Nikolai Petrov tried to control the rage he felt toward his niece's killer. He was, in fact, known for his short temper; one of his superiors had advised him to stay out of the Biiyuk investigation, lest he do something rash. He went to Zaplavskaya and told Pelagea what had been found. He advised her not to go and see the remains, and she accepted his judgment.
The corpse and its location presented Fetisov, Petrov, and the other syshchiki with several questions. They could speculate and come up with a reasonable explanation of how the girl had gotten to the scene of her death. It was about ten yards from the path that ran through the wooded strip in the direction of Zaplavskaya, and perhaps five hundred yards from the liquor store, which, judging from the package of cigarettes, she had indeed visited. With the bus not running, she might well have decided to walk the mile and a half back to her village, and been attacked on the way.
But who would attack her, and why? Russian murders generally fell into two categories. Nearly half were committed in fits of rage, most often drunken rage, directed at family members and friends.
In Lyubov's case, as in the murder of any young girl, her father would normally have become an immediate suspect. But she did not know her father, Viktor Maksimovich Biryuk. Around the time of her birth, Viktor Maksimovich had gotten drunk, started to argue with his mother, and stabbed her fifteen times. He was in a prison in Rostov-on-Don, a city forty miles to the south, nearing the end of a fifteen-year sentence.
Pelagea had divorced Lyubov's father and resumed using her maiden name, Petrova. She lived, in 1982, with a man named Nikolai Yeremin, who worked in the sovkhoz warehouse. Lyubov called Yeremin her stepfather. He was the one who smoked Nasha Marka, and he, too, would normally have been a suspect. But he had not left the sovkhoz on the day of her disappearance, and there were witnesses to support his alibi.
Another thirty or forty percent of the murders in Rostov were premeditated; most often, the killer in a premeditated murder dispatched his victim in order to steal something. But the Biryuk murder did not seem to have been premeditated any more than it seemed the work of a relative. The girl had had little money and nothing worth killing her to steal. The fact that the killer left the cigarettes at the scene, in fact, provided one of the few clues about him: he probably did not smoke.
And how had he killed her without being heard or seen? Dozens of people used the path through the woods every day. Even more walked or rode on the paved road, which was about seventy-five yards away, well within earshot. Why had there been no witnesses? Why had the killer been so bold, even reckless? And why were there so many wounds?
Had she been raped? The position of the corpse and the absence of the girl's dress suggested that she had. But any semen that might have confirmed the commission of a rape had washed away in the rains.
The medical examiner's detailed report, a month later, suggested one answer. The decomposition of the body had gone too far to permit a precise identification of the cause of death, but wounds in the skull suggested that the killer had attacked the girl's head from behind with both the blade and the handle of his knife. Most likely, he had first knocked her unconscious with the handle, then stabbed her. That helped explain why no one the militsia could find remembered hearing any cries for help. The description of the knife was uselessly vague: a single blade of indeterminate size.
The case was given a file, number 6181 of the Oktyabrsky region, Rostov oblast. Before he returned to Rostov, Fetisov helped Petrov and the local militsia do what the book prescribed in cases like this, where neither witnesses nor physical evidence identified the killer. They constructed a list of hypotheses. Basically, the hypotheses amounted to educated guesses about the kind of person who might drag or lure a thirteen-year-old girl into the woods in broad daylight and stab her twenty-two times.
At the top of the list, they put relatives. Though neither the girl's father or stepfather appeared to be involved, grilling the relatives was standard procedure. Even if it did not yield the killer, it could yield information about Lyubov's friends and contacts. Next on the list came people in the Donskoi area previously convicted of sex crimes. Next came friends of the girl, and then anyone in the area suffering from a mental illness with a sexual abnormality. Finally, they decided to check out juvenile delinquents.
A search of the dead girl's possessions yielded a lead. Lyubov's older sister, Nadezhda, had a friend named V. I. Gubenko, who was in prison for theft. He had somehow gotten acquainted with Lyubov, and from prison he had written her a letter, saying he hoped to see her when he got out. He himself could not have committed the crime. But perhaps he had passed her name along to another prisoner, perhaps to a man with violent tendencies and an interest in young girls.
