Ed Dee - The Con Man's Daughter

"And you think there's no way the murder of Angelo Caruso and his wife is connected to that incident?"

"I gave my best guess to Boland. The past is the past. I think it's a brand-new world and all the new roads lead to Yuri Borodenko. Maybe he's getting rid of all the tough old birds. Then there'll be no doubt who's in charge. I remember reading in The Gulag Archipelago that the KGB would watch the crowd cheering during a rally for Stalin. The people would stand there applauding and yelling for hours and hours. But then someone would realize the stupidity of this and sit down. Then a few others. Then they'd all sit down. The KGB would make a note of who sat down first. They'd have those people eliminated. They knew that any independent thinking was dangerous. Borodenko is doing away with the independent thinkers."

"Are you an independent thinker?" she said.

Eddie reached across the table and held her hand. Her hands were cold.

"I want you to know that no matter how this turns out,

I know that I brought this on myself. You are the good that's come out of it."

Eddie's phone rang. Kevin looked over, recognizing his signature Irish tune. It was Matty Boland. They'd found Freddie Dolgev.

Sunday

10:00 P.M.

Fredek Dolgev's mental retardation was more severe than they'd imagined. By the time Eddie got to the Coney Island precinct, the interview was over. Boland doubted that anything the maintenance man said could be held reliable. Eddie said he didn't care about reliability, that he'd take whatever truth Dolgev's fevered brain could conjure up.

"He's got the mind of a ten-year-old," Boland said. "It wasn't much of an interview."

Freddie's lawyer had called and insisted the questioning of his client cease. The lawyer arrived about ten minutes later. He'd been on the phone ever since. Boland said that after the lawyer called, they didn't push any further. It wasn't worth jeopardizing the search of his apartment for such a small prospect of a return. Plus, as Boland said, it didn't hurt to get a little goodwill on the legal ledger. Who gives a shit about goodwill? Eddie thought. Give me five good minutes. I'd have him pissing blood in half that time.

"Where did you find him?" Eddie asked.

"Uniform picked him up. Somebody told them about a guy hiding under the boardwalk, talking to himself in Russian. He wasn't far from his house. Apparently, he came home, saw the cops, and freaked out."

Eddie had dropped Kate's hairbrush off at the NYPD lab on Jamaica Avenue before going to his old precinct. It felt strange walking up those steps. The squad room was essentially how Eddie remembered it, disheveled and disorganized. The paint job, a shade of brown, rather than the two-tone green in his day. Computer screens blinked where old Remingtons had once rested. A plastic tower with CD-ROMs had replaced the stack of phone books.

"Can you hold him until we get the lab analysis on the hair?"

"Not on the word of a Gypsy we can't find," Boland said. "The boss is kicking him. I asked him to stall until you got here. At least you could eyeball him."

"He say anything at all?" Eddie said.

" 'Nyet, nyet' is about the extent of it. We used that Russian interpreter from the DA's office-the heavy set woman. Sometimes I wonder whose side she's on. Whenever we showed him the picture of Kate and asked questions about her, the interpreter told us he answered 'No,' although it sounded different every time to me. But it was clear he knows something. The guy is scared. He's in there stinking up the room."

From behind the two-way glass of the observation room, they watched Fredek Dolgev pace the floor, muttering. He was alone in the interview room. The right side of his face, where it could be seen above the bandages, looked like a deep red birthmark. His thin gray hair was singed; both eyebrows had been burned off. His right shirtsleeve was tight from the bandages. But the burns didn't seem to bother him. The guy was clearly agitated about something. His face contorted in some internal argument. The back of his shirt was stained with sweat. A huge set of keys hung from his belt.

"Somewhere in that hellhole of a mind, he knows he's part of something wrong," Eddie said.

"He'll never say it, though. The only thing he knows is to shut up. We could beat this guy until morning and he wouldn't give up the people he depends on."

Boland said he'd started with simple questions, trying to get Freddie to relax, but that didn't happen. At first, he was careful to avoid any direct questions about the kidnapping of Kate. He tried to talk about Freddie's background, figuring everybody is comfortable telling their own story. Then he'd swing back around to questions about Kate, and Freddie would go into his shell.

"You get a background check?" Eddie asked.

"Yeah, Immigration finally started keeping somebody there on weekends."

Fredek Dolgev came to the United States from Russia three years ago. He was sponsored by his cousin Yuri Borodenko. Dolgev had worked for Borodenko in Moscow for many years, shoveling snow and keeping wood in the fire. Borodenko brought him over to the States as a hardship case after his father died. He was currently employed as part of Borodenko's personal staff, doing repair and maintenance work.

"Did he say how he got burned?"

"Yeah, he admitted being in the Rolls-Royce," Boland said. "He said he ran because he thought he'd set the car on fire, cleaning under the dash. He didn't know which hospital they took him to, or why they went so far out of their way."

"Zina took him," Eddie said. "Her name is on the form."

"I asked him about Zina. I asked him several different ways. He kept repeating that Zina is his friend."

"We know any more about her?"

Boland said several of the squad detectives knew her. According to them, Zina Rabinovich was a tough, streetwise Russian Bukharan Jew, the first in her family not born in Russia, but in the borough of Brooklyn. She'd worked in numerous junkyards, managing the used-parts business. She was in her twenties, slender but well muscled, with shoulder-length brown hair. And the word tomboy didn't do her justice. She walked with an exaggerated street punk's bounce, all head bop and shoulder flex. No one had ever seen her wear anything but work boots, jeans, a T-shirt, and a leather motorcycle jacket. Zina was a girl who could take a car apart blindfolded. She could spit, curse, scratch, smoke, and throw better than most guys. About a year ago, she began working for Borodenko as a chauffeur and bodyguard for his wife.

"She hangs out in a dyke joint off Stillwell called Alice B's," Boland said. "Don't go there; you ain't tough enough to drink in that place."

Zina's arrest record included a few assaults, all upon males. The rest were car thefts, starting as a teenager and including her high school principal's Honda. She lasted only two months into her senior year, then went to work in the junkyards.

"I bet she still steals cars," Eddie said.

"You're thinking she stole the black BMW?"

"Parrot said it's her face on both sketches. I also think she broke into my house, and killed Lukin."

"Let's find a reason to bring her in. Maybe she's more than just a chauffeur."

Eddie kept quiet on the fact he'd tailed Mrs. Borodenko and a slender dark-haired female to lunch on Staten Island. Although he never got a good look, he was sure now that the other female was Zina. For the few minutes he was able to see both of them clearly, he'd focused on Mrs. Borodenko.

"Do you have a booking photo of Zina?" Eddie asked.

"Yeah, but don't look at it yet. You're an eyewitness. We'll need you to be a virgin, so give me a chance to put together a decent photo lineup."

Eddie kept hearing a jangle as Freddie wore out the floor in the interview room. The noise came from a huge ring of keys clipped to Freddie's belt loop. At least fifty keys. Eddie got closer to the window. It looked like each key had a piece of tape with a notation, probably an address.