Rasputin's Shadow (3 page)

I tossed my wrapper into a garbage can and headed back to the office.

I could use the distraction.

S
o how’
d it go with Gallo?”

Aparo was behind the wheel. We were in his white Dodge Charger, lights strobing and siren wailing, rushing up the FDR on our way to the Midtown Tunnel.

“He’s a prince,” I said, just staring ahead.

Aparo shrugged. “So how long are you going to keep this up?”

“Seriously?” I snapped back. “You too?”

“Hey, come on, buddy,” he protested. “You know I’m with you on this. All the way. But you’ve got to admit, we’ve kind of run out of bullets on this one.”

“There’s always a way.”

“Sure there is. It’s like me and the thirty-six double-D’s in my spinning class.”

“Hang on, you’re doing spinning now?”

He tapped his belly. “I’m down nine pounds in two weeks, amigo. The ladies no likee the blubber.”

Nothing like a fresh divorce to make a guy get back into shape. “And you just discovered that?”

“My point was, this chick,” he continued, “I’m sure she’d rather be kidnapped and sold into slavery off the coast of Sudan than spend a night with me. But does that mean I’m going to give up trying? Of course not. There’s always a way. But then again, we both know how low I’m willing to stoop and how much I’m ready to humiliate myself in my hopeless quest for booty. The question for you, my friend, is: how far are you willing to go to get it done?”

I was asking myself the very same thing.

We soon hit Astoria and our destination was, predictably, a bit of a zoo. Despite how blasé one would expect New Yorkers to be given everything the city’s seen, a public death like that still managed to attract a standing-room-only crowd.

The scene in question was a six-story brick prewar building on a treelined cross-street just off Thirty-first Street. The area had been cordoned off, causing some traffic mayhem, with irate drivers honking their horns and hurling disappointingly unimaginative abuse at one another. Aparo managed to cut through the mess with the assistance of blips from his siren and some deft maneuvering before parking down the block. We made our way past a scattering of media vans and patrol cars and badged through the taped perimeter to get to the first point of interest, the spot where our victim had met his demise. It was on the sidewalk right outside the building, which had a delicately detailed facade that was zigzagged by fire escapes and further defaced by a scattering of air-conditioning units that dotted some of its windows.

The forensics people had put up a large tent over the body to safeguard any evidence from tampering—accidental or otherwise—weather damage, and, of course, to ensure privacy. Judging by the number of people looking down from their windows, I imagined there’d be a lot of canvassing to do and cell-phone photo and video evidence to collect. Canvassing and collecting, because the preliminary info we’d already been given was that the first cops on the scene had quickly ascertained that the dead man had come through a closed window before plummeting down to the sidewalk.

Suicide jumpers tended to open the window first.

My other question—why we were being called out to a potential murder in Queens, when that’s pretty much the local homicide squad’s exact job description—was also easily answered. The victim was a diplomat.

A Russian diplomat.

As we approached, I looked up and saw a couple of guys leaning out a window on the top floor of the building, directly above the tent. They were probably the local investigators. It was a safe bet they wouldn’t be too pleased to see us. Also, it looked like our victim had missed the trees on his way down, which didn’t bode well for what shape his body would be in.

Aparo and I stopped at the tent door. There was a handful of forensic technicians busily taking pictures and collecting samples and doing all the geeky things they do. I asked for the coroner. He was still there, waiting for the green light to whisk the body away to his windowless lair, and stepped out of the geek scrum. As we hadn’t met before, we introduced ourselves. His name was Lucas Harding and he had the same unnervingly casual demeanor all medical examiners seemed to have.

Harding invited us into his fiefdom. We slipped some paper booties over our shoes, donned the requisite rubber gloves, and followed him in.

It was not a pretty sight.

No body that flew down six stories onto a concrete sidewalk ever was.

I’d only ever seen one similar corpse in my day from a big fall like that, and although I’ve witnessed my fair share of blood and gore, it was a sight I’d never forgotten. The sheer fragility of our bodies is something most of us tend to ignore, but nothing brought that fragility rocketing into focus with such brutal clarity like seeing someone sprawled on the sidewalk like that.

Despite a skull that was so pulverized it looked like it had been made out of plasticine before some giant baby had squashed it out of shape, it was still clear that we were looking at a white male adult with dark, short hair, somewhere in his thirties and in good shape, at least before the fall. He was dressed in a dark blue suit that was perforated in a couple of places—below his left elbow, and by his right shoulder—by shattered bones that had ripped through the cloth. There was a big puddle of coagulated blood around his head, and another to the left of his body, where it followed the slight angle in the sidewalk before pooling in a big crack in the concrete. Most gruesome, however, was his jaw. It seemed to have taken a direct hit and had been wrenched out of place, and was hanging off to one side like an oversized helmet chin strap that had been flicked off.

