The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  At the bus station, they got another break. The militsia had a constant presence at the station, working from a smaU office furnished with a desk, a telephone, and a sofa with cracked vinyl upholstery, just off the main waiting area. One of the militsia'sjobs there was to chase out the people who tried to spend the night in the station. Three times in the evenings before her death, the militsia had rousted Natalia Shalopinina. On one of those occasions, she had been with a boy who worked at the nearby tractor factory called Rostselmash.

  With this information, the militsia quickly assembled a profile of the victim, done in their peculiar, fill-in-the-blanks language. "Work: none. Studies: none. Abused alcohol. Vagrant life-style. Suffered from gonorrhea. Disorderly sex life," the report said. "Disorderly" was the all-purpose Soviet negative. A driver violating traffic rules was disorderly. A factory that failed to meet its quotas was disorderly. A woman who slept around indiscriminately had a disorderly sex life. Conversely, when something was right, it was "in order."

  The boy from Rostselmash, it turned out, had known Natalia for several years, since their days together at a school in Semikarakorsk, sixty miles northeast of Rostov. He had, he said, met her for three consecutive nights at the bus station—January 6, 7, and 8. But he lived in a dormitory at the factory. He had no place private to take her. That had not deterred Natalia. On those three nights, she had satisfied him sexually outdoors, almost on the street. They had used alleys and doorways for shelter.

  But the boy had an alibi for January 9. He had been at work. Witnesses placed him in the factory or the dormitory from before the last time Natalia had been chased from the bus station to after the discovery of her body.

  The medical examiner's autopsy report added three leads. Natalia had been infested with pubic lice; her stomach contained undigested food; there was no semen inside her. Fetisov's men started to work on the hypothesis that someone had met her at the bus station and lured her away with the offer of a free meal. His semen was found on her clothes. And he might well have gone to a doctor or a pharmacy to get treatment for lice, gonorrhea, or both. They began to check out all the local clinics and pharmacies. They showed her picture around the bus station. But no one had seen her go off with anyone. No pharmacist had sold anti-lice ointment to someone who could not account for his whereabouts on January 9. All the people being treated at the Rostov venereal disease clinic also had alibis.

  The preliminary investigation established another enticing lead. Natalia had had one close girlfriend, Olga Kuprina. In August 1982, Olga and Natalia had gone together to Semikarakorsk, where Natalia wanted to enroll in a music school. But Olga failed to show up for the bus trip home. Natalia had told a sister at the time that she assumed Olga had gone off somewhere, but she had no idea where. No one in their hometown had seen Olga since 1982.

  It took no genius to wonder whether Olga Kuprina might be one of the unidentified bodies. The militsia had already obtained an artist's sketches, based on the skulls, of all the unidentified corpses. They were checked against her picture. A resemblance to one sketch was immediately apparent. Then they looked up Kuprina's dental records. They matched the teeth in the skull found near Kazachi Lagerya in October 1982, the second in the lesopolosa series.

  Kuprina had a biography sadly similar to her friend Natalia's. She had dropped out of school. The neighbors recalled a constant stream of boys and men visiting her. Her relations with her mother were such that the older woman had not bothered to report her daughter's absence to the militsia. No one in Olga's family could say how she had come to be near Kazachi Lagerya. Maybe, they ventured, she had been having an affair with a soldier.

  The friendship between Natalia Shalopinina and Olga Kuprina was the first link between victims in the case. But the list of unanswered questions only grew. Had someone who knew both Shalopinina and Kuprina killed both of them? Had he also killed Lyubov Biryuk and the others? If he did, why had he stopped slashing at the eyes of his victims? Why had semen begun to show up on their corpses? Was it because the bodies had been found quickly, in cold weather, preserving what had been washed off or had decomposed in the earlier cases, or was this the signature of a new killer? Since Kalenik and Tyapkin were both in jail when Natalia was murdered, was there a third killer at large? Or were they innocent? Could the same person have committed all the lesopolosa murders?

