Her name was Irina Popovitch. Twenty-four, she had been in the United States thirteen months on a work visa obtained through an agency in St. Petersburg, where she’d been assured she would find employment as a fashion model. They’d even paid her airfare.
Instead of glory on the fashion runways, she’d arrived to find that she had become the property of Russian organized crime figures who ran a string of high-class private brothels up and down the Eastern Seaboard: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Tampa, and Miami.
Popovitch had been to every one of them. The Russians evidently believed in moving the girls around in order to keep the clients, who paid upwards of two thousand dollars a visit, coming back for more. She’d been with this team of four women about a month. They stayed in a guarded apartment in Falls Church and commuted to work every day under the watchful eye of Dimitri, the well-dressed dead guy in the main room.
Around six forty-five that evening, twenty minutes after the arrival of the man we’d found dead in the first bedroom, Popovitch had welcomed Martin, her third client of the day, a man she’d seen once about a week before. She said Martin had asked Dimitri for her specifically.
Martin liked to take off his clothes first and have her tease him in her lingerie before they got down to business. That was what she was doing, teasing, when she heard the apartment buzzer. She was still teasing Martin when the music in the outer room was turned up very, very loud.
“That does not to make sense for me,” Popovitch said, beginning to cry again. “Dimitri, he hate loud music and he hate hip-hop music. He say men with money enough for us are too old to like that shitty rap.”
Streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks like spiderwebs. I got a wipe and cleaned her face, said, “So, you heard the music and you went to look?”
Popovitch nodded, sniffling. “After a minute, yes, because, well, my client he says he cannot do things he wants to with such music playing so loud. I go to bedroom door, and I don’t know why, something says open just little bit.”
Her face grew taut and her gaze fixed.
“You saw him?” I said. “The killer?”
She bobbed her head, crying again. “He wears business suit and hat like Indiana Jones. He carries two guns with these things to make no sound.”
“Suppressors.”
She took a deep, wavering breath. “He disappears into Marina’s bedroom, and then I see down the hall my friend Lenka lying there in her blood.”
Popovitch said she spun around and hissed to her naked client, “Run! He kills everyone!” She heard a scream from the other bedroom and ran for the window. She got her head and shoulders out the window, realized she was going to fall headfirst onto brick, and hesitated. Martin pushed her out from behind. She fell and hit her head.
Stunned, she nevertheless heard the music grow louder, understood that the door of her bedroom had opened. She heard her client say, “No, please!”
Then she got up, trying to find another place to hide. She said Dimitri kept a key to the basement door in a fake rock and she figured if she could get in there she was safe.
“I no know the glass is there,” she said. “I run onto it, feel it cut, and want to yell, but I say nothing. I hear something back up at window, so I get down, cut myse
lf more, but try to find key.”
“Lucky you did,” I said. “Why didn’t you come upstairs once you heard the music stop?”
“I hear walking on floors, I hear voices,” she said. “I no know who this is, where he is, so I stay put.”
The ambulance stopped and then backed up to the emergency room entrance at Georgetown University Medical Center.
“How well did you see him?” I asked.
She thought about that. “He will know of me?”
“If you mean can we protect you, yes,” I said firmly. “This is not Russia. Did you see him?”
Popovitch hesitated but then replied reluctantly, “Yes. Good in light from bathroom. But only from the side as he goes into Marina’s bedroom.”
The EMTs opened the rear doors to slide out her gurney. There was a female police officer waiting behind them.
“You come with me, Detective?” Irina asked in a pleading tone.
“The officer will stay with you,” I assured her. “They’ll fix your cuts, and I’m going to send an artist around to see you.”
“I see this on television. They draw what I see, yes?”
“Exactly,” I replied, and patted her on the shoulder. “You’re a brave woman, Irina, and we’re going to help you.”