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“I can’t give you the papers at the moment, Ms. Guryev,” Mahoney said. “But I give you my word.”
Several seconds of silence followed. “For my son too.”
Mahoney sighed. “For your son too. Where is he?”
“Here, with me. He’s sleeping.”
“Your husband?”
The silence was longer this time. “Dead.”
“Let us get you and your son out of here,” Mahoney said.
“Go to wine cellar in the basement. It has door, like from a barn. Go inside. There’s a camera there. Show me your badges and identifications.”
The house was sprawling and we took a wrong turn or two before finding a staircase into the basement. The wine-cellar door was rough-sawn barn wood. We opened it and stepped into a brick-floored room with thousands of bottles of wine in racks along the walls.
We each held up our badge and ID to a tiny camera on the ceiling.
A moment later, we heard large metal bars disengage and slide back. A section of the wine cellar’s rear wall swung open hydraulically, revealing Elena Guryev studying us from a space about the size of two prison cells.
She was tall, willowy, and in her late thirties, with sandy-blond hair and the kind of bone structure and lips that magazine editors swoon over. Black cocktail dress. Black hose and heels. Hefty diamonds at her ears, wrists, and throat.
Her hazel eyes were puffy and bloodshot, but she acted in no way distraught. Indeed, she seemed to exude a steely will as she stood with her arms crossed in front of a bunk bed. On the lower bunk, a boy of about ten slept, curled up under a blanket, his head wrapped in gauze bandages.
Across from the bed, six small screens showed six different views of the house and grounds.
“Mrs. Guryev,” Mahoney began softly.
“Dimitri cannot hear us,” she said. “He is stone-deaf and on pain drugs. He had a cochlear implant operation two days ago at Johns Hopkins.”
I said, “Do you want a doctor to see him?”
“I am physician,” she said. “He’s fine and better sleeping.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No,” she said, her fingers traveling to her lips, her eyes gazing at the floor as if contemplating horror. “I don’t know what I’ll tell him about his father.”
A moment later, she raised her head and that toughness was back. “What do you want to know?”
Sampson gestured at the screens. “You saw what happened?”
“Some of it,” she said.
“Is the feed recorded?” Mahoney asked.
“It is,” she said. “But they knew where the big hard drive was stored and took it with them.”
“Got away clean again,” Sampson grumbled.
“They only think they got away clean,” Mrs. Guryev said, reaching down to the bed. “But I make sure they will pay.”
She held an iPhone in her hand like a pistol. “I videoed them, two without their hoods.”
Chapter
77
