The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  “He drives for us, or did, before layoffs,” Svengrad answered LaMoia. “He has not gone and gotten a parking ticket or something, has he?” The man grinned smugly. “Date of termination-because that’s the next thing you’re going to ask, yes? Ninety-three days. You may ask the Fish and Wildlife Department.” He met Boldt’s surprise. “Not INS, Fish and Wildlife. They will tell same date.”

  “Ninety-two days,” Boldt said, misquoting him. “You track all employees with such enthusiasm, or is Alekseevich special to you?”

  “Ninety-three days, Lieutenant. We, our caviar, is under a lockdown. Forbidden from making business. Big mix-up on government’s part. And yes, I do keep track. Certainly. When this affects one’s livelihood, one keeps count of such things.”

  “A lockdown,” Boldt repeated, spinning on his heels to look once again at the quiet warehouse behind them. Svengrad’s explanation fit the human emptiness of the place.

  Svengrad flipped through a Rolodex and fixed on a card. “We have the same address-for the home of Alekseevich-as does INS.” He handed Boldt back the sheet of paper. “Have a nice day, Lieutenant.”

  “You said we were missing something,” Boldt said.

  “My mistake. Fedor will show you out.”

  “Something, or someone?”

  Most people shrank some from a cop’s gaze. Not this man. Svengrad fixed his attention onto Boldt and asked, “You like dirty movies, Lieutenant?”

  It wasn’t often that Boldt had to contain himself from striking out at a man.

  Svengrad said, “I find them quite a turn-on myself. The home movies on the Internet are the best. Crude lighting. The women always trying too hard to look sexy. The men trying to look hard. Much better than cheap porn, don’t you think? Gives reality TV a new meaning.” He added, “But to answer your question, no: something, not someone.”

  Boldt asked, “Do you get these films off the Internet, or do you have the originals?”

  “I have my sources,” Svengrad said. “Mature women are the best, don’t you think? They know what they want-what it takes for them-and they aren’t afraid to say so.”

  Boldt’s stomach squirted some bile into his esophagus. He coughed through the burning and swallowed it down. He’d have bloody stool if he continued to keep this tension inside: ulcers the size of golf balls.

  “Where would I get such a home movie?”

  LaMoia shifted on his heels, uncomfortable. He whispered, “Sarge.”

  Boldt did not so much as look in his direction. “John,” Boldt said, still eye-to-eye with Svengrad. “Ask the guy out there for a cigarette, would you please?”

  LaMoia withdrew from the room, though reluctantly. Once he was on the other side of the glass his attention remained on Svengrad and Boldt, as did the attention of Svengrad’s man.

  “You like caviar?” Svengrad asked Boldt, ignoring Boldt’s inquiry. He swept his arm to encompass the warehouse.

  “No,” Boldt confessed. “I never acquired the taste.”

  “Too bad. Your wife, where do her tastes lie?”

  “I will not now, nor at any time, discuss my family,” Boldt said. “And neither will you. To misjudge me in this regard would be a terrible error on your part.”

  “I thought we were already discussing your family,” Svengrad said. “Or at least home videos.” Boldt kept the death stare on him. “No matter,” the other said. “Even if I wanted to, I could not give your wife our best Beluga Negro. This is because of some very good forgeries of my company’s labels. These have caused the… interruption in my business.”

  “The feds can be a real bother sometimes,” Boldt said.

  “Indeed they can.”

  “Counterfeit caviar?” Boldt asked. “Seriously?”

  “Paddlefish eggs,” the general answered. “Gravely serious. We never heard about it until your Fish and Wildlife service discovered them bearing our label. Paddlefish, at four dollars an ounce, mixed in with our eighty-dollar Beluga. Like cutting cocaine with powdered milk.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Boldt said. “About either.”

  “I am the victim here. But because I am Russian, I must be big mafia guy.” His attempt to come off as an innocent bordered on comical.

  “Paddlefish eggs.”

