Neptune Avenue (21 page)

Jack pressed him. “Which was it?”

Joral scowled. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘possession.’ I park my car on the damn street. Anybody could’a got hold of it.”

“Are you saying it might have been stolen?”

Joral was looking sickly now. If he lied and said it was, the next question would be why he hadn’t reported the theft. Jack looked on with satisfaction: it was like watching a checkers champion suddenly forced to figure out future moves in chess.

“Nobody said nuthin’ about it bein’ stolen.”

“All right.” Jack nodded. “So your car was in your possession all three of those nights.”

The lawyer drew himself up. “You know what, Detective? It sounds to me like you’re just on another fishing expedition here. Once again, if you don’t have any evidence against my client, I’m going to have to demand that he be released immediately.”

Jack sat back and smiled. “But that’s the thing, Counselor. We
do
have evidence.” He reached into the manila envelope and pulled out a Polaroid of Joral’s fur-wrapped steering wheel. “We found a certain type of animal fur at both crime scenes, and it matches what we found today in your client’s car. DNA doesn’t lie.”

The lawyer crossed his arms. “There’s no way you would have had time to conduct a DNA test.”

“You’re right,” Jack admitted. “But a preliminary forensic exam indicates that the fur is the same, and we’ll get the DNA results soon. What would you like to bet that we don’t get a match?”

“You can’t do a DNA test on no goddamn animal,” Joral muttered.

Jack smiled. “Why not? Animals have DNA, just like we do. And it’s just as traceable. Interesting fact, huh? Maybe you should’ve been watching some nature TV.”

After all this talk of DNA the lawyer’s eyes alighted on his client’s soda can. He turned to his client. “Say, Joseph, are you finished with your soda?”

Joral nodded.

“Would you mind if I have the can?”

Joral looked puzzled. “Why?”

“I collect them,” his lawyer answered, smirking to let the detectives know that he was on to their ruse.

“Help yourself,” his client said. The P.D. picked up the can and tucked it into his briefcase—now
he
was in legal possession of it.

Jack nodded at the man. “
Your point,
Counselor.”

The lawyer grinned.

Joral looked on, mystified.

Jack shrugged. “The match on the fur will do. It’s over, Joey.” He knew that he needed to regain the power in the interview, not to mention distract the lawyer. It would only take a minute for the man and his client to realize that the fur was not evidence of murder. Jack leaned toward his suspect. “Why don’t you just tell us why you did it? It’ll make things easier for you if you cooperate.”

The public defender held up a hand. “Not so fast, Detective. All this evidence might establish is that my client could have been at these scenes. You haven’t presented anything that directly implicates him in any crimes.”

Kyle spoke up angrily. “We know he did them, and I’m sure a jury will agree.”

The public defender kept his cool. He stood up. “If you think you have what you need to prosecute my client, then go right ahead and arrest him. Otherwise, let’s put an end to all this dancing around.”

He nodded at Joral, who started to stand up.

Jack saw his case walking out the door again. He spoke up quickly. “Tell me something, Joey: do you consider yourself good in bed?”

The lawyer’s eyes went wide. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Joral scowled. “Why you asking, cop? You some kinda fag?”

Jack tapped his manila folder. “I was rereading LaTanya Davidson’s complaint. She said that when she wanted to have sex with you, you couldn’t perform. Is that right, Joey?” He didn’t feel good about teasing anybody about their sexual difficulties, but given the circumstances …

The precinct was air-conditioned, but not much of that cool air made it into the little interview room. Of course, Joseph Joral might have had other reasons for starting to sweat.

“This interview is over,” the lawyer said, but his client wasn’t done.

“That’s a goddamn lie! I didn’t
wanna
have sex with her. She was too skanky.”

The man’s hatred of women was practically pouring out of him, and Jack ached to take him down.

“Is that so?” he tapped the folder again. “Here’s an interesting little fact from our crime scenes: at both of them, we found dry, empty condoms lying on the ground.” He turned to Kyle. “What does that suggest to you, partner?”

Kyle picked up on the last-ditch strategy. He leaned forward and sneered. “We know why you killed those girls, Joey. You were ashamed ’cause you can’t get it up.”

