The cold room hc-2 Read online

  My first instinct was to charge into Millard’s office, to vent my frustration in an entirely unacceptable manner, say by slapping his face until he started crying. But something in Bobby’s tone, a mocking element he lacked the courage to openly display, brought me back to earth. Bandelone had come through with the Polaroids, snapping the photos before Barsakov’s lawyer arrived. Now it was Clyde Kelly’s turn.

  I set up the photo array in my little cubicle, placing Barsakov’s in the upper right-hand corner, then brought Clyde into the room. He identified Konstantine without hesitation.

  ‘You sure?’ I asked. ‘Take a closer look at the other men.’

  ‘Nope, that’s him. I’d know the squinty-eyed prick anywhere.’

  Five minutes later, after a quick knock, I stepped through Lieutenant Millard’s door to find him in conference with an Assistant District Attorney named Monica Baird. Just a couple of years out of law school, Baird was tall, attractive, and as blond as she was ambitious.

  ‘Spare me the righteous indignation,’ she declared before I could speak, ‘there was nothing to be done.’

  Millard, apparently, felt I was due a fuller explanation. ‘I brought her in,’ he told me, gesturing to Baird, ‘so we’d be ready with the warrants. Then Barsakov’s lawyer showed up.’ He sighed. ‘If Monica hadn’t been here, I would have snuck Barsakov out the back way, shipped him over to the Nine-Four.’

  ‘And faced a lawsuit for false imprisonment,’ Monica quickly added. ‘The charge was bogus from the beginning.’

  I took a breath as I struggled to re-gain control. Monica Baird had no authority to order Millard to do anything. Cops and prosecutors are employed by different agencies of government. Another squad commander would have kicked her (and Barsakov’s attorney) out of the precinct.

  ‘My witness, Clyde Kelly,’ I finally told them, ‘has formally identified Barsakov from a legitimate photo array. That should be enough to get the warrants, right?’ I waited for Baird to nod agreement before continuing. ‘Barsakov is a foreign national and I’m afraid he’ll rabbit. That’s why I’m driving into Greenpoint where I can sit on his residence until the warrants are signed.’

  ‘C’mon, guy,’ Millard said, ‘you don’t wanna break anybody’s door down. Unless you actually see Barsakov, you gotta promise me you’ll stay put.’

  In fact, I didn’t know what I was going to do, only that I was going. But I promised, nonetheless, as Millard promised to arrive with the Crime Scene Unit and enough cops to make a show of force.

  ‘By the way,’ Millard added, ‘we did manage to get Barsakov’s prints, which we’ll run tomorrow morning.’

  For a moment, I thought Millard was going to offer his hand, but he simply thrust it into his pocket. His attitude was definitely sympathetic, though, as was Monica Baird’s when she called out to me as I turned to leave.

  ‘I’ve seen the crime scene photos,’ she declared, ‘and I know how much you want this man. I’ll have the warrants ready within the next three hours. I promise you. And I promise you this, too. Once we take Konstantine Barsakov into custody, he won’t be going anywhere for a very long time.’

  Smiling now, I looked back over my shoulder. ‘That’s assuming, of course, he isn’t already on a plane back to Russia.’

  Domestic Solutions was dark, upstairs and downstairs, when I parked on the far side of Eagle Street. I shut off the Crown Vic, then got out of the car and crossed the sidewalk, to the glass-brick window that concealed Dimitri and Giselle’s homely residence.

  ‘Anybody inside?’ I knocked on the window with the heel of my hand. ‘It’s Detective Corbin. C’mon out.’

  A few minutes later, I watched Dimitri make his way across the vacant lot. He walked up to the fence and gripped the links. ‘Giselle ain’t feelin’ so good,’ he explained.

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’ I registered the dusting of white powder beneath his nostrils, knowing it wasn’t sugar and not giving a damn. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’

  ‘They been takin’ shit outta there all night. Musta made three trips in that van they got.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The skinny bald guy and the woman with the red hair.’

  ‘When did they bring out the last load?’

  ‘A half hour ago.’

  ‘Who was in the van?’

