Last Snow (18 page)

“Nevertheless,” Annika said, “it couldn’t hurt to take a look around the grounds.”

They set off in a more or less northeasterly direction, making a full circle of the property. The dull, clammy morning had been swept away by a freshening wind out of the west, but high up the remnants of the morning’s clouds drifted across the sun. They came first to an apple orchard, the orderly rows of gnarled trees looking abandoned and forlorn. Next came a fenced-in section that in the summer would be bursting with rows of pole beans, cabbage, cucumbers, and lettuce, but now lay fallow.

By this time they were behind the manor house, approximately at a forty-five degree angle to its right-hand wing, moving in a counterclockwise direction. Coming over a rise they spotted a finger of water that turned out to be a small lake or perhaps a large pond, it was difficult to tell from their present position. But what surprised them was a small family cemetery set in the adjoining lowland planted with mature weeping willows, which so craved water. Here were the headstones of perhaps four or five members, Magnussen’s forebears all, from what Jack could glean as he scanned them. The letters
M
and
S
were for some reason the easiest for his brain to interpret immediately.

“Father, mother—and a brother, I think,” Alli said as she came up beside him. “Each stone has the places they died, along with the dates.” She squinted through the watery sunlight. “The father was ten years older, but curiously, though they both died during the same week it wasn’t in the same place.

“Who’s the smart one?” Alli said. “Daddy could have made the money.”

At that moment, they heard Annika calling them. They turned, saw her standing on the opposite rise, waving them on. Jack, wondering what she’d found, strode up the gentle incline, Alli scrambling after him.

“Look.” Annika pointed to their left, as soon they gained the modest crest.

Now Jack could confirm what he’d suspected, that Magnussen, spending like a drunken sailor, had had the pond or lake built, because on a spit of land that perfectly bisected the body of limpid water was a stone pergola, a folly in the classic Roman style. But the pergola, per se, wasn’t what had caught Annika’s attention; rather it was a seated figure drenched in the shadows beneath the pergola’s dome. From their viewpoint they could see that the figure, bent slightly forward, forearms on knees, had the aspect of a person deep in contemplation.

They descended the far side of the rise, walked on the damp, mossy ground around the skeletal willows whose branches arched overhead in a tangle of rheumatic fingers. Skirting the edge of the lake they walked out onto the small peninsula. From this angle it was impossible to tell anything about the figure other than it was male.

“Magnussen?” Jack called out. But if Magnussen had flown the coop as Jack had surmised this man wouldn’t respond to that name. He didn’t, remaining in the same position, plunged deep in thought.

They approached ever more cautiously until Jack, his spine tingling, moved around in front of the figure. He looked hard at the man for a moment, then very quietly said, “Alli, stay where you are, please.”

Her curiosity piqued, she felt the urge to take a step forward, but something in Jack’s voice stayed her. “Why? What’s going on?”

By this time Annika had joined Jack in front of the figure, whose
eyes were fixed on the horizon. The man was sitting on a gaily painted wooden Adirondack-style chair. It was difficult to see at first for all the blood and the gaping hole in his chest, but the top of each thigh where it creased with his abdomen was punctured by a
sulitsa
—seemingly identical to the one that had killed the young woman—which some force, terrible in its rage, had driven all the way through muscle and fat so that the points had buried themselves in the wood beneath, pinning the victim in place.

“It’s the man in the photo at the dacha,”Annika said. “This is Karl Rochev.”

Jack knelt in front of yet another example of man’s barbarity. “Which means that our prime suspect in his mistress’s murder has himself become a murder victim.”

“Not that it matters, we’re at a dead end.” Annika sighed. “This murder tells us very little.”

“On the contrary,” Jack said, rising to his feet. “It’s proof that Senator Berns’s death wasn’t accidental. He was murdered because of something Rochev told him, something the senator was about to tell someone else.” He reached out to touch one of the shafts, then thought better of it, stuffed his hands in his pockets instead. “This leak is being sealed one hole at a time.”

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war,
death after life does greatly please.
—E
DMUND
S
PENSER
, 1590

R
HON
F
YODOVICH
Kirilenko used one thin, reddened hand to shake out a cigarette and put it to his mouth. He slid open the slender box of wooden matches he always carried and lit the match. For an instant the sharp scent of sulfur sucked the oxygen out of his nostrils, causing a little gasp, an involuntary exhalation. Slowly and deliberately, as he did all things large and small, he put the flame to the tip of the cigarette, then took a deep pull on the harsh, black Turkish tobacco and held the smoke in his lungs until his mind ceased its hurrying. A hurrying mind was a disorganized mind, and a disorganized mind made mistakes. Ever since he had become a homicide detective in the FSB, that had been his philosophy; it was so simple, so succinct, so true that in his twenty-odd years running down murderers and serial rapists he’d never had cause to change it even one iota. This was precisely the sort of man Kirilenko was: practical, stolid—his few detractors accused him of being plodding, dull, even pedantic. On the other hand, his benefactors understood that this persona—bland
and gray as the federal building in which they all toiled—was a carefully constructed facade. They saw him as being smart enough to follow orders to the letter, possessed of a quiet rectitude that ruffled no feathers and that allowed him to run his investigations as he saw fit. Everyone knew him as relentless; once he sank his teeth into an investigation he never let go until he’d reached a satisfactory conclusion, which meant a conviction of the perpetrator, or his death, whichever came first. That was about the only thing Kirilenko wasn’t fussy about. Incarceration or death, it was all the same to him because these death-wielding perps infuriated him. He looked on them as something other—other than human, less than human, a subspecies inferior even to animals.

