Dodge and burn, p.1
Dodge and Burn, page 1
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Ellen Crosby
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Ellen Crosby
About the author
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Acknowledgments
Also by Ellen Crosby
The Wine Country mysteries
THE MERLOT MURDERS
THE CHARDONNAY CHARADE
THE BORDEAUX BETRAYAL
THE RIESLING RETRIBUTION
THE VIOGNIER VENDETTA
THE SAUVIGNON SECRET
THE CHAMPAGNE CONSPIRACY
THE VINEYARD VICTIMS
HARVEST OF SECRETS
THE ANGELS’ SHARE
THE FRENCH PARADOX *
BITTER ROOTS *
The Sophie Medina mysteries
MULTIPLE EXPOSURE *
GHOST IMAGE *
BLOW UP *
Other titles
MOSCOW NIGHTS
*available from Severn House
DODGE AND BURN
Ellen Crosby
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2024
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
This eBook edition first published in 2024 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Ellen Crosby, 2024
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Ellen Crosby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1159-0 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1160-6 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,
Stirlingshire, Scotland.
Praise for Ellen Crosby
“Sophie is a principled, smart, well-drawn character in a fast-paced story”
Booklist on Blow Up
“Exciting … Recommended for fans of Crosby and of novelists who specialize in intricate plots and amateur detectives”
Library Journal on Blow Up
“Boldly drawn characters shoulder mysteries set among elite Washington power brokers”
Kirkus Reviews on Blow Up
“Sophie is a tough, relatable heroine … Just the right amount of thrills”
Library Journal on Ghost Image
“Intriguing … Compelling”
Publishers Weekly on Ghost Image
“A quick-moving mystery with a wealth of fascinating material”
Kirkus Reviews on Ghost Image
“Character-driven … A good mystery”
Kirkus Reviews on Bitter Roots
“A treat”
Booklist on Bitter Roots
About the author
Ellen Crosby is the author of the Wine Country mysteries, the Sophie Medina mysteries, and Moscow Nights, a standalone. Previously she was a freelance feature writer for The Washington Post, Moscow correspondent for ABC News Radio, and an economist at the US Senate. She lives in Virginia with her husband.
www.ellencrosby.com
For the Rector Lane Irregulars, with much love
Donna Andrews, Carla Coupe, Laura Durham, Val Patterson, and Sandi Wilson and in memoriam Peggy Hanson and Noreen Wald Smith
‘When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.’
—Alfred Eisenstaedt, photographer.
Dodging and burning are two of the oldest photo editing techniques and refer to the ability to manipulate exposure by making parts of a photo lighter (dodge) or darker (burn). The terms go back to the era of darkroom film editing when a photographer went through a time-consuming process of manually brightening or darkening segments of a photographic print to get the desired amount of contrast. Some modern digital image editing programs also have dodge and burn tools.
ONE
When Monica Yablonski asked me if I’d drive out to Dulles Airport on what we both knew might be a wild goose chase, I said I’d go because she didn’t ask me that often these days, and when she did, it was because she knew the story would be right up my alley: edgy, a bit risky, a challenge. She also asked because she wanted someone who would deliver, and she knew I was that person. ‘Just be your sweet, charming self and see what you can get, Medina,’ was actually how she put it.
Monica is probably the only person on the planet who can get away with that kind of sexist talk and not get a smart-ass answer in return. It also meant my odds of getting anyone to talk to me, never mind letting me take any photographs, were probably slim and none.
‘Who is the newsroom sending?’ I asked.
‘Kirby. He’s a pit bull. New. You haven’t met him but he’s good.’
I used to work as a photographer for International Press Service, a worldwide news agency that has its headquarters in New York City. IPS produces news reports that are distributed to the newspapers and broadcasters that are their clients, so the journalists and photographers they employ work their tails off to break the story before anyone else has it – including the other news organizations that are their competition. Every so often, Monica, who is the Director of Photography, calls or texts me and tries to pull me back into the fold. But after twelve years of having a packed go-bag at the foot of my bed for those middle-of-the-night summonses to get on a flight to who-knew-where and enough frequent flier miles for a trip to the moon – make that a round trip to the moon – I quit my job in the London bureau and moved home to Washington, DC. Part of the reason was burnout, but most of it was to be near my family after my husband, a CIA operative, went missing and was presumed kidnapped – which turned out to be an elaborate ruse. Then, two years ago, he was killed after being outed on a covert assignment he agreed to do as a favor to his old bosses, and that’s when I decided I was done with journalism for good.
