The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series)

by Daria Desombre

  “Well now. That’s not hard to understand. I hope she’s not a suspect?”

  “I didn’t check it out,” admitted Masha, biting her lip. “But I don’t think that fits our theory.”

  Andrey laughed. “That’s what I’ve been saying! The facts fitting the theory, instead of the theory fitting the facts! Anyway. Go ahead.”

  Masha colored slightly, and Innokenty swiftly came to her aid.

  “Finally, number three. Solyanko. He was a professional athlete, an Olympic contender. He’s suspected of planting drugs on his main competitor, Snegurov.”

  “Suspected?”

  “Snegurov suspected him, anyway. He’s thinking along the lines of cui prodest. Find the one who benefits—”

  “Is that how the jock put it?” Andrey asked with a smirk.

  Innokenty smirked in response. “More or less.”

  “All right, so what do we have?”

  “What we have,” said Masha quietly, “is three bodies where the tsars had their gardens in medieval Moscow, a place that is a stand-in for the Garden of Gethsemane. One victim offended the church, the second gave false testimony, and the third slandered a colleague. All three had their tongues cut out.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Pretty harsh,” Andrey said finally, but he had to agree. “Go on, Intern Karavay.”

  “Number four was the drunk they found at Kutafya Tower—in Jerusalem, that’d be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. His number, four, showed up in the form of a new tattoo on his biceps. A cop from his neighborhood confirmed he’d never seen it before.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t make any headway on that one,” confessed Innokenty, wringing his hands. “Just wasted some time and wrecked a good suit.” He stopped when he met Andrey’s wry gaze. “I had a long but fruitless conversation with a local alcoholic guru. All I learned was that Nikolai Sorygin was a flower drunk.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Apparently that means he lived like a plant, drank vodka like breathing air. Never did anything bad, but never did anything good, either. An archetypal drunk. And vodka was used to kill him, too, in a medieval way perfectly suited to our dismal hero.”

  “The next, I think, was the architect, Gebelai,” Masha went on.

  “Is that the one who killed all those people when his metro station collapsed?”

  “That’s him.” Masha looked Andrey straight in the eye. “Andrey, I’m pretty convinced that our killer did this one, too. We don’t need to look too far for Gebelai’s sin—there were hundreds of victims. There was even proof that he was at fault, but the charges were dropped. They found him in an apartment on Lenivka.”

  “In Jerusalem, that’s the Jaffa Gate,” Innokenty piped up. “He died of exhaustion. He was an award-winning architect, rich and pampered, with all kinds of medals. One of them was pinned to his body. Right into his skin.” Kenty passed Andrey a photograph of the medal he had found online. “This is a third-degree Akhdzapsh medal, awarded in Abkhazia for exemplary service. It has eight rays. Three of Gebelai’s were broken off.”

  “So five were left,” said Andrey, doing the depressing calculations. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “All right. Let’s go on.”

  “Then we were able to identify the arm.”

  “What arm?”

  “Remember how, about half a year ago, a detached arm was found in a bag with a Chagall? We went to see the collector that painting was stolen from. He recognized the arm.”

  “He recognized it?” Andrey looked at them skeptically.

  “This man has a fantastic visual memory,” Innokenty insisted. “He recognized tattoos that he had seen on a thief named Samuilov one time in court. This wasn’t the first time Samuilov had robbed the same group of art collectors.”

  “I think the arm is a symbol,” Masha said. “The murderer didn’t care what thief he killed, as long as it was a thief.”

  “I agree,” said Innokenty, nodding. “The arm—or the hand, anyway—represents theft. And they used to chop off thieves’ hands in the Middle Ages.”

  Andrey sighed. “Where?”

  Innokenty knew what he meant. “The arm was found between Lobnoye Mesto, which maps onto Golgotha, and St. Basil’s, which represents Mount Zion. Remember how in Ivan the Terrible’s time St. Basil’s was called ‘Jerusalem’?”

  Andrey did not remember, naturally. But he did suddenly feel as if an unnaturally cold breeze was blowing over him. And he was grateful that Innokenty was splashing some more whiskey into his glass.

