The Icon Thief (25 page)

Propping the door open with a rubber wedge, the unit poured silently into the corridor. The agent at the head of the line swiped a card through the lock of the hotel room, swearing under his breath when the green bulb on the keypad did not light up at once. When he swiped it a second time, there was a low electronic tone, and the door finally unlocked.

At a shout from the commander, a swarm of tactical agents entered the room. Powell and Wolfe followed close behind, only to find the unit looking around, disappointed, at nothing. The room was empty.

As the agents continued their sweep, Powell, whose arms and knees still ached from climbing the fence two days before, tried to infer as much as he could about the room’s absent occupant. In the bureau, there lay several neatly folded changes of clothes, their tags still attached. A
receipt on the bedside table indicated that Ilya had paid in cash. “Looks like he has a lot of money to throw around.”

“And he paid cash for the room,” Wolfe said. “He wouldn’t have been carrying this much at the mansion.”

“Check for burglaries on the night of the heist. Look for houses within walking distance of the vineyard.” As he spoke, Powell searched the rest of the bedroom. The wastebaskets were empty, but on the carpet, something had been missed by the cleaning staff. He picked it up. It was a sliver of cardboard, curved like a potsherd, as if sliced from a length of tubing.

Looking at the piece of cardboard, he thought back to the scene in the study, remembering the camera bag that he had found wedged behind the shelves. He went over to the bureau, pulling it away from the wall. In the space behind the bureau, along with some scraps of plastic and cord, a frame and wooden armature had been concealed. It was the stretcher from a painting.

“Here we go,” Powell said quietly. “See what he did? He took the painting apart.”

Wolfe picked up the stretcher, which was very light. “So what did he do with it?”

Powell showed her the scrap of tubing. “He rolled it up. Which means that he probably had it with him at the courthouse. We thought he’d stashed it elsewhere, but he was carrying it the entire time.”

Feeling crowded by the tactical unit, they went into the hallway. “So he paid cash for the room, but used a stolen license, which means that he doesn’t have a passport,” Wolfe said. “Now that the license is blown, it’ll be hard for him to travel. He’s on his own. So he should be easy to flip.”

“Maybe,” Powell said, although he privately doubted that it would be so simple. “But he’ll go after Sharkovsky first.”

“Then he’ll come right to us. We’ve got men posted at the club around the clock.”

“I know.” Powell headed for the stairwell, going past the elevator, which had been disabled by the tactical team. This was something else to keep in mind. Barlow wanted to move against the club soon. In the confused aftermath at the courthouse, Sharkovsky had slipped away, but there was no doubt that his suspicions had been aroused. The criminal division was already transcribing tapes to prepare a warrant for a raid, possibly within the next few days.

In the meantime, there was nothing to do but push forward with the murder case. An hour later, they were at the ballet studio where the dead girl had worked, speaking with the head instructor. A glass partition in her office looked into the studio itself, its sprung floor streaked with chalk, where ten children were doing exercises at the barre, their daypacks heaped against the mirrored walls.

“Yes, I remember Karina,” the teacher said, removing the cotton gloves she had been wearing. She was tall and angular, her hair shot through with gray. “At the time, we had only seven principal dancers, so when she vanished, it hit us hard. We all hoped that she had gone home, but in my heart, I knew the truth.”

“She danced at a club in Brighton Beach,” Wolfe said. “Did she ever talk about this?”

“Only in passing. It wasn’t something she liked to discuss. Maybe she was afraid that we would disapprove.
But I know very well what it takes to keep dancing.” The teacher looked out at the class in the next room. “I kept some of her things when we cleaned out her locker. Would you like to see them?”

When Wolfe said that they would, the teacher produced a carton from under her desk, removing the lid to reveal a folded leotard and a roll of surgical tape. Underneath, there lay a bottle of mouthwash and a package of antacids, along with a stack of photos and a clay figurine. Powell picked up this last object, turning it over in his hands. “What’s this?”

“It’s a toy from her hometown,” the teacher said. “Kargopol is famous for them. I believe it was made by her father—”

Powell examined it. The clay had been painted and fired into the image of a fairy with tangled green hair. For all its crudeness of execution, there was something uncanny about the figure. Its face had been shaped with nothing more than a few quick movements of the sculptor’s fingers, but it had an expression of sly seductiveness, a cross between a succubus and a mermaid.