  Viktor Burakov, still working on the case against Yuri Kalenik, studied the reports on the Natalia Shalopinina investigation. He thought he noticed something, the beginning of a pattern. The victims who had been identified earlier had been boys and girls like Lyubov Biryuk, Olga Stalmachenok, and Igor Gudkov. Each lived with at least one fairly responsible adult, and each had been traveling on innocent missions when they disappeared. But Vera Shevkun and Natalia Shalopinina were, legally, young adult women. Kuprina, though only sixteen when she was killed, was physically mature. All three lived on the verge of prostitution. So, at least theoretically, might have the remaining unidentified victims. Burakov knew their type.

  Every militsioner who had ever worked a station knew women like them. Russian train and bus stations attract them. In a nation where only a privileged minority own automobiles, tens of millions of ordinary Russians use the transit stations every day. One group, the largest, consists of people passing through on their way to and from work, or to buy and sell in the city markets, or on vacation. These Russians have two things in common: they have money in their pockets, and they will soon be gone. A second group uses the stations as shelters; they are the only warm places in Russia where a person has a plausible pretext for loitering all day and into the night. The third group, thieves and pimps and con men, preys on the first two. They are like sharks, selecting their victims from the constantly changing offerings of the sea, striking and moving on.

  On a summer Saturday, at a big train station like Rostov's, perhaps a dozen different gangs run con games. Usually a boy or, preferably, a pretty girl, sets up a folding table with a stack of numbered tickets and six dice. She sells tickets for a few rubles each, then invites someone, from the crowd that always gathers, to throw the dice. The first payoffs are small. But then, when a flush-looking mark shows up, it transpires that two people have the same number, and they must bet against each other for the pot. The second winner, of course, is a gang member, posing as part of the crowd. He may be dressed in rags, or he may be a young man looking too proud and foolish for his own good, whose "wife" begs him not to play because he doesn't have enough money. In this game, a person who cannot match his opponent's bet loses. Miraculously, the poorer-looking player always manages to reach deep into his pocket for enough cash to match and better the mark's cash. Shortly afterward, the girl folds the table and moves on. She will meet with her confederates later on to divide the take. The mark, if he understands he has been conned, will have a choice. He can attempt to find the gang in the swirling throngs at the station and to find a militsioner who will arrest and prosecute the gang members. Or he can catch his train to Volgograd and hope no one finds out how stupid he's been. Invariably, he will choose the train.

  Russian prostitutes also work the stations, but they are a much lower class of prostitute than the pretty young women who bribe the doormen to get into the tourist hotels of Moscow or Saint Petersburg, looking for customers with dollars, deutsche marks, or yen. The women in the stations have cheaply dyed hair, worn bodies, and tired eyes; they service five to ten customers a night for a few rubles each and consider themselves lucky when a client has a car to give them some temporary shelter.

  At the bottom of the station's social order are the Russian homeless. Theoretically, Soviet society had no homelessness and no unemployment. The law required the government to give every citizen a job and a place to live, however menial or miserable. It required every citizen to carry an internal passport and a work booklet, listing his residence and place of employment. If the militsia picked up someone with neither document, standard procedure called for turning the individual o
ver to a priyemnik-raspredyelityel, a term that means a center of reception and distribution. In fact, these places are all but indistinguishable from jails, complete with militsionery serving as guards. An individual served thirty days in the priyemnik-raspredyelityel, then received a work assignment, generally on a collective farm looking for field hands. Some people bounced continually in and out of the system, quitting the farms and drifting back to the stations. The men among them might try to get by scavenging bottles and selling them back to liquor kiosks. The women, like Natalia Shalopinina, might take on a man for half a bottle of vodka, or a hot meal, or a warm place to sleep. Sometimes, they became the victims of a shark who was smarter, or stronger, or cruder than they were. Burakov felt a certain sympathy for them. Nearly always, he had found, they came from families unlike his own, families in which the parents drank, or fought, or both. But he also felt an aversion, based on his belief that they were part of an environment that encouraged crime.

