In the Crosshairs: Russian Historical Thriller (Nikolai Volkov Book 2)

by Julia Gousseva

  “No, it’s not,” Nikolai said. “I know about your pregnancy.” He expected Ekaterina to ask him how he knew, but she did not. She blushed and lowered her voice. “We’ll make it right. Pavel and I are getting married in August. I feel horrible about my dad. I should have told him and all of my family right away, but I didn’t. And now that we’ve waited so long, we’ll have to tell him after the wedding. My mom said we should tell him right at the restaurant, during the reception. He won’t get angry then, and I know he’ll be happy to have a grandson. He loves my sister’s kids, so he’ll love my little boy, too. He always says he wants a grandson to play with, and my sister has two girls.”

  The more Nikolai listened to Ekaterina, the less likely it seemed to him that she had anything to do with Grisha’s death. It was both frustrating and satisfying. He was content that he was about to solve the mystery of Ekaterina’s baby but frustrated that he was no closer to finding the killer.

  “How old is your son?” Nikolai said.

  “Almost six months now. And my dad has no idea.” Ekaterina shook her head. “But he’ll forgive me, right? Wouldn’t you if you were him?” She didn’t wait for Nikolai to answer and continued. “He likes Pavel, and we’re both working very hard. We’re almost ready to buy our own apartment. Not far from here.”

  Nikolai nodded. “I’m amazed that you and Pavel managed to save enough money to buy your own apartment so quickly. Roman must be paying you both very well.”

  “Yes, he does. He’s a wonderful boss, but of course our salaries aren’t enough to save up for an apartment that quickly.”

  “Where did you get the money then?”

  “From my grandmother. She’s getting older, so she sold her apartment a few months ago and moved in with my parents. She gave us most of the money, almost enough to buy a place outside the Garden Ring. We don’t need to live in the center.”

  “Where’s your son now?” Nikolai tried to be patient but he really wanted Ekaterina to get to the point quicker.

  “With my sister. She’s staying at home with her girls, and she agreed to take care of my son. I offered to pay her, but she wouldn’t even hear of it. And her husband makes good money, you know. I’m so grateful to her. We wouldn’t be able to make it if it weren’t for her help.”

  “I see.” Nikolai thought for a moment. Ekaterina’s story, although a bit odd, seemed to make sense. A young love, a desire for independence, an unexpected pregnancy, a strict dad, and a grandmother who wants to help were not that unusual. In Ekaterina’s case, the situation happened to coincide with dramatic events. Nikolai did not like coincidences and treated them with suspicion and skepticism, but this time, his research seemed to support the coincidences, and Nikolai was beginning to believe that’s what it was indeed, a coincidence. Unless facts proved otherwise, Ekaterina was off his list of suspects.

  The kitchen door opened, and Tatiana walked in. “Do you have a couple of minutes, Ekaterina? I wanted to discuss a few details with you.”

  Nikolai got up to leave.

  Tatiana glanced at his unfinished tea. “You can stay, Nikolai. Just don’t say anything to Roman.”

  Nikolai nodded, sat down again, and took another sip of his tea.

  Tatiana turned to Ekaterina. “Konstantin and I have made all the arrangements at the Dvorik, so the only thing I’d like you to do is to make sure that the cake is delivered on time. Dvorik has great food, but we are not great fans of their deserts.”

  “Who is Konstantin?” Nikolai asked.

  “Roman’s brother.” Tatiana smiled broadly. “He was supposed to be on his overseas assignment but something changed, and he returned to Moscow early.” She giggled. “We’ve been meeting for a while, and nobody has any idea. It will be such a surprise for Roman when he sees Konstantin and the rest of his relatives at the Dvorik. He loves big parties, and this one will be simply amazing.”

  “I’m sure it will be,” Nikolai said. He took one last sip of his tea, put the cup in the sink, and walked out of the kitchen. Tatiana’s words had just saved him a lot of potential embarrassment and time wasted on another dead end investigation. But just to make sure, he called Elena.