There were also shards of broken glass around the body that we avoided stepping on.

Harding noticed me glancing at them.

“Yeah, the glass matches what the body’s telling us,” the coroner offered. “The arms are consistent with him extending them to try and break his fall. Pointless, of course, but instinctive. And it confirms he was alive and conscious when he fell. The position where he landed in relation to the edge of the building also fits the story. Suicide jumpers tend to just drop down. No one does it enthusiastically; it’s not like they’re leaping off a diving board. They usually just step off a ledge, and if that were the case, I’d have expected him to land a few feet closer to the base of the building than he did. This guy left the building with some momentum. If this sidewalk hadn’t been as wide as it is, he’d have landed on someone’s car.”

“Do we have a positive ID?” I asked.

Harding nodded. “First responders got it off his wallet. Hang on, I have it here.” He flicked a page back on his notepad and found it. “Name’s Fyodor Yakovlev. It was confirmed by the rep from the Russian embassy who’s around here somewhere.”

“Confirmed, as in he knew him?”

“
She
knew him,” Harding corrected.

“What was the time of death?” Aparo asked.

“Eight twenty, give or take a minute or two,” Harding said. “He almost hit a couple of pedestrians. They were the first to call it in.”

I checked my watch and knew what Aparo was getting at. It was almost eleven. Our victim had died around two and a half hours ago. Which meant that if this was a murder—which seemed kind of obvious at the moment—it meant we were coming to the party late, which was not an ideal place to start.

I looked around, then asked what had become the key question in a situation like this. “Did you find a cell phone on him? Or anywhere around?”

The coroner’s face scrunched up curiously. “No, at least, not on him. And no one’s handed anything in.”

Not great. But there were ways for us to recover what he had on his phone, once we had the number. Assuming the Russians gave it to us, which was unlikely, given that he was a diplomat. “We need to make sure the area’s properly searched in case it fell out of him on the way down.”

“I’ll get the guys to do another trawl.”

We finished up with the coroner, left the tent, and headed into the building.

As we walked into the lobby, I noticed that there was a voice intercom by the front door, but no security camera. The lobby area was tired, but clean. No CCTV cameras in there that I could see, though I didn’t expect there to be any in that building. There was a grid of lockable mailboxes on the wall to our right, some with names and others with just apartment numbers on them. We were going up to 6E. It was one of the ones that didn’t have a name on it.

We rode the rumbling elevator to the top floor and were greeted by a uniform as we stepped out. The landing had three apartments on it, with 6E being the one farthest to the left. I imagined the immediate neighbors would have already been interviewed, although given the time of day it had happened, some of them may have already been at work.

We stepped into the apartment. The place was dark and had a kind of faded grandeur to it. Like many of the better prewars, it had some charming, old-world features—thick hardwood floors, high ceilings, arched doorways, and elaborate crown moldings . . . stuff you didn’t get in newer buildings. Its décor—all dark wood and floral and lacy and cluttered with knickknacks—even its smell instantly conveyed a strong sense of history. Its occupants had obviously been living there for many years. A framed photo on a side table in the foyer fit the place’s aura perfectly. It showed a smiling couple in their mid-sixties, posing in front of some great natural arch, the kind you find in national parks out west. The man in the picture, short and round-faced and with a thin tuft of white hair around his balding pate, was clearly not the dead man downstairs. On the wall above it hung a trio of antique religious icons, classical depictions of Mary and a baby Jesus painted on small slabs of cracked wood.

There was also a woman’s magazine on the side table, where one would normally leave the mail. I noted the name on its subscription mailing label—Daphne Sokolov.

The foyer led to the living room, where three guys—two suits and a uniform—and a woman were standing and chatting by the shattered window that looked out on to the street. It was immediately obvious there’d been a tussle of some kind in the room, as attested to by the broken coffee table, shattered vase, and flowers strewn on the carpet by the window.

Quick intros informed us the suits were indeed the detectives from the 114th Precinct, Neal Giordano and Dick Adams. The uniform was an officer by the name of Andy Zombanakis, also from the 114th. The three of them looked put out, which was likely, given that they’d probably been told to wait there for us and hand over what they no doubt considered to be their investigation. They also looked annoyed, like Aparo and I had somehow intruded on their little get-together. That was even more understandable and likely due to the lady they were conversing with, who looked out of place until she introduced herself as Larisa Tchoumitcheva, there on behalf of the Russian consulate.