  ‘The skinny dude was drivin’, with the redhead sittin’ up next to him.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘No, the redhead was holdin’ something in her arms. I think it was a kid.’ Dimitri shook the fence, his mouth twisting back and forth, his jaw locked. He was coked out of his mind.

  ‘Is there something else you wanna tell me?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, okay, but it’s just that Giselle can’t be no kinda witness. She’s got, like, serious emotional problems. She can’t put herself in front of a jury. Believe me, detective, she can’t.’

  He stopped at that point, and I began to count, slowly. I got to three before he blurted it out.

  ‘Little while ago, we heard a shot.’

  ‘Ah, and when was that?’

  ‘Maybe ten minutes before the van took off for the last time.’

  Without saying goodbye, I approached the door leading into Domestic Solutions, wrapping my hand in the tail of my shirt before trying the knob. It was open, which came as no great surprise to me. Nor was I surprised, once I got the lights on, to find the computers and filing cabinets gone, or even to discover Konstantine Barsakov in an office chair on the other side of the room.

  Barsakov was dead. In his right temple, he had a small entry wound. Behind his right ear, he had a much larger exit wound. A gun lay on the floor beside his chair, a nine-millimeter Smith amp; Wesson. It lay in a pool of blood generated by the middle finger of Barsakov’s right hand, half of which had been blown away. Undoubtedly when he’d raised it to his temple in self-defense.

  As staged crime scenes go, this one was pretty weak. But that didn’t surprise me, either, given the haste. No, it was the flag that shouldn’t have been there, the green flag of Chechnya, with its lone wolf staring directly into my eyes, positioned directly behind Konstantine Barsakov. Aslan had left it behind to make sure I got the message. As I’d humiliated him, he’d now humiliated me.

  I backed out of the building, closing the door, and walked back to my car. Ignoring Dimitri, who continued to grip the fence, I slid onto the passenger’s side of the front seat, leaned against the headrest and closed my eyes. I’d been running on adrenalin all day, but now my tank was empty. Domestic Solution’s business records were gone, as were all the other victims, the women and the children. I’d moved too fast, committed myself too early, and there was a price to be paid. In the short and the long term.

  I waited in the car until midnight, when the warrants and the Crime Scene Unit finally arrived. Though I was anxious to get going, I gave the CSU sergeant a heads-up on the Jane Doe homicide in the hope that his unit would turn up trace evidence, especially blood. That done, I conducted a long and fruitless search for any mention of the company’s clients or where Aslan had gone, a stray invoice, a business card, an answering machine, a diary, a half-written letter to the home folks. I even went in search of the two bags of garbage I’d seen Barsakov carrying earlier in the day.

  I found evidence of haste everywhere. The closets on the second floor were only half-emptied, as if the best garments had been culled and the rest abandoned, and much of the furniture had been left behind. On the first floor, an oily patch of concrete in a large room outside the office revealed a near-perfect set of tire prints. In the same room, along the back wall, a staircase led to the second floor. The stairs were important because they would have allowed Aslan to evacuate the children without leading them past Konstantine’s body.

  It was all very interesting, but not particularly helpful, until the Crime Scene Unit ripped away the floor tiles in a small bathroom behind the office. There, on the undersides of the tiles and on the floorboards, the techs discov
ered small quantities of a dark substance with the consistency of dry mud. A few minutes later, a sample of that substance was placed in a test tube before a clear chemical, a reagent of some kind, was added. When the reagent turned blue, a CSU sergeant named Palmbach held the tube up for my inspection.

  ‘I’m not callin’ it proof positive,’ he announced, ‘but if this is human blood, which it most likely is, there’s more than enough to run a DNA test.’

  I went from the warehouse over to the precinct where I spent more than two hours, until four-thirty a.m., trying to make up for lost time. There was nothing in the case file about my forays to the outer boroughs, or about Sister Kassia or Father Stan, or even about the ad in Gazeta Warszawa. Without doubt, I’d soon have to account for the chain of events that led me to Domestic Solutions and Konstantine Barsakov. I needed paper to back up whatever story I decided to tell.

