Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [55]
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