Page 16 of Capture (Primal #3)
T here was nothing I liked more than watching the little liar getting fucked, but I had to brush those tantalizing thoughts aside to focus on business.
“A Mr. Dalgety is here to see you,” Betty informed me on the phone, and I told her to send him up.
“Dalgety?” Ronan screwed his face up. “Doesn’t sound familiar. Is he a cop?”
I shrugged, noticing a pale piece of fabric poking out from his pant pocket. “No idea. You’re coming out.”
“Huh?” he frowned in his confusion, following my finger pointing at the front of his pants.
“Your pocket,” I clarified, since he was looking in the wrong place.
“Oh,” he seemed bashful. “Annika’s washing. I dumped her dirty clothes on my desk, but found a pair of her panties on the floor that I must’ve dropped on the way up here. I’ll put them through the laundry at home.”
I wiggled my finger at him, and he pulled the pair out and threw them onto the desk. “Full brief soft pink,” I said, holding them up.
“I think that’s more like bikini briefs, but you know…she doesn’t seem to like G-strings,” he educated me. “Or at least I haven’t seen her wear them, and there’s none in her laundry. It’s either bikini bottom or naked.”
“Naked?” That caught my attention.
“Naked swimming. Skinny dipping. That’s how I first saw her, naked, swimming. So, it’s kinda hard to turn my brain into hating her, because I had seen her at her finest, before I knew who she was,” he seemed to be making an argument to save her. “She was exquisite.”
Betty knocked at the door, and I yelled, “Enter,” and a plump man with a receding hairline who on first glance looked like a cop, but I could be wrong.
“Mr. Dalgety?” I pushed my chair back and offered him my hand as Ronan grabbed a chair and sat to the side of us.
He shook my hand, then sat in the chair, and then looked behind him to ensure the door was closed and Betty had gone. “I must apologize, Mr. Kaiser, I deliberately used a pseudonym. My name is not Dalgety, it’s George Tindale, Sergeant George Tindale from Gothenburg PD.”
My heart sank, and I wondered if he was collaborating with Betty, and my hand that was resting on the desk formed into a fist out of fury. Yet it was Freddie who approached me, urging that I have a meeting with the guy, so I was starting to think that I couldn’t trust Freddie either.
I glanced at Ronan because the name Tindale didn’t ring a bell, and reading the expression on Ronan’s face, he hadn’t heard of him either.
“Sergeant, how can I help you?” I asked, playing dumb, suppressing the anger and punishment I was planning to inflict on Freddie. It seemed as if the entire fucking place was rife with enemies trying to take us down.
“We are currently investigating these two people,” he stated, swiping his phone and bringing up two photos.
I glanced at Ronan, who leaned over the desk to take a look, yet we kept our expressions blank. We knew who they were, alright, but I had no intention of letting the sergeant know that.
“Do you recognize them?” he asked.
“What is this about, Sergeant?” I avoided answering his question in case he incriminated me for a crime I didn’t commit again.
“Let me explain,” he said flatly, even though the guy likely had enough experience as a cop to spot a liar or at least someone trying to evade telling the truth.
The guy probably had his mind made up about me before he walked in here.
“Understandably, there are some pieces of information I am not privy to share, but I was alerted by their behavior when a student by the name of Riley Laws, correct name Annika.”
He shot me a side glance, but I remained quiet, waiting for him to finish.
He continued, “Obviously, you would know Annika, since she was fostered by your uncle several years ago.”
“Ah, that Annika,” I still played dumb, unsure of where I should go in this conversation, so I glanced again at Ronan, whose complexion was draining of color.
“Her pseudonym was Riley Laws, and she was under the witness protection program after she testified to…” he stalled as if he wasn’t keen to finish the sentence off.
“Put me in prison. Yes, I’m very familiar with what happened there, and she lied,” I finished off the sentence for him, clenching my jaw as I spoke because it still pisses me off, even as my feelings toward the little liar had changed.
Every time I was reminded of what happened three years ago, it reopened the fresh wound.
Tindale nodded, watching me closely. “I am aware,” he agreed, and I refused to relax, because he might be trying to grease me up so I dropped my guard, and then he’d pin some fake shit on me and I’d be back in prison again. Fuck that.
