back at the seminary, “that got Fyodor through his adolescence.”
“But now?”
“He rebelled when he was a teenager. Hated my parents’ accent — he so wanted to be an American kid. Hated everything about the circus and our traditions. Rebelled at any chance he had. With no provocation. It was our priest who found a place for him.”
“What do you mean by ‘a place’? Did Fyodor go to jail?” Maybe she was trying to tell me something about a criminal history after all, something that would be useful in our efforts to find Chat.
“Never jail. No. But my parents sent him away for two years. To a really tough school. Far away from home, and sort of like a reform school, I think it was. He was placed there instead of a juvenile jail. He was grateful to come home, to join the troupe, to have a family that cared to take him back and embrace him again. But I think always bubbling beneath the surface was this rage. These new friends must have seen that side of him. Encouraged it. I can’t think what else it could be.”
“Who are these guys, Oksana? These new friends?”
“Fyodor met them at the gym, where he was working out.”
“You know where the gym is?”
She hung her head. “Yuri does. It’s near Atlanta. After the accident, my brother had to find a place to build up his strength again. That’s what our trainer told him. That’s why I think it’s all their fault.”
“Who?”
“These guys. Really crazy guys. They got Fyodor into very dangerous stuff,” Oksana said. She held her hands up at me and twisted them back and forth. “We really need to be strong in our work — our hands and wrists especially — but these guys were teaching him to fight. Like that was a way to build strength.”
“Martial arts?” I asked.
“Exactly. But crazy. Really extreme. Like for combat, he told Yuri.”
Like the Russian combat sport, sambo, and other deadly ways to bring an opponent down that had been demonstrated to us that morning, at the X-Treme Redeemer.
“And church? Did Fyodor give up the church?”
“The Orthodox church, yes,” Oksana said, fingering the cross she wore around her neck. “He told Yuri these friends had a stronger church. That he could only get his life back if he fought for it. That fighting could make him a better person. Crazy, isn’t it?”
“I agree with you.” Totally insane. “Why don’t you rest for a few minutes, Oksana? Let me ask Detective Chapman if there’s anything else we need from you right now.”
I wanted to get the information about the Georgia Pentecostal connection off to Peterson. I wanted to see if there was a juvenile record in Florida that had been resolved with an alternative sentence at a reform school, and where that might have been.
Oksana sat back on her bed and I returned to Yuri’s room. He and Mike still seemed to be facing off against each other, seated and at arm’s length. The questioning was contentious and I guessed that Yuri had held his ground more firmly than his sister did.
“You want to step out for a minute?” I asked, sweeping the small room with my eyes.
“Sure, kid. This prick needs a good tune-up with a barbell to make him talk. Short of that, he doesn’t care that his brother’s headed for the end of the line.” Mike stood up from the desk and started after me, then turned back. He reached for the telephone and yanked out the wire that connected it to the wall.
Yuri Zukov just laid back on the bed and laughed.
I stood on my tiptoes and grabbed the gym bag that was stashed on the luggage rack over the small sink in the corner.
Yuri leaped to his feet and tried to grab it from me, but Mike pushed him onto the bed again.
“Take this, Detective,” I said, passing the gym bag to him. “His sister says he keeps his valuables in it. Of course he doesn’t care if you rip the phone out of the wall. I’m betting he’s got his cell right in there.”
FORTY-SIX
“HERE’S the cell phone information for the perp’s brother, Loo. Get somebody to run with it,” Mike said, then hung up with Peterson. “Nice grab on that gym bag, blondie.”
It was after ten thirty and we were working out of a small office in the headquarters of the Rhode Island State Police. Several patrol cars met the train when it reached the freight track at Providence Station an hour earlier. Local cops and troopers had orders to sweep it from end to end, talking to all the troupe members, searching for evidence of a crime or signs that Fyodor Zukov had brought any of the women on board.
Mike and I had trailed the officers through the compartments for a first look at every possible place to conceal anything from a weapon to a body, then left them to their work. Daniel Gersh rode with us to headquarters, in case there was any way he could assist in the ongoing search. Yuri and Oksana Zukov were separated for the ride, and a prosecutor had been called in to discuss whether they could be held overnight as material witnesses.
“No sightings of Fyodor or the truck on the highway?” I asked.
“Nothing yet. You trust that broad?”
“Not entirely. She swore to the lie Yuri told about not having phones. But when we started to talk about Georgia’s death penalty, she really got nervous.”
“So you think he’s headed south?”
“I guess we wait to see if there’s any info on Yuri’s cell,” I said, opening the door to a cop who had brewed a fresh pot of coffee for us and handed mugs in to me.
The television was on in the main squad room, and all the news channels — local and national — were interrupting broadcasts to show photographs of the man wanted for the abduction of Chastity Grant and the possible murders of five other people from Georgia to New York. MANHUNT FOR CLERGY KILLER was the continuous crawl running at the bottom of the screen.
“I’m ready to start mainlining caffeine,” Mike said. “Another hour and it probably makes sense to accept the captain’s offer to drive us back to New York.”
“Whatever you think,” I said, yawning as I settled into a high-backed chair and curled my legs up beneath me.
“Did you reach Mercer?” Mike asked.
“He’s not picking up. I left him a message.”
“Where are you, Coop? You’re thinking something you’re not telling me.”
“The one piece that stumped me was why Zukov was at the trial this week, why he was there when Bishop Deegan testified. He certainly didn’t have his eye on me — I was a surprise guest, the designated hitter stepping in for the young prosecutor.”
“And the bishop?”
“No. Deegan’s his kind of guy. Old-fashioned, misogynist, trying to uphold the dignity of the church. No, no. He was scouting his outcast.”
“Who?”
“The defendant on trial. Denys Koslawski. Think of it, a disgraced priest who had molested children.”
“Yeah, but how would he know?”
“I’ll take the hit on this. There was a story in all the papers about Koslawski — no mention of Deegan’s court appearance at the time because he wasn’t expected to testify — when the original trial was supposed to start.”
“December?”
“Yes, December. There was a feature about rogue priests. And then we had the idea to adjourn the case for three months because juries tend to be so generous to the bad guys around the holidays. I didn’t want a Christmas verdict for Koslawski.”
