Daria Desombre: The Sin Collector

That moment, the telephone rang. It was urgent. The police had found a body downtown. Fished it out of the Moskva River, pretty much directly in front of the Kremlin walls.

“On my way!” Andrey pushed his chair back noisily and grabbed his denim jacket.

The girl looked at him, eyes shining with hope. Obviously, she was already imagining how she might get out of her assignment. Moscow State honor student, my ass. Andrey smirked and pretended not to notice.

He had to park some distance away from the cordoned-off scene and push through the crowd of gawkers. An ambulance was already there to cart away the corpse. They were just waiting for him. Andrey took a look at the body and immediately noted that the victim, a middle-aged man, must have worked out a lot. A prison tattoo on one muscular arm caught his eye: a ring with a snake design.

“He did time,” a young forensic expert confirmed.

Andrey took a couple of pictures on his phone, for his own use, of the man’s arms and the frozen grimace on his face. Then he gave a nod to the men standing off to one side, smoking. While the corpse was being loaded into the vehicle, the man’s head suddenly lolled over, and Andrey caught sight of a number shaved into the hair at the back of his neck: 14 .

“Wait!” Andrey hurried over and took another picture. That’s when he noticed two kids, maybe fourteen years old; the girl nestled her face into the boy’s shoulder, and the boy stood there uneasily, his own face white as a sheet.

Witnesses. Unlucky bastards. Andrey sighed. Here they were in the blush of first love, a romantic rendezvous, and out of nowhere, a dead man in the water. What sweet memories they would have.

Then he remembered his own first love and frowned. He would have preferred a dead guy. Andrey walked up to the young couple.

“You found him?”

The boy nodded.

“See anything?”

“No.”

Which was to be expected. Andrey gave him what he hoped was an encouraging smile, like some sort of young Commissaire Maigret; took down their phone numbers; and sent them on their way. He watched the boy wrap his arm very sweetly around the girl’s waist. Andrey snorted and walked back to the forensic experts.

“So, find anything?” he asked, even though his gut was already telling him there was nothing there to be found. If the murderer had left any trace, the Moskva River would have washed it away.

That body had been polished smooth as a pebble in the sea.

It didn’t take Masha too long to pull all the archived files for the last two years of murder cases. Nobody in the office paid any attention, but they weren’t overtly hostile, either, like that detective in denim. What had she done to make him hate her so much? Good thing she’d been quick-witted enough not to ask him to take her along to the crime scene. He had made it perfectly clear: no field trips for her, just some statistical report nobody cared about.

How had she ever imagined she’d be in the thick of things? Maybe not chasing down a suspect, pistol in hand, but at least standing among the famous Petrovka detectives and their perfectly trained German shepherds, making brilliant deductions. They would exchange awed glances. How young she is, they’d say, and yet soooo smart! Masha understood, of course, that all her knowledge was just theoretical, but didn’t they want to make use of Maria Karavay, valedictorian? Masha sighed, not realizing how much she looked like her father as she jutted her chin out proudly. To hell with him! Twice as stormily stubborn as before, she dove into the coroners’ reports and crime-scene photos.

Until she suddenly ran up against something very strange. Here was a report on a murder along the Bersenevskaya waterfront. The file said three people had been killed in the basement of an old electric station, now a tram depot. Two men, one woman. Masha peered closely at the photographs, and after a stealthy look around—naturally, everyone was still ignoring her—she pulled a magnifying glass out of the cup on Andrey’s desk. Yes, just as she’d thought. There were numbers on the victims’ T-shirts. Damn these black-and-white photos. What were they written with, blood? The shirts were all covered with it, and blood was pouring out of the victims’ mouths. Masha averted her gaze for a second. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing the pictures weren’t in color. She moved on to the interrogation reports. The chief witness, the man who found the bodies, was a security guard, an I. N. Ignatiyev.

Masha jotted down the name in her notebook and turned back to the pictures, magnifying more details, one after the other: the tied-up legs, the big, loud earrings on the woman, the chairs arranged in a semicircle, and those T-shirts… they were enormous, unsightly, one size fits all. They obviously did not come from the victims’ own closets. No. The murderer must have brought them—the big white shirts were the perfect canvas for those Arabic numerals, written in blood: 1, 2, 3 .

Everyone should have a friend who examines corpses. Andrey chuckled to himself. Probably some people would disagree.

People on this particular career path fell into one of two categories. The first type were the mimics. Somebody who hung out with dead bodies all day could start to resemble their clients. Pale and gloomy, basically. The second type just got more hearty and healthy, optimists with a very specific sense of humor. The only thing they all had in common was a propensity for strong drink—and in this, Andrey could deftly provide company to either type. Business dictated that they could often be found together: Andrey; the coroner; and corpses, corpses and more corpses.

Pasha belonged to the second category. He had three kids and a very practical wife with her own travel business. She covertly supported the family and openly adored her husband, a guy who cheerfully spent his time digging around in dead people’s guts.

Andrey had stopped by the morgue to pick Pasha’s brain, but the coroner was on his way out; his middle kid had a middle school concert, and these horrific amateur performances—“You’ll understand when you have kids, man”—could not be missed.

Before leaving, though, Pasha did tell him that the cause of death was asphyxiation under water. That was the first thing. Also, the corpse had been frozen. It could be that the guy had not in fact died just a few days ago, as the condition of the soft tissues might indicate. That was the second thing.

“Wait!” Andrey grabbed Pasha by his sleeve. “What do you mean, frozen? It’s summer!”

“Let go!” Pasha twisted out of Andrey’s grip. Running out the door, he answered in a sing-song falsetto. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and not today, as all the lazy men say!”

And he left Andrey alone in the morgue, rubbing with annoyance at the bridge of his nose.

Masha perused files until eleven o’clock that night, until it was completely dark outside and the office was empty. She was tired. Tired of the reports, tired of all the terrible photographs, and tired of this undefinable sense of awkwardness, or confusion, or whatever it was. She had the impression there was something else in the files having to do with numbers. But what? It felt as if there were a shadow lurking behind her back. If she just looked behind her, she’d see something, understand it. Something very important. But the shadow kept slipping away, her eyes were exhausted, and the impression was fading. It didn’t make any sense to keep sitting there.