The second item on the list of guesses also turned up a suspect. Vladimir Pecheritsa, thirty-four, had been convicted of raping a woman who taught "Scientific Communism." He had also been accused of assaulting his wife's mother. He lived in the countryside near Donskoi, tending a garden. On the day of the killing, he had been at the clinic in Donskoi, being treated for tuberculosis. More interesting still was the hobby the syshchiki discovered when they began to investigate him. He made his own knives.
The written reports on the investigation politely refrained from discussing the length and the style of the Pecheritsa investigation. One report said that Nikolai Petrov had handled the interrogation himself Petrov, in later years, would deny having done so. But the style of Soviet interrogations had not changed too much since Stalin's time. The militsia knew how to put emotional pressure on a suspect. They knew how to apply physical pressure, to beat a man so no marks would show. Suspects had no right to a lawyer's counsel until the case against them had been assembled.
Pecheritsa, who would have learned these things firsthand during the investigation of his earlier crime, could not give his own account of the interrogation he underwent after Lyubov Biryuk's murder. According to the reports filed with militsia headquarters in Rostov, he hanged himself after learning that he was a suspect.
"Maybe it was because he was ill. Maybe it was because he didn't get along with his wife," Petrov would say.
Russia was a country sadly accustomed to the idea that, in any major enterprise, there are incidental victims. Peter the Great caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to build his capital, Saint Petersburg, in the frozen marshes near the Gulf of Finland. Stalin sent millions to their deaths to build Communism. The hunt for the killer of Lyubov Biryuk would, though Fetisov and Petrov did not then know it, become a major enterprise. Pecheritsa had become its first incidental victim.
After Pecheritsa's death, the Biryuk investigation slowed down. It was not an uncommon problem in Soviet society. In factories, in government ministries, on collective farms, plans were formulated and orders were issued. Very few people dissented, but very few did all they were supposed to do, either. A report on the Biryuk investigation filed in October to Fetisov's office by Rostov homicide syshchik A. P. Khrapunov noted this in the wooden, bureaucratic prose so characteristic of the late Brezhnev era. "Active work for the solution of the case is not being done at the present time," the report said. "The organization role of the leadership of the militsia station is lacking."
No outside pressure forced the militsia to work harder. The local newspapers and radio stations disseminated only the information they were told to disseminate, which amounted to a brief announcement that the authorities were looking for people who might have seen Lyubov Biryuk on the afternoon of June 12. Her neighbors and relatives, of course, knew that someone had murdered her. But they had no influence, and the information did not travel beyond the bounds of Donskoi.
That autumn, though, pressure came from another quarter. On September 20, a railroad worker, walking near the train station for the city of Shakhty, some twenty miles northwest of Donskoi, found skeletal remains in the woods that edged close to the tracks. The medical examiner estimated that the body had been there for six weeks or more. Thi
s corpse was also naked, and it lay on its stomach, hands near its head and legs splayed open. The bones showed the striations of multiple knife wounds, including wounds in the eye sockets. But the body could not be identified beyond the fact that it was that of a grown woman, and its size and sex fit no missing-persons reports from the area.
On October 27, a soldier went into the woods to gather logs near a military base called Kazachi Lagerya, ten miles south of Shakhty and fifteen miles west of Donskoi. He stumbled across the skeletal remains of a woman, lying on her stomach, covered over with branches. This skeleton also bore the marks of knife wounds, especially to the breasts. Like the one near Shakhty, this skeleton fit none of the missing-persons reports in the files of the local militsia, and its identity remained unknown.
And, like the skeleton in Shakhty, and the remains of Lyubov Biryuk in Donskoi, it had traces of knife wounds in its eye sockets.
The skeletons of three females, all found in woods, all with knife wounds to the eyes, demanded a more energetic response. Early in December, Major Fetisov organized a special work group often syshchiki, based at oblast headquarters in Rostov, charged with solving all three cases.