  “Bearing my label. Perhaps, when this small problem is resolved, we can work out an arrangement that is mutually satisfying.”

  “The most I can do is look into it.”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself. The right motivation, it’s amazing what a man can do.”

  “This late in the week,” Boldt reminded, “I’m unlikely to make much headway.”

  “What a shame. For a moment there I thought we had a real connection.”

  A knock on the glass window where LaMoia held a pack of cigarettes to the glass. Proletarskie.

  The general saw this as well. “Russian brand. We import them along with half a dozen others.”

  “Alekseevich smokes this brand,” Boldt said.

  “Malina smoke? I do not think so. Too athletic.”

  “Sell a lot of this brand, do you?”

  “Enough to justify importing it,” Svengrad replied. “The kids at the raves. The colleges. They love Russian cigarettes. Much stronger. They make Camels look like Virginia Slims.”

  “How many cartons, cases, a week?”

  “You bring a warrant, I’ll gladly turn over this information. Otherwise, no reason to let my competitors know my numbers.”

  “I’m not your competitor,” Boldt said.

  “Sure you are.”

  Boldt understood the general’s tactics then: gun and run. He struck an area of Boldt’s vulnerability, the video, and then came back with his own needs-the lockdown of his caviar-and then got defensive when his cigarettes came into play. Boldt might have enjoyed this more had Liz not been directly involved.

  “You like birds, Lieutenant?”

  “The winged variety?” Boldt asked, wondering what came next.

  “The magpie will watch the same bird nest for hours. Must seem like forever, a brain that small. Patient like a saint. The mother bird leaves that nest, even for a moment, and the magpie eats her eggs. Right there in the nest.”

  Boldt felt a warmth run through him, like he’d peed in his pants. He pictured the yellow yolk spread around the bird’s nest the same way the blood had been spilled around the cabin. Svengrad made sure his message was received. “You like art, Lieutenant?”

  “Some.”

  “I collect WPA-era charcoals. It’s a seller’s market right now. Smart time to watch for forgeries.” Svengrad sat on the word-an elephant on an egg. “The limitation of imitation,” he said. “It’s good of you to have stopped by.”

  Dismissed, Boldt thought he meant to say.

  Back in the Jetta, Boldt loosened his tie.

  LaMoia said, “It’s not so much the salty taste that bothers me, but the way they pop between your teeth.”

  “Smelling like low tide doesn’t help,” Boldt said.

  “So what happened after I was excused?”

  “I had to do that.”

  “I understand,” LaMoia said, but his voice betrayed him.

  “He wasn’t going to threaten me in front of someone.”

  “And did he?”

  “Not exactly, no. He wanted to cut a deal: his import business back for the video of Liz and Hayes.”

  “Damn,” LaMoia said. He pulled the Jetta out onto wet streets. The sky this time of year was worse than a leaking faucet.

  “His caviar business is important to him. We can assume that’s where the seventeen million came from in the first place: some undeclared profits.”

  “You think it was his money?”

  “I think it was. But his main message was a story about magpies.”

  “What-pies?”

  “Birds. He took the long way around to explain to me that the Hayes crime scene, the cabin, is a cheap imitation. His guys turned their backs, and somebody took Hayes.
”

  “You buy that?”

  “There’s a second interpretation. This may just be me being paranoid.”

  LaMoia waited.

  “Liz and I drove the kids out to Kathy’s-my sister’s-in the middle of the night, Tuesday night. We literally took them out of our nest. Maybe I blew it. Maybe we were followed. Maybe he’s warning me not to try to move them again or he’ll take action the next time. Maybe he doesn’t know where they are and he’s looking for me to panic and lead him to them. We both know the Russians have a reputation of working the family when the going gets tough.” Boldt recalled an unsolved child murder, and the suspicion of Russian involvement.

  “Holy shit,” LaMoia breathed.

