Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Jack gave her the address. “The collector’s named M. Magnussen.”

“Doesn’t sound Ukrainian,” Alli said.

“Or Russian, for that matter,” Annika added, as she navigated through Kiev’s crowded streets.

“Whatever his nationality,” Jack said, “there seems to be a clear line back to my starting point. Senator Berns is killed by a hit-and-run on Capri after having flown from here. The last person he met with was Karl Rochev, whose mistress has been murdered in bizarre fashion with an antique Cossack weapon, and Rochev himself is nowhere to be found. Now it seems clear that the murder weapon belonged to this M. Magnussen.”

“Whoever he is,” Alli said.

WHOEVER MAGNUSSEN was, he was wealthy. He lived outside the city, in one of the areas so high-priced that not a high-rise or even a block of cement was to be seen. Instead, rolling farmland not unlike that of rural Virginia protected his domicile from the ravages of the modern-day city. The driveway to his estate was a half mile long, snaking through dense stands of pine forest that would have completely obscured the house from the road even if it were only a hundred yards from it. The structure, which stood on a shallow knoll, was modeled after an English manor house with two wings attached to either end of a long central section that faced the visitor with both the square shoulders of a soldier and the chilly contempt of a high-court magistrate.

“This place looks like any minute Keira Knightley is going to draw up to it in a gilded horse-drawn carriage,” Alli said.

She wasn’t far off the mark, Jack thought. The place was fit for a nineteenth-century baron or viscount, but a dead one. The place was lightless and, as they soon discovered, locked up tighter than a duck’s behind.

“Not making sense,” Alli said.

Which was also true, Jack thought, unless Magnussen, having gotten the warning call from Boyer, packed up and flew the coop in the hour or so it had taken them to drive out here. It would have taken them far less time if they hadn’t been slowed down by the dark-colored sedan tailing them. And then, of course, he understood.

“Magnussen’s gone,” he said. “The purpose of the tail was not to see where we were going, but to slow us down. Boyer must have gone to the back of his shop the moment we left and seen the bill of lading out of place.”

“Nevertheless,” Annika said, “it couldn’t hurt to take a look around the grounds.”

They set off in a more or less northeasterly direction, making a full circle of the property. The dull, clammy morning had been swept away by a freshening wind out of the west, but high up the remnants of the morning’s clouds drifted across the sun. They came first to an apple orchard, the orderly rows of gnarled trees looking abandoned and forlorn. Next came a fenced-in section that in the summer would be bursting with rows of pole beans, cabbage, cucumbers, and lettuce, but now lay fallow.

By this time they were behind the manor house, approximately at a forty-five degree angle to its right-hand wing, moving in a counterclockwise direction. Coming over a rise they spotted a finger of water that turned out to be a small lake or perhaps a large pond, it was difficult to tell from their present position. But what surprised them was a small family cemetery set in the adjoining lowland planted with mature weeping willows, which so craved water. Here were the headstones of perhaps four or five members, Magnussen’s forebears all, from what Jack could glean as he scanned them. The letters M and S were for some reason the easiest for his brain to interpret immediately.

“Father, mother—and a brother, I think,” Alli said as she came up beside him. “Each stone has the places they died, along with the dates.” She squinted through the watery sunlight. “The father was ten years older, but curiously, though they both died during the same week it wasn’t in the same place.

“Who’s the smart one?” Alli said. “Daddy could have made the money.”

At that moment, they heard Annika calling them. They turned, saw her standing on the opposite rise, waving them on. Jack, wondering what she’d found, strode up the gentle incline, Alli scrambling after him.

“Look.” Annika pointed to their left, as soon they gained the modest crest.

Now Jack could confirm what he’d suspected, that Magnussen, spending like a drunken sailor, had had the pond or lake built, because on a spit of land that perfectly bisected the body of limpid water was a stone pergola, a folly in the classic Roman style. But the pergola, per se, wasn’t what had caught Annika’s attention; rather it was a seated figure drenched in the shadows beneath the pergola’s dome. From their viewpoint they could see that the figure, bent slightly forward, forearms on knees, had the aspect of a person deep in contemplation.

They descended the far side of the rise, walked on the damp, mossy ground around the skeletal willows whose branches arched overhead in a tangle of rheumatic fingers. Skirting the edge of the lake they walked out onto the small peninsula. From this angle it was impossible to tell anything about the figure other than it was male.

“Magnussen?” Jack called out. But if Magnussen had flown the coop as Jack had surmised this man wouldn’t respond to that name. He didn’t, remaining in the same position, plunged deep in thought.

They approached ever more cautiously until Jack, his spine tingling, moved around in front of the figure. He looked hard at the man for a moment, then very quietly said, “Alli, stay where you are, please.”

Her curiosity piqued, she felt the urge to take a step forward, but something in Jack’s voice stayed her. “Why? What’s going on?”

By this time Annika had joined Jack in front of the figure, whose eyes were fixed on the horizon. The man was sitting on a gaily painted wooden Adirondack-style chair. It was difficult to see at first for all the blood and the gaping hole in his chest, but the top of each thigh where it creased with his abdomen was punctured by a sulitsa —seemingly identical to the one that had killed the young woman—which some force, terrible in its rage, had driven all the way through muscle and fat so that the points had buried themselves in the wood beneath, pinning the victim in place.

“It’s the man in the photo at the dacha,”Annika said. “This is Karl Rochev.”

Jack knelt in front of yet another example of man’s barbarity. “Which means that our prime suspect in his mistress’s murder has himself become a murder victim.”

“Not that it matters, we’re at a dead end.” Annika sighed. “This murder tells us very little.”

“On the contrary,” Jack said, rising to his feet. “It’s proof that Senator Berns’s death wasn’t accidental. He was murdered because of something Rochev told him, something the senator was about to tell someone else.” He reached out to touch one of the shafts, then thought better of it, stuffed his hands in his pockets instead. “This leak is being sealed one hole at a time.”

PART TWO

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war,

death after life does greatly please.

—EDMUND SPENSER, 1590

THIRTEEN

RHON FYODOVICH Kirilenko used one thin, reddened hand to shake out a cigarette and put it to his mouth. He slid open the slender box of wooden matches he always carried and lit the match. For an instant the sharp scent of sulfur sucked the oxygen out of his nostrils, causing a little gasp, an involuntary exhalation. Slowly and deliberately, as he did all things large and small, he put the flame to the tip of the cigarette, then took a deep pull on the harsh, black Turkish tobacco and held the smoke in his lungs until his mind ceased its hurrying. A hurrying mind was a disorganized mind, and a disorganized mind made mistakes. Ever since he had become a homicide detective in the FSB, that had been his philosophy; it was so simple, so succinct, so true that in his twenty-odd years running down murderers and serial rapists he’d never had cause to change it even one iota. This was precisely the sort of man Kirilenko was: practical, stolid—his few detractors accused him of being plodding, dull, even pedantic. On the other hand, his benefactors understood that this persona—bland and gray as the federal building in which they all toiled—was a carefully constructed facade. They saw him as being smart enough to follow orders to the letter, possessed of a quiet rectitude that ruffled no feathers and that allowed him to run his investigations as he saw fit. Everyone knew him as relentless; once he sank his teeth into an investigation he never let go until he’d reached a satisfactory conclusion, which meant a conviction of the perpetrator, or his death, whichever came first. That was about the only thing Kirilenko wasn’t fussy about. Incarceration or death, it was all the same to him because these death-wielding perps infuriated him. He looked on them as something other—other than human, less than human, a subspecies inferior even to animals.