  “That match you mentioned,” he said. “Is it possible that there’s another relationship between that man and the child?”

  “I was just going to call you back,” Elena said. “After the first result, I wasn’t quite convinced, so we ran some more tests, this time for the avuncular index. And the number we got is higher than one.”

  “What’s an avuncular index?”

  “It helps us determine whether a child is a biological niece or nephew. If the number is greater than one, then there’s a high likelihood that such relationship exists. In other words, most likely that man is the baby’s uncle.”

  “Thank you, Elena. That’s what I just figured out, too,” Nikolai said.

  “Always glad to help,” Elena said. “If you need anything else, just give us a call.”

  He clicked off. This was frustrating. All that effort, and what had he accomplished? Not much. He now knew that Tatiana was not having an affair with anyone, and that Anastasia was Tatiana and Roman’s daughter. He also knew that the only deception Ekaterina and Pavel were involved in had to do with the timing of their relationship and Ekaterina’s pregnancy that Ekaterina’s dad might not have approved. Filip was no longer a suspect, and neither was Nikita. So far, all results had been negative. In theory, any negative result in an investigation meant that the field of possibilities was narrowing and that the path to finding the answer was getting shorter. But reality was different from theory, so Nikolai was never that optimistic. To him, a negative result meant that he had spent valuable time chasing a dead-end lead. And each day, hour, and minute spent pursuing the wrong lead gave Grisha’s killer more opportunities to hide the traces of his crime.

  The phone buzzed again, and Nikolai picked up without looking at the number.

  “Did you forget to tell me something, Elena?” Nikolai asked.

  “Nikolai, it’s Karina. I don’t want to call the police but I really need help. We just got home.” Her voice sounded shaky.

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody broke into our apartment. They made a huge mess of everything. I’m scared.”

  “I’m on my way,” Nikolai said, walked to his car and headed south, towards Karina’s house.

  A light brown sedan slowly turned north, drove in a wide circle and parked across from Karina’s apartment.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Nikolai considered himself a good judge of character, and he had never suspected Karina or Grisha of any wrongdoing, but as he navigated through heavy Moscow traffic, he started doubting himself. Perhaps, Grisha was involved in the kidnappings as well and perhaps both the mysterious Eduard Kolyanin and the now dead Pyotr were his accomplices. Something went wrong between the three of them, most likely a disagreement about money, and they started eliminating each other and any evidence of their involvement in these crimes. Perhaps, the goal of today’s ransacking of Karina’s apartment was not a burglary but a search for compromising material. The more Nikolai thought about all the events of the past days, the more he was convinced that Eduard Kolyanin did not exist. Somebody else was using his name, somebody who was behind the kidnappings, who staged this burglary, and who was most likely after something much more sinister than a few valuables in Karina’s apartment.

  Karina’s apartment door was wide open. Karina and her neighbor, a woman who looked to be in her early fifties, were standing in the foyer, talking quietly. Probably hearing the elevator doors open, they both turned around.

  “Thank you for coming, Nikolai,” Karina said.

  Nikolai stepped into the foyer. The door to the kitchen was open, and he saw two light-haired boys inside. Grisha’s kids. He recognized them from the funeral. They were young, but their facial expressions were those of much older people. In front of them was a stack of children’s books, but the boys were not look
ing at the books. They just sat on the couch, close to each other, and stared into space.

  “I’ll let you two talk,” the other woman said, walked into the kitchen, and closed the door behind her.

  “I’m sorry this happened, Karina. Things were hard enough for you already,” Nikolai said. “Have you called the police?”

  “Yes, a few minutes ago. Can you stay with me until they come?”

  “Sure. Is anything missing?”

  “The most valuable thing I have are my samovars, and all of them are here,” Karina said. “I checked my jewelry, and everything seems to be here. Not that I have much.” She paused for a moment. “And I don’t keep any money at home, so no money is missing.”