“You’re aware that she lied under oath?” Ronan spoke for the first time. “You’re not part of the Larsson police force, so how do you know?”
“I’m aware that the girl was coerced,” he told me straight.
“Which is why I’m here. And to answer your question, I was part of the witness protection program under the Gothenburg Police dept that helped Annika relocate here.
” He stalled for a moment to swipe his phone for the pics of the blond cop and her sidekick from Larsson.
“I’m not sure if you’re aware that it wasn’t her choice to bring her to this location.
It was hers,” he pointed to the blond cop, Judith.
“Did she know we were here?” I asked him carefully.
If he had been following her for a while, then he’d have noticed that she had gone missing for a while. He’d notice that she hadn’t turned up to class, and if he’s in contact with the blond cop, then he might also know that the last time she saw Annika was here at the club when we grabbed her.
“Yes, that was why she convinced Annika to study here to use her as bait to lure you out.” He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly, then a strain washed across his face.
“It was confusing to me at first because Annika was in disguise and had nothing to do with you until she started working here. I was perplexed because of all places, it was here in your club that she chose to work. I assumed Judith played a part in her finding work here, so I did a little digging and discovered there was a second player in the scheme.”
“Who?” Ronan asked, expectedly.
“The Russian family that was driven out of this area when your family came along. They went underground to strengthen their resources and returned wanting to take back what you took from them,” he explained breathlessly with a slight wheeze, indicating that he was an asthmatic or a smoker.
“We know,” I told him. “We’re fully aware of what the Ivanovs are trying to do.”
“If I were brutally honest with you, we’re not keen to have them back.
They kept the streets dirty with drug dealing and forcing girls out onto the streets, coercion, among other crimes, and since your family arrived the streets had been cleaner, crime had dropped,” as he spoke, I felt proud of Ronan since it was him that had been working hard to do that while I was in prison.
We had contacts whom we called upon to remove street scum that was causing us problems. Even though we rarely saw their faces, we knew we could rely on them and had been calling upon them since my uncle was alive and running the family business in Larsson.
He handed those highly secretive contacts down to me and Ronan.
Cleaning up the streets was done illegally, and I wondered if Tindale and his police colleagues were aware of that. Maybe they were and turned a blind eye. We were good at covering our tracks, and we even had hidden bank accounts under fake names specifically to pay them.
Tindale flicked his hand. “I’m digressing. Katerina Ivanov, strategically planted in the same hall to befriend Annika and then sold her a fake ID with an older date of birth so she could start working here,” he stated flatly.
“We knew she was using a fake ID and sacked her. She doesn’t work here anymore,” I informed him, stretching the truth a little. She was sacked because she was betraying us, but we were aware of the fake ID for some time.
It was revealing to us how vital Katerina’s role was in the scheme of things.
“So, are you sure that the Ivanov family and the Larsson police department are working together?” I pressed, because this was our suspicion as well, but I felt there was a missing link.
Why would they join forces at the risk of corrupting the Larsson PD? That part didn’t make sense to me. Many things didn’t make sense to me. The eagerness to have me imprisoned in the first place and the eagerness to have me arrested and placed back in prison were oddly contrived.
“Yes. What alerted me was when Annika was being manipulated and emotionally blackmailed by Judith from the Larsson PD. So, I did some digging on her to discover that she was married to the nephew of one of the top-dogs in the Ivanov family and was mysteriously killed in a car crash a few miles out of the edge of Larsson city nineteen years ago,” he flicked me a sharp knowing look, like he suspected I had something to with it.
“The Ivanovs had no territory and no power in Larsson,” I educated him. “They were happy here in Gothenburg until they made some stupid financial decisions that destroyed their empire.”
“But they were trying to squeeze their way in, weren’t they?” he said it like it was common knowledge. “At the time, they were spreading their territories, not just into Larsson, but into other cities as well. We were aware of that and kept track of them.”
“What was the nephew’s name?” Ronan asked, keeping his tone even.
“Serg Popov or Poppa,” he answered, and I rubbed my jaw with the back of my fist.