A long pause. Abby wondered if the call had been dropped. Then: “I’m sorry,” Michael said. “Let me… let me call you back.”
“Good luck.”
Another long pause. “Thanks.”
Something was wrong. Abby glanced at Aleks. He nodded. He meant for her to hang up.
“Okay. I love you.” Abby barely got the words out. She wondered if this was the last time she’d ever speak to her husband. “And I -”
Dead air.
She pressed END CALL. The screen reverted to the photograph Abby used as wallpaper, a picture of herself, Michael, and the twins sitting on a bench near the beach in Cape May. Charlotte and Emily wore floppy straw sun hats. The sun was high, the water blue, the sand golden. Her heart ached.
Aleks held out his hands, indicating he wanted Abby to toss him the phone. She did. He caught it, put it in a pocket. “I appreciate your discretion. I am sure Anna and Marya do as well.”
Anna and Marya. It was the second time he had used these names.
Abby slipped onto one of the stools at the breakfast counter. She remembered shopping for the stools in White Plains, trying to decide on color, fabric, finish. It seemed so important at the time. It seemed to matter. It seemed like a million years ago.
“What are you going to do with us?” she asked.
For a moment, the man looked amused at her choice of words. “We are going to do nothing. We are going to wait.”
For how long? Abby wanted to ask. For whom? For what? She remained silent. She eyed the drawer on the kitchen island, the drawer containing the knives. Her glance was not lost on her captor.
He turned, glanced out the back window, then back to Abby.
“And now, if you would honor me with an introduction.”
He crossed the kitchen, stopping just a few feet away from Abby, and for the first time she saw his face in the bright afternoon sunlight streaming through the large window overlooking the backyard, saw his pale eyes, his sharp cheekbones, the way his widow’s peak met at his brow. The nausea suddenly became a violent, thrashing thing inside her. She knew this face almost as well as she knew her own. She tried to speak, but the words felt parched on her lips. “An introduction?”
Aleks smoothed his hair with his hands, straightened his clothing, as if he were a shy Victorian suitor meeting his betrothed for the first time. “Yes,” he said. “It is time I met Anna and Marya.”
“Why do you keep saying those names?” Abby asked, although she feared the answer. “Who are Anna and Marya?”
Aleks glanced out the window at the twins running around the yard. His profile was now unmistakable. He looked back at Abby.
His words took her legs away.
“They are my daughters.”
NINETEEN
Michael sat in the passenger seat of Tommy’s Lexus RR5, his mind outracing his heart. But not by much.
Abby had sounded distracted. Whenever she tried to make cocktail chatter with him, something was up. He had wanted to ask her why, but he knew he’d have to get off the phone quickly, because if he didn’t, she would read him, and he would have been forced to tell her about Viktor Harkov. He hated to lie to her. He didn’t lie to her. All he could hope for was that she didn’t see it on the news before he could tell her. She rarely watched television news, so this was in his favor.
When he did tell her about the murder, he wanted to have a lot more information. There was only one way that was going to happen.
Tommy made his way through the traffic. He opened the driver’s side door, but did not slip inside. He looked a little shaken. He took a few seconds. Tommy Christiano never took a few seconds. Especially with Michael.
“What’s up, man?” Michael asked. “Talk to me.”
Tommy looked up. “You sure you want to do this?”
Michael did not want to see it. He felt he had no choice. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”
The smell hit him first. It wasn’t as bad as some of the ripe corpses he had encountered in his time in the office, but it was bad enough. Many of the crime scene personnel walking in and out of the office wore white masks.
They stood in the hallway. They were waiting for the investigating detectives to invite them in. There was a time when anyone authorized to be at a crime scene could walk onto the scene at any time. No longer. Enough contaminated crime scenes leading to forensic evidence being tossed out at trial had changed all that.
Michael could hear conversations inside the office. He strained to understand what was being said. He heard scattered words: Telephone… voltage… serrated… eyelid… blood evidence.
Michael did not hear anything about files, stolen or otherwise. He did not hear the word adoption. There was a glimmer of hope in this.
Five minutes later, Detective Powell waved them in.
When Michael met Viktor Harkov, nearly five years earlier, the man had walked with a limp. A long-time diabetic with a litany of other physical ailments, Harkov’s body seemed frail even then. But not his mind. Although Michael had never squared off against the man in a courtroom, he knew a few lawyers who had, including Tommy, and they all agreed that Viktor Harkov never walked into Kew Gardens unprepared. He was much sharper than he looked. It was all part of the act.
Now Viktor Harkov looked hardly human.
The dead man slumped in his chair behind the desk. The sight was horrific. Harkov’s skin was paper white, leached of all color. His mouth was open in a slash of terror, baring yellowed teeth, gums thick with dried blood and saliva. Where his left eye had been was now a charred bubble of flesh, a red bull’s-eye at the center. A thin column of phlegm leaked from one of his nostrils.
As Michael passed to the left of Harkov’s desk, he had to look twice to be certain what he was seeing was true. It appeared as if Harkov’s trousers had been ripped or torn away. The area surrounding his genitals too had been burned, the flesh there blackened and spilt. Michael had seen many indignities in homicide victims – from the targets of sexual predators, to gang hits that left little to identify, to the nearly superhuman violence of murder done in a jealous rage – and in each there was a mortification to the way these people were seen in death. Perhaps a violent demise was in and of itself the final humiliation, one the victim could not avenge. Michael had always thought that this was part of his job as a prosecutor. Not to necessarily exact revenge – although anyone on the state side of the aisle who denied vengeance was part of their motivation would be lying – but rather to stand up in a court of law and restore some measure of dignity to those who could not rise.
What was done to Viktor Harkov was as brutal a humiliation as Michael had ever seen.
On the desk was a desk phone, an older touch-tone model, a nicotine-stained avocado green popular in the Seventies. From beneath the phone extended a pair of long electrical wires; one snaking across the desk and attached to one of Harkov’s toes. The other wire, ending in an alligator clip, lay along Harkov’s left leg. The alligator clip was scorched black.
But that was not the worst of it. The reason that the desk was covered in dark, drying blood, was that whoever had tortured this old man, whoever had killed this man, had thought the act of murder was not enough.
He had cut off the old man’s hands.
Michael looked up from the mutilated corpse, his eyes roaming the scene, for what? Perhaps some respite from the horror. Perhaps for some justification to why this man had been so destroyed in his place of business. Then it hit him. He was looking for something that would tell him to what degree to be worried. For a moment he felt deep shame, realizing he was leaping over the horror of what had happened to Viktor Harkov, and thinking
