Page 59 of Boardroom Mask

I almost scream when I hear my name from two feet behind me. Whirling around in my chair, I see that Doug is standing at the edge of my cubicle with a coffee in one hand and a pen behind his ear. He doesn’t sit down. As he explained on my first day,sitting down means a conversation, and he doesn’t ever want a conversation. Standing means he wants a status report and he wants it fast.

“Whatchyahave?” he asks in a single grunt as he works through the bite of cream cheese bagel in his mouth.

“Good morning to you, too, Doug,” I say with false cheer. “How was my holiday weekend? It was lovely, thank you so much for asking. Quite relaxing. And yours? Did you spend some nice time with the family?”

“Ex-wife had the kids, so I sat on the couch in my underwear and drank beer,” he retorts in a monotone. “Unless you’d like more nitty-gritty details, cut the bullshit and tell me where you’re at on your story.”

I shudder. Doug in his tighty-whities was not a visual image I ever cared to know more about. “You could’ve just said,Fine, thanks,you know.”

He gives me a squint-eyed scowl and somehow munches his bagel in a menacing way. Never before have cream cheese stains on a mustache been so intimidating.

“Right. Yes. Work.”

He nods. “Yes. Work. The thing I pay you to do.”

I minimize the Delaware filing and pull up the document I’ve been building. It’s a timeline, color-coded, cross-referenced, and yet still painfully full of holes.

“Okay,” I say. “So. To recap. The morgue attendant, Giovanni Ochoa, came to me originally because a set of remains came through the Queens ME’s office that flagged something for him. Bones found at a construction site in Astoria. The site wasbeing excavated for a new development project. Workers hit the remains and called it in.”

Doug sips his coffee. “Remind me, how old are the remains?”

“Ochoa said the initial assessment put them at roughly fifteen to twenty years old. Which, on its own, fine. Lots of people died fifteen to twenty years ago.”

“But.”

“But—and this is a part I’m still trying to flesh out, so bear with me while I hand-wave you through the still-unclear bits—somehow, Ochoa gets the idea in his head that this has to do with the Lazarev family.”

Doug nods. “And since Lukas and Kir are still among the living, that means the bones can only belong to…”

I nod back to confirm he’s on the right track. “Elena Lazareva, yes. Lukas Lazarev’s wife. She died eighteen years ago. The official story is that she was ill. But they sure weren’t interested in expanding on the details.”

“Foul play is still a big leap in logic, though,” he warns.

“Yeah, of course. I was hoping Ochoa would give me some more details there when we met. But since he ghosted me, I’m gonna have to get my hands on his report another way.”

Doug licks crumbs off his thumb as he thinks. “So your theory is that the bones in Astoria belong to Elena Lazareva, meaning someone whacked her and dumped the body.”

“I don’t have enough to call it a theory yet,” I correct. “It’s a suspicion. The timeline fits. And the fact that Ochoa disappearedright after he started dropping names like ‘Lazarev’ around fits, too.”

“That’s a lot of ‘fits’ and not a lot of proof,” he says dubiously. “You got dental records? DNA? Anything from the ME’s office directly?”

“No. Ochoa was my way into that, and Ochoa is gone. I’ve been trying to find another contact inside the office, but nobody wants to talk. The case file on those remains has gone quiet, too. It’s not showing up in any of the public databases I can access.”

Doug looks at me for a long moment. “Meaning someone buried it. Figuratively.”

“That’s what I think, yeah.”

“It’s promising,” he sighs. “I’ll give you that. But it’s circumstantial as hell, Jill. Every single piece of this is secondhand from a source who’s now MIA. You’ve got no records, no corroboration, no nada. I think you need someone on the record. Even a ‘no comment’ from the right person is better than what you’ve got now, which is a whole lot of empty air andHm, ain’t that strange?”

I shrug. “Yeah, but who?”

“What about going straight to them?” he suggests. “Drop in unannounced at Lazarev Global. See what poor sucker you can corral into giving you some sort of interview. It’s standard operating procedure before you publish anything anyway. Might as well do it now and see what shakes loose.”

Is there anything worse than hearing your own half-baked ideas suggested back to you? After all, this was originallymyplan. I texted Doug about it last week, back when I was riding the highof actually making progress and feeling bold. Request a sit-down with Kir Lazarev, maybe even Lukas himself. Poke the bear. See what happens.

Funny how a very odd weekend changes things. Suddenly, I don’t feel very sure of anything at all.

“I don’t think I’m ready for that yet,” I mumble.