  MASHA

  Masha didn’t completely understand why Andrey’s face, initially screwed up into a scowl, had smoothed out so nicely, but she figured the good whiskey must be responsible. I should start bringing a flask to work at Petrovka, she thought to herself, almost giggling.

  But she couldn’t help admitting that this new easygoing Andrey was much better looking than the old one. He was finally wearing something other than jeans, and his thin sweater emphasized his lack of paunch. Probably works out like crazy, thought Masha, ashamed of her own neglected gym membership. She liked his hands, too. The fingers that gripped his whiskey glass were startling—contrary to expectations, there was nothing crude about them. They were perfectly proportioned, and looked flexible and sensitive. And his eyes! When he looked at her without his usual fury, his eyes were piercing, even though she usually found that light-blue color sort of dull. All in all, Masha had to admit that Captain Yakovlev, even though he might as well have been an alien, a man of some other species and tribe, possessed a certain sullen attractiveness. Is that what it was?

  Masha looked at him with her usual caution, but also with curiosity. He’s probably been with tons of women, she thought, blushing. Thank God nobody was looking at her. Innokenty, ever the gracious host, was pouring his guest some more whiskey. Masha decided she’d better not have any more wine, if one glass was leading her mind down this titillating path.

  “Way to go!” Andrey was praising them now. “That’s great work, identifying the victim. It will be easier to hunt down the body now. Although we don’t get that many bodies missing an arm, honestly.”

  “You heard it here, Masha!” Kenty said, winking at her. “Your first compliment from your new boss.”

  “I’m flattered.” Masha smiled at Andrey, and he grinned in response. I need to stop drinking right now, she thought. She set down her glass and changed the subject.

  “Let’s move on to the governor’s wife, Liudmila Turina. We don’t know which number she is, but she was quartered, so clearly this is another medieval execution. Then she was wrapped up in newspaper articles about her excessive bribe-taking, and found at Kolomenskoye, exactly where a tower marks the Ascension of Christ in Jerusalem.”

  “I see.” Andrey nodded, no longer grinning.

  “And the singer Lavrenty.” Masha frowned. “He was a weasel, but I’m not sure which of his sins got him killed. A pipe burst near the Polytechnic Museum, and he drowned lying facedown in the muck. His watch stopped at eleven o’clock, even though the time of death, according to the coroner, was around six in the morning.”

  “And what do we have there?”

  “Lubyansky Drive travels over the hill between the Polytechnic Museum and the Kitay-gorod metro stop, and that hill is a stand-in for the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.”

  “Got it.”

  The further they went down their list, the more serious Andrey looked. He believes us, thought Masha. He finally believes us! And he’s afraid. But who wouldn’t be? The killer could freeze over the deepest circles of hell. Not only does he collect our sins, thought Masha, he numbers them according to some mysterious scheme, and picks the perfect places to leave the bodies, too. As if he were a spider weaving a web or a careful accountant making a table in Excel.

  “I’m cold,” she told Innokenty, and her loyal friend left to get her a sweater.

  “That eye on the wall looks so familiar,” Andrey said. “But I can’t figure out why
. I’m not real up on contemporary photography.”

  “That’s my eye,” said Masha, embarrassed.

  “What?”

  “It’s mine. Kenty took that picture maybe ten years ago. He was into macrophotography then. It was terrible. What if he’d made some huge version of my nose? I told him I’d never come to his place again if he hung a photo of my nose up on the wall. But an eye—that’s not too bad, right?”

  “No, it’s fine,” Andrey said, and furrowed his brow as he turned to look at Innokenty, who’d returned with an enormous fuzzy sweater.

  “I keep this here just for Masha. She’s always freezing,” he said as he draped the sweater over her shoulders.

  “Uh-huh,” said Andrey. “Right, so, where were we?”

  “Next was Katya,” said Masha, pulling the sweater tight around her. “But that’s just conjecture.”

  “It’s not conjecture, Masha,” Innokenty said gently. “Someone made that accident happen. She died on Nikolskaya Street, Via Dolorosa. And you said yourself that she had those ten bracelets. Number ten. She was wearing your clothes, driving your car, so—the sin of envy?”

