Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Having gotten what he needed from it, Kirilenko blew out the Turkish smoke in a rush, then inhaled slowly and deeply. Behind him he could hear the small, familiar sounds of his men sifting through the charred remains of Karl Rochev’s dacha, but he paid them as much mind as he would the noises coming from the seats around him in a sports stadium, inconsequential until proven otherwise.

His attention was focused on the mattress his men had salvaged from the upper floor bedroom just before the staircase collapsed. It lay now among the trees, brushed by dead leaves and blades of un-mowed grass. On the bed was the twenty-two-year-old body of Ilenya Makova, Rochev’s current mistress or, he corrected himself, his late mistress. She was lying on the charred and smoldering mattress, a ragged hole opened up clear through her. On close inspection he could see that the wound had been inflicted by neither a bullet nor a knife. It looked malevolent, ugly, ancient, as if whatever had killed her had been used to rip her insides out. But whatever that weapon might be, it was nowhere to be found.

His gaze moved now to the digital photo on the screen of the cell phone in his hand. One of the men assigned to this detail by the FSB had had the presence of mind to snap a photo of the three people as they emerged from the front door before the fire started: Ilenya Makova’s killers. Sadly for him that man was Mondan Limonev, the one member of the division he worked out of who he despised more than any other. Worse still, he instilled both a sense of fear and distrust in Kirilenko. Limonev, a dead-eyed killer if Kirilenko ever saw one, was just the sort of animal Kirilenko had spent his entire adult life hunting down and bringing to justice. It offended him no end that this creature should be employed by the FSB. In his fantasies he’d discovered many novel ways to exterminate Limonev, none of which, sadly, he was at liberty to put into action.

The photo on Limonev’s cell was grainy, slightly blurred. Three figures. By narrowing his eyes slightly, he could recognize a male and two females. This, in itself, was a mystery. Why would Rochev hire three people to kill his mistress? Why would he want her dead in the first place? Kirilenko knew him as a serial fucker—he cheated on his wife with a roster of women as professional as they were beautiful. He’d never seen fit to kill one before so why start now? And, anyway, where was he? Disappeared from work, from his home, and not in a tryst at his own private love hotel.

But first things first. Back to the killers: Not only were there three of them, but it seemed that one was either an adolescent or a midget. Neither fit the usual profile of a professional hit man who, so far as Kirilenko’s extensive experience decreed, worked solo. But, actually, that meant little, since his experience also confirmed that professional hit men would use any tactic they could think of to throw him off the scent. As of this moment, none of them had succeeded; he’d run each of them into the ground. One of the reasons he always tracked down the perp, the murderer, strangler, shooter, knifer, was due to his orderly mind, which allowed him to know more about each situation than anyone around him. He absorbed a crime scene with all his five senses, then allowed his mind to look for patterns. A crime scene, steeped in death, in anger, violence, fear, even disinterest, was the very definition of chaos. Death disordered life. Many of the killers he was after were, in their way, as detached as he was. The difference was outrage. Murder outraged him, whether it be premeditated or accidental, professional or amateurish. To him, the taking of a life—any life—was unthinkable, a sin worthy of full retribution, lawful or otherwise. The taking of a life was a violation. It created a state of affairs unto itself, one that had nothing to do with society, that existed, throbbing painfully, outside the boundaries of civilization. Let the punishment fit the crime. Nevertheless, he lived with these acts of cruelty, with the most heinous of insults, as if they were lodgers who had overstayed their welcome in his mind and who would not now relinquish their place in his life for love or money.

He tried zooming in on the faces of the perps, but the man appeared to have his arm raised in front of his eyes, the woman was in the process of turning away, and the face of the adolescent or midget was lost behind the woman’s body. He was about to try zooming in on her face when he saw that she was gripping something in her hand: an arrow or a short spear, something with a wicked tip, meant to tear the insides out of its victim: the murder weapon. Now he moved up the image to the woman’s face. By zooming in, though not too much, he could discern her features. With a sickening lurch of his stomach he recognized Annika Dementieva.

“There is no trace of the marksman, the man in the woods who fired his weapon.”

The thin man with the saturnine face had emerged from the wreckage of the dacha to stand beside Kirilenko’s car. Kirilenko, becoming aware of his approach, had quite sensibly pocketed Limonev’s phone with its incriminating photo. He’d be damned if he’d share inside information with this man. As for Limonev, he had made a mental note to have the Ukrainians get him a replacement cell immediately.

“He wasn’t one of mine,” Kirilenko said, “so he must have been one of yours.”

“He wasn’t,” the man said. “Anyway, I wasn’t supplied with a marksman, you know that.”

“When it comes to you people,” Kirilenko said without rancor, “I know nothing.”

“Well, take my word for it.” The thin man glanced back over his shoulder. “Perhaps one of the SBU men, you know how undisciplined these Ukrainians are.”

Kirilenko regarded the man impassively through the smoke passing out of his half-open lips. “Do you judge Russians as harshly as you do the Ukrainians?”

“We have high regard for you,” the thin man said with some asperity. “I thought we’d made that perfectly clear.”

Kirilenko continued his study of the man. He had golden hair and the ruddy cheeks of an athlete. Unconsciously, Kirilenko rubbed the backs of his hands, reddened and stiff with a rheumy ache. “It wasn’t one of the Ukrainians,” he said. “They know not to make a move without checking with me first.”

“They despise you,” the thin man said.

“But they fear me more.”

“And whom do you fear, Kirilenko?”

Kirilenko took his time drawing on his cigarette, holding the smoke deep so his lungs could absorb the nicotine. Releasing the smoke, he said, just before he turned away, “Not you, American, if that’s what you think. Certainly not you.”

“MAGNUSSEN OR one of his people was at it a long time,” Jack said after some deliberation. “Rochev must have had something or known something Magnussen wanted very badly.”

“What did they do to him?” Alli said.

“It’s bad enough to give you nightmares.” Jack rose, and Annika was left to inspect the corpse on her own.

“The people who did this,” she said, “are professionals—experts, I must say, in torture and the application of pain.”

“Spoken like a professional yourself,” he said.

She looked up at him. “What an odd thing to say. Do you take me for a torturer?”

He deliberately ignored her comment. “Whoever they are, they must have a strong international connection to plan and execute a hit-and-run murder on Capri. It’s a small island with extremely limited vehicular traffic.”

Alli was staring out at the flat expanse of the water. “But Annika’s right. We’ve hit a dead end. There’s nothing left for us here and we have no way of finding out where Magnussen went.”

“Not necessarily.”

Jack led them back over the shallow crest and into the lowland of the cemetery. The afternoon was waning; the sun, exhausted from its misty journey, was sinking as if weighted down by the earth or by sorrow. The lengthening shadows seemed to thrust the headstones across the grass like accusing fingers.