Powell stepped back over to where Michael and Tommy stood. She glanced at the window on the second floor, then at Tommy. “CSU is wrapping up. Shouldn’t be too much longer.”
“We’ll be across the street,” Tommy said, pointing at the pizza parlor.
Powell shoved her hands in her pockets, turned, and walked across the street. In that moment, a transport van from the ME’s office arrived. Two weary techs stepped out, walked around back, casually slid out the gurney. They moved as if underwater, and for good reason. It was a beautiful spring day. Viktor Harkov wasn’t going anywhere.
They stood at the window counter at Angelo’s. Tommy worked a slice. Michael was not hungry.
Michael had related the entire story, sparing no detail, beginning with the first call made to the adoption agency in South Carolina, and ending with the moment he and Abby unlocked the door to the house and brought Charlotte and Emily into their new home.
As he was telling the tale, Michael watched Tommy’s face. He knew that this would hurt Tommy – they had few secrets from each other – but Tommy just listened, implacable, not judging.
Like the savvy lawyer he was, Tommy gave it a few long moments before responding with the options. “You’re saying the papers were forged?” he asked.
“Just the one document,” Michael replied, matching his volume. “The adoption broker in Helsinki, the one whose job it was to approve and clear the time frame. His assistant was paid five thousand dollars to forge his name on the clearance. The man – the official – died two years ago. We always felt that, unless they began to dig deep and ask a lot of questions, it couldn’t possibly come out.”
Tommy folded his slice, took a bite, wiped his lips. “They’re going to start digging in about an hour. You know that, right?”
Michael just nodded. He knew that, if his name was in one of Viktor Harkov’s files, investigators would get around to him.
Tommy finished eating, rolled his trash and put in the can. He carefully inspected his shirt, tie, trousers. No grease. He sipped his soda. “How did Harkov work these things Did he keep separate files?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said. “I met him once at his office, then a second time at a restaurant in midtown.”
“Were there official documents you signed?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “The standard papers. Everything filed with the state of New York is perfectly legal.”
Tommy looked across the street, at the growing official presence. He looked back at Michael. “You know if you go up there, you have to sign the log. It will all be on the record.”
“I know.” Michael tried to sort out all the ramifications of his presence at this scene. He couldn’t think straight. All that mattered was keeping his family safe and intact.
Powell stepped out of the crime scene building, caught Tommy’s eye, waved him over.
Tommy slipped on his suit coat, shot his cuffs. He handed Michael the keys to his car.
“Let me see what I can find out.”
Michael watched Tommy cross the street. He looked at his watch. He was due in court in ninety minutes.
Michael stood on the street. The sun was high and warm, the sky clear. Too nice a day for dead bodies. Too nice a day for the world to end.
He recalled the first and only time he had visited Viktor Harkov in his office. He had known what he was doing was wrong, that making a covert payoff to grease the wheels of the adoption process might one day come back to haunt him, but there was a higher purpose, he had thought at the time, a nobility in his larceny.
As he stood there, watching the police do their job, getting ever closer to the truth, he asked himself if it had been worth it. In his mind, he saw his beautiful girls. The answer was yes.
He took out his phone, scrolled down to Abby’s cellphone number. His finger hovered over the touch screen. He had to call her, but couldn’t tell her about this. Not yet. Perhaps this had nothing to do with Viktor’s side-business of adoption. Maybe this was just another robbery homicide, or some family or ethnic dispute gone terribly wrong. Maybe Viktor Harkov had gotten involved in something far more dangerous than simply circumventing adoption laws. Maybe there was nothing for them to worry about.
On the other hand, maybe there was.
EIGHTEEN
He stood about ten feet away, in the hallway leading to the first-floor office. He was half in shadow, but seemed to fill up the entire door jamb.
Abby watched him. She tried to think of how much cash she could get together. The man had said nothing yet about money, but it was coming. What else could this be about? The man who called himself Aleksander, along with his partner, had probably done this before, stalking a suburban family, holding them for ransom. She’d read about it.
How long had they been watching? How much did they want? Why had they been selected? They weren’t rich. Far from it. Hell, all you had to do was check out the cars in the driveways along the street. The Murrays had a Lexus and a BMW. The Rinaldis had a Porsche Cayenne.
Abby did the math. There was less than a thousand dollars in the house. She had very little jewelry. They owned no valuable paintings or sculpture. If you added up all the gadgets – digital camera, camcorder, computers, stereo system – it didn’t add up to much. Was this going to work against them?
The initial shock of seeing a stranger standing in her home had begun to fade, turning instead into something else, the slow-crawling fear one feels when things slide completely beyond one’s control.
Keep it together Abby, she thought. The girls. The girls. The -
– cellphone rang. Abby jumped. The sound of the ringtone – a silly song she and the girls had downloaded online – sounded sardonically comic now, as if they were all in an abandoned amusement park.
The phone was on the counter, halfway across the kitchen. The man who called himself Aleksander picked up the phone, looked at it. He beckoned Abby toward him, showed her the screen.
It was Michael calling.
Abby noticed for the first time that the man was wearing latex gloves. The sight made her heart sink even lower. It added all kinds of possibilities, any number of futures to this scenario. All dark. Perhaps this was not a kidnapping after all. Perhaps this was not about money.