  Reading the reports on Shalopinina and Kuprina, Burakov found further reason to doubt that the boys from the intemat in Gukovo had played any role in the lesopolosa killings. He could not envision Yuri Kalenik, much less Mikhail Tyapkin, in the role of a shark. Whatever else the two boys might be, they were not guileful. And he thought he saw in the reports an important clue that the other syshchiki had overlooked. They had assumed that if Shalopinina was wearing a ring on the finger the killer had cut off, it was the cheap one found near the body, a yellow metal band worth a ruble or two. Burakov wondered whether the killer would have bothered to cut off a finger to steal something so nearly worthless. He thought there might have been a second ring, one more valuable for some reason. Perhaps the killer had given it to her. Perhaps he had put his initials on it.

  At that point, early in 1984, Burakov had some time to pursue his suspicions. The investigators had just sent Yuri Kalenik to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow for a psychiatric examination that would determine whether he was legally competent to stand trial for murder, should they decide to charge him. It gave Burakov a break from the constant round of questioning and requestioning Kalenik, trying to determine his whereabouts on the days when the early victims had died, trying to establish which of his friends might be members of the "gang" that some syshchiki still believed had gone on killing after Kalenik was jailed.

  Burakov requisitioned a car and driver and drove northeast to Zolotaryevka. The village, on a state farm that raises livestock, is a cluster of sagging frame cottages and muddy dirt roads, with geese and chickens pecking in the weeds. It is a place where women age quickly, turning from girls to mothers and from mothers to babushki by the time they are forty, becoming square and thick, with metal caps on their teeth, kerchiefs over their graying hair, and muddy rubber boots on their stumpy legs. Burakov could see them as he drove into town, waiting by the war monument for the bread truck to arrive at the village store. When it did, they gathered around it and lined up, gossiping quietly, just as the geese and the chickens would come clucking to them when they brought the bread home.

  Natalia Shalopinina's mother, Galina Bondarenko, looked like her neighbors, short and heavy, with a round, weathered face, a kerchief on her head, thick socks in her boots, and dirt under her fingernails. She walked with a slow, rolling gait. Natalia was her first child, born when she herself was only nineteen. Galina's union with Natalia's father was not a happy one, and they divorced when Natalia was three years old.

  She snorted when asked why the marriage failed. There was one, pandemic reason for the failure of marriages in rural Russia. Galina flicked her index finger against her neck—the Russian sign for drunkenness. He would drink heavily. They would quarrel. He would beat her. He would drink some more.

  Galina remarried when Natalia was five, but her first husband would still show up occasionally, drunk, imploring her to take him back. He always had, Galina recollected, a soft spot for his daughter, and he never beat her. Eventually, he moved to Rostov and he, too, remarried.

  Galina thought that her second husband tried to be a good stepfather to Natalia, and for a while she seemed to be growing up normally. She did reasonably well at school, and she learned to play the accordion. But as she reached adolescence, Natalia rebelled. Perhaps it was because of her early memories. Perhaps she simply couldn't stand the idea of becoming one of the women in line at the bread store.

  She started to talk back a lot, to do whatever she wanted to do. Mother and daughter would fight. Natalia started going out with boys when she was thirteen. Sometimes, she would stay out all night. Just as she finished the seventh grade, she got pregnant. Her mother persuaded her to get an abortion. What choice did she have? She had to finish the eighth grade. Natalia spoke very little to her mother after that. She refused to say which boy, if she knew, had fathered her aborted child. "If I tell you, they'll kill me," she told her mother.

  A year or so later, when she was fifteen, Natalia attracted the attention of an older man, recently divorced. By that time, Galina recalled, Natalia was as attractive as she would ever be. She had a broad face that could charitably be called plain, but she had a woman's figure. She was too young to marry legally, but she dropped out of school, moved into her lover's cottage, and became pregnant again. Again, she got an abortion. Her lover, like her father, drank a lot. Soon, the couple broke up. Natalia spent time at an aunt's in Semikarakorsk, where she worked sporadically in a canning factory. She would occasionally try to live with her father in Rostov, but her father's new wife disliked her and generally threw her out after a few days.

  Natalia tried twice to learn a trade. In 1982, when she was sixteen, she announced that she wanted to enroll in a music school in Semikarakorsk and learn to play the accordion professionally. That was when she went to Semikarakorsk with Olga Kuprina. But the director of the school, she said, had been out of town, and she had not enrolled. She never tried again. At the end of 1983, she had decided that she would enroll in a school for trolleybus drivers in Rostov. That was where she was going, or where her mother thought she was going, when she disappeared.