  When I was finally satisfied, I packed it in. But I didn’t go straight home. Instead, I drove to the waterfront, to South Fifth Street, parking behind the mound of rubble blocking access to the East River. It was raining, a soft drizzle that reduced the Manhattan skyline to a dim glow on a horizon that might have been a few inches in front of the windshield, or at the outer edge of the universe.

  I had no good reason to make the stop. I just felt that I needed some time before I went home. But time to do exactly what? To think? To examine my conscience? To prepare myself for atonement?

  But I wasn’t ready to go there, apparently, because my attention quickly settled on a pair of photo-hard images. Konstantine Barsakov first, carefully posed before the Chechen flag. Then Aslan with his back to me, singing at the top of his lungs to that same flag.

  I kept these images in front of me as I considered my next move, eventually focusing on the worst-case scenario: Aslan decides to round up the women and carry them off, possibly to another country. How fast could he do it? The women were all at work, five women living in the homes of five employers, each employer wealthy enough to afford a live-in servant. Would these employers simply release their maids if Aslan knocked on their door? More to the point, would Aslan risk it? Or would he wait until Saturday and pick up the unsuspecting girls at the usual time?

  Aslan had taken his files and computers, along with some of the furniture and clothing, from the warehouse on Eagle Street. According to Sister Kassia, debts like the ones that bound the women to Aslan are commonly bought and sold. Well, that’s exactly what I’d do, if I were Aslan. I’d sell them, preferably to an entrepreneur doing business in some far off place. Like, maybe, Cambodia.

  I looked out through the windshield at a gray curtain fragmented by lines of water streaming down the windshield. The rain was picking up, the patter on the Crown Vic’s roof more or less continuous. I flicked on the wipers and the headlights, then put the Crown Vic into reverse before making a broken u-turn. This close to the river, my headlights barely penetrated a fog that hung in folds above the deserted streets. I didn’t pass a single vehicle on Kent Avenue.

  But there was traffic up on the bridge, bakery and newspaper delivery vans and yellow cabs just beginning their twelve-hour shifts. I trailed behind, in the right lane, ignoring the astonishingly bright lights of an eighteen-wheeler that didn’t slow down until it came to within a yard of my rear bumper. I ignored the blast of its air horn, too, and the driver’s upraised finger as he fell back.

  ‘Thick skin,’ I remembered an old partner telling me. ‘That’s how you do it. That’s how you get through the day. Nothing in, nothing out. Keep it from the wife, keep it from the kids.’

  SEVENTEEN

  I got out of bed at ten o’clock, after five hours’ sleep, and set a pot of coffee to brewing. Then I quickly showered and shaved. Though I couldn’t be sure that Aslan was contemplating a move — or that he wasn’t already in the wind — the need for haste was obvious enough.

  At ten thirty, I dialed the number of INS Agent Dominick Capra. He picked up on the third ring.

  ‘Dominick, it’s Harry Corbin. You remember, we had lunch at Pete’s Tavern.’

  ‘Hey, Harry,’ Capra said, ‘how’s it goin’?’

  ‘Can’t whine. How about yourself? You put away any foreign gangsters this week?’

  ‘We don’t put ’em away, Harry. We just send them back where they came from. So, what’s up?’

  ‘Chechens, Dominick. Chechens are up. Or one particular Chechen, named Aslan Khalid, who used to have a Russian business partner named Konstantine Barsakov.’

  ‘Used to?’

  ‘Barsakov’s dead, but that’s not what I’m calling about. I always thought that Chechens and Russians hated each other.’

  Capra took a minute to consider the statement. I could almost hear the little wheels turning.

  ‘First thing,’ he finally said, his good-old-boy tone conspicuously absent, ‘Khalid is not a Chechen family name. Chechen family names sound like Russian names. Second thing, there’s no Chechen immigration quota. Chechnya is a province of Russia. If your man’s here legally, he came in under the Russian quota. Third, Chechnya has been penetrated by jihadists from everywhere in the Middle East, so the only way a Chechen could enter the United States under the Russian quota is if the Russian government intervened to get his application approved.’

  ‘I saw Khalid’s green card, Dominick. It seemed legit to me.’

  ‘What was his country of origin?’

  ‘Russia.’