“I want you to speak to him,” he said. “I want you to sound normal. I want you to tell him whatever it is you tell him on a beautiful day such as this. He will soon enough know his role. But not now.” Aleks pointed out the window. The man he called Kolya was pushing the girls on their swings. “Do you understand this?”
“Yes.”
“Please put this on speakerphone.”
Abby took the phone. Despite her trembling hands, she flipped it open, pressed SPEAKER. She did her best to keep the fear from her voice. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“What’s up?” Abby asked. “You at the office?”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “I’m going to be stuck here for a while. The voir dire is taking longer than I thought.”
If there was one thing Abby Roman and her husband excelled at in their marriage, it was a nightly recap of their days. Abby was certain that the Colin Harris case – a case Abby knew was close to the bone for Michael – had wrapped its jury selection days earlier. The voir dire was complete, the panel was set, and here was her husband telling her it was not.
“You’re inside your office?” Abby asked.
A pause, then: “Yeah.”
Michael was lying. She heard street sounds in the background, loud street sounds. He was outside.
Why was he lying?
“Something wrong?” Abby asked. She looked at Aleks as she said this, feeling he knew that she was trying to communicate something. He now stood in the shadows of the hallway, listening intently to the conversation. She could not see his eyes. He was impenetrable. “Are you worried about the case?”
“Not really,” Michael replied. “Just a few last-minute details. No big deal.”
“The blo
ck sale went pretty well,” Abby said, trying to sound chatty. “We sold the toreador painting. It went for high one-figures.”
The toreador painting was a running joke. Michael, whose taste in oils and acrylics ranged from A Bachelor’s Dog to New Year’s Eve in Dog Ville, bought it at a flea market while he was in college. It had sat in their garage for their entire marriage – Abby refused to hang it in the house – the unsold veteran of five straight block sales, in two different counties.
“Babe?” Abby said. “The painting?”
A long pause. Abby wondered if the call had been dropped. Then: “I’m sorry,” Michael said. “Let me… let me call you back.”
“Good luck.”
Another long pause. “Thanks.”
Something was wrong. Abby glanced at Aleks. He nodded. He meant for her to hang up.
“Okay. I love you.” Abby barely got the words out. She wondered if this was the last time she’d ever speak to her husband. “And I -”
Dead air.
She pressed END CALL. The screen reverted to the photograph Abby used as wallpaper, a picture of herself, Michael, and the twins sitting on a bench near the beach in Cape May. Charlotte and Emily wore floppy straw sun hats. The sun was high, the water blue, the sand golden. Her heart ached.
Aleks held out his hands, indicating he wanted Abby to toss him the phone. She did. He caught it, put it in a pocket. “I appreciate your discretion. I am sure Anna and Marya do as well.”
Anna and Marya. It was the second time he had used these names.
Abby slipped onto one of the stools at the breakfast counter. She remembered shopping for the stools in White Plains, trying to decide on color, fabric, finish. It seemed so important at the time. It seemed to matter. It seemed like a million years ago.
“What are you going to do with us?” she asked.
For a moment, the man looked amused at her choice of words. “We are going to do nothing. We are going to wait.”
For how long? Abby wanted to ask. For whom? For what? She remained silent. She eyed the drawer on the kitchen island, the drawer containing the knives. Her glance was not lost on her captor.
He turned, glanced out the back window, then back to Abby.
“And now, if you would honor me with an introduction.”
He crossed the kitchen, stopping just a few feet away from Abby, and for the first time she saw his face in the bright afternoon sunlight streaming through the large window overlooking the backyard, saw his pale eyes, his sharp cheekbones, the way his widow’s peak met at his brow. The nausea suddenly became a violent, thrashing thing inside her. She knew this face almost as well as she knew her own. She tried to speak, but the words felt parched on her lips. “An introduction?”
Aleks smoothed his hair with his hands, straightened his clothing, as if he were a shy Victorian suitor meeting his betrothed for the first time. “Yes,” he said. “It is time I met Anna and Marya.”
“Why do you keep saying those names?” Abby asked, although she feared the answer. “Who are Anna and Marya?”
Aleks glanced out the window at the twins running around the yard. His profile was now unmistakable. He looked back at Abby.
His words took her legs away.
“They are my daughters.”
NINETEEN
Michael sat in the passenger seat of Tommy’s Lexus RR5, his mind outracing his heart. But not by much.
Abby had sounded distracted. Whenever she tried to make cocktail chatter with him, something was up. He had wanted to ask her why, but he knew he’d have to get off the phone quickly, because if he didn’t, she would read him, and he would have been forced to tell her about Viktor Harkov. He hated to lie to her. He didn’t lie to her. All he could hope for was that she didn’t see it on the news before he could tell her. She rarely watched television news, so this was in his favor.
When he did tell her about the murder, he wanted to have a lot more information. There was only one way that was going to happen.
Tommy made his way through the traffic. He opened the driver’s side door, but did not slip inside. He looked a little shaken. He took a few seconds. Tommy Christiano never took a few seconds. Especially with Michael.