She was gorgeous. Almost my height in three-inch heels, slim but with rolling curves that challenged the tailored navy blue skirt suit and white shirt she was in, and the wickedest combo of lips and blue eyes I’d ever seen, the lot topped by perfectly coiffed light auburn hair that fittingly veered more toward fiery red than stately brown. I flicked a glance at my newly single partner and could just visualize the wet ’n’ wild clips that were unspooling in his lecherous mind. In this instance, it was hard to blame him. Any man would have had a hard time keeping them in check.

Ever the perfect gentleman, I told her, “I’m sorry for your loss. Did you know him?”

“Not really,” she replied. “I met him briefly at some official functions, but our duties didn’t really intersect.”

She spoke with the barest hint of a Slavic accent. And as if she needed it, her voice only made her more attractive.

Focus.

“Who was he?”

“Fyodor Yakovlev. He was Third Secretary for Maritime Affairs at the consulate here.”

Maritime Affairs. I hadn’t come across that one yet.

I asked her, “And you? You said your duties didn’t intersect.”

She fished a card out from an inside pocket of her jacket and handed it to me. I read the small letters under her name out loud. “‘Counselor for Public Affairs.’”

Well, at least it didn’t say “attaché.”

I left the words hanging there and looked up from the card. Our eyes met and I just gave her a small, knowing grin. She obviously read me and my suspicions, but didn’t seem fazed by it at all. It was a dance I’d danced before with, among others, Chinese, French, and Israeli “diplomats.” But most of all, it was the Russians who never stopped hogging that particular ballroom.

The one for spies.

E
ven
with the Berlin Wall down and the Evil Empire a relic of the past, we were still playing the same old games.

Russia was no longer the USSR, the head honchos of the KGB and their organized-crime kingpin partners now owned the country outright instead of just controlling its people, and Communism was lying in some shallow grave while a wildly perverted version of capitalism was dancing the
kalinka
on it. But that didn’t mean we were friends. Even though we no longer had any ideological differences, we still pretty much hated each other’s guts, and we both spent a lot of time and resources snooping on each other.

We had spies over there; they had spies over here. Mostly, the ones the Russians shipped our way were pretty much of the classic kind: some would be here under “official cover,” meaning they’d have some mundane job at their embassy or consulate, typically an attaché, secretary, or counselor; others, the more adventurous ones, would be here under “non-official cover”—the ones we call “NOCs”—meaning they didn’t have a government job as a cover and, as such, they didn’t enjoy the associated diplomatic immunity if they were caught. And given the stiff penalties sometimes handed out on espionage charges—execution, for one—being an NOC was by far the more hazardous of the two.

Then there was the new breed of “penetration agents,” like Anna Chapman and her bumbling crew of social butterflies who we nabbed and expelled a few years ago. The media had giggled at the notion of a glamorous redhead and her Facebook-addicted posse posing any kind of threat to our great nation. The truth was, a Russian spy in our midst was far more likely to have a degree from NYU, start out as an intern somewhere, have an affair with someone who had an important position in an area of interest to the Kremlin—finance, industry, politics, media, among others—and end up working in some target institution and sending back insider knowledge about that sector.

It was no longer about destroying each other militarily. It was now all about making money and getting the upper hand economically. And if a terrorist attack or a war in another country helped to distract, weaken, and bankrupt us while messing us up as a society—all the better.

We had a dead third secretary downstairs and a counselor here to assist us in the investigation.

More old-school. But potentially nastier.

I turned and took in the rest of the room. There was a sofa, well used and floral patterned, and a couple of plain armchairs on either side. There was a big old TV set facing them, and massive bookshelves all along one of the side walls. The shelves were crammed with books and held what looked like a pretty elaborate stereo system, with two beefy speakers sitting on opposite ends of the top shelves. There was the broken coffee table I noticed earlier. And there was the large window that gave onto the street. Its glass was mostly gone, and the timber frame was cracked and splintered.

“So where are we with this?” I asked the three of them, pointing at the damage. “What do we know? This wasn’t Yakovlev’s place, right?”

“No,” Giordano answered. He handed me another framed photo. It was of the same couple as the picture in the hallway, only this time they were on vacation somewhere sunny. “You’re looking at Leonid Sokolov and his wife, Daphne. They live here.”

“So where are they?”

