Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [56]
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.
“Alli, didn’t you say that Magnussen’s parents died on the same day?”
She nodded. “But in different places.”
Jack examined the headstones, one by one. Using his fingertips to trace the outlines of the chiseled letters allowed him to read what had been written more easily and quickly. “They died on August first, seventeen years