  “What about electronics? Rare china? Silverware?” Nikolai asked.

  “We never had much of anything valuable.” She shrugged. “If something is missing, I haven’t noticed it. But look at this mess.” Karina said.

  They walked into the living room. Nikolai saw piles of clothes, books, papers, overturned lamps, emptied drawers, and cut up pillows. It clearly looked like somebody was searching for something and judging by so many things out of place, they probably did not find it. If whoever was here had found what they looked for, then some of the things would have been untouched because they would have stopped looking.

  A common mistake that people made when searching an apartment or a house was to focus on items inside the apartment or the house, such as furnishings and furniture. Movable items. They often forgot to inspect structural items: vents, floor boards, trash chutes, and other objects that are part of the building. Nikolai had seen many apartments that looked like Karina’s place today, and he had been successful at finding what the others had missed, and that’s because he always searched structural items. He slowly walked around the living room, then back out into the foyer. He checked the kitchen, the bathroom, and the small hallway between them. He looked behind radiators, tapped the floorboards and inspected grout lines between the floor tiles for any signs that the tiles had been recently replaced. He couldn’t find anything. Then, he looked up, above the front door, and saw a small metal door with a knob. An electric meter was probably behind that door. A string was wrapped around the knob, and a key hung on the string. There was no keyhole in the door.

  “Would you mind if I took a look at the meter?” Nikolai asked Karina. When she agreed, he brought a chair from the kitchen, climbed up, and removed the key. The serial number on it was government issue.

  For a moment, Nikolai thought that perhaps whoever broke into the apartment was after the valuables that Karina kept at a bank but he quickly discarded that idea. A key was not nearly enough to access a safe deposit box. All banks had complicated and elaborated systems of identity verifications. It was something else. He stepped down from the chair and handed the key to Karina. “Do you know what this key is from?”

  Karina took the key, looked at it, turned it over, and looked at the serial number. “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “It looks like a key to a private mailbox,” Nikolai said. “You know, for people who travel or want their mail to be more secure. They can get their mail from the box at the post office.”

  “Grisha had a post office box?” Karina said, her expression worried. “Why? What was he hiding?”

  “Maybe, it’s nothing. We’ll know as soon as we open the mailbox.”

  “But how will we find it? There are lots of post offices in Moscow.”

  “The number on the key tells you what post office it is. Can I see it?” Nikolai said.

  Karina handed him the key. Nikolai looked at numbers again. “You see these first six numbers? That’s the postal code.”

  Karina leaned in. “That’s the postal code of the Central District. So it must be the Central Post Office on Gorky Street. But it doesn’t say what mailbox number it’s from. And there must be a lot of mailboxes there.”

  “Grisha could have written down the number somewhere,” Nikolai said. “If not, I can figure out which mailbox it is.”

  Karina nodded slowly. “I have no idea what Grisha was hiding, and I’m afraid to find out.” She shook her head. “We were married for a long time, and we never had any secrets from each other.” She paused. “Or at least that’s what I thought.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions yet,” Nikolai said. “There are many reasons people get private mailboxes. My parents used to have one when they had some subscriptions to expensive magazines, to prevent theft.”

  That was a lie: Nikolai’s parents never had any expensive subscriptions or private mailboxes, but Nikolai wanted to say something to make the shock of this discovery, coupled with the ransacked apartment, a little easier on Karina. It was hard to tell whether she believed Nikolai, but she nodded gratefully. “Yes, of course, there are many reasons. Can we go to the post office today and check?”

  Nikolai stepped over to the window and watched a police car, its light bar turned off, pull over. A uniformed officer and a plainclothes man, probably a detective, came out and headed into Karina’s building. “The police are here to talk to you,” Nikolai said.

  “I don’t want them to know about the key. At least not yet,” Karina said. “Can you take it?”

  “Sure,” Nikolai said.