He turned his attention to the pictures. There were twelve photos in all, their corners marked with adhesive from where they had been taped to the locker. Most were pictures of students and dancers. Karina herself appeared in a few of the shots, brooding and blond, with attractive, faintly oversized features.

One of the photos was much older than the rest. It showed a family of four standing before a house by a river. In the faded snapshot, Karina was no more than fourteen, bundled in a sweater and wool cap. Her younger sister’s hand was clasped in her own. Looming
over the girls were their parents, the mother wearing a quilted jacket, the father in a flannel coat, his flushed face peering into the lens.

“It was taken in Kargopol,” the teacher said. “That was their house by the river.”

Powell checked the other side of the photo. It was blank. “Did she ever talk about her family?”

“Only occasionally. For the most part, she was very private, except—” The teacher hesitated, then said, “A few years ago, when she danced the lead in
Coppélia
, something in the role seemed to open her up. You know the story? An inventor builds a dancing doll, and a boy becomes obsessed with it, until his true love shows him what a fool he is by taking the doll’s place—”

Wolfe reached out and took the photograph from Powell. “What did Karina say?”

“As I mentioned before, her father was a toymaker. The girls would dig clay out of the riverbed so he could make it into figurines. When I looked at that toy, and thought of the things she said about her father, I used to wonder if he had done anything to those girls. If he dressed them up, or—” The teacher hesitated again. “I can’t prove any of this. But I always wondered.”

Wolfe wrote out a receipt for the photos and figurine. “What about the sister?”

“She vanished years ago. According to Karina, she ran off when she was a teenager. The rumor was that she had gone to Moscow. I don’t think Karina ever saw her after that.”

Something about this fact lodged in Powell’s mind as they wound up the interview. As they left the studio, Wolfe seemed thoughtful. “You know, there’s something
I should probably mention. There were antacids and mouthwash in that box. You know what that says to me? She was bulimic. It’s a shame that her head is gone. I’d need to look at her teeth to be sure—”

Powell was surprised to hear Wolfe speak so clinically. “You’re serious about this?”

“It isn’t so unusual. Dancers can be monsters about their weight. You’ve got men lifting you overhead all day, and that darned Balanchine ideal. Swanlike neck, long legs. But the perfect ballerina, by those standards, has a short torso and a flat chest, so I don’t know why she got breast implants. Unless it was for her night job. You said yourself she was probably a prostitute—”

“I’m not so sure about that anymore,” Powell said, removing his glasses. “I’ve been looking at the record of prostitution in Brighton Beach, and the Russians have had trouble entering the business. They’ll import a few girls from overseas, and after a week, the local pimps tell the police, who shut it down.”

“But if Karina was nothing but a dancer, then why did she get her breasts done?”

Powell finished cleaning his glasses, then pushed them back up the bridge of his nose. “Conflicted body image, perhaps.”

As they neared the subway, Powell found himself thinking of the ways that a woman might try to reinvent herself. There was the body, yes, but there was also the mind. Karina had focused on transforming her body, much as a toy might shrink and harden in her father’s oven, a process that had not concluded until long after her lonely burial in the sand. Her sister had run away at an even younger age. And perhaps she had tried to transform herself as well—

These thoughts ran through his brain, ramifying and evolving, until they were on the train. Then, as they were passing through a darkened tunnel at the heart of the city, something clicked in his head, and he knew.

He rummaged in his briefcase, finally emerging with a copy of the coroner’s report. “Look here,” Powell said, showing the page to Wolfe. “According to the report, based on her pubic area and underarms, the dead girl had brown hair. But in her photos, Karina is a peroxide blonde.”

“So cuffs and collar didn’t match,” Wolfe said, looking at the report. “So what?”

“Let’s see how she might have looked as a brunette.” Powell took a headshot from the file, uncapped a marker with his teeth, and used it to color in the dead girl’s hair and eyebrows. The changes subtly altered the character of her face, emphasizing its buried exoticism. “Remind you of anyone?”