  Had she been wearing a ring on her left hand, Burakov asked.

  Yes, Galina said. She had noticed it around New Year's. She did not know who gave it to her daughter. She thought it was someone in Rostov.

  Who, Burakov asked, were her boyfriends.

  There were too many boyfriends to keep track of, Galina replied.

  And that proved to be the case. When Burakov and the local militsia started checking on men in Zolotaryevka and the neighboring villages, they had difficulty finding someone who had not slept with Natalia Shalopinina, Olga Kuprina, or both. The obvious suspects, like Natalia's ex-lover, had alibis for January 9. No one admitted giving Shalopinina the ring her mother had seen.

  Frustrated, Burakov returned to Rostov, leaving the local investigators to complete the work of checking out the alibis of Shalopinina's many partners. So many of the clues in this case, it seemed, led only to endless hours of fruitless checking. In Novo-shakhtinsk, the handwriting experts were still trying to match the handwriting on the Black Cat postcard to the employment records in the area. Others were completing the checks on the old satyr Vladimir Babakov. Now more men were painstakingly dissecting the sex life of an unhappy eighteen-year-old who had slept with far too many men for her own good. He himself had months of work ahead of him, trying to pin down the activities of a group of retarded boys. None of it, he sensed, had brought them any closer to the man he felt was out there, a man with a knife and a fearful rage.

  On March 11, railroad workers walking in the woods beside the tracks near Shakhty found another body, just emerging from the winter snows and thoroughly decomposed. It had apparently lain in the woods since the previous summer. The militsia could not identify it. But the medical examiner found traces of knife wounds in the eye sockets and on the rib bones. It was the thirteenth body found in the woods since the summer of 1982.

  Fetisov ordered a search, with bloodhounds, of all the parks and
wooded strips where bodies had been discovered. On April 22, the dogs found a fourteenth body, a woman's remains. They lay in a dense thicket in Aviators' Park in Rostov, near a Mig-21 fighter jet mounted on a plinth as a military monument and about half a mile from the woods where Irina Dunenkova and Natalia Shalopinina were killed. The winter cold and snow had preserved the body well, and its wounds left little doubt about the killer. With a knife, he had extirpated most of her vagina, uterus, and bladder. He had, however, left her eyes alone.

  The body was half clothed, and from papers in the coat the militsia identified Marta Ryabenko, forty-four, a worker, sometimes, at the Krasny Aksai factory outside Rostov and an inmate, sometimes, of various drunk tanks and alcohol detoxification wards in Rostov. She was a woman born to the Soviet elite. Her grandfather had been a general. But after his death, the family fell into difficulty. The last day anyone had seen her at work was February 22. Under personal traits, the investigators filled in "disorderly sex life."

  Her coat and dress bore semen stains, and Fetisov ordered them sent to the lab for identification.

  On the theory that the killer might return to the scene, Fetisov also ordered a covert watch of the area near the Mig-21. In short order, the watchers brought in a suspect named Nikolai Byeskorsy.

  Byeskorsy lived near the airport, where he worked as a baggage handler. He drank and he showed up for work. Once in a while, he met a woman and persuaded her to share a bottle in the park.

  That was what Byeskorsy had been doing when he was caught. He had brought a woman into the area where the Ryabenko corpse had been, opened a bottle, and split it with her. When she was thoroughly drunk, he had stripped her naked, laid her on the cold ground, and had intercourse with her. When it was over, the woman lay where she was, all but insensate. Byeskorsy got up, went to a store, and bought another bottie. When he returned, the watching militsionery decided that he was not going to pull out a knife. But to be on the safe side, they took both of them in for questioning. The woman went to a drunk tank and Byeskorsy to a cell. To the embarrassment of the guards in the drunk tank, the woman came to, slipped away, and disappeared. Vladimir Kolyesnikov, Fetisov's deputy in the division of criminal apprehension, participated in Byeskorsy's interrogation and almost immediately returned with triumphant news. Byeskorsy had confessed to the murders of both Ryabenko and Shalopinina.