“Well, they ain’t here, are they?” Adams pitched in.

His tone wasn’t particularly friendly. Not that I cared. But I didn’t have much patience for juvenile sulking or for a jurisdictional pissing contest. I’d seen it played out in too many bad movies to ever want to suffer through it in real life.

Giordano stepped back in. “Sokolov teaches science at Flushing High. He didn’t show up at work this morning.”

“And his wife?”

“She’s a nurse at Mount Sinai. She was on the night shift last night, came off work at seven.”

“No sign of her, either?” Aparo asked.

Giordano shook his head. “Nope. We had a look around the place. Toothbrushes in the bathroom, bed’s been slept in, reading glasses still on the night table. There’s a couple of empty suitcases tucked away in the hall closet where you’d expect them. The toaster’s got a couple of slices of bread in it. Doesn’t look like they’re on a trip.”

I nodded and, avoiding the debris on the carpet, stepped over to the window. I looked down. The tent was directly below us. Then I looked across the street. It might have been helpful if there had been similar buildings across from where I was standing. Maybe someone there would have seen something. But there was only a single-story row of shops. Great open view for the Sokolovs and their neighbors. Not so great for us.

“Anyone hear or see anything useful? Neighbors, people out on the street?”

Zombanakis said, “We’ve got uniforms and detectives out canvassing, but nothing so far.”

I turned to Larisa. “So why was Yakovlev here? What was he doing?”

“I don’t know. I spoke to the first secretary for Maritime Affairs—his direct boss. As far as he knows, Yakovlev had no official business here.”

“Did Yakovlev know the Sokolovs?”

“Not that we know of,” she replied. “But we need to talk to people who knew him.”

“Was he married?” Aparo asked. “Any next of kin we should be talking to?”

“He was single,” she replied. “Any relatives he has are back in Russia.”

“Girlfriend?” Aparo pressed on. “Boyfriend? Sponsor?”

My partner, the king of tact. I shot him a small glare, to which he responded with his trademark, faux-surprised “What?” look.

Larisa didn’t flinch. “None that he’s bragged about,” she told him flatly. “Look, this only happened a couple of hours ago, and as you can imagine, everyone at the consulate is pretty shaken up about it. We’ll get some answers soon enough. Believe me, we want to know what happened here as much as you do.”

I nodded and glanced at the framed picture again. Leo and Daphne Sokolov. Sweet and harmless-looking older couple, the kind of folks we’d all like to have as neighbors. Only there was obviously more to them than that. That much was clear. But I doubted there was any point in pressing Larisa on it. If she knew anything more about them, she wasn’t about to share.

Still, for the record, I asked, “What about the Sokolovs? Anything else we should know about them? Any kids?” I hadn’t seen any telltale pictures of kids and grandkids.

“Doesn’t look like it, but we’re not sure,” Giordano said.

I asked Larisa, “Are they on your radar for any reason?”

“No. But then again, I wouldn’t expect them to be. As you well know, there are hundreds of thousands of Russians in this city. We have no reason to keep tabs on them any more than you do. They only come to us if there’s some kind of problem.”

“Which the Sokolovs never had—until this morning.”

She shrugged and nodded in agreement. “So it seems.”

“Would anyone want to harm them?” I asked.

She looked at me curiously. “What are you thinking?”

“Well, could be there was a confrontation and one of the Sokolovs ended up pushing Yakovlev through the window. But Yakovlev seemed like someone who was in pretty good shape and I’m finding it hard to imagine Leo or Daphne Sokolov getting the upper hand on him physically like that.”

“Unless Leo—or Daphne, for that matter—unless one of them had a black belt we don’t know about,” Aparo threw in helpfully.

“Sure, there’s always that possibility,” I granted him without too much sarcasm in my tone.

“Or they could have drugged him,” he added.

“Your coroner will look into things like that, won’t he?” Larisa asked.

“Yes, we’ll get a full tox report on the victim. But maybe the Sokolovs weren’t behind this. Maybe they were in some kind of trouble and they turned to Yakovlev for help. Maybe they were friends and he showed up here at the wrong time and interrupted something and got shoved out the window for it.” He turned to the detectives. “Either way, Yakovlev shows up here, there’s some kind of a fight, he ends up taking a dive out the window, and the Sokolovs are gone. The key is to find the Sokolovs. That sound about right to everyone?”

“Hey, you guys are the pros,” Adams said sourly. “We’re just here to do the legwork.”

I let it slide and asked, “You got a BOLO out on them?”