2
THE DETECTIVE
Mkhail Fetisov still had no more than an informed hunch that the skeletons in the woods near Kazachi Lagerya and the Shakhty train station had anything to do with the killing of Lyubov Biryuk. With the investigation in Donskoi going nowhere, he and his deputy^, Vladimir Kolyesnikov, decided to recruit some new talent for the syshchik squad formed to investigate the three murders.
On a cold day in January, Kolyesnikov waited in the lobby of militsia headquarters for a second heutenant from the criminology laboratory named Viktor Burakov. Burakov was the department's best man in fingerprints, ballistics, footprints, and the other arcana of police science. Kolyesnikov meant to recruit him.
To Kolyesnikov's left, on one wall, hung photographs of the outstanding militsia workers of the previous month, looking stern and formal in their gray dress uniforms with the red piping. To the right, the wall was engraved with the names of Rostov militsia officers who had fallen in duty. Kolyesnikov could watch Burakov approaching before Burakov could see him. The double doors from Engels Street into the lobby had treated glass, enabling those inside to look out, but preventing the people on the sidewalk from looking in.
Burakov walked in, bundled up against the Russian winter. He looked like an amalgamation of two bodies. He stood about five eight, but he had the torso of a much larger man, with broad shoulders, a deep chest, and thick forearms. Spindly, slightly bowed legs gave him a top-heavy look, accentuated by his rapid, rolling walk. He had dark, thinning hair, long sideburns, and a couple of pink warts on his left cheek. The overall impression was of a man more rugged than handsome. He was, Kolyesnikov knew, still active among the martial arts competitors at the Dynamo gym, where the militsia and the KGB worked out, even though, at thirty-seven, he was past the age at which most Russian men begin to pursue more sedentary activities.
The two shook hands. Burakov's daily route took him through the lobby and outdoors again, as he walked through an inner courtyard to the rear wing that housed the militsia laboratory. Kolyesnikov fell into step with him, and they paused by a fountain, dry in the winter, for a moment of private conversation.
How would Burakov feel, Kolyesnikov asked, about leaving the lab and coming to work as a syshchik?
The invitation did not surprise Burakov. He knew Kolyesnikov liked his work. Burakov had perhaps the most complete academic preparation on the Rostov staff. He had studied for four years in the Ministry of the Interior's criminology academy in Volgograd, finishing with certificates of expertise in half a dozen branches of police science. Most Rostov detectives held a certificate in only one area of expertise, if any.
The prospect of leaving the lab piqued Burakov's interest. As a criminologist, he often inspected crime scenes with detectives. But once he had completed his analysis of the bullets fired or the fingerprints left, his work ended. The syshchiki went on to track down the criminals. Burakov had long since stopped seeing anything novel in bullets and fingerprints. He needed a new challenge.
There was, he told Kolyesnikov, only one obstacle. He and his wife, after ten years, had finally reached the top of the militsia waiting list for an apartment. He needed to know whether switching departments would cost him his seniority on the waiting list. Svedana Burakova was a patient and cheerful woman, but she had already sacrificed thousands of rubles and years of her husband's company because of his work in the militsia. He was not sure she would tolerate the loss of an apartment.
The Burakovs and their two small boys, Andrei and Maksim, lived in half of an old cottage in a section of Rostov formally called the New Settlement. They had three small rooms with a coal stove. Water came from a well a block away, on Twelfth Street, and the outhouse, behind the clothesline where the women dried their laundry, required a walk through a muddy little tomato garden in the courtyard.
The neighborhood bore the informal nickname Nakhalovka, which, loosely translated, means Punkville. It is an area of rutted roads and crumbling pavement, broken sewer mains, rumbling trams, and one-story brick or wood cottages, thrown up without plumbing during Stalin's first five-year plan to house the factory workers of a rapidly industrializing city. Over the years, other, newer sections of Rostov had gotten the bulk of the state's housing investment, sprouting phalanxes of twenty-story white apartment buildings, which, though ugly and poorly built, at least have central heat and indoor plumbing. For years, the city had planned to tear down the cottages in the New Settlement, and for years the influx of people into Rostov had created such a housing shortage that every inhabitable square meter had a claimant.
