Free Walking Dead by Greg Rucka

time to think, and thinking had given me the frame for a plan.
     
Sex was for sale everywhere. It was just a question of knowing where to look.
     
     
My first day in Trabzon, the day I met Arzu, I woke early, did yoga for half an hour, then ordered room service. The food arrived just after my shower, and I ate while going through Bakhar's address book, this time looking for numbers with a Trabzon exchange. There weren't any, which left me the BlackBerry, and while I was violently suspicious of the device, or, more precisely, of who might have Vladek's number and be tracking him through it, it gave me a window into his life and his business. All I needed to do was access the information.
     
The Zorlu had wireless, so I set up the laptop to download the software I needed, then went down to the lobby and got directions from the concierge to the nearest store selling mobile phones. It was a three-minute walk, but they didn't have the USB cable I needed. I bought two prepaid international SIM cards from them, anyway, then got directions to another store, which did carry replacement cables. I bought another two SIMs, and the cable, and headed back to the room. Then I ran the software I'd downloaded, plugged the BlackBerry into my USB port, and cracked open a very disturbing window into Vladek Karataev's life.
     
His address book, like Bakhar's, exercised discretion. Whilethis time there were both first and last names to be discerned, there were no addresses provided, only phone numbers. It looked like Vladek had made a point of clearing out his emails and text messages regularly, and I was only able to find a handful of each. It would have been simple enough to recover the deleted communications, I suppose, but all the methods I knew of required additional hardware, none of which I had, and none of which I could think of a way to acquire quickly.
     
So I worked with what I did have, started searching, and the laptop made that easy; all I had to do was run a find. “Trabzon” didn't kick back any results. “Turkey” got the same negative result. When I tried the country code for Turkey, though, three hits came back, and one of those looked like it was for Trabzon, or at least close by—a man named Arzu Kaya. I checked against Bakhar's book, and lo and behold, he had an Arzu, too.
     
I skimmed the rest of the BlackBerry entries while considering how to proceed. There were numbers for phones in Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia, and it looked to me like Vladek had kept his business local, though I found two out of Western Europe-one in the Netherlands, the other in Germany.
     
The mail and text messages got my attention next. Almost all of the emails were in Cyrillic, which was a minor headache, as I could speak Russian much better than I could read it. It took me a while, even though they were universally terse. Vladek had been circumspect, carrying on what little correspondence remained in open code, with references to “deliveries” and “stock” and “items.” It might've referred to anything, guns or drugs as much as people. It might've referred to Georgian wine.
     
Of the text messages, the most recent had been the one sent by Zviadi at the point of my gun. The only other sequence was a short exchange of messages sent the night Tiasa had beentaken, between Vladek and Arzu. The exchange had run in Russian.
     
BUYING?
     
HOW MANY
     
5. 16 16 17 19 AND 14.
     
WHEN
     
TOMORROW NIGHT. CALL TO DISCUSS PRICE.
     
Which meant that Vladek had planned on selling Tiasa even before he and his pals had murdered Bakhar.
     
For a while, that was the worst the BlackBerry gave me.
     
Then I found the pictures.
     
And the video.
     
     
The photos had been taken on the phone itself, and the most sinister thing about them was that they were so very mundane. Mostly headshots of different women, different girls, one after another. In a couple, the subject was actually smiling. In a couple, the subject was crying. If I'd seen