  “I guess,” Masha conceded. “Why did it have to be my friend, though? Are there really no other envious people in Moscow?” Masha looked down. She hadn’t meant to whine.

  Andrey studied Innokenty’s face which was suddenly transformed by pity. His host caught his gaze and smiled sadly.

  “There’s also the man who was whipped to death. He used to beat his wife, and may have been responsible for the death of his infant son.”

  “The place?” Andrey asked.

  “Prechistenka, near the Church of the Assumption.”

  “And the number?”

  Innokenty shrugged. “I only spoke with his widow. She thought her husband got what he deserved for what she called his ‘excessive wrath.’ I didn’t think to ask about a number. But maybe we could find one in the file?”

  “There’s one more,” Andrey added, by way of summing up. “Yelnik, the hitman who was drowned under the ice, kept in a freezer for months, then fished out of the Moskva, which matches up with the Jordan River. And Yelnik, like the thief you found, is probably just a stand-in for any old murderer. The number fourteen was shaved onto the back of his neck.”

  “So there are at least fourteen of them, then,” said Masha, “which means we haven’t found them all yet.”

  “About those numbers,” Andrey asked, “have you dug anything up?”

  Masha looked like a guilty schoolgirl. “Not really,” she admitted. “The more I read on the topic, the less I understand. I mean, we need to find the system all these murders fit into, hopefully through the numbers. Something like a ranking of sins. In the Bible, for example, you can find the tax collectors, the prostitutes, and the Pharisees listed as sinners. But our victims don’t fit into those categories. Then there’s Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first circle of hell is for unbaptized but virtuous non-Christians. The second is for people who committed crimes of passion, the third is for gluttons—”

  “But Dante was a Catholic,” Innokenty interrupted. “He was writing in the context of the seven deadly sins. In Orthodoxy, there’s no such concept.”

  “So no sins are deadly?” Andrey asked.

  “It’s more like the opposite: every sin is deadly. Our killer is obsessed with the purely Orthodox, medieval idea of the New Jerusalem. In those days, the conflict between Catholicism and Orthodoxy was much more strident than it is now.”

  Innokenty couldn’t help himself. He was off and running on one of his favorite topics. “Orthodox believers called Catholics ‘Latins’ and Catholicism ‘heresy.’ In the eleventh century, the venerable Feodosy Pechersky said there was no eternal life for those in the Latin faith. Later, in the sixteenth century, Maximus the Greek said something similar, denouncing Latin heresy in the same breath with all Jewish and pagan blasphemy. The Orthodox hated Latins almost as passionately as they hated the splinter Russian Orthodox groups like the Old Believers. Actually, no. You always hate your own kind more.”

  Andrey looked annoyed at first, but then decided this historical diversion was kind of a relief from their eerie dance around the unknown killer. He let Innokenty chatter on.

  “Want to know the focus of one of the central debates between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages?” Innokenty asked.

  Masha and Andrey both raised their eyebrows.

  “Baked goods!” Innokenty declared with a grin.

  “How’s that?” Andrey asked.

  “You see, the holy fathers of the Orthodox Church believed that communion bread should be leavened—that it should contain yeast. The Catholics wanted unleavened bread. Our side, being more poetically inclined, insisted that the living yeast symbolized a living God. Our bread was alive, we said, and the Catholic bread was dead. Plus, the poor Catholics only received their dead Christ during the sacrament of the Eucharist.”

  “Who do you think was right?” asked Andrey, in spite of himself.

  “The Catholics, I think, as annoying as that is. The Last Supper is believed to have been a seder—part of the Jewish celebration of Passover. And during Passover, Jews refrain from eating anything with yeast in it, including leavened bread. Passover is a commemoration of the Exodus, after which they wandered the desert with only a dry bread called matzo. There are other differences, too. The Orthodox—and here I think they’re absolutely correct—reject the idea of God having a ‘lieutenant on earth,’ like the Catholic Pope. And one more thing,” said Innokenty, looking serious again. “This, I think, is vital for our serial killer. In Orthodoxy, there is no purgatory. Everything is either black or white: heaven or hell. No shades of gray.”