  “That’s why I’m likely to make a call asking about the possibility of lifting this lockdown. And I’m going to talk to Bernie about cross-comparing every single piece of evidence from that cabin against Danny Foreman’s crime scene. I think what just happened in there was that Yasmani Svengrad confessed to us that Alekseevich is our guy, but that he didn’t do Hayes at the cabin. My bet is, Svengrad wants Hayes as badly as, or worse than, we do.”

  “The merger. The deadline.”

  “That’s it,” Boldt said, but his main thought was that this still put Liz squarely in the center.

  FOURTEEN

  LIZ COULDN’T SPEND TIME IN the house with the kids gone. She’d left for work earlier than usual, wrung out by waiting for the phone to ring and by the eerie silence of an empty home. Lou called with an invitation to lunch. It hit her hard because they were both too busy for such extravagances, which meant this had to be of the utmost importance. It also occurred to her that she was probably the last person in the world her husband wanted to sit down to lunch with, and this both broke her heart and made her all the more curious and fearful of his reasons.

  Somewhat typical of Lou, he chose Bateman’s, a semi-underground lunch joint that made the freshest turkey sandwiches in the city but at the expense of atmosphere. She walked to the cafeteria, despite a light mist in the air that others might have called rain, not only aware of, but glad for, the man and woman in trench coats who followed behind her. Bobbie Gaynes and Mark Heiman were both familiar faces to her-and yet seeing them surprised her, for they were among the very best of Lou’s detectives. By assigning these two to watch her, Lou sent her a message, intended or not, of just how serious he took the threat to her safety. As the three of them reached the restaurant, Gaynes peeled off and crossed the street, entering a mystery bookshop from where she would watch Bateman’s and any activity on the street. Heiman followed inside and ate at a table nearby, a cell phone/walkie-talkie on the table in plain view.

  But not too nearby. Lou wanted his privacy. After moving through the line, they took a table well away from Heiman, so the detective couldn’t overhear.

  Liz worked on a bowl of chili, picking out chunks of meat and setting them on the plate. Lou deconstructed a turkey and cranberry on wheat and dug into it with a plastic fork. It struck her that neither of them could simply eat what had been served.

  He spoke in the practiced voice of a man used to talking in the third row of a courtroom while the trial was under way. “You and I have barely had five minutes to catch up.” His tone suggested apology and so she braced for more bad news. Not the kids, she thought, presuming he would not wait for a lunch meeting if whatever it was had to do with them. Lou pushed some cranberry jelly onto a piece of white meat and ate the combination. He washed it down with hot tea.

  “We don’t know how it all fits together, or for that matter, even if it all fits together, but there are some things you need to know.” He told her about the blood evidence at the cabin, and how forensics would be the clincher, but that he couldn’t say exactly what had gone on out there. He warned her that if her latent fingerprints surfaced, they would have to deal with it, that such a discovery might signal the end of their keeping the affair secret, and that he wanted her prepared for that eventuality.

  “The tape?”

  “Danny Foreman shot that tape of you two.”

  She calmly set down the spoon. Either the chili had landed on an empty stomach, or this news was about to make her sick.

  “It’s a surveillance tape that he suppressed,” Lou explained. “He didn’t think it relevant at the time, which is cop speak for his not wanting to get you in trouble.” He told her the lab had discovered both Paul Geiser’s and Danny Foreman’s prints on the outside of the cassette. “And another partial that belonged to an INS green card holder-a Russian.” He covered the difficulty of connecting a partial print legally to an individual, but how the discovery of a Russian cigarette ash at the Foreman assault had helped confirm suspicions and led them to a distributor. This, without naming names. “What you need to know, Liz, is that this man, this importer, he plays rough. The Russian mafia is famous for coming after one’s family as a means of pressure.”

  “The LaRossas,” she said.

  “Yes. The Russian… I saw him late yesterday… told me this tale-the story’s unimportant-that may mean that he, they, I’m not sure, followed us out to Kathy’s. May know where Miles and Sarah are.” He lowered his head.