“What’s up, man?” Michael asked. “Talk to me.”
Tommy looked up. “You sure you want to do this?”
Michael did not want to see it. He felt he had no choice. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”
The smell hit him first. It wasn’t as bad as some of the ripe corpses he had encountered in his time in the office, but it was bad enough. Many of the crime scene personnel walking in and out of the office wore white masks.
They stood in the hallway. They were waiting for the investigating detectives to invite them in. There was a time when anyone authorized to be at a crime scene could walk onto the scene at any time. No longer. Enough contaminated crime scenes leading to forensic evidence being tossed out at trial had changed all that.
Michael could hear conversations inside the office. He strained to understand what was being said. He heard scattered words: Telephone… voltage… serrated… eyelid… blood evidence.
Michael did not hear anything about files, stolen or otherwise. He did not hear the word adoption. There was a glimmer of hope in this.
Five minutes later, Detective Powell waved them in.
When Michael met Viktor Harkov, nearly five years earlier, the man had walked with a limp. A long-time diabetic with a litany of other physical ailments, Harkov’s body seemed frail even then. But not his mind. Although Michael had never squared off against the man in a courtroom, he knew a few lawyers who had, including Tommy, and they all agreed that Viktor Harkov never walked into Kew Gardens unprepared. He was much sharper than he looked. It was all part of the act.
Now Viktor Harkov looked hardly human.
The dead man slumped in his chair behind the desk. The sight was horrific. Harkov’s skin was paper white, leached of all color. His mouth was open in a slash of terror, baring yellowed teeth, gums thick with dried blood and saliva. Where his left eye had been was now a charred bubble of flesh, a red bull’s-eye at the center. A thin column of phlegm leaked from one of his nostrils.
As Michael passed to the left of Harkov’s desk, he had to look twice to be certain what he was seeing was true. It appeared as if Harkov’s trousers had been ripped or torn away. The area surrounding his genitals too had been burned, the flesh there blackened and spilt. Michael had seen many indignities in homicide victims – from the targets of sexual predators, to gang hits that left little to identify, to the nearly superhuman violence of murder done in a jealous rage – and in each there was a mortification to the way these people were seen in death. Perhaps a violent demise was in and of itself the final humiliation, one the victim could not avenge. Michael had always thought that this was part of his job as a prosecutor. Not to necessarily exact revenge – although anyone on the state side of the aisle who denied vengeance was part of their motivation would be lying – but rather to stand up in a court of law and restore some measure of dignity to those who could not rise.
What was done to Viktor Harkov was as brutal a humiliation as Michael had ever seen.
On the desk was a desk phone, an older touch-tone model, a nicotine-stained avocado green popular in the Seventies. From beneath the phone extended a pair of long electrical wires; one snaking across the desk and attached to one of Harkov’s toes. The other wire, ending in an alligator clip, lay along Harkov’s left leg. The alligator clip was scorched black.
But that was not the worst of it. The reason that the desk was covered in dark, drying blood, was that whoever had tortured this old man, whoever had killed this man, had thought the act of murder was not enough.
He had cut off the old man’s hands.
Michael looked up from the mutilated corpse, his eyes roaming the scene, for what? Perhaps some respite from the horror. Perhaps for some justification to why this man had been so destroyed in his place of business. Then it hit h
im. He was looking for something that would tell him to what degree to be worried. For a moment he felt deep shame, realizing he was leaping over the horror of what had happened to Viktor Harkov, and thinking about himself. As he glanced around the room, his gaze landed on Desiree Powell. His heart skipped.
Powell was watching him.
They stood in the outer office. Michael looked at the file cabinet. It was a five-drawer steel model. The bottom drawer was slightly open. A crime scene technician was dusting the file cabinet for prints.
“Is that how they found it?” Michael asked. “With only one drawer open?”
Tommy nodded.
Michael glanced below the desk. There he saw an old Dell tower computer, perhaps a Pentium II model from the Eighties or Nineties. It too was covered in black fingerprint powder. Michael knew they would take the entire computer system back to the lab for more controlled tests – including an examination of the data on the hard drive – but with a vicious murder like this, they did field tests to get prints up and into the system as soon as possible. The old adage about the first forty-eight hours of a homicide investigation being critical was not just an adage, it was true.
Whenever Michael rode to homicide scenes, he always stood on the sidelines, confident and somewhat in awe of the job that the criminalists did. He watched how they addressed the scene, always mindful of every aspect and department of the forensic team – fingerprints, hair and fiber, blood evidence, documents. He had never wanted to jump in and help. Everyone had their job, and in Queens County those people were among the best in the city. But now, watching the glacial pace of the physical investigation, he felt helpless and increasingly hopeless. He wanted to tear through the file cabinets and see which files were missing. He wanted to go through the disks and CDs in Viktor Harkov’s desk and delete any mention of the names Michael and Abby Roman. He wanted to drop a match in the middle of this dusty, ugly office, and destroy the essence of the practice. He wanted to do all these things because, if there was any possibility that his relationship with Viktor Harkov became known, there was a real possibility that Charlotte and Emily could be taken away. And that would be the end of his life.
The Devil_s Garden Page 13