Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

He waited, listening at the apartment door. No sound came from inside. Just to be sure, he listened at the doors of the apartments on either side. In one of them he could hear a television and smelled borscht cooking. He would have to be quiet. He studied the lock for a second, then took out the Glock and the Peterson key. He unlocked the door and opened it, snapping into the apartment in shooting position.

The studio apartment was empty. Whoever had left was in a hurry. There were drawers open and clothes on the floor. He searched the lone closet. If there had been any luggage, it was gone. The bed hadn’t been made. Scorpion examined the bed, the frayed sheet and blanket, and under the thin mattress. There were rust-colored stains on the sheet and mattress. It looked like dried blood, not very long ago. The hairs stood up at the back of his neck.

The girl was doomed and she knew it, he thought. But it didn’t fit. If Pyatov had done something to Alyona, there were two problems. The walls were thin. He could hear the television from the next apartment. How come no one heard anything? And if Pyatov had killed her, how could he have disposed of the body in broad daylight?

Scorpion got his answer to the second question in the bathroom. The tiny curtainless shower stall had dark stains around the drain. He studied them, ran the water and using a folded piece of rough toilet paper rubbed at one of the stains. It ran red on the paper and down the drain. At the moment, he would have given a lot for access to a police lab, but he had no lab and not a lot of time either. Assumption: Pyatov killed the girl silently, perhaps by cutting her throat in the bed, then cut her up in the shower and carried the pieces out in a suitcase. Tough but possible. The alternative was that she wasn’t dead. But if not, where was she and why the bloodstains in the shower?

What would he have used to cut her up? he wondered, looking in the small cupboard over the kitchen sink. In the counter under the sink he found a stained butcher knife and a rusted hacksaw frame minus the blade. It also had traces of blood. A torn sticker on the frame indicated it belonged to Filostro Elektrychni, Ltd. on Dymytrova Street. After taking one last look around and making sure to wipe off anything he might’ve touched, he left the apartment, locking the door behind him with the Peterson key.

He knocked on the door of the apartment next door; the one with the television on. A jowly middle-aged woman in a housedress opened the door.

“ Dobry dyen. I am friend of Pani Kushnir,” Scorpion said in his best Russian.

“Shcho vy khochete?” What do you want? she said in Ukrainian, peering nearsightedly at him.

“ Pazhalusta, your neighbor, Pani Kushnir, is missing,” indicating next door, “Vy videli yee?” he asked in Russian. Have you seen her?

“Kto vy?” Who are you? she answered in Russian, her face hardening. “You’re a foreigner.”

“Ya zhurnalist,” I’m a journalist, “iz Kanady,” from Canada. “It is very important.”

“ Slushaite, you make them stop making so much noise with the television next door. Around noon there is shouting and screams and suddenly the televidenie is so loud I cannot hear my own,” she said, shaking her finger in Scorpion’s face.

“Have you seen her today?” he asked.

The woman shook her head.

“What about her drooh?” Her boyfriend.

“That batjar,” she said, her eyes hardening. “A few weeks ago I thought he was going to hit me! I knocked on the door. It sounded like he was going to kill her in there.”

“What about today?”

“I heard him leave a couple of hours ago, the pig,” her mouth wrinkling like she wanted to spit. “They finally turned the televidenie off. You find her, you tell her I am calling the pomishchyk. ” The landlord. “All this business-and now you, a foreigner! Plah! Where does it end?”

“Was she with him?” Scorpion asked.

“Ni.” She shook her head. “He was leaving. For good I hope.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw through the peephole.”

At first Scorpion didn’t understand. He shrugged, holding his hands up. She pointed at the door peephole. “Glazok,” she said, repeating the word, annoyed. “He had a big suitcase on wheels. It looked heavy.”

Jesus, Scorpion thought. Just like that. “And you haven’t seen her?”

“ Ni- I don’t want to be involved and I don’t talk to foreigners,” she said, closing the door firmly in Scorpion’s face.

That left him on the Metro to Respublikansky, the station near the football stadium. According to the Kyiv map, it was the closest station to Dymytrova Street, the address on the hacksaw frame where Pyatov, an electrician, presumably worked. He had thought of calling, then decided it was best if he just showed up in case Pyatov was there.

The subway car was crowded with people. It had that Eastern European winter smell of sour bodies, wet wool, and cigarettes. A train headed in the opposite direction passed theirs with a roar, lighted windows speeding by. One of the passengers in the other train, a shaved-headed type in a cheap leather jacket who had blatnoi thug written all over him, happened to look up at Scorpion. He was gone in an instant, but it hit Scorpion like an electric shock. It was a reminder. Mogilenko undoubtedly had informants scouring the city looking for him.

He also realized he’d been avoiding thinking about Alyona, the pouty blonde, so young and wannabe sexy in the photo and yet who already knew she was doomed. He hadn’t wanted to think about it, but after being in the apartment and hearing what the neighbor woman had said, there was no escaping it.

The probability was that his visit to Gabrilov had triggered her death.

He was getting in very deep, very fast, feeling the drag as the train slowed, pulling into the Metro station, all modern lighting and arched white ceilings.

He came up the long escalator to street level. The Kyiv Metro was one of the deepest subways in the world. The sky outside had turned dark and threatening. Billboards and shop windows were already lit and power lines over the street swayed in the wind. Scorpion walked on a sidewalk trail in the snow, his collar pulled up against the wind. He spelled out the Cyrillic letters of FILOSTRO ELEKTRYCHNI, LTD. in the electric sign on top of a long brick building and went inside.

A young blond woman in a thick sweater looked up from behind a glass window.

“Dobry den,” she said, opening a small window in the glass.

“ Zdrastvuitye. I’m looking for the shef,” he said in Russian. The manager.

She picked up the phone, and a few minutes a paunchy balding man in a sagging shirt and tie came to the front and said something in Ukrainian that Scorpion didn’t understand.

“Ya ishchu kogo-to,” Scorpion said in Russian. I’m looking for someone. “An employee. Sirhiy Pyatov.”

“What you want with Pyatov?” the manager said in a broken English Scorpion was becoming accustomed to.

“He works here?”

“Not no more. I fire three weeks ago. I not see him in month, the sooka suna. You friend of him?”

Scorpion shook his head.

“ Kharasho. Otherwise get out or I call militsiyu police,” the manager said.

“Do you have an address for him?”

“What? He owe you money? Na vse dobre! ” Good luck. The manager smirked.

“Can I get his address?”

The manager said something to the girl. She looked it up on her computer, scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Scorpion.

“ Spasiba,” Scorpion said. Thanks.

“You see Pyatov, you tell him no come back. He don’t work here no more,” the manager said.

No, Scorpion thought. When I see him, I’ll kill him.

His latest prepaid cell phone vibrated in his pocket. It was a text from Iryna. Urgent we meet. Hurry! she wrote, and specified an address in the Podil district.