got the lights on, to find the computers and filing cabinets gone, or even to discover Konstantine Barsakov in an office chair on the other side of the room.
Barsakov was dead. In his right temple, he had a small entry wound. Behind his right ear, he had a much larger exit wound. A gun lay on the floor beside his chair, a nine-millimeter Smith amp; Wesson. It lay in a pool of blood generated by the middle finger of Barsakov’s right hand, half of which had been blown away. Undoubtedly when he’d raised it to his temple in self-defense.
As staged crime scenes go, this one was pretty weak. But that didn’t surprise me, either, given the haste. No, it was the flag that shouldn’t have been there, the green flag of Chechnya, with its lone wolf staring directly into my eyes, positioned directly behind Konstantine Barsakov. Aslan had left it behind to make sure I got the message. As I’d humiliated him, he’d now humiliated me.
I backed out of the building, closing the door, and walked back to my car. Ignoring Dimitri, who continued to grip the fence, I slid onto the passenger’s side of the front seat, leaned against the headrest and closed my eyes. I’d been running on adrenalin all day, but now my tank was empty. Domestic Solution’s business records were gone, as were all the other victims, the women and the children. I’d moved too fast, committed myself too early, and there was a price to be paid. In the short and the long term.
I waited in the car until midnight, when the warrants and the Crime Scene Unit finally arrived. Though I was anxious to get going, I gave the CSU sergeant a heads-up on the Jane Doe homicide in the hope that his unit would turn up trace evidence, especially blood. That done, I conducted a long and fruitless search for any mention of the company’s clients or where Aslan had gone, a stray invoice, a business card, an answering machine, a diary, a half-written letter to the home folks. I even went in search of the two bags of garbage I’d seen Barsakov carrying earlier in the day.
I found evidence of haste everywhere. The closets on the second floor were only half-emptied, as if the best garments had been culled and the rest abandoned, and much of the furniture had been left behind. On the first floor, an oily patch of concrete in a large room outside the office revealed a near-perfect set of tire prints. In the same room, along the back wall, a staircase led to the second floor. The stairs were important because they would have allowed Aslan to evacuate the children without leading them past Konstantine’s body.
It was all very interesting, but not particularly helpful, until the Crime Scene Unit ripped away the floor tiles in a small bathroom behind the office. There, on the undersides of the tiles and on the floorboards, the techs discovered small quantities of a dark substance with the consistency of dry mud. A few minutes later, a sample of that substance was placed in a test tube before a clear chemical, a reagent of some kind, was added. When the reagent turned blue, a CSU sergeant named Palmbach held the tube up for my inspection.
‘I’m not callin’ it proof positive,’ he announced, ‘but if this is human blood, which it most likely is, there’s more than enough to run a DNA test.’
I went from the warehouse over to the precinct where I spent more than two hours, until four-thirty a.m., trying to make up for lost time. There was nothing in the case file about my forays to the outer boroughs, or about Sister Kassia or Father Stan, or even about the ad in Gazeta Warszawa. Without doubt, I’d soon have to account for the chain of events that led me to Domestic Solutions and Konstantine Barsakov. I needed paper to back up whatever story I decided to tell.
When I was finally satisfied, I packed it in. But I didn’t go straight home. Instead, I drove to the waterfront, to South Fifth Street, parking behind the mound of rubble blocking access to the East River. It was raining, a soft drizzle that reduced the Manhattan skyline to a dim glow on a horizon that might have been a few inches in front of the windshield, or at the outer edge of the universe.
I had no good reason to make the stop. I just felt that I needed some time before I went home. But time to do exactly what? To think? To examine my conscience? To prepare myself for atonement?
But I wasn’t ready to go there, apparently, because my attention quickly settled on a pair of photo-hard images. Konstantine Barsakov first, carefully posed before the Chechen flag. Then Aslan with his back to me, singing at the top of his lungs to that same flag.
I kept these images in front of me as I considered my next move, eventually focusing on the worst-case scenario: Aslan decides to round up the women and carry them off, possibly to another country. How fast could he do it? The women were all at work, five women living in the homes of five employers, each employer wealthy enough to afford a live-in servant. Would these employers simply release their maids if Aslan knocked on their door? More to the point, would Aslan risk it? Or would he wait until Saturday and pick up the unsuspecting girls at the usual time?
Aslan had taken his files and computers, along with some of the furniture and clothing, from the warehouse on Eagle Street. According to Sister Kassia, debts like the ones that bound the women to Aslan are commonly bought and sold. Well, that’s exactly what I’d do, if I were Aslan. I’d sell them, preferably to an entrepreneur doing business in some far off place. Like, maybe, Cambodia.
I looked out through the windshield at a gray curtain fragmented by lines of water streaming down the windshield. The rain was picking up, the patter on the Crown Vic’s roof more or less continuous. I flicked on the wipers and the headlights, then put the Crown Vic into reverse before making a broken u-turn. This close to the river, my headlights barely penetrated a fog that hung in folds above the deserted streets. I didn’t pass a single vehicle on Kent Avenue.
But there was traffic up on the bridge, bakery and newspaper delivery vans and yellow cabs just beginning their twelve-hour shifts. I trailed behind, in the right lane, ignoring the astonishingly bright lights of an eighteen- wheeler that didn’t slow down until it came to within a yard of my rear bumper. I ignored the blast of its air horn, too, and the driver’s upraised finger as he fell back.
‘Thick skin,’ I remembered an old partner telling me. ‘That’s how you do it. That’s how you get through the day. Nothing in, nothing out. Keep it from the wife, keep it from the kids.’
SEVENTEEN
I got out of bed at ten o’clock, after five hours’ sleep, and set a pot of coffee to brewing. Then I quickly showered and shaved. Though I couldn’t be sure that Aslan was contemplating a move — or that he wasn’t already in the wind — the need for haste was obvious enough.
At ten thirty, I dialed the number of INS Agent Dominick Capra. He picked up on the third ring.
‘Dominick, it’s Harry Corbin. You remember, we had lunch at Pete’s Tavern.’
‘Hey, Harry,’ Capra said, ‘how’s it goin’?’
‘Can’t whine. How about yourself? You put away any foreign gangsters this week?’
‘We don’t put ’em away, Harry. We just send them back where they came from. So, what’s up?’
‘Chechens, Dominick. Chechens are up. Or one particular Chechen, named Aslan Khalid, who used to have a Russian business partner named Konstantine Barsakov.’
‘Used to?’
‘Barsakov’s dead, but that’s not what I’m calling about. I always thought that Chechens and Russians hated each other.’
Capra took a minute to consider the statement. I could almost hear the little wheels turning.
‘First thing,’ he finally said, his good-old-boy tone conspicuously absent, ‘Khalid is not a Chechen family name. Chechen family names sound like Russian names. Second thing, there’s no Chechen immigration quota. Chechnya is a province of Russia. If your man’s here legally, he came in under the Russian quota. Third, Chechnya has been penetrated by jihadists from everywhere in the Middle East, so the only way a Chechen could enter the United States under the Russian quota is if the Russian government intervened to get his application approved.’
‘I saw Khalid’s green card, Dominick. It seemed legit to me.’
‘What was his country of origin?’
‘Russia.’
‘Well?’
I gave it a couple of seconds, than got to the point. ‘Aslan’s vanished and I need to find him,’ I said. ‘I was hoping you’d run his name through your database. If he’s here legally, he has to have a sponsor. I’d like to know that sponsor’s name.’