The city of Rostov-on-Don was a product of imperial Russia's drive to reach warm seas, free of ice. In the eighteenth century, that meant taking land from the Ottoman Empire, with which Russia fought four wars for control of the northern coast of the Black Sea. In 1747, with the Turks still in control of the seacoast, the Russians founded Rostov, on the high, readily defended right bank of the Don, twenty-five miles inland. It was, at that time, as close to a warm-water seaport as Russia had. Over the next century and a half Rostov grew into a cosmopolitan, raffish river port with large minorities of Jews, Armenians, and Greeks and a complement of nineteen brothels, according to a count taken toward the turn of this century.
The Russian Revolution and Stalinism scraped away much of the city's eccentricity and charm. It became a manufacturing center for tractors that plied the southern Russian steppe, a typically Soviet city with nearly a million inhabitants, a single main street, and more monuments than restaurants. A big statue of Lenin stood at one end of Engels Street, and Marx occupied a small square at the other, in a spot once held by Catherine the Great. Outside the tractor factory, which was called Rostselmash, a pedestal held the millionth orange tractor the line had produced.
Viktor Burakov was not, by birth, a city dweller. He came from peasant stock in central Russia, from a collective farm called Bolshevik. He was born just after World War II, a time of famine and hardship in the countryside. He remembered the taste of bread made from potatoes, because, in the wintertime, after the government had requisitioned all the peasants' grain to feed the workers in the cities, his family subsisted on the potatoes they grew in their small private garden next to the cottage. He remembered his father in the fields, cutting wheat with a scythe and pushing a big wheel to break up the ground, because there were no machines and no farm animals. He remembered the day the kolkhoz got a motorized combine and his father gave him a ride. It was a highlight of his childhood. Two of his younger sisters died as girls, one of scarlet fever and another from whooping cough. He came down with both diseases. He survived.
When he was six, his father, Vasily, moved the family to Siberia, to a coal-mining town on frigid Sakhalin Island. Mining was harrowing, life-shortening work. The coal dust was thick inside the shaft and the sa
fety precautions were often forgotten in the rush to fulfill the monthly plan. But mining paid better than the handful of rubles earned by kolkhoz workers under Stalin. The Burakov family lived in Siberia for nearly ten years. Yekaterina Burakova was assigned a job stoking the boiler at the local school, working from morning to evening. As a boy, Viktor Burakov had to cut wood, carry water, and care for his surviving sisters. He prepared their meals, plaited their hair, and ironed their dresses. He played only after he had fed them and washed the floor and waited until his mother trudged home from the boiler room and said, "Good boy, son. Thank you." Years later, the memory of her praise for his dutiful performance could still cause his voice to grow husky.
The wet, frigid Siberian climate damaged his mother's health, and the family returned to the kolkhoz in central Russia when Viktor Burakov was fifteen. He completed the local school and entered the equivalent of high school in a town called Sevsk, fifteen miles away from his village. In the late summer and early autumn, before snow and mud made the road unusable, he rode a bicycle back and forth. In the winter, he lived in a dormitory in town, and his father brought potatoes to the school in exchange for his board. He learned to drive and maintain tractors and combines, which was about as sophisticated an education as the school offered.
He also learned to fight. Russian boys in that time and place needed to know how to take care of themselves. On the eve of Lent, when Mediterranean cultures celebrate Mardi Gras, Russians, though officially atheistic, observed the Russian Orthodox festival of Maslenitsa. The occasion called for feasts of pancakes, called Mini, and mass fistfights called stenka na stenku, or "wall to wall." The boys and men of one village would gather in a field and square off against their counterparts from a neighboring village; the fight lasted until one side gave in. After the battle, the vodka bottles would appear, and the two sides would drink together. Tradition allowed no weapons, so no one was killed, and the militsia generally turned their backs. But broken noses and black eyes were common. Fights between villages sometimes arose spontaneously if, for instance, a boy from one village went to a dance in another and stole the affections of a local girl. Viktor Burakov, strengthened by years of farm chores and toughened by Siberian winters, participated in fights of all kinds. He fought well enough that his friends in neighboring villages competed to recruit him for their village sides. Years later, he remembered the stenka na stenku brawls with nostalgic affection.
The Killer Department Page 2