“JESUS.” Windermere watched the paramedic apply antiseptic to the scratches and claw marks on Stevens’s face. “That girl had some fight to her, huh?”
Stevens winced from a fresh sting. “Poor thing,” he said. “Probably didn’t even realize I was one of the good guys.”
“Probably feels the same as her sister, figures all men are evil,” Windermere said. “I just wonder what those bastards put her through.”
“Guess we’ll find out.” Stevens looked across the sidewalk to the DuPont, the shattered front door, the tabloid news photographers lining the sidewalk, angling for a good shot of the first gunman’s body. “Soon as the translator arrives.”
They’d locked Catalina Milosovici in the back of a patrol car, for her own protection. She’d struggled, fought like a cornered animal until they got her in the backseat, and then something seemed to break inside her and she collapsed and cried, bitter and angry. Now, her tears gone, she sat morose and sullen, staring at her hands in the back of the cruiser, unresponsive to any offer of food, drink, or first aid.
“Her feet were torn to shreds,” Stevens said.
Windermere nodded. “She’s a fighter. I wonder what she was planning to do to Volovoi.”
“Seemed like she was ready to carve out his eye.”
She made a face. “Gruesome. What do you think she was telling him?”
Stevens didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Something about the girl wasn’t really jibing for him yet. She’d fought harder than a girl who was lost and traumatized. She’d fought like he’d interrupted her somehow.
Probably she was just angry. The NYPD had guys in an apartment upstairs, said there were mountains of cocaine, guns, blood everywhere. Too early to tell just how the puzzle fit together, but Catalina was probably just trying to even the score.
Maybe.
Stevens let the paramedic fix him up, clean his wounds, apply a few bandages. Windermere watched. “You better hope those don’t scar,” she said. “Ruin your movie star looks.”
Stevens laughed. “Chicks dig scars,” he said. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Nancy tell you that?”
“No,” he said, “but she put up with me for this long, and I don’t figure I could get much uglier now.”
She eyed him appraisingly. “That poor woman.”
Movement behind them. Stevens turned to find a man studying them. He wore glasses and tweed—a professor. “Excuse me, agents,” he said.
Stevens and Windermere swapped glances. “Yeah?”
“I’m Dr. Fidatov,” he said. “The translator. I’ve just talked to Catalina, and I think there’s something you both should know.”
Stevens looked at Catalina’s patrol car. The girl stared out at them, her eyes dark and inscrutable.
“Okay,” Windermere said. “What’s up?”
Fidatov cleared his throat. Fiddled with his jacket. “She said she was trying to get information when you pulled her away from the dead man,” he said. “She seems to think you ruined her chance to save them.”
“‘Them,’” Stevens said. “Who’s them? The girls in the box? Tell her we’re on it. We tracked her container to the rest of the buyers. The women are safe.”
Fidatov shook his head. “The other girls,” he said. “The rest of the Dragon’s New York captives. They’re trapped in a warehouse somewhere, and according to Catalina, only the dead men could find them.”