Daria Desombre: The Sin Collector

“Do you happen to have the coroner’s report from yesterday’s death on the riverbank?”

Yakovlev lifted his eyebrows, obviously annoyed at Intern Karavay meddling in his case.

“I mean,” Masha hurried to add, blushing, “was there anything strange about it?”

Now his eyebrows reached a nearly unnatural height. “What do you mean by strange ?” he asked coldly.

Masha shrugged her shoulders, feeling helpless, and tried to think. Yakovlev took the opportunity to turn back to the papers he was studying.

What a jerk. Masha was furious. Fine, she told herself, arranging her own eyebrows in a way that would make her mother say she scowled just like her father. Fine. Screw him, and the numbers, too. Let’s try a different angle. There was the weird way the tongues were cut. And there was that other case, a bizarre one, with the drunk who had come to Kutafya to die with his throat all swollen. There was the severed arm and hand with the Chagall painting. What else? Masha went on reading old files, finding more and more strange things. How could she have forgotten? There was the terrible case all the papers had covered, not long after the severed arm, about the wife of the governor from Tyumen Province. She was one of the ten richest women on the planet, wealthier than the Italian boss of the Benetton Group and J. K. Rowling. They found her body, hacked into four pieces then neatly wrapped in old newspapers, at a gift shop at the Kolomenskoye estate.

Masha felt sick. The governor’s wife had not been well liked—too many people depended on her business dealings. Everyone had to bribe her, grovel at her feet, and do their best to cater to the whims of this all-powerful woman. And Liudmila Turina had ruled with an iron fist. Her businesses grew, and money flowed into her Swiss bank accounts. The papers loved to describe her mansion outside London, wondering when she’d show some shame. But she never did, and anyone who dared to scold her for it was punished. Liudmila squeezed them dry.

Who could have done such a thing to a governor’s wife, someone who was always surrounded by bodyguards? And who could have done it and not gotten caught? That’s the real question, Masha thought. Would they let her take a look at the full case file, or at least the initial evidence they had collected? There had been a time when Petrovka’s best resources had been directed at solving that murder, but Turina’s widower had fled, one fine day, to the foggy shores of England, and after that, things had quieted down.

Masha sketched out a table (every line perfectly straight, though she hadn’t used a ruler). In it, she wrote, Liudmila Turina . She entered the date of death, and the place: Kolomenskoye.

Then she dove back into her files. Yesterday she had spotted something else strange, but let it go, because she hadn’t known yet what she was looking for. Half an hour later Masha stopped cold. There it was! Architect and builder Bagrat Gebelai had died in an exquisite apartment on Lenivka Street from severe enervation and physical exhaustion. The contrast between the words exquisite and enervation jumped out at her. And Masha thought she’d heard the name Gebelai in the news, too. Masha filled in the next line in her table: Bagrat Gebelai, eight months ago, Lenivka . She leaned back in her chair. Most of the strange cases were connected by one thing: the places where the bodies were found. Aside from Liudmila Turina at Kolomenskoye, on the outskirts of Moscow, all the rest had shown up right in the city center.

The detective sitting next to her announced that it was time for a smoke break, and Masha asked if she could use his computer. He told her to go ahead, then walked out, the rest of the office trailing after him.

First Masha pulled up a detailed map of Moscow. She fed some A3 paper into the printer in the hallway and printed out a full-color map of downtown. Down the hall she caught a glimpse of Captain Yakovlev, cigarette in hand, listening with an ironic gleam in his eye to the detective whose computer she was borrowing.

She went back to the computer and risked searching for a few numbers and the word numerology . Google didn’t let her down. The number one, Masha read, was a symbol of glory and power, action and ambition. Someone born on the first day of the month was supposed to pursue those things, never wavering from his course, but never trying to make a big jump too early, either. Then there was two, which symbolized balance in a person’s mood and actions, a personality that was gentle and tactful. Four meant an even-natured, hardworking disposition. Six predicted success in business, as long as the person could win the trust of those around him, attracting not just customers, but followers.

Masha closed the browser window and sat down again in her own seat, irritated. So the man who had the tip of his tongue cut off was ambitious, and the woman labeled 2 was supposed to maintain balance, despite the blood rushing from her mouth. Not to mention the alcoholic whose number indicated his hardworking personality. She had no idea how numbers had predicted destiny for the owner of the arm found on Red Square; nevertheless, Masha was sure the numerology idea was too simplistic to be useful. She didn’t even know whether the numbers meant something, or if it was only her imagination.

“Captain Yakovlev!” Masha stood up and set a sheet of paper down before her supervisor, who’d just returned.

He gave a start at being addressed so directly, but his face stayed impassive as he picked up the paper.

“What’s this?”

“These are deaths I picked out that seemed strange to me.”

“Strange again?”

“Yes. Again.”

“You know, I asked you to look at murders passed off as accidents.”

Masha said nothing.

Andrey sighed. “I’m listening, Intern Karavay.”

“You don’t actually care what I work on,” Masha said quietly. “Right? But without anything to work on, I’m still going to be here. You can’t get rid of me.”

“That sure seems to be the case.” He smirked. “Fine. Go ahead and investigate your strange things.”

Masha nodded quickly and almost ran out of the room.

“Why are you so pissy with her?” she heard someone ask as the door closed behind her.

Masha didn’t wait around to hear the answer.

When Pasha finally called, Andrey raced off to the morgue. Something was needling at him. He knew his intern didn’t deserve this treatment. She had been working hard all day. A couple of times Andrey had noticed the intense focus on that odd, striking face of hers. An honor student! He had to admit she knew something about navigating case files. He wasn’t sure what sort of strange stuff she had dug up, but if it helped her with her thesis, then fine, why not? Why shouldn’t she run around asking questions? Some people would tell her to fuck off, but some might tell her what she needed to know. It wouldn’t hurt her to learn a little about working with people, too, instead of just paper.

In this pedagogical mood, Andrey walked into Pasha’s office and shook his enormous hand, before accepting the latex gloves his friend held out for him.

“Crazy stuff,” Pasha began, pointing to the dead man’s open stomach.

Andrey winced and looked inside. A big, empty cavity.

“All his internal organs had been removed,” Pasha said, nodding. “Somebody gutted the guy like a big fat chicken. All I found inside him was this.” Pasha handed Andrey a plastic bag.

“Money?” he asked.

“Right. Soviet kopecks, to be precise. Pennies.”

“How many?”

“Fourteen.”

“Huh.” Bewildered, Andrey sat down.