
“Rory, ignoring the dead humans for the time being, this needs to be looked into for two reasons. One, it will look very bad for Ernesto if there is an out-of-control vampire draining women and leaving them for the human authorities to find. It’s sloppy. Two, it’s bad for business.”
He sat at his desk, idly tapping a pencil next to the driver’s license picture of Natalie Ellis as he spoke to Rory on the speaker phone. It was not a sufficient picture. She looked pale and unsmiling, nothing like the vibrant young