by Mark Dawson
It was an awkward speech, but one which Fedorov had evidently delivered before. The adults around the table raised their glasses and one of the men—Milton suspected that he was Fedorov’s brother—proposed a toast that Milton could not understand. Glasses were raised and the toast was solemnly observed.
Milton cleared his plate, enjoying the warm atmosphere that pervaded the group. It was evident that the family was close: Fedorov’s parents conversed affectionately, his father—who didn’t speak any English—reaching out regularly to touch his wife’s hand; the siblings shared raucous stories, slipping between languages to suit whatever it was they wanted to say; the children were polite and well-mannered, with good-natured ribbing at one another’s expense. The shot glasses were filled and then refilled, but no one put pressure on Milton to drink and he found it easy to relax. The evening was more enjoyable than he had anticipated, and he was glad that he had made the effort to come.
The first course was finished and the plates were cleared away.
“You do not drink, John,” Fedorov said. “Do you have any vices?”
“I smoke,” he said.
“That is good.” Fedorov reached into his pocket and took out two cigars. “Would you smoke one of these with me?”
Milton thought of the cheap packet of cigarettes in his jacket pocket. “That would be nice,” he said.
“Come.” Fedorov stood. “We go outside. We smoke and talk.”
64
Milton retrieved his leather jacket, put it on and stepped out onto the boardwalk. He followed Fedorov as he crossed over to the bench next to the railings that guarded the short drop down to the sand. He looked back and saw the tall apartment buildings that backed onto Café Valentin and the Tatiana Grill. The beach stretched away, the first few feet lit by the tall lamp that stood above the bench, the illumination quickly swallowed up by the darkness. There was a big freighter in the channel, turning right to the open Atlantic.
Fedorov joined him on the boardwalk. He held a bottle of vodka in his right hand and the two cigars in his left.
He dropped down onto the bench next to Milton. He held up the bottle of samohon. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. But thanks.”
“My wife says I drink too much,” Fedorov said. “I tell her to mind her own business.” He took the cap off the bottle and raised it. “Za nashu druzhbu. To our friendship.”
He put the bottle to his lips and took a generous swig. He put the bottle down on the bench, took out the cigars and found a cutter in his pocket. He inserted the head of the first cigar and made a neat cut just before the cap, leaving enough space to avoid tearing the wrapper. He gave the cigar to Milton and then set to work on the second. Milton held the cigar beneath his nose and inhaled it.
“It is from Nicaragua,” Fedorov said. “Very good.”
The tobacco was pungent. Fedorov took out a lighter and thumbed flame. Milton put the cigar to his lips and puffed on it as Fedorov lit the end.
Fedorov waved a hand at the boardwalk and the blackness all around them. “Odessa is not so different from this,” he said. “Both are on the sea. Odessa has no boardwalk, like here, but it has a promenade along the water. My city is beautiful. I doubt I will ever have the chance to return.”
He put the bottle to his lips and drank again.
“You say you are a cook, John?”
“That’s right.”
“But you haven’t always done that.”
“No,” Milton admitted.
“You were a soldier, I think.”
Milton was surprised by his perceptiveness. “Is it that obvious?”
“Perhaps only to those who know what to look for. I was a soldier for many years. I think you and I have much in common.”
Milton drew down on his cigar.
“Where did you serve?” Fedorov asked him.
“Here and there,” Milton said, and then, when Fedorov looked at him expectantly, he added, “Gibraltar. Helmand. Northern Ireland. Other places.”
“Helmand? I was there, too.”
“With the Soviets?”
He nodded. “In 1989, just before Gorbachev ended things. I was young. I saw things that no one should ever see.”
“So did I.”
Fedorov put the bottle to his lips again. Milton heard the calling of a gull, high overhead, and the shushing as the tide gently ran up and down the beach.
“What did you do after the war?” Milton asked him.
“I went back to Sevastopol, married my wife and started my family. The Crimea is beautiful, John. Have you been?”
“No,” Milton said.
“We lived in the Riviera, near Yalta. It is warm and pleasant. A good place to bring up my children. I would have stayed there forever if it wasn’t for Putin and his thugs. If I was a younger man, I would have fought them, but I have family now and I am old. It is the same for my brothers. We were all in the military. We left together and came here. We put our assets together and bought this place. We have been fortunate.”
“It’s very nice,” Milton said. “And the food was delicious.”
“Then you must make sure to return. Whenever you wish. You just need to say that you are a friend of Alexei and you will not need to pay.”
“That’s very kind, but it’s not necessary. Tonight has been more than thanks enough.”
“Nonsense,” Fedorov said, drinking again. He held the bottle up. “Are you sure? Just a taste?”
Milton could smell the alcohol on Fedorov’s lips and could see that he was fast becoming drunk. “Thanks, but no.”
Fedorov nodded and put the bottle down. “You know, what you did for my daughter, it means more to me than perhaps you understand.”
Milton didn’t respond and waited for Fedorov to find the words to continue.
“We lost our son a year ago,” he said. “He was called Dmitri, after my father. He was eighteen years old.”