Having gotten what he needed from it, Kirilenko blew out the Turkish smoke in a rush, then inhaled slowly and deeply. Behind him he could hear the small, familiar sounds of his men sifting through the charred remains of Karl Rochev’s dacha, but he paid them as much mind as he would the noises coming from the seats around him in a sports stadium, inconsequential until proven otherwise.

His attention was focused on the mattress his men had salvaged from the upper floor bedroom just before the staircase collapsed. It lay now among the trees, brushed by dead leaves and blades of un-mowed grass. On the bed was the twenty-two-year-old body of Ilenya Makova, Rochev’s current mistress or, he corrected himself, his late mistress. She was lying on the charred and smoldering mattress, a ragged hole opened up clear through her. On close inspection he could see that the wound had been inflicted by neither a bullet nor a knife. It looked malevolent, ugly, ancient, as if whatever had killed her had been used to rip her insides out. But whatever that weapon might be, it was nowhere to be found.

His gaze moved now to the digital photo on the screen of the cell phone in his hand. One of the men assigned to this detail by the FSB had had the presence of mind to snap a photo of the three people as
they emerged from the front door before the fire started: Ilenya Makova’s killers. Sadly for him that man was Mondan Limonev, the one member of the division he worked out of who he despised more than any other. Worse still, he instilled both a sense of fear and distrust in Kirilenko. Limonev, a dead-eyed killer if Kirilenko ever saw one, was just the sort of animal Kirilenko had spent his entire adult life hunting down and bringing to justice. It offended him no end that this creature should be employed by the FSB. In his fantasies he’d discovered many novel ways to exterminate Limonev, none of which, sadly, he was at liberty to put into action.

The photo on Limonev’s cell was grainy, slightly blurred. Three figures. By narrowing his eyes slightly, he could recognize a male and two females. This, in itself, was a mystery. Why would Rochev hire three people to kill his mistress? Why would he want her dead in the first place? Kirilenko knew him as a serial fucker—he cheated on his wife with a roster of women as professional as they were beautiful. He’d never seen fit to kill one before so why start now? And, anyway, where was he? Disappeared from work, from his home, and not in a tryst at his own private love hotel.

But first things first. Back to the killers: Not only were there three of them, but it seemed that one was either an adolescent or a midget. Neither fit the usual profile of a professional hit man who, so far as Kirilenko’s extensive experience decreed, worked solo. But, actually, that meant little, since his experience also confirmed that professional hit men would use any tactic they could think of to throw him off the scent. As of this moment, none of them had succeeded; he’d run each of them into the ground. One of the reasons he always tracked down the perp, the murderer, strangler, shooter, knifer, was due to his orderly mind, which allowed him to know more about each situation than anyone around him. He absorbed a crime scene with all his five senses, then allowed his mind to look for patterns. A crime scene, steeped in death, in anger, violence, fear,
even disinterest, was the very definition of chaos. Death disordered life. Many of the killers he was after were, in their way, as detached as he was. The difference was outrage. Murder outraged him, whether it be premeditated or accidental, professional or amateurish. To him, the taking of a life—any life—was unthinkable, a sin worthy of full retribution, lawful or otherwise. The taking of a life was a violation. It created a state of affairs unto itself, one that had nothing to do with society, that existed, throbbing painfully, outside the boundaries of civilization. Let the punishment fit the crime. Nevertheless, he lived with these acts of cruelty, with the most heinous of insults, as if they were lodgers who had overstayed their welcome in his mind and who would not now relinquish their place in his life for love or money.

He tried zooming in on the faces of the perps, but the man appeared to have his arm raised in front of his eyes, the woman was in the process of turning away, and the face of the adolescent or midget was lost behind the woman’s body. He was about to try zooming in on her face when he saw that she was gripping something in her hand: an arrow or a short spear, something with a wicked tip, meant to tear the insides out of its victim: the murder weapon. Now he moved up the image to the woman’s face. By zooming in, though not too much, he could discern her features. With a sickening lurch of his stomach he recognized Annika Dementieva.

“There is no trace of the marksman, the man in the woods who fired his weapon.”

The thin man with the saturnine face had emerged from the wreckage of the dacha to stand beside Kirilenko’s car. Kirilenko, becoming aware of his approach, had quite sensibly pocketed Limonev’s phone with its incriminating photo. He’d be damned if he’d share inside information with this man. As for Limonev, he had made a mental note to have the Ukrainians get him a replacement cell immediately.

“He wasn’t one of mine,” Kirilenko said, “so he must have been one of yours.”

“He wasn’t,” the man said. “Anyway, I wasn’t supplied with a marksman, you know that.”

“When it comes to you people,” Kirilenko said without rancor, “I know nothing.”

“Well, take my word for it.” The thin man glanced back over his shoulder. “Perhaps one of the SBU men, you know how undisciplined these Ukrainians are.”

Kirilenko regarded the man impassively through the smoke passing out of his half-open lips. “Do you judge Russians as harshly as you do the Ukrainians?”

“We have high regard for you,” the thin man said with some asperity. “I thought we’d made that perfectly clear.”