The White City (9 page)

Irina lit a cigarette. —Not so much as he wished to be.

Moscow

Police Palace, Kremlin

May 1903

Another woman might have wondered
silently
how it was that the Russian Empire failed to employ some regional equivalent of the Zaubererdetektiv or Crown Investigator, when one of the world’s finest universities for sorcerers lay in the garden city of Kyiv. While the Ukraine was not exactly an Imperial possession, that was more a matter of courtesy and title than any lack of tribute paid the Tsar.

But Lady Abigail Irene Garrett, Th.D., had not arrived at her current station in life—doctored, defrocked, deported—by failing to ask such questions as they occurred. So as Dyachenko opened the incongruously beautiful enameled door at the top of the stone steps leading to the police morgue, she rested one hand on the crimson-and-gilt double-headed eagle and paused. Two steps along a descent illuminated by watery electric lights, he turned and glanced back.

A breath of cool air pressed her face, relieving the heat of a day already promising to grow oppressive.

“It was a dungeon first,” he said, apparently mistaking her hesitation for confusion or curiosity. “And then it was a wine cellar.”

Garrett let one fingertip rub lightly at the eagle’s toe, hitching up the blue velvet carpetbag that held her sorcerer’s tools in the other. “Inspector Dyachenko, how is it that the Imperial Police have failed to employ forensic sorcerers of their own?”

“We had them.” His mouth quirked, fingers curving as he beckoned her to follow. Even when he turned away, she had no difficulty understanding his words, his voice amplified by reflection off all that stone. “But after the Imperial Sorcerers united with democratic revolutionaries to overthrow Ivana III in 1726, it was disbanded, and since then the Imperial family of Mother Russia has…formally discouraged professional organizations for sorcerers. We have hedge-witches, of course, and they have their covens. But those are technically illegal. The University is tolerated, both due to its history and on a technicality—while Ukraine is an Imperial protectorate, legally it has its own parliament and Duke—but you will not find any sorcerer’s unions in Moscow or Pavelgrad. I suspect if Ivana had not been a sorceress herself, the entire profession would have been burned out.”

“I wonder how I missed that bit of history,” Garrett said. Although now that he explained it, the information evoked a familiar tickle in her head. As if she had once been aware of that, in her university days, and it had drifted to that deep quiet place where unrecalled
knowledge eventually sedimented.

She wondered if Dyachenko’s half-glance over his shoulder was because he abruptly recollected her own recent revolutionary past, and determined not to raise it unless he did.

Thankfully, he held his peace on that matter. He just tipped his ears from one shoulder to the other in a curious sort of shrug and answered her question as if it had been something other than rhetorical. “More pressing concerns?”

She laughed, surprised by how bright and resonant it sounded in the confined space. And unsurprised by the startled glare of the morgue attendant as they came through another, less elaborate door at the bottom of the stairs and into a dim, cool space that smelled of formaldehyde, rose-scented cleanser, and layers of decay. Garrett breathed shallowly, through her open mouth, but that only meant she
tasted
it instead.

Catching Dyachenko’s frown, the morgue attendant looked down quickly again. He was a man of average height, thin for his frame, his pin-striped shirtsleeves rolled up and gartered like a banker’s. His black bowtie and spectacles only added to the impression of clerical efficiency. He said something in Russian too thick and fast for Garrett to follow, and to which Dyachenko nodded and responded in the affirmative.

He signed them in, and Garrett caught her own name. She also knew the Cyrillic alphabet well enough to recognize its outline when Dyachenko wrote it down.

When they passed through another door into a reeking corridor, the floors of stone so smoothed by centuries of feet they seemed almost sculptured, Dyachenko translated for her. “He was apologizing that the surgeon had not yet been in to perform the postmortem.” His shrug indicated that this was usual.

“Is there an honorarium?” Garrett asked, suspecting that such things might be usual here, as they were in New Amsterdam—more so than London or Berlin. It was all about the culture of the place.

“Government employees inevitably consider themselves undercompensated,” Dyachenko said. “However, I imagine the delay can only serve your purposes, Crown Investigator.”

“Please,” Garrett said, surprised by the pang her lost title still sent through her. “Doctor Garrett will suffice.”