  Karina handed him the key, and Nikolai put it in his pocket. In the stairwell, the elevator doors opened and closed, then the doorbell rang. The next moment, the uniformed officer with his plainclothes colleague were inside Karina’s apartment.

  “I’ll leave the rest to the professionals,” Nikolai said. “If you need anything, Karina, call me. Anytime.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The next morning, Nikolai was at the post office half an hour after it opened. The delay was on purpose, intended to avoid extra attention from staff or eager customers who came early. Shopkeepers and post-office workers tended to remember the first and the last customers of the day. Nikolai needed to blend in. Despite its title of the Central Post Office, the building was not large and usually not crowded. People were using the postal services less and less, so the expectation was that the clerk would not be too busy. Idle clerks were a nuisance as they tended to pay attention to people who did not want that attention. Nikolai needed a diversion, so he asked Marina to assist him.

  The post office was even smaller than Nikolai remembered. Half of the building belonged to a bank now, leaving only one large room for the post office. The clerk, a bored young woman with purple hair, sat behind the counter on the far left. The middle of the room had chairs and tables where two customers were filling out paperwork. Marina was already there, at one of the tables, busily filling out a form.

  Without acknowledging her, Nikolai headed towards the wall on his right that was occupied by mailboxes. There were six mailboxes from floor to ceiling and ten across in each row. That was sixty possibilities. Nikolai’s chances of opening the right mailbox on the first try were one in sixty, less than a two percent chance. He hoped for some luck but did not expect it.

  Nikolai pulled the key out of his pocket and stuck it into the first mailbox on the top left. The lock did not budge. He checked the next one down, then the next, and the next. He glanced at the purple-haired clerk. She was busy talking to Marina. Nikolai crouched and checked the three remaining mailboxes. No luck.

  Six down, fifty-four to go. Not much progress yet.

  A middle-aged woman in a long green sundress carrying a large black purse came up to the mailboxes. Nikolai stepped aside, pretending to be checking messages on his phone. He watched her insert a key into the top mailbox in the second column and pull out a stack of letters and a small parcel. She slipped them into her purse, locked the mailbox and walked away.

  Fifty-three to go. Nikolai glanced at the clerk again. She was explaining something to Marina who had a confused expression on her face. Marina was pointing to something on a page she held in her hands, and the clerk was inspecting the page.

  So far so good. Nikolai moved ove
r slightly and began working on the second column of mailboxes. He skipped the top one that belonged to the woman in the green sundress and kept checking the remaining ones. Twelve down, forty-eight more to go.

  He glanced in the direction of the counter. It looked like Marina was running out of things to ask the clerk. With no other customers to take care of, the clerk would notice Nikolai. He had to hurry.

  The chances of the next mailbox being the right one were slightly over two percent. The chances of attracting the clerk’s attention were significantly higher. She was already looking in his direction. Marina smiled and thanked the clerk, then she turned to Nikolai, her expression a mix of worry and apology, and walked outside without acknowledging him.

  Nikolai slipped the key back into his pocket and headed towards the exit. At that moment, an older couple pushing a bag on wheels came into the building. They were loudly debating the relative benefits of using boxes or envelopes to mail things. Within moments of their entry into the building, they involved the clerk in their discussion. Nikolai used the opportunity to check the next column of boxes. When he got to the last one, the one at the very bottom, something happened. The key turned to the left easily but instead of opening the lock, it stayed there. Nikolai pushed and pulled, jiggled it in the lock, but nothing happened. The key stayed inside. As he frantically worked to free the key, the couple had resolved their packaging dilemma. Their conversation with the clerk was over, and Nikolai knew that within moments she would turn her full attention to him.

  And that could create serious problems.

  The mailboxes were used on a self-serve basis, but if something looked suspicious, the postal clerks had the right to ask for an ID. If she did, she would find out he never had a mailbox at this post-office, and she would confiscate the key. That was the best case scenario.