  ‘Well?’

  I gave it a couple of seconds, than got to the point. ‘Aslan’s vanished and I need to find him,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you’d run his name through your database. If he’s here legally, he has to have a sponsor. I’d like to know that sponsor’s name.’

  This time Capra took so long to respond that I thought we were disconnected.

  ‘Dominick?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Harry, listen close to what I’m sayin’. I feel the dead hand of higher-ups in this business. You’ve grabbed a buzzsaw, but gettin’ cut is not on my list of priorities. Not only will I not do this little favor for you, I don’t want you to call me again. Comprende?’

  Chastened, I refilled my coffee mug before making a series of phone calls, to the Department of Finance, The Motor Vehicle Bureau, and the Department of Consumer Affairs. My hope was to connect Aslan to Domestic Solutions, but the calls were unproductive. Finance told me that Domestic Solutions was not incorporated and had never paid taxes of any kind. Motor Vehicles told me that the Econoline’s registration had been signed by Konstantine Barsakov. Consumer Affairs told me that Domestic Solution was unlicensed.

  I’m not terribly superstitious, but I’d had enough of the telephone by then. I walked to the living-room window and stood for a moment, looking out on a playground overrun with screaming children. For the past week, the playground had been deserted because of the heat, so whatever the kids had been doing, they’d been doing it indoors. Now all that pent-up energy was pouring out.

  The children were in constant motion, running from one apparatus to another, barely pausing to interact.

  A few minutes later, I fired up the computer in my office and went back to work. Aslan Khalid had issued a personal challenge to me when he posed Barsakov in front of the Chechen flag. This was a display of ego I could certainly use against him. As for the challenge itself, the case became personal for me when I rolled Jane Doe over and saw what was done to her. I didn’t need additional motivation.

  I jumped from my server to Google, typed in Chechnya, got 892,000 hits. For the next hour, I bounced from website to website, covering no more than twenty. At one, I discovered a version of Aslan’s flag. At another, a history of rebellion that stretched back to 1785 when a Russian army swept south to engulf Chechnya, at the time a virtually autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. In 1944, a fed up Josef Stalin deported the entire population to the gulags in Kazakhstan. In 1959, a conciliatory Nikita Khrushchev allowed their return. The strug
gle for independence continued throughout. Not even the 1994 assault on the capitol of Grozny, an attack which left the city looking much like Berlin at the end of World War Two, was sufficient to stop it.

  It was all very noble and I found myself in sympathy with the Chechen people. Still, the past ten years had seen a pair of troubling developments. After the rebels were driven out of the capitol and into the hills, Chechnya had been penetrated by Arab jihadists offering money, arms, and a concept of struggle that led to the mass slaughter of Russian school children. At the same time, in the absence of any rule of law, a criminal class had emerged. According to an article in Le Monde, Chechnya had become a trans-shipment point for everything from Afghani morphine headed for Europe to stolen BMWs headed for Thailand. Kidnappings for ransom were an everyday occurrence, even now that the Russians had consolidated what passed for a victory by installing a sadistic butcher named Ramzan Khadyrov as president.

  I took a break at noon to stand beside the kitchen window while I ate a slightly overripe nectarine and collected my thoughts. According to Dominick Capra, Aslan couldn’t be in the country legally unless somebody in the Russian government requested a favor of somebody in the United States government. If so, it must have been a very big favor. Aslan’s description of the Russian assault on Grozny was too graphic to be entirely rehearsed. Almost certainly, he’d been there, in his mid-twenties, involved in the fighting. Was he already working for the Russians? Or was he originally a freedom fighter?

  That was as far as I got before the phone began to ring. I knew it was from Adele before I picked it up. Adele was the only one who called these days.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘how’d it go?’

  I spelled it out for her, summarizing the facts, my tone neutral. On the prior night, just before I fell asleep, I’d come to a conclusion: I could not have reasonably anticipated the events leading to Barsakov’s release. Neither the presence of Monica Baird, nor the arrival of Barsakov’s lawyer, nor Drew Millard’s chickenshit decision. Any one, or even two, of these elements would not have been enough to spring Konstantine. It took all three.