Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [54]
“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.
Having gotten what he needed from it, Kirilenko blew out the Turkish smoke in a rush, then inhaled slowly and deeply.