Daria Desombre - The Sin Collector

Masha was offended, which he certainly understood, but Andrey just couldn’t take her with him. Fomin, who had been first on the scene, had said it was fucking horrible and he had never seen anything like it, so that was one good reason. The other was some funny feeling, deep in his gut, which had given up whispering and was now shouting in his ear: Do not let Masha anywhere near this one!

They reached her building, Masha already opening the door so she could leap out without a word, but he pulled her inside and kissed her, even though she resisted like a proud little bird. Andrey hoped the kiss would sustain him through a day that was sure to be long and terrible. Poor girl, he thought as he watched her walk away. Nice boyfriend you found. No candles, no coffee in bed, not even tea on the veranda. He loved you and left you—for an unidentified corpse.

The crime scene was a rented apartment inside the boundaries of the old Bely Gorod walls, a line on the map Andrey thought of, these days, as a barrier of blood and flame. By the time he arrived, it was difficult to push his way up the crowded stairs. Even though it wasn’t a work day, every member of the investigative team had shown up, and they were standing around smoking and talking quietly, waiting for the forensics experts to wrap things up. Andrey bummed a cigarette off Fomin while the detective piled information on him in an excited whisper. The body had been found in some kind of coffin thing shaped like an enormous doll, with sharp nails poking into the hollow inner chamber. The murderer had closed the victim inside, so the nails pierced his arms, legs, stomach, eyes…

“You can’t even get a good look at him!” Fomin told Andrey, his eyes wide and serious. “Blood everywhere! Poor bastard tried to wriggle out of the way, and the fucking nails only dug deeper.” Fomin took a deep breath. He apparently did not relish the memory.

“Who called the police?” Andrey asked.

“Only about three different neighbors, all on their own. Apparently, the killer hit him over the head to knock him out, then stuffed him into that doll-thing. But the guy woke up and started yelling.” Fomin went pale again, imagining the screams.

Andrey told him and Gerasimov to go interview the neighbors, and he headed up to visit the apartment in question. He stood next to the forensic examiner and leaned over the body. It really was hard to look at it, smeared all over with blood, and the face… Looking for long at that face, frozen and distorted in a spasm of terror, was completely out of the question.

“Anything in his pockets?” Andrey asked hoarsely, tearing his eyes away from the dead man’s hideous, white-toothed grin.

“Here.”

Someone handed him a transparent plastic sleeve holding a photograph of a man smiling happily, holding a woman close to him. The man was obviously the same one lying before them now, being covered modestly with a sheet. Andrey gestured that they could take the body away. But the woman—the woman in the picture looked strangely familiar. When it occurred to Andrey that her lips were just like Masha’s, his stomach turned. How fucking lovestruck must he be, to see her face everywhere he looked? Then he remembered the face at the door to Masha’s place. Masha’s not home. Her books are gone, so she’s probably at the library. That was Masha’s mom in the picture, and the guy had to be her missing stepfather. Which meant he must be the poor soul who’d spent the night in the iron maiden. Masha! Andrey’s legs went out from under him, and he sat down hard on a chair. It was all leading back to her again. Could it possibly be a coincidence? Even the question seemed ridiculous. The Sin Collector had chosen this victim purely because he was close to Masha. And, of course, because Masha’s stepfather somehow fit into that fucking table that Masha herself had copied out for the team.

Andrey pulled the sheet of paper out of the back pocket of his jeans. Her stepfather hadn’t been missing for long, so assuming the killer was working in order, his sin must be even worse than that pedophile Minayev’s. There were only two tollhouses on the list after the one for sodomy: nineteen and twenty, heresy and cruelheartedness. Masha’s stepfather, as far as Andrey could guess from Masha’s conversation with her mother that morning, was a doctor. Maybe he had been too stern with one of his patients? Or, cruelheartedly, hadn’t realized how sick one actually was? A mental patient would be easier to finger for the crime than an Old Believer. Not a bad theory, but it would need work. Masha’s stepdad could just as easily have been, say, a Baptist, which was definitely heresy to the Orthodox faithful. Then he’d fit the bill for the second-to-last tollhouse.

He would have to tell Masha. He would have to call her, and interrupt the painful and humiliating routine she and her mother must be going through right now, calling around to all the hospitals asking if he had been admitted, calling all their friends and relatives to see if he had spent the night. What was that humiliation, though, compared to the truth: that he was a cold dead body, poked full of holes, with a picture of Masha’s mother in his pocket? No. Andrey wanted to give himself just a few more minutes before he dialed the number he already knew by heart. A few more minutes to think.

He read the table again, frowning. It seemed like the suspect had been making mistakes in his order, jumping around. It was as if, once he realized the police were onto him, he stopped taking the trouble. The pattern skipped forward and backward like kids playing a game. And another thing: Why had the killer put a family photograph in his victim’s pocket? Was it because Masha’s mother was somehow tied up in his plot? Andrey sighed out loud, and with a heavy heart, he took out his phone. He needed Masha’s help. Awful as it was, she wasn’t just a detective in this case anymore. She was a witness, too. It was as if the killer wanted to involve her in every part of the process, from theory to practice, from investigation to evidence, from evidence—Andrey couldn’t help but finish the thought—to complicity.

Fomin was sitting across from the downstairs neighbor, a middle-aged woman with an unhealthy pallor. The color of her skin was explained by the stale odor of cigarette smoke, which permeated the miserly little apartment, and by the woman’s profession. She was a technical translator. In her kitchen, which also served as her office, there was an old laptop and a stack of instruction manuals for all sorts of high-tech kitchen gadgets: microwaves and pressure cookers, bread makers, blenders, and deep fryers. The only machine that graced her own tiny kitchen was an ancient refrigerator trembling in a senile state of exaltation. Wrapped up as she was in the written word, the woman had little opportunity to speak with live human beings, so she was eager for a nice talk, even if it had to be with a police officer.

Fomin had already given up asking questions. Why bother if the woman was going to tell him everything with no prodding? She was doing a good job, too, speaking precisely without getting distracted by the details. This might be a lucky day for the redhead. Fomin classified every circumstance in his life one of two ways: either the redhead was lucky, or he was not. Conveniently enough, those two categories had been all he needed for the past twenty-six years. New girlfriend? The redhead was lucky. No place to start a family? Unlucky. The girl leaves him for some other guy? Probably the redhead was lucky, because what was he going to do with her with no place to live? And so on and so forth.