“I’m sorry,” Milton said. “What happened?”
“Drugs.” Fedorov drew down on his cigar, held the smoke in and then blew it out, to be dispersed in the wind. “We lost him. There were kids at his school. Bad kids. Dmitri started to go out with them. There was one friend, a Dominican boy called Diego, they grew close. Diego was a drug addict. He liked the heroin. He gave it to Dmitri, and he liked it, too.” Fedorov paused, the caws of the gull competing with the susurration of the waves. Fedorov drank again, and then continued. “My son hid it from us. We didn’t know until it was too late. He was given heroin that was contaminated with fentanyl. It made it more powerful. His body, it could not stand it, and it killed him. I found his body in an apartment in Bath Beach. I had to kick the door down. The police said he had been there for three days. He was curled up on the floor as if he was asleep.”
“I’m sorry,” Milton said. “That’s terrible.”
Fedorov continued as if he hadn’t noticed that Milton had spoken. “The police said there was nothing that they could do. I disagreed. I found the dealer who sold him the heroin.” He took another slug of the vodka. “My brothers and I met with him one night. Let us say he never sold it to anyone else.”
The atmosphere had changed. Fedorov was a little drunk, but the earlier ebullience had given way to a darkness that Milton found disconcerting.
Milton stood. “I should be going,” he said. “I’ve got a busy day tomorrow and I haven’t slept properly for a while. I’ll say goodbye to your family and then I’ll be off.”
Fedorov stood and immediately lost his balance. Milton caught his arm and held him up. He could feel the tight muscle of his bicep.
“Thank you,” Fedorov said with a chuckle. “I think this bottle is a little stronger than usual.”
He released himself from Milton’s grip, crossed to the restaurant and opened the door. A slant of warm light painted a golden stripe across the boardwalk. Milton followed. It was cold and growing colder. The snow couldn’t be far away now, and he had business to attend to.
65
Milton made it back to the precinct house at eleven fifty. He knew that the cop with the truck was on the four-to-twelve tour, and, if his routine was anything like it had been the previous night, he guessed that he would be leaving for home at a little after midnight.
He found a spot on the other side of Linwood where he could leave his bike and put himself out of plain sight by hanging around behind a large dumpster that had not been emptied for some time.
He took off his helmet and rested it on the seat, then leaned against the wall that separated the sidewalk from a parking lot and took out his phone. He navigated to the app that he had downloaded after purchasing the tracking devices and fired it up. He was rewarded with a map of Brooklyn, with Sutter Avenue running across the centre of the screen. There were three dots highlighted on the map: the first, in red, was his position, to the east of the precinct house; the second two, both blue, winked on and off just a short distance to the west.
He lit a cigarette and waited.
PART IV
WEDNESDAY
66
Milton watched the patrol cars as they arrived back at the station house for the change of shift. His position was a decent distance from the entrance to the precinct, but he was close enough to see the faces of the men and women as they got into and out of their cars. It was just before midnight when the patrol car with the same license number as he had seen yesterday arrived. It slowed and then backed into a space that had just been vacated by a departing Altima. Milton waited patiently, observing as the two cops that he had seen last night got out of the car and then went inside together.
The younger of the two men re-emerged first. He paused beneath the tree that leaned out into the street, did up his jacket, and then went over to the Fusion. He opened the door, slid inside, and backed out into the street. Milton glanced down at his phone and saw the first of the two blue dots sliding smoothly along Sutter as the Fusion pulled away. Milton had already decided that he would leave that officer for another time. He had tagged his car for the sake of thoroughness; his partner was the one who had conversed with the black guy that Freddy had recognised. The odds were against the younger cop being involved, but Milton was thorough and he could be investigated later.
The second officer emerged a moment later. He passed along the sidewalk behind the parked cars until he came to the Ford F-150.
Milton straddled the Bonneville, rolled it off its kickstand and gripped the key.
The engine of the F-150 started with a loud grumble. The lights flicked on and the cop revved it, then drove out of the parking space and onto the road.
Milton turned the key and kick-started the engine.
The NYPD didn’t allow its officers to live in the areas that they patrolled, so Milton was ready for a reasonable ride, maybe up north to Westchester. But, as he let the Ford pull away into the distance, he saw that the driver was headed east. Milton followed, keeping the Ford almost out of sight. There was no need to take chances. The tracker was active, and Milton could easily rely on the map on his phone if he lost sight of the truck.
The Ford followed the Belt Parkway east, continuing on through Valley Stream, Wantagh and West Babylon. Milton stopped trying to guess where they were headed. The roads became quieter, and, as they headed to Smithtown, he dropped back even farther, confident that he would be able to track the lights of the truck if it took a sudden turn.
They approached the coast at Stony Brook and Milton knew that they must be close to where the truck was headed. They headed into Setauket, following the road until they reached a series of large houses. Milton saw the flash of the brake lights as the truck slowed. He slowed, too, switching off the headlamp and drifting across to the side of the road behind a parked car. The truck rolled off the road and onto a sloped driveway. The engine continued to run for a moment, but then it was switched off. The lights flicked off and the driver got out. He paused next to his truck, reached up and stretched his arms, and then went inside.
