Michael Walters - The Shadow Walker

It was not late, but the streets were largely deserted, except for an occasional passing truck or car-mostly old-fashioned former Soviet or Eastern European models. Nergui pointed to an imposing building on the right. “The British Embassy,” he said.

Drew nodded. “The ambassador wants to see me. I’ve an appointment for tomorrow.”

“For lunch?”

Drew laughed. “I don’t think so. I’m due there at ten. I’m probably not important enough to merit lunch.”

“A pity,” Nergui said, as if he really meant it. “He gives a good lunch.”

Drew was vaguely wondering how often this senior policeman had cause to lunch with the British ambassador when the car pulled to a halt outside the hotel Chinggis Khaan.

Nergui gestured toward the extraordinary towering pink and black glass monolith, set incongruously among the featureless Soviet-style architecture that otherwise dominated much of the city center. “I hope you don’t mind staying here,” he said. “I was unsure whether it was tactful to place you so near the scene of the crime.”

Drew shrugged. “At least I’ll be on hand for the next one,” he said. Even as he spoke, he felt that his words were glib and inappropriate.

But Nergui gazed at him impassively, as if taking his statement seriously. “Let us hope,” he said, “that your help will not be needed.”

At first, the second killing changed little. The circumstances were different, and nobody connected the two deaths. The body was found in the early morning, sprawled in a narrow alley at the rear of the Hotel Bayangol, by a hotel cleaner heading in to work. She had nearly walked past, mistaking the corpse for one of the huddled homeless drunks commonly found sleeping in the meager warmth of the hotel’s rear entrance or scavenging in its kitchen bins. But as she got closer, she realized that the distorted angle of the limbs and the surrounding splashes of blood indicated a fall from a much greater height than street level. Her screams were loud enough to bring out a group of the hotel’s kitchen staff who had been smoking by the rear exit.

By the time Doripalam arrived an hour later, the body had already been removed. One of the local officers was standing within the police cordon, apparently directing activities. Doripalam hoped, without much confidence, that everything had been done by the book. More likely, the priority had just been to clear up the mess.

“What’s the story?” he asked.

The local man shrugged, looking mildly irritated at Doripalam’s arrival. Doripalam was growing accustomed to this. He had once naively assumed that local forces-with their limited resources always stretched to the limit-would welcome the involvement of the Serious Crimes Team. Now he realized that as far as the locals were concerned, his arrival simply heralded more complications and more work.

“Who knows?” the man said. “Suicide, probably, or a drunk trying to close his bedroom window. We’re checking the hotel guest list. Shouldn’t take long.” He turned away, the sense of dismissal almost palpable.

But, by the end of the morning, when the case remained unresolved, the local team had itself been dismissed and Doripalam’s men had taken over. Doripalam established a temporary base in the hotel manager’s office, and sat with Batzorig, one of his junior officers, working through the data that had been collected. They were no closer to identifying the victim or to determining the circumstances of the death. Batzorig, with his usual blend of enthusiasm and rigor, was working painstakingly through his notes. “It looks as if we’ve accounted for all the guests and hotel staff. We thought at first that one of the night porters was missing but he was just sleeping off a hangover.”

Doripalam looked up and raised an eyebrow. “A hangover? Was he on duty?”

“Supposedly. I don’t think our investigation has done his employment prospects a lot of good.”

Doripalam nodded. It was this kind of thing that made his team so unpopular. Solving serious crimes usually meant uncovering a raft of more trivial misdemeanors along the way. “So what do we know, then?”

“Well, we know that the victim didn’t fall through a bedroom window-all the rooms on that side of the hotel were either occupied or locked, and there’s no sign of any disturbance. It looks as if the body must have fallen from the hotel roof.”

“Is the roof accessible?”

“Not easily, but you can get up there through a maintenance area on the top floor. You’d have to know about the access, though-it’s not the sort of thing you’d just stumble across.”

“So this isn’t just some drunk who went up to look at the stars and took one step too many?”

“It doesn’t look like it. And, since he wasn’t staying at the hotel, we don’t know how or when he got in. But security wasn’t particularly tight. They usually lock the doors at midnight, but if he’d come in before that he wouldn’t necessarily have been spotted. We’re checking the security cameras, but I’m not hopeful. We’re still waiting for confirmation of the time of death-it’s not easy to be precise because it was so cold out overnight-but it could have been midnight or even earlier.”

“And nobody saw anything?”

“We’re interviewing all the guests and the staff. But so far nothing.”

“But this still could just be a suicide?” Doripalam was playing devil’s advocate, but everything had to be checked. After all, suicide was not exactly unknown in the city, or indeed anywhere else in the country. Unemployment had been running at forty percent or more in the post-Soviet era. Poverty levels were similar, although less severe in the urban areas. Many people were living at barely more than subsistence levels.

Batzorig shrugged. “Well, yes, it could be. But the puzzle is the anonymity. We’ve got a body dressed in cheap, mass-produced clothing-empty pockets, no documentation, no identifying labels. Why would a suicide bother to clear his pockets? For that matter, why would he bother to break into a hotel to kill himself? I can think of plenty of easier ways to do it. It doesn’t feel right to me.”

Batzorig’s instinct proved correct; the body remained anonymous. The fingerprints matched nothing in the police records. The dental records provided no clues. The victim was confirmed as a male, in his late thirties, medium height, heavily built, and appeared to be a Mongolian national. Beyond that, there was no information. The story was reported in the media, and the police hoped that someone would come forward to identify him, but there was little else they could do.

The postmortem revealed that the victim had died from the massive trauma caused by the impact of hitting the hard concrete. But, although the state of the body prevented a definitive judgment, the victim appeared to have been involved in some sort of violent struggle prior to death, and there were traces of a strong sedative in the victim’s blood. There seemed little doubt that the man had been murdered.

To his surprise, Nergui had found that a copy of the scene of crime report arrived on his desk in the Ministry, this time unrequested. Clearly his authority was now such that his arbitrary demands were immediately interpreted as essential departmental routines. After all these years, he was finally beginning to understand the attractions of power.

Nevertheless, the coincidence of the two unexplained deaths sparked his interest. Murders happened in the city more frequently than most people liked to admit; but this was still a relatively stable society. Most killings were sordid and straightforward-crimes of passion, drunken brawling, domestic violence. Even the unexplained murders could usually be categorized fairly easily. If a small-time local hoodlum was found murdered, it might be difficult to identify the individual perpetrator, but the police would generally have a good idea why the killing had happened and what sorts of people were involved.