The Witness

a polo shirt, his weapon holstered at his side.
    He stepped back so they could enter the kitchen—bigger than the one they’d just left. The appliances more modern, the floor a buff-colored tile.
    “Liz, this is Deputy Marshal Cosgrove.”
    “Bill.” He extended a hand and an encouraging smile to Elizabeth. “Welcome home. Deputy Peski—that’s Lynda—is doing a perimeter check. We’ll be keeping you safe tonight.”
    “Oh … But—”
    “We’ll be back in the morning,” John told her. “But we’ll get you settled in before we go.”
    “Why don’t I take you up, show you your room,” Terry suggested, and before Elizabeth could agree or protest, Terry had picked up her suitcase and started out.
    “She looks younger than I figured,” Bill commented.
    “She’s worn out, still a little glazed over. But the kid’s solid. She held up to two hours with Pomeroy without one fumble. A jury’s going to love her.”
    “A teenage girl taking down the Volkovs.” Bill shook his head. “Go figure.”
    S ERGEI V OLKOV WAS IN HIS PRIME, a wealthy man who’d come from wretched poverty. By the age of ten he’d been an accomplished thief who’d known every corner, every rat hole, in his miserable ghetto in Moscow. He’d killed his first man at thirteen, gutting him with anAmerican-made combat knife he’d stolen from a rival. He’d broken the arm of the rival, a wily boy of sixteen.
    He still had the knife.
    He’d risen through the ranks of the Moscow
bratva,
becoming a brigadier before his eighteenth birthday.
    Ambition had driven him higher until, with his brother Mikhail, he’d taken over the
bratva
in a merciless, bloody coup even as the Soviet Union crumbled. It was, in Sergei’s mind, a moment of opportunity and change.
    He married a woman with a lovely face and a taste for finer things. She’d given him two daughters, and he’d been amazed at how deeply he’d loved them from their first breath. He’d wept when he’d held each child for the first time, overcome with joy and wonder and pride.
    But when, at last, he’d held his son, there were no tears. That joy, that wonder and pride, were too deep for tears.
    His children, his love and ambition for them, pushed him to emigrate to America. There he could present them with opportunities, with a richer life.
    And he’d deemed it time to expand.
    He’d seen his oldest child married to a lawyer, and had held his first grandchild. And wept. He’d set up his younger daughter—his artist, his dreamer—in her own gallery.
    But his son, ah, his son, his businessman with a degree from the University of Chicago, there was his legacy. His boy was smart, strong, clearheaded, cool-blooded.
    All the hopes and hungers of the young boy in the Moscow ghetto had been realized in the son.
    He worked now in his shade garden of his Gold Coast estate, waiting for Ilya to arrive. Sergei was a hard and handsome man with shocks of white waving through his dark hair, thick black brows over onyx eyes. He kept himself rigorously fit and satisfied his wife, his mistress and the occasional whore.
    His gardens were another source of pride. He had landscapers and groundskeepers, of course, but spent hours a week when he could puttering, digging in the dirt, planting some new specimen with his own hands.
    If he hadn’t become a
pakhan
, Sergei believed he might have lived a happy, very simple life as a gardener.
    In his baggy shorts, the star tattoos on his knees grubby with earth and mulch, he continued to dig as he heard his son approach.
    “Chicken shit,” Sergei said. “It’s cheap, easy to come by, and it makes the plants very happy.”
    Confounded, as always, by his father’s love of dirt, Ilya shook his head. “And smells like chicken shit.”
    “A small price to pay. My hostas enjoy, and see there? The lungwort will bloom soon. So many secrets in the shade and shadows.”
    Sergei looked up then, squinting a bit. “So. Have you found her?”
    “Not yet. We will. I have a man checking at Harvard. We’ll have her name soon, and from there, we’ll have her.”
    “Women lie, Ilya.”
    “I don’t think she lied about this. She studies medicine there, and is unhappy. Her mother, a surgeon, here in Chicago. I believe this is also true. We’re looking for the mother.”
    Ilya crouched down. “I won’t go to prison.”
    “No, you won’t go to prison. Nor will Yakov. I work on other avenues as well. But I’m not pleased one of my most valued