Joral jumped to his feet. His lawyer put a hand on his client’s arm, but it was too late.

“That’s a lie, motherfucker! I banged
both
those stupid bitches. And they only got what they had comin’.”

The lawyer slumped back and put a hand over his eyes.

BACK OUT IN THE
squad room, Kyle traded high fives with the other cops. “Beautiful!” said one. “Schweet!” crowed another.

Jack just shrugged. “Like shooting ducks in a barrel.” He was pleased, though. Talk about job satisfaction: this was what it was all about. They had caught the killer of two young women and likely saved others from a similar fate.

Sometimes it was just this simple: the Good Guys won.

ON A NORMAL NIGHT,
Smith Street made Jack Leightner feel severely out of place. He couldn’t believe how this humble little thoroughfare from his childhood was now swarming with twentysomething hipsters who thought nothing of dropping nine bucks on a trendy mojito or saketini.

Tonight he was feeling a bit old and square, but those feelings were balanced by the situation: he was out for a celebratory dinner with a beautiful young woman. It was funny: Zhenya didn’t really fit in here either. Jack didn’t know anything about fashion, but he knew that his date didn’t blend in with the casually chic women roving these crowded sidewalks. She had dressed as if she were going to some expensive but rather garish 1940s Manhattan nightclub: she tottered along on impossibly high-heeled shoes, wore fishnet stockings, and sported a skintight evening dress. She looked—Jack was ashamed of the thought—kind of like a high-priced escort. Even so, she was so sincere in her excitement about this rare night out that she somehow pulled it off. Young hipsters dressed all in black swiveled around as she walked by; she was like a brightly plumed bird passing through a flock of crows.

The setting was so foreign to both of them that they didn’t have to worry about bumping into Russian friends who might disapprove of the young widow, or cop friends who might wonder what he was doing socializing with a victim’s widow. The restaurant choices were dazzling: French bistros, Japanese sushi, tapas bars, Peruvian, Jamaican, Korean … They settled on a candlelit Argentinean restaurant with tables out on the sidewalk and a live salsa band inside. After a couple of cocktails, they took to the crowded dance floor; neither of them really knew how to do Latin dancing, but they had a great time pretending.

For most of the evening Jack was able to stay in the moment and enjoy himself, but by the time they had finished their dinner—a steak for him, some sea bass for her—his mind had wandered back to the other evening, when Zhenya had suddenly declared herself too busy to see him. He sat pensive, stirring his coffee, a powerful, muddy brew.

Zhenya watched him for a minute. “What you are thinking, Mr. Thinker?”

He tried to smile but failed. Ah, what the hell, why not just bring it out in the open and be done with it?

“Listen,” he said, “I know it’s really none of my business, but the, ah, the other evening, when you said you had ‘plans’ … I was just wondering what you meant by that?”

She stared at him and said nothing for a moment. Jack sank into a horrible flashback, the moment when, in another New York restaurant, he had proposed to his last girlfriend, and she had stared at him just like this, then burst into tears and announced that she was having an affair.

But Zhenya just shrugged. “I had dinner with an old friend who visits New York.”

Jack winced. “I just … I thought maybe you had a date or something.”

Her eyes widened, and he was afraid she was going to get angry, but she shook her head calmly. “I promise you, on my mother’s grave: I did not have a date.” She reached out, laid a hand on his, and grinned. “You were zhealous? You know what?”

He smiled, hesitantly but more genuinely this time. “What?”

“When you are jealous, Zhack Leightner, you are looking very cute.”

J
ACK SNORTED WHEN HE
saw the tabloid headline the next morning:
NYPD K.O.S RACIST KILLER.

The story was fundamentally wrong: Joseph Joral actually had a thing for black women, and he was clearly into hip-hop style. (It was
women
he had a problem with.) Jack couldn’t blame the paper, though—they were just running with the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information’s official spin on the story. The Department was trying to score a few points with the black community. Jack shrugged: the brass and the press could do whatever they wanted with Joral’s story; he was just glad that he had gotten another killer off the city’s streets.
And,
he reflected, still feeling a good buzz from the previous day’s events, if he and his colleagues could take down one arrogant creep, surely they could take down another. It was Semyon Balakutis’s turn.