Wolfe took the headshot from his hands. “Not really. What am I supposed to see?”

“The face of another woman tied up in this case,” Powell said. “Natalia Onegina.”

“Archvadze’s girl?” Wolfe frowned and looked at the picture more closely. “Maybe. But I don’t really see it.”

“It isn’t obvious. But it’s there.” From his briefcase, Powell removed the picture of Karina standing by the river with her family. He pointed to the younger sister. “I’m not entirely sure, but I think this is Natalia Onegina. She’s the sister who went to Moscow. Which means that these two cases are connected.”

The subway pulled into the City Hall station, disgorging its passengers onto the platform. Powell shoved the
files back into the suitcase, keeping the family photo in one hand, and followed Wolfe to street level. “We need to delve more deeply into Natalia’s background. Every profile repeats the claim that she’s a niece of German Khan, but I don’t know how seriously anyone has ever looked into this. And there’s one more thing we need to check.”

Wolfe climbed the stairs to the crowded sidewalk. “And what would that be?”

Powell handed her the snapshot. Now that the connection was so clear in his mind, he was troubled by how long it had taken him to understand the dead girl’s importance, as if the lapse were a portent of a more permanent decline to come. “We need to find out the name of that river.”

They reached the granite chessboard of the Javits Building, which was guarded by a row of iron posts, like pawns. Caught up in his thoughts, Powell was a few steps from the entrance when he heard someone call his name.

He turned. A young woman, who had been seated on one of the backless benches that lined the sidewalk, was walking in his direction. Although he had studied her image carefully on the mansion’s outdoor security tapes, it took him a moment to recognize her in the light of day. It was Maddy Blume.

“T
hey told me you’d be back soon,” Maddy said, approaching Powell and the woman she had glimpsed briefly at the mansion. “They wouldn’t let me wait in the lobby, so here I am.”

Turning to his colleague, Powell said that he would be up in a minute. As the woman headed for the main entrance, he turned back to Maddy, looking as if there were something else on his mind. “If you’re concerned about the investigation, I can assure you that you’re no longer under suspicion.”

“Then why is someone following me?” Maddy handed him a copy of the photo that she had taken yesterday. “Is he one of yours?”

Powell glanced at it. At once, his expression darkened. “Where did you take this?”

“On Sixth Avenue. I was running an errand and saw this man on the street. I also saw him outside my apartment a few days earlier. He was watching me.” Maddy searched the agent’s face. “Do you know who he is?”

“Maybe.” Powell studied the photo. “Did you notice if he walked with a limp?”

“Yes. It was his left leg.” As she spoke, Maddy felt a
strange sense of relief, then decided to push it further. “Does this have anything to do with what happened at the courthouse?”

Powell’s look of surprise was rather satisfying. “How did you know about that?”

“I saw the thief’s photo in the paper. He was there to meet someone, wasn’t he?”

Powell was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “I need you to keep this to yourself. I don’t know why this fellow is watching you, but he won’t be on the street for long.” He folded and pocketed the photo. “If you see him again, don’t confront him. Just call me. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can.”

He went into the Javits Building. Watching him go, Maddy felt simultaneously terrified and exultant. Now that her suspicions had been confirmed, she felt vindicated, but no less exposed than before.

Forty minutes later, Maddy emerged from the train station at Atlantic Avenue, but did not take her usual route home. Instead of going to her building directly, she rounded the corner one street early, then circled the block, advancing on her brownstone from the opposite side. When she was twenty paces from her door, she halted, pausing in a convenient area of shade.

Three cars were parked across the street. As far as she could tell, they were empty. Aside from a solitary woman on the far corner, walking a dog on a retractable leash, the sidewalk was deserted. Maddy scanned the windows across from her house, looking for a raised blind or a gap in the drapes, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Only then did she continue toward her own building.

When she entered her apartment, she closed the door,
then set her things down in the hallway. Taking a camera from her purse, she turned on the preview screen and scrolled to a series of pictures that she had taken that morning. The first shot was an image of her dining table, covered, as always, in a drift of junk mail and unpaid bills. Going up to the table, she studied it, then compared it to the shot on her camera. As far as she could tell, nothing had changed.