Milton waited for ten minutes. He saw a light flick on in one of the downstairs windows and then flick off again.
He started the engine, switched on the headlamp and rolled ahead. It was a very nice house. Big. It looked like it was sixty or seventy years old and had been built to mimic the Queen Anne cottages that still persisted in the Hamptons. It was two storeys tall with projecting gables to the front and the side. The roof was hipped and the structure was clad in white clapboard. There was a wraparound porch to the front and left-hand side, with turned porch posts and elaborate balustrade spindles. It had small sash windows on the upper floor and larger windows on the ground floor.
Milton memorised the address—87 Shore Road—and took a series of photographs of it with his phone. He decided that he would return tomorrow. He continued past the property, retraced his path along adjacent roads, and headed back toward the city and his own apartment.
He was halfway home when the first flakes of snow started to fall. He glanced up into the sky; the stars were hidden beneath an impenetrable vault of cloud. The flakes were fat and ponderous, the headlamp picking them out in its golden light. They started to fall more heavily, reducing visibility and settling on the road despite the layer of salt that had been spread earlier in the evening. Milton slowed down, bleeding twenty miles an hour off his speed and concentrating hard on the way ahead.
67
Milton slept in until eleven. He awoke and closed his eyes again, aware, as he slowly came around, that something was different. It took him a moment to realise what it was: it was the noise from outside the window, or rather the lack of it. The buzz and hum of activity was missing. Instead, there was a sense of a smothering, muffled quality to the sound that reached him. He pushed his duvet aside and—flinching from the sudden frigidity of the apartment away from the warmth of his bed—he stood, parted the curtains and looked outside.
The snow that had started on his ride back to Coney Island must have fallen all night. Everything was covered. The cars that were parked at the foot of the block had seen their sharper angles smoothed out and replaced by gentle curves and lines. The road itself had been cleared, with ridges on either side where a snow plough had forced its way through, but the snow had continued to fall and the grey of the asphalt was invisible, covered by a whitening carpet. Flakes were still falling, but they drifted down lazily, as if the storm was taking a moment to gather its strength.
Milton took out his phone, navigated to CNN’s website and tapped to play the last bulletin.
“The biggest snowstorm to hit the north-eastern United States since 2006’s epic nor’easter left behind over two feet of snow, widespread power outages and significant travel disruptions. The weather quickly deteriorated in cities such as New York City and Boston by the Wednesday morning commute as the system continued to strengthen, eventually turning into a powerful blizzard. Snowfall rates exceeded two inches an hour, making travel almost impossible for a time. There have been five reported fatalities and—”
Milton closed the page and went into the bathroom. He showered, standing under the warm water and scrubbing the sleep from his eyes. He brushed his teeth, dried himself and dressed. He collected his laptop and set it up on the small table.
He opened a browser, navigated to Google Maps and typed in the address of the house that he had tailed the officer back to last night. Shore Road traced the outline of a bulge of land that formed the southern shore of Setauket Harbor. The officer’s property was in a prime spot. Milton dragged the Google Street View icon to the road and scouted the area. He remembered the houses that he had seen last night, and was able to match the relevant property to the one he had photographed on his phone. Now he had the benefit of the bright sunlight that had accompanied Google’s camera car when it had visited the town. The houses were all neat and tidy, their owners evidently house-proud judging from the freshly painted picket fences and the neatly clipped lawns.
Milton opened a second window and opened up Zillow. He looked
at the prices of comparable houses in the area. There were twenty properties on the market, and none of them were priced at less than $400,000. A house on View Road, similarly close to the water, was being marketed for $600,000.
The Ford F-150 he had tailed last night was on the drive of the property in the Google photograph, its license plate blurred out. Milton opened another browser window and Googled local Ford dealerships. The officer had been driving the F-150 XLT with the crew cab; the same make was available for a touch over $50,000.
Milton looked at the Setauket real estate prices and the cost of the truck and couldn’t help thinking that both would normally have been beyond the reach of a patrol cop. Other possibilities? He could have benefited from a windfall. A bequest from a wealthy relative, perhaps. It was possible, but unlikely.
Milton was more certain now than before: the officer was involved in something, and the dead man in the restroom had been a threat to whatever that was.
68
Mackintosh had spent the morning and the early afternoon working on the case.
The autopsy report had come back on José Luis González. The coroner reported that the body was that of a well-nourished male around forty years old. The body weighed 160 pounds and measured 72 inches from crown to sole. The section headed ‘Evidence of Injury’ was extensive: there were multiple stab wounds to the torso, with associated wounds to the hands and forearms that Mackintosh knew would have been defensive as González tried to fend off his attacker. The coroner had concluded that the fatal wound was the incision across the man’s throat. The wound began on the left side of the throat, an inch from the left ear, and continued for six inches to a point diagonally adjacent to the tip of the right ear. The wound passed through the skin, the subcutaneous tissue, and into the musculature beneath.