Page 83 of Gone Before Goodbye

“Who will be monitoring?”

He shakes his head and scooches a little closer. “Maggie, listen to me. I will explain everything when you’re ready. It’s a lot. But right now—and I can’t stress how important this is—I need to know why you were staying at Oleg Ragoravich’s house.”

“I need my phone first.”

“I don’t have it,” he says. He leans back, blinks, runs his hand through his hair. “Your”—he stops, searches the air for the word—“extraction—it was not easy. Do you remember the crash?”

She nods.

“A bullet grazed your upper back. Wait, are you in pain? I should have asked you that first.”

“I’m fine,” she says.

“The old Ferrari didn’t have seat belts and luckily, I guess, your windshield was shot out. So you didn’t slam into it on impact. You rolled down a ravine. That’s what saved you. You were hard to reach. Ragoravich’s men couldn’t get to you right away. They figured the exposure would kill you anyway. You have frostnip, by the way—you’re lucky it wasn’t full-on frostbite. That will hurt for a while. Point is, they saw no point in rushing to you. The ravine is tricky in the snow. That gave us time to get there.” He looks off, his eyes welling up. “Do you remember an SUV chasing you?”

She nods.

“There were two men in it. They’re both dead.”

Silence.

“So I don’t know where your phone is. In that Ferrari, I guess. Maybe in that ravine, I don’t know. It’s not important. We can get you another. If you’re too tired to answer questions—”

“I’m not.”

“You had my emergency phone number,” Charles says.

“Yes.”

“Only one way: Marc gave it to you before he died.”

That wasn’t the way, of course, but it would be too much to explain the griefbot right now.

“And if he gave you the number, then you know you can trust me.”

She doesn’t know that, but it makes sense. And what choice doesshe have? She doesn’t even know where she is. She only knows that Marc had warned her that Ragoravich or Brovski would try to kill her, that they had indeed tried, and that someone, probably Charles Lockwood, had saved her.

So why not? She had to trust someone.

“I was hired to do plastic surgery,” Maggie says.

Charles Lockwood frowns at that answer. “On?”

“Oleg and a young woman named Nadia.”

“That’s the mistress I saw you talking to?”

She nods.

“So how did they end up hiring you?”

She explains in spurts about Evan Barlow, about Nadia’s breast augmentation, about the facial surgeries on Oleg Ragoravich, about Ragoravich disappearing from his recovery room, about the sudden panic, about the attempt on her life. She doesn’t go into the griefbot. As she speaks, exhaustion wedges its way into her bloodstream and spreads. It takes everything she has to stay awake.

“You know it’s not a coincidence,” Lockwood says. “You being hired for this job.”

She does now, doesn’t she?

“Who are you?” she asks.