Richard Montanari - The Devil_s Garden

“Of course.” She made another note, took a few moments, then glanced at James. “May I ask where you were when this happened, sir?”

James cleared his throat. It sounded like a stall. Powell knew all the delay tactics – clearing the throat, scratching the lower leg, asking for a simple question to be repeated.

“I was at the school where I teach. Franklin Middle school on Sussex Avenue.”

Powell flipped a few pages back. “You were there at nine o’clock at night?”

“We had a parent-teacher meeting that night. I was helping clean up.”

Powell wrote this down. She would contact the school to see if James was telling the truth, as well as plug this information into the timeline surrounding the murder of Viktor Harkov.

“And what time did you get home?”

“I think it was just before ten.”

“The school is an hour away?”

“No,” James said. “We stopped for coffee.”

“We?”

James gave Powell the names of two of his colleagues.

“And your wife said nothing about this incident when you got home?”

“No.”

“Does this person she described sound familiar to you?”

“No.”

Powell turned back to Sondra. “Have you cleaned the bedroom since the incident, Mrs Arsenault?”

“No,” Sondra said. She looked slightly embarrassed by this, as if by implication it made her a bad housekeeper.

“I have a forensic team standing by,” Powell said. “Would it be okay if they processed the room for DNA and fingerprints?”

“Yes,” Sondra said.

Powell took out her cellphone, dialed the weather, listened. She would not be able to get her own CSU team out here for at least two hours, but the Arsenaults did not need to know that. When she got the forecast, she said a few perfunctory, official sounding phrases. She clicked off, took a sip of her coffee, which had grown cold. She leaned forward in her chair, a sure sign of intimate friendship, and continued.

“You both strike me as decent, intelligent people, so I think you know what I have to ask you next.”

Here it comes, Sondra’s face said.

“A man breaks into your house,” Powell continued. “It appears he does not steal anything, or harm anyone. It appears he thought your daughters were little girls named Anna and Marya. Have I gotten this right so far?”

Sondra nodded.

“So why do you think this has anything to do with the murder of a lawyer in Queens?”

Sondra took her time answering. “The newspaper account said that the lawyer handled foreign adoptions.”

“Yes,” Powell said. “He did.”

“And when the man – this intruder – spoke, he had an accent. Eastern European, Russian, perhaps Baltic.”

Powell pretended to consider this for a moment. “Mrs Arsenault, with all due respect, there are a lot of Russian people in New York. A lot of people from Romania, Poland, Lithuania. You’ll forgive me if I don’t see the immediate connection.”

Sondra tried to hold Powell’s gaze. She withered. “We… we knew Mr Harkov.”

Powell felt her pulse kick up a notch. “You mean professionally?”

“Yes.”

“He did some legal work for you and your husband?”

Sondra took James’s hand in hers. “You could say that.”

“What would you say, Mrs Arsenault?”

Tears began to gather in Sondra’s eyes. “Yes. He did some work for us.”

“I have to tell you that when we got the call from your local police department, we looked through Mr Harkov’s files, going back twelve years. We didn’t see your name.”

Powell did not wait for her to respond.

“Tell me how you came to meet Mr Harkov.”

Sondra told him about the process. How they had tried to adopt, three different times, and been rejected. How Sondra had heard about Harkov from a woman she had befriended at a medical conference in Manhattan. She recalled how Harkov said that he could get around certain things, that being their ages, and how they wanted a baby, not a child of five years. For a fee.

“Are you saying that Mr Harkov may have done something off the books? Something illegal regarding the adoption of Lisa and Katherine?”

It appeared that Sondra Arsenault might have had a million words to say, but in the end only three words found her lips.

“Yes,” she said. “He did.”

Powell looked at the woman. It was the break she had been waiting for. She glanced at Fontova, who had been sitting quietly on a rather severe-looking Danish modern dining-room chair. He moved his head an inch to one side, then back. No questions.

Powell stood, walked to the front window. A had just led to B. It was on. She had never gotten past C in her career, had never needed to. When she got to C she had her killer.

There was a good chance that the man who had destroyed Viktor Harkov had broken into this house. Maybe he had left a fingerprint. Maybe an eyelash or a drop of saliva. Maybe he had been seen by one of the neighbors. They would begin a canvass.

But who were Anna and Marya? Was there another couple out there in jeopardy?

And if so, why? Why was a killer looking for two little girls?

Powell had one more question for the moment.

“Mrs Arsenault, this woman, the one you met at the medical conference, what was her name?”

Sondra Arsenault looked at her hands. “I never got her last name, but I remember she was a nurse,” she said. “An ER nurse. Her name was Abby.”

Michael put his ear to the motel wall, listened. He could hear a muffled voice coming from the room next door.

He picked up the remote, turned on the television, all the while holding the volume down button. In seconds the picture came on. Ear still tight to the wall, Michael flipped through the channels. The service was basic cable, and soon he returned to the channel where he began. The sound from the other room did not sync with any of the TV channels. The sound was either a radio talk show or another motel patron talking on the phone.

He turned off the TV, cupped his ear to the wall once more, concentrated. The rhythm sounded like a man having a telephone conversation, like the man was agreeing with someone. A yes-man talking to his boss. Or his wife.

After five minutes or so, there was silence. Michael heard the water flowing through the pipe, but he could not be sure it was coming from the next room. He then heard the television click on, a few ads, then the unmistakable rhythms of a game show. After another five minutes the television was turned off.

Michael heard a door open then close. He stepped quickly to the window, inched over the vertical blind. He saw a middle-aged man in a wrinkled gray suit exit the room next to his, walk over to a red Saturn. He fumbled with keys for a moment, then opened the car door, slipped inside. Michael saw the man unfold a map, study it for a full minute. Soon the car backed up, drove out of the parking lot, pulled onto the marginal road, and head toward the avenue.

Michael glanced over at the motel sign. The blue Ford with the tinted windows was still in position.

He crossed the room, put his ear to the wall again. Silence. He held this position for a few minutes, listening. No sounds came from the room next door. He knocked on the wall. Nothing. He knocked louder. Silence. The third time he pounded on the wall, hard enough to dislodge the cheap framed print above the bed in his own room and send it crashing to the floor.

He listened again. Unless the world’s soundest sleeper was in the next room, it was empty.

He ran his hands along the wall. It felt like drywall beneath the cheap wallpaper, perhaps half-inch gypsum. There was vinyl cove base at the floor, no crown molding at the ceiling. He wondered if -