He found Linda Vargas in the task force’s file room, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

She grinned. “I heard about your win yesterday. Nice job.”

He waved the compliment away. “The guy basically hung himself. If you’ll excuse the expression.” He poured himself a cup, then put a new filter in the machine. “Hey, what’s going on with the Lelo case? Anything new?”

Vargas frowned. “Still no witnesses. No forensic evidence. I would kill for a little something exotic here. Maybe a little beaver fur …” She shook her head. “If Balakutis is our man, he sure pulled off a slick little murder.”

Back out in the squad room, Jack reclined in his desk chair, rotating slowly from side to side. All over the room, his teammates were doing phone interviews, reading files, scanning computer screens. He scratched his cheek. The Lelo case wasn’t his, officially, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t continue to help out. … After a minute, he sat up straight and picked up the phone. For lack of a better move, he figured he’d take another run at Andrei Goguniv, Daniel’s fish company manager.

Someone picked up, but it wasn’t Goguniv.

“Andrei?” The voice continued in rapid Russian, sounding worried.

“No,” Jack said. “I want to
speak
to Andrei. Is he there?”

“Not here.” The other person hung up.

Jack called his contact in the fish market security office.

“No prob—I’ll go over there and check on it.”

A few minutes later, the man called back. “I just went up to the Black Sea office. Goguniv wasn’t there. I had a hard time finding anyone who could speak any English, but it seems that the guy didn’t show up for work today.”

“Is he married or anything?”

“I got his wife’s name,” the security officer said. “I just called: it turns out he didn’t come home last night either.”

“And she didn’t tell anybody?”

“You know how it is with these people: they think we’re all KGB or somethin’.”

As soon as he got off the phone, Jack called across the room to Linda Vargas. “You busy?”

She set down a file folder she’d been reading. “Why?”

“I think we should take a little ride.”

ANDREI GOGUNIV’S BENSONHURST DOMICILE
was a modest brick home, with a white wrought-iron fence surrounding a tiny concrete front yard. An aluminum awning provided a little shade over the front door, and a small American flag, extended on a pole from a second-story window, drooped in the summer heat.

Goguniv’s wife, Galina, was a plump little blonde. She looked as if she hadn’t slept at all in the past twenty-four hours. She kept jumping up to pace around her small living room, with its big old TV and plastic-upholstered furniture. “He goes to work yesterday, as usual,” she said in a thick Russian accent. “Every day, he comes home at eleven
A.M.
—you know, he works in the night at the market. But yesterday, he doesn’t come. One o’clock, two o’clock, he doesn’t come.”

Linda Vargas sat perched on the edge of an armchair, a sympathetic expression on her face. “Did he call you?”

The wife shook her head. “No. Is not like him. If he is only an half hour late, he will call me. He is good husband.”

“Has he ever stayed out all night like this?” Vargas asked. Jack knew where she was heading—maybe the man had a girlfriend stashed away somewhere.

Galina shook her head. “Never. For twenty years we is married, and we is together every night.”

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

The woman sank down into the sofa and put a hand over her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know.” She began to cry.

Vargas pressed on. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Goguniv, but we need more information. The, uh, things that happened to his hand … what did he tell you about that?”

Galina wiped her eyes. “He says was ‘accidents,’ but I don’t believe. One time, okay—is dangerous job, with saws and hooks … But two times?”

“Was he acting differently than usual, around the time of these incidents?”

Galina chewed her lower lip. “He was very … how you say? Not paying attention.”

“Preoccupied?” Jack said. “Nervous?” He felt sorry for the poor woman.

She nodded. “Yes.
Nervous.
Something is not good at work, but he is not telling me. And now I am afraid.”

Linda Vargas reached into her purse and pulled out a photo: Semyon Balakutis. “Do you recognize this man?”

Galina looked at it without any sign of recognition. “Who is he?”

Vargas tucked the picture away. “Don’t worry about it. And don’t worry: we’ll find your husband.”

Jack turned away. He guessed that they would indeed find Andrei Goguniv, but he wouldn’t be willing to bet that the man would be alive.