“I am sorry, Doctor Garrett.” Dyachenko paused before a much more modern gray metal door hung counterweighted on swinging hinges. Like all the others along this corridor, it was marked with a number and a letter. “I did not mean to raise uncomfortable memories.”

He glanced at her. It was her turn to shrug. A year before, she might have taken him on, but today she was reasonably sure that his blunder had indeed been inadvertent, and besides she was too tired to refight battles she’d already lost.

“It will be cleaner for me to work with an undisturbed corpse,” she agreed, and watched his sigh of relief raise his chest and drop it. “Come, let us interview the victim, then.”

He straight-armed the door and led her through.

Sharankova’s body lay on a marble slab—
like pastry
, Garrett thought, inevitably—with an oiled sheet drawn over her. The slab was supported by a modern chromed steel armature, the tubes forming a number of cubbies and shelves on which her personal effects had been stored. Garrett could just barely puzzle out the labels on the butcher’s-paper packages. Clothes, shoes, contents of her pockets—minus the silver ring, of course, though by Garrett’s assessment of Dyachenko, she would bet there was a receipt for it.

The dead woman had not been carrying a handbag, which made Garrett wonder what had become of it, or if she had had one at all. Surely some women managed without, though it seemed to Garrett a foreign way of life.

Sharankova’s dark hair, blood-clotted into stiff antennae, protruded from under her shroud. There were three other slabs in the room, of which two were occupied. Garrett selected the fourth as a resting place for her carpet bag and set it there. When she turned back to the dead woman, she held a glass rod in one hand, a piece of rabbit fur sewn to a silk backing in the other. “Do you have the murder weapon?”

Dyachenko produced it from the shelves under Sharankova’s corpse. He’d taken the precaution of wrapping it in a layer of silk before sliding it into an oiled-paper evidence envelope. Garrett was grateful for his foresight: not every mundane investigator understood the forensic process even that well.

“You’ll want the gloves,” he said, offering her a white silk pair.

She smiled and produced her own. “You don’t use those to avoid leaving thaumaturgical residue.” The state of the ring he’d handed her was proof enough of that.

“Fingerprints,” he said. “Did you know that no two people have the same pattern of spirals on their fingers? And skin oil left behind when a killer handles something can leave residue in the shape of those whorls. We wear the gloves to protect that evidence.” He grinned, delighted to share his trade secrets with a fellow professional, and Garrett felt a sharp and sudden pang. “You have a labyrinth on your fingertips.”

Garrett paused before drawing the glove onto her left hand, turning the palm up to the electric lights to see how their sheen revealed the presence of minute ridges and valleys
in her skin.

“Did you get anything off this one?”

“A clear thumbprint and partials of three left fingers.”

“So your killer is left-handed.”

He made that funny shrug again. “It would seem. Or at the very least, someone handled the knife left-handed. It could have been Irina Stephanova, though—even if she was not the killer, one would expect her fingerprints to be on a tool found in her studio. Although it would be more likely that those would be smudged, and these were quite clear, laid over older unusable prints.”

“Well, maybe I can help to tell you who the prints belong to,” Garrett said. “First, though, I’m going to look for trace evidence on the body. The principle of contagion tells us that any time two things come into contact, each leaves an influence on the aura of the other.”

Dyachenko rocked back in his down-at-the-heels boots, clapping silk-clad hands together. “We call it the principle of transference. The idea is that anybody who passes through a location takes something and leaves something behind, and if you can find those things, you can prove that the person in question was present at the scene.”

Garrett cocked her head at him.

He winked. “The Imperial Police are very good at murder, Doctor Garrett.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see.”

She unwrapped the blood-caked canvas knife, and laid the triangular tool down atop its wrappings on the empty bench. While Dyachenko stood nearby, arms folded, carefully out of the way, she sprinkled a circle of salt around it and spoke a few focusing words in Latin. She rubbed the glass rod with the rabbit fur, charging it, and touched the tip to the handle of the canvas knife where the victim’s blood had smudged it.

“A violent event leaves a stronger thaumaturgical impression,” she said. “Almost an imprint. It should override other uses to which the tool has been put.”