It sounded weird to say it. Not the word. The idea. To have an all points bulletin out for a couple of sixtysomethings who seemed like your quintessentially harmless citizens felt odd. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me like they might be in trouble. We needed to find them.

Adams, meanwhile, had feigned a deeply concentrated look, like he was racking his brain about it, before his face lit up in a eureka moment. “Damn, why didn’t we think of that?” He turned to his partner and pointed in our direction. “Listen and learn, buddy. These feds, they’re just magic. Listen and learn.”

He was obviously aching for me to give him an excuse to escalate things, and judging by the uncomfortable face his partner pulled, it wasn’t a first. But I didn’t feel like getting baited. Aparo was off to one side checking out the shelves and he turned too, but I shot him a look to make sure he kept his cool.

“All right,” I said. “Until we find the Sokolovs, we’ve got a lot of questions that need answering. Let’s start at the beginning. How did Yakovlev get here? Did he drive, did he take a bus or the subway or a cab? Did anyone see him arrive? Was he alone?” I looked pointedly at the detectives. They stayed mum. “Was anyone else here already,” I pressed on, “and if so, how did they get in? Also, what happened to Yakovlev’s cell phone? You didn’t find one here, did you?”

Adams shook his head.

“’Cause there’s no sign of it downstairs,” I continued, “and he had to have one, right? And who else was here? Clearly, someone was. Was it the Sokolovs? Someone else? Either way, how did they leave? Is there a back entrance to the building, a service entrance? Did anyone see them leave? Do they have any cars and if so, where are they?” I let the barrage of questions hang there for a moment. “So there’s a whole bunch of legwork that needs to be done here.” I then added, eyeing Adams as I said it, “And you can either lose the attitude and make yourself a couple of friends at Federal Plaza, which could come in handy someday, or you can stop wasting our time and get your ass out of here and let us do our job. Your call. But make your play, here and now.”

Giordano glanced at Adams and said, “We’re cool here. And we’re glad to help. As long as you keep us informed on what you find. It’s gotta be a two-way street.”

“Sure thing.”

“And we’d like to share the collar,” he added.

“Not a problem. Though if we end up following this thing halfway across the planet, it might not work out that way.”

Aparo chuckled. “These things do have a habit of turning out that way with him,” he said, referring to me.

I glanced at Adams. Giordano gave him a look.

He frowned, then nodded grudgingly. “Sure. Whatever.”

Aparo cut the tension by remarking, “Hey, was this open like that when you came in here?”

We all turned to see what he was talking about.

He was pointing at the stereo. I stepped over for a closer look.

The stereo was a stack of black, clunky, old-style components—amp, tuner, cassette player, and CD player. The cassette player had two decks in it, but it was the CD player that had caught Aparo’s eye. It was one of those five-CD changers that stored the discs not in a stack, but on a tray the size of a twelve-inch vinyl album that slid out when you hit the Eject button, allowing you to place the five CDs in their respective slots around its rotating platter. The tray was in its out position. I took a closer look. It had four CDs still in it. The slot farthest out—the one that would start playing if you hit the Play button and it had a CD in it—was empty.

Which was curious, sure. But whether it actually meant something was doubtful.

Aparo was studying the names on the CDs with a smirk on his face. “Whoa. Get a load of the opera and classical stuff they’ve got in here. And given the size of those speakers . . . the neighbors must love them.”

We all looked at him blankly.

He shrank back. “I’m just saying.”

“What about the media?” Giordano asked. “They’re waiting for something from us.”

I thought about it for a moment, then handed Giordano the framed photo. “Let’s put it out. Say we need to talk to the Sokolovs, it was their apartment, but they weren’t here when the tragedy happened. Choose your words and your tone carefully and make sure you don’t paint them as suspects, that needs to be clear. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will call in.”

Giordano nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

I took in the room again.

A Russian diplomat had been pushed out a window after some kind of fight, and an older couple was missing.

Not exactly worthy of raising the threat alert level to orange. Or even beige, for that matter.

I had to admit I wasn’t too excited about dealing with it. It was, well, a murder investigation, and as such, it was probably better left to the local homicide detectives, at least to start with. Even a jackass like Adams could probably put it to bed effectively. The only reason Aparo and I were there was because of the kind of passport the dead guy carried. And we had bigger fish to fry—not to mention the spook I was hunting. Still, there was no ducking the assignment. Besides, somewhere at the back of my skull, an irrepressible little voice was telling me that the Sokolovs needed our help. And after all these years, I knew better than to ignore that nag.