  “Harsh,” Andrey joked, but he felt himself shiver.

  “That’s our Russian maximalism at work—everything is a dichotomy, all or nothing,” Innokenty responded sadly.

  Andrey put down his glass, which had been empty for a while now, and stood up.

  “Thanks for the hospitality. It’s time for me to go.”

  Innokenty and Masha saw him to the door, where they hovered awkwardly as Andrey fumbled with his shoes. Finally, his face red with the effort, he got them tied. He shook Innokenty’s hand and gave Masha a nod.

  “You’ve both done good work.”

  “Wait!” Innokenty said. “Here. I jotted down some more places in Moscow connected to Jerusalem. Just in case.”

  “Just in case, huh?” Andrey chuckled gloomily, glancing over the list before tucking it in his pocket. “We’re really going to need this, I’m afraid.”

  ANDREY

  Andrey was not in the habit of lying to himself. If he had fed Marilyn all the food he wanted that morning, if he had put on his new pants and a clean shirt, if he’d driven to work like a madman while listening to some cheesy classical station, it must be because he was excited about seeing Masha Karavay.

  But, Andrey told himself, that excitement was purely because the work was moving along nicely now, and if it weren’t for Masha, they never would have linked all those cold cases. Intern Karavay had turned out to have a good head on her shoulders, and Andrey Yakovlev wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Terrifying as it was, he was beginning to suspect their unnamed killer knew it, too. Otherwise, why would he have picked Masha’s best friend as a victim? He’s playing with her, Andrey thought. Challenging her to a duel. And suddenly he was overcome with fear for Masha, deep in his gut. That crazy fuck. Try coming at me, asshole! I’ll—

  Unfinished thoughts whipped around in his brain. You threaten a girl, but you don’t have the balls to come after me? Then he realized it wasn’t a question of balls at all. Andrey simply didn’t interest the killer. But Masha did.

  He got out of his car and slammed the door, annoyed and maybe even jealous. There was something between those two. An intelligent young woman and a merciless killer. A mental connection could be more powerful than a physical one. But how could Andrey protect her
from . . . coupling, in some horrible way, with a maniac? Andrey opened the door to his office, nodded to his colleagues, and strode right to Masha’s desk.

  “Masha!” he said gruffly.

  Masha looked up with a smile, which quickly disappeared. Andrey was panting like he’d just run the hundred-meter dash. In fact, he had—up the stairs and down the hallways of Petrovka.

  “Masha,” he repeated sternly, sitting down across from her and trying to even out his breath. “I’m taking you off this case.”

  Her face went pale, enough to make her eyes glow behind the long eyelashes.

  “Why?” she asked, her voice calm. “What am I doing wrong? Why do you hate me so much?”

  “No, Masha,” he whispered in response. “Seriously, for such a smart girl, you’re an idiot! Do you think we’re playing games here? He killed your best friend. Do you realize what that means? He walked into your apartment, dressed her in your clothes, put her in your car, and ran her right into a concrete wall! He knows who you are. And I’m not going to continue putting you in danger. You don’t have enough experience. You haven’t had time to develop the professional instinct that we have here, the sense that lets you sniff out danger—”

  “But I sniffed out the pattern!” Masha interrupted in a furious whisper. “I had enough knowledge and intuition for that, when nobody else here had a clue! If he killed Katya, that means he was trying to tell me something. It’s a message. Subconsciously, serial killers often want to be caught, right? If I don’t figure out his riddle, that means Katya will have died for nothing.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” Andrey answered, roaring this time. “This isn’t a riddle or a game! He’s going to kill you for your sins, and only he knows what they are! And he’s going to kill you in some twisted, medieval way, and it’s going to be my fault!”

  “Don’t worry,” said Masha, her voice devoid of emotion. She was already stowing documents in her bag. “Nobody’s going to accuse you of anything. Definitely not gratitude, anyway.” And she walked quickly out of the office.