Monica thought otherwise about me leaving the business and made no bones that she wanted me back at IPS. Perry DiNardo, my former boss in London, did as well. Every so often something would come along that they knew would prick old memories, kick in the adrenalin rush of what it was like to be first, to discover something no one else knew about yet that would make news headlines – that shiver-down-the-spine thrill. So one of them would ask me if I’d take on just this one assignment, just this one time. And, of course, I’d say yes.
‘OK, fill me in,’ I said.
‘We got a tip from someone who works at Dulles,’ she said. ‘Apparently, a couple of baggage handlers lost their cookies on Friday night when they opened the curtain of a luggage trolley – those carts they drive out to the plane with your suitcase on it – and found a guy stuffed inside. Shot dead at point-blank range.’
I’d been sent to war zones when I was with IPS, so I’d seen enough dead bodies and blood-soaked scenes to last the rest of my life. I could get along just fine without doing it again.
‘Don’t tell me you want me to try to get a photo of that bag carrier?’ I said. Because that didn’t sound right. IPS wasn’t into exploitative journalism. They left that stuff for the tabloids.
‘No. Good God, no.’ Monica is an old-school journalist, also a pack-a-day smoker for years. Now she was down to two cigs a day. The smokes had seeped into her voice, which had roughened and turned gravelly. If she c oughed or laughed, she started to wheeze.
‘Then why do you want me to go out there?’
‘To see if you can get any photos of what he was trying to smuggle in,’ she said. ‘Our source says a guy who was handling unclaimed luggage from a United flight found two suitcases filled with rings, necklaces, coins, goblets – seriously old stuff. Antiquities. He said everything looked like it was solid gold. The dead guy was a Brit who came in on the same flight. Since it’s Monday, by now the Dulles PD probably knows if those suitcases belonged to him. Some of the items had tags on them. He says they were written in Cyrillic. Or at least he thinks it’s Cyrillic.’
‘So the stuff’s Russian?’ I said. ‘Or maybe – these days – it’s Ukrainian.’
‘My money’s on it being Ukrainian,’ Monica said. ‘With the Russians stealing everything that isn’t nailed down in that country and selling it on the black market to buy more weapons, the odds are probably pretty good. Makes me sick what they’re doing, trying to eviscerate that country’s culture and its history.’
‘Why would someone kill the courier – if that’s who he was – and leave the suitcases? People walk off with suitcases that don’t belong to them all the time. No one stops you. No one would have said boo.’
‘Beats me. Look, bring me a couple of shots of what was in them, OK? You remember the photos you took for a piece back in 2016 on the ancient burial ground a couple of archeologists found in the Caucasus?’
Monica has a photographic memory. Pun intended. She probably didn’t even have to look up the date of that story. The Caucasus Mountains run along an isthmus separating the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, a place where Europe and Asia converge. The burial ground, which had been located on a farmer’s field at the base of the mountains in southern Russia, had belonged to the Scythians, a nomadic tribe that founded a rich, powerful empire lasting from the eighth century bc to the second century ad. Because they didn’t have a written language, almost nothing had been known about them before this discovery. What little information there was had come from the Greeks, who didn’t like the Scythians much, calling them ‘mare milkers’ and drunks. The cache of items found in the burial ground told a different story.
‘Sure, I remember taking those photos. I nearly got pneumonia tramping around that field for a few very cold days,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Because what our guy described to me sounds not only like what they found at that burial site but also the things you photographed later at the museum in Melitopol,’ Monica said. ‘So I figured you’d be the perfect person to send for this one.’
If Monica ever went on Jeopardy, she’d ace every geography question hands down. Melitopol was a city in southern Ukraine with a museum that possessed a collection of exquisitely worked necklaces, rings, arm bands, goblets, hair combs, shields, and other items that had been made from gold by the Scythians. The Ukrainians claimed the Russians had staged a bizarre heist – a man in a white lab coat had shown up accompanied by Russian soldiers at the home of a museum caretaker who was forced at gunpoint to accompany him to the Melitopol Museum of Local History. The white-coated thief then cherry-picked nearly two hundred priceless items belonging to the Scythians and disappeared. The items he’d taken had vanished and no one knew where they’d gone.
