Free Brides of Blood by Joseph Koenig Page B

And?” Maryam Lajevardi blew her nose in a man’s colored handkerchief. “Isn’t that enough? Are you asking what comes next for me? How can I tell you, when I don’t know myself?”
    Darius touched his pen to his notebook, and the young woman stopped sniffling. “You won’t report that you found me?”
    “No,” he said. “That’s not my job.”
    “Because if I’m forced to go back, it will be the murder of two girls you’ll be investigating.”
    “One more question. How do you live in Shemiran on what you bring home from the currency exchange?”
    Maryam Lajevardi went into the kitchen, and tore open the cabinets above the sink. Waxy white paper lined the bare shelves. “I starve.”
    A blue service taxi had run an Iran Peyma bus into a streetlight, and emergency vehicles blocked all lanes of Saltanatabad Avenue. Darius drove onto the sidewalk around the accident, and then continued downtown. Of nearly three dozen witnesses he had spoken to, Maryam Lajevardi alone merited a follow-up interview. How much of that could he credit to her short dress and the warm promise of her silken skin? How much to the melodrama of her escape from a brokered engagement? Even if her story had been delivered to wring the last drop of sympathy from him, in its endless complications he’d heard it too many times before to discount it out of hand. Minus the tears supplied on cue, the lip willed into a spastic bout of vulnerability, he had little cause to view it with skepticism.
    At a red light Darius shut his eyes and conjured the image of the young woman. His mind’s eye could be counted on to circumvent the cleverest guise while going to the heart of uncooperative witnesses and suspects. What came to him most vividly about Maryam Lajevardi was her breathy voice, the defiance of authority that she was at loose ends to contain. Hearing it again in his head he decided the tone was too excitable for a native of the Caspian; he had supplied her brash words with the wrong accent—or she had. Her speech, as well as her coloring, seemed in part foreign, which might explain why he had gotten nowhere with the bullying tactics that as a rule produced quick results with men and women made docile through generations of submission to Islamic decree. Intrigued now, he played over the voice until he had located the faint accent in central Europe, or the shores of the Mediterranean, or else, he thought briefly, in a corner of his brain that would invent a lonely, beautiful woman who was also an outsider in her own land. Already he was looking forward to their second talk. When no good reason came to mind for putting it off, he angled toward the curb, prepared to wheel into a U-turn.
    He never heard the car that ran up his tail and slammed the Thunderbird into the intersection. Returning to consciousness, he was vaguely aware that if he hadn’t had his foot off the brake, the whiplash would have snapped his neck. He doubted he’d been out for more than twenty seconds. His nose was running. He wiped it on the back of his hand, and blood spilled between his knuckles. Two teeth had been driven through his lower lip. In the mirror was a caricature from a new school of realism of a helpless Dracula with bloody fangs. Touching his tongue to a jagged incisor, he went out to inspect the damage to his car.
    The bumper was dangling, the trunk lid jack-knifed over the spare tire. He was sick on the blood and the smell of gasoline. The other vehicle appeared to be unscathed. It was an American limousine, an old Chrysler with a grille like the jaws of a road-grading machine. As it disentangled from the Thunderbird, the loose bumper came away with it.
    “Stop right there!” His words were thick, shaped by a swollen tongue as clumsy as a big toe against the roof of his mouth.
    Silvered glass offered little of two figures in the other car’s front seat. The Chrysler shifted into drive, the torn bumper throwing off sparks like a lit fuse. Darius stuck out