“I see,” said Dyachenko. “So if I use my pocket knife to trim my nails every week for thirty years, and then I stab my brother with it—”

“The stabbing wins,” she agreed. “In terms of the aura of the piece. We theorize that this is because we live in a solipsistic world, and intention is paramount.”

She had, she noticed, fallen easily into treating him as a colleague. It made sense that the Russians would have developed procedures and sciences the West had not, having removed the forensic option from their investigative process. It would be interesting to see which tactic was more effective.

Garrett waited a moment while the rod attracted wisps of residue from the murder weapon. Carefully holding it elevated—like a sorcerer in a motion picture—she turned back to the slab that held Olesia Valentinova Sharankova’s mortal remains. “Would you uncover the victim, please, Detective?”

With gentle precision, accordioning the sheet down in twelve-inch sections, he obeyed. Sarankova lay nude along the slab, eyes clouded and staring. The gummy blackened crimson had not been washed from her throat or hands, and Garrett could imagine how she had clutched at the canvas knife protruding from her throat after the killer stabbed her, trying to deny the inevitable and keep the slick-sticky hot blood within. Garrett wondered if she had come to the understanding that there was no stopping this, or if she had died still fighting.

“We’ve been over her with tweezers and soft brushes,” Dyachenko said. “We collected some fiber and dust, some animal hair—she had a cat. Once we have finished with her, I will put some pressure on the coroner to dissect.”

Garrett did not glance over. She could not afford the break in her concentration now. After a moment, Dyachenko seemed to come to an understanding of that, because he shut his mouth and backed away.

Garrett balanced the rod across her fingers and moved it over every inch of Sharankova’s skin, starting with the soles of her feet. It showed no response until Garrett approached the neck, when it swung to indicate the gummed slice of the wound. No surprises there, and after bending to inspect the red edges more closely, Garrett moved on.

When it swung again, it was to point to Sharankova’s mouth. A superficial inspection revealed only bruised lips, with no sign of foreign material. Garrett looked up to find Dyachenko watching intently, the tip of his tongue
protruding in concentration.

“How’s her rigor?” Garrett asked.

Dyachenko didn’t take his eyes from the dip and shiver of the wand-tip. “You’re dowsing for evidence.”

Garrett smiled. “It works. Can you get her jaw open for me?”

“I can try. Her arms were already in cadaveric spasm when your—friend found her, which indicates to me that she put up a fight, because rigor is delayed in cases of exsanguination or hemorrhage, but accelerated when there has been extreme muscular exertion. Unfortunately, there was no damning trace evidence clutched in her deathgrip.”

“There never is, when it would be convenient.”

Dyachenko snorted. He let his hands hover beside Sharankova’s cheeks, frowning down at the dead woman. “But this is the second day. Odds are very good that rigor is fully developed.”

He touched her cheeks, ran a thumb across her lower lip, and grimaced. “Her jaw is locked, Doctor Garrett. I think I can get the lips apart, but it would take a stronger man than I to open this mouth.”

“Lips, then,” she said.

“And then I’ll fetch the diener. He can help me break the rigor on her jaw, and we’ll see if there’s anything in there,” said Dyachenko.

She watched him wedge his thumbs into the cold mouth and pull, grimacing with effort or distaste. It took force to part her lips, but once it was done, they opened loosely, flaccidly, revealing the pink-stained valleys between her teeth. Garrett leaned forward over the body beside him, their heads almost touching. Garrett’s glass rod dipped gently to tap the dead woman’s tooth enamel, emitting a soft clink. The inside of Sharankova’s lips revealed cuts and abrasions, marks from where they had been jammed against her teeth by the pressure of—perhaps—a hand.

Garrett looked up at Dyachenko. “I can’t be sure until we see inside, but I suspect that not all that blood is her own.”

“She got a piece of him,” Dyachenko said. “That’s the American term, isn’t it?”

Garrett smiled. “I think she did. Somewhere, somebody has a set of bite marks.”

Dyachenko patted the dead woman’s blood-stiff hair. “And it’s not even my birthday.”

Garrett huffed, but in truth she was well-satisfied. “Hand me the ring, would you? We’re just going to make absolutely certain it wasn’t hers before we proceed with that line of investigation.”