  She felt made of stone. Frozen, both from motion and in terms of cold. She knew exactly what he was telling her, and yet her mother’s sense of protection tried to reinterpret whatever it was so that it wouldn’t come out the way it had sounded. The way he meant it. She finally said, “I want to hear the story.” “It’s not important,” he repeated.

  “I… want… to… hear… the… story.”

  “I screwed up, Liz. I’m sorry. I did everything I could to avoid being followed.”

  She understood then that he took this as a failure on his part. She wanted to forgive him, placing little importance on how it had happened, but then reconsidered and felt angry he’d let them be followed. It felt so wonderfully good to deflect the blame for some of this onto him-even if only briefly. But within seconds she felt awful about gloating over his shame, knowing these problems had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her own past, and this realization and the combined guilt ate into her all the more deeply. She pushed the chili aside distastefully. “The story,” she said again.

  He took a moment to explain the tale of the magpie waiting for the empty nest. “We can’t be sure,” he added quickly, “that it has anything to do with the kids. It could very well have been his way of denying responsibility for what happened to Hayes at the cabin. We know Danny Foreman was lured away from the cabin. It’s not inconceivable that this man I’m talking about… his guys were lured away as well, or even followed Foreman when they should have stayed on Hayes. It’s not clear. I want to emphasize that.”

  “We’ve got to get them out.”

  Lou had the audacity to shake his head no. “That’s not an option.”

  She’d never felt this kind of cold, even through her illness, never anything close to this sense of removal and distance. “Why? Kathy can take them somewhere. Boise. Reno. Someplace far away.”

  “If they’re being watched, it’ll do no good, only take them farther from us. Look, they may simply know our kids are gone and be using this to trick us into leading them to Miles and Sarah.”

  “This can’t be,” she said too loudly. Heiman turned his head slightly, and then thought better and returned to his sandwich. Liz suddenly felt as if eyes from everywhere were upon them. It felt claustrophobic to her. Oppressive.

  “We… don’t… know,” Lou said firmly. “We can’t jump to conclusions. It does no one any good. But at the same time, we have to be wise about this. We have to rethink everything.”

  Not really listening to him, she said, “We-you-could send police cars. A whole phalanx of them. Middle of the night. Get them out of there. Use dummy cars like they do with the president. They can’t follow them all.”

  “Then it’s Kathy they go after,” he said, meeting eyes with her. His were filled with pain. “Or your parents. Or you. Or m
e, even. Maybe they wait six months, a year-and then go after the kids. The point being, if this was meant as a threat-and we don’t know that for sure-then there’s no way to beat it. You don’t beat these people, Liz. Not at their game.”

  “This is not a game.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  “There must be a way.”

  “For the time being, we cooperate.”

  He stunned her with this announcement. Her eyes searched the various tables, the people working the sandwich line, wondering if they were watching them right now.

  “Are you saying the money’s tied to these people?”

  “We don’t know that either.”

  “You’re just a wealth of information, aren’t you?”

  “It’s fluid,” he said.

  She disliked that term. He used it all the time.

  He said, “We work on a couple of different assumptions. One is that they may know that Miles and Sarah are with Kathy. The other is that it may have been their money-this Russian’s money. It makes some sense because his business is in trouble with the government right now, and he’s probably cash shy. It makes that seventeen million all the more tempting. He hires Hayes’s new lawyers, gets him out on parole, and puts him to work.”

  “What have I done?” she asked, a desperate sadness permeating her.

  “You can’t beat them at their game,” he said in that Lou way that suggested he’d already thought this through to where he was now ahead of it. She knew this about him, loved him for it-always looking around the next corner, but could hardly see clear to understand what he meant.

  “We beat them, we make it safe, by either playing along or putting the whole lot of them in jail. We’ve already taken certain steps, and there’s more I have planned, but in the meantime, no matter what, you play along. That was the message I took away from there. That’s something I won’t even share with my own team. If you get a call, when you get a call, you call me first and we decide how to play it. Whether or not, and how I include our guys, I don’t know yet.”