‘Monica. A guy was murdered. The suitcases are evidence. Do you think anyone from Dulles PD is going to let me take pictures of what are probably stolen goods? That person would have their head handed to them by whoever is in charge of the investigation. After they got canned for stupidity.’
‘I have faith in you, Medina,’ she said. ‘You can be very persuasive when you want to be.’
She disconnected and I stared at my phone. Like I said, this was probably going to be a wild goose chase.
I went anyway, my journalistic curiosity getting the better of me.
The graceful curl of the gull-wing main terminal at Dulles Airport came into view as I rounded a corner on the access road an hour later. Vince Kirby, who looked like he’d graduated from J-school all of about ten minutes ago, met me on the lower level by the baggage-claim area near a door that led to the airport manager’s office, a conference room, and a small warren of offices – cubicles, really – that were used by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and the Dulles division of the MWAA police department.
Dulles is vast, sprawling over 12,000 acres of land in northern Virginia. Most of its facilities are invisible to the millions and millions of passengers who fly in and out of that airport each year. Hidden in a remote field with a view of the low-slung Blue Ridge Mountains in the background is an airplane fuselage and a truncated control tower with the capacity to set fire to the plane as if someone is turning on a gas grill for a barbecue. It is where firefighters, airport staff, airline crews, and law enforcement authorities regularly run drills and practice the what-if scenarios of everyone’s nightmares. I photographed one of the triennial emergency drills every airport in the country must run for an IPS story years ago. As the professionals practice these drills in eerie silence, passengers at the main terminal are sublimely oblivious to the hellish scene happening a few miles away because all lights, sirens, and emergency horns are turned off for just that reason. But, let me tell you, an airplane with a fire raging through the cabin, shooting flames out the windows and the cockpit – even if you know it’s a simulation – is something you don’t forget.
Ever.
Kirby had already done his homework before I got to the airport. ‘There’s going to be a presser late this afternoon, maybe tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘A cattle call where they’ll share what they know about the dead guy and what was in the two suitcases that belonged to him.’
‘Asking for the public’s help?’ I asked.
‘Yep. I nudged a bit, asked if we could get an early peek at the contents of the suitcases.’
‘Who’d you talk to?’
‘A lowly secretary who couldn’t – and wouldn’t – promise diddly. We have to plead our case to whoever talks to us from Public Affairs. At least she didn’t tell me to go pound sand.’ He sounded hopeful.
I indicated the door to the offices. ‘Well, then, shall we?’
Kirby opened the door and held it for me. ‘Why not?’
The secretary Kirby had talked to led us down the hall to a small windowless conference room, told us that Rex Morgenthau from Public Affairs would be in momentarily, and shut the door on her way out. Kirby and I found two seats around the conference table and sat down, checking out our surroundings. The only decoration in the plain vanilla room was a series of model airplanes parked on a shelf that ran along one wall. Each plane had the logo of an airline that flew out of Dulles.
Kirby got up and picked up a plane with an Emirates logo. ‘Wow, do you know what this is?’
‘An airplane,’ I said. ‘A big airplane.’
He gave me the Thanks-wise-guy look. ‘It’s an Airbus A380-800, the largest airplane in the world. If it’s configured as a double-decker, it can hold more than five hundred passengers. Eight hundred and fifty if it’s a single level. It can fly eight thousand nautical miles at a max speed of six-hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. Price tag nearly half a billion dollars. Built in France.’
He went down the line, picking up each plane and examining it, geeking out telling me the model number and explaining its history, how big it was, and how fast it could fly. Something in the way he held each plane told me this was more than a childhood hobby, that he’d done more than build model airplanes as a kid.
‘How do you know all this stuff?’ I asked.
‘My father was a Navy pilot. Based on the USS Independence in the Mediterranean, flew all over the Middle East. My grandfather flew missions in Vietnam.’ He shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve got anomalous trichromacy so no pilot school for me.’ He saw my puzzled expression. ‘Color blindness inherited from my mother’s family. In my case, protanopia. I can’t see the color red.’
