through threats to her sister who was working for the Russians as a prostitute, to start a relationship with Esteban Calderon and fulfil certain tasks related to the 6th June bomb conspiracy,' said Falcon.
'And El Pulmon?'
'I don't think there's a connection between him and the 6th June conspiracy,' said Falcon. 'This was just business. But it looks as if Nikita Sokolov, the weightlifter, was involved in clearing up the loose end of Marisa Moreno, and he's now made a mistake in failing to kill El Pulmon. If we can find El Pulmon, we can use him to locate Nikita Sokolov, and if we can charge Sokolov with the two killings in Las Tres Mil, that will give us some leverage in the case of Marisa Moreno.'
'Matching DNA from the paper suits to unknowns on a database is going to take longer than seeing if we have a DNA sample for Sokolov and matching the samples from El Pulmon's apartment,' said Parrado. 'So let's do that first.'
'We've still got the problem of finding either of them,' said Ramirez.
'Nikita Sokolov will be very keen to find El Pulmon. He's the only credible witness we might get who'd be willing to place him in his apartment as the shooter,' said Falcon. 'I'll talk to my brother, Paco, as well. After his own accident in the ring he's always tried to help injured toreros.'
The meeting broke up while Parrado was called out for an urgent consultation on another case. Everybody turned on their mobiles, went to the windows to make calls.
Falcon called his bull-breeding brother, worked through the excuses for not having gone out to the farm for months.
'Paco, a question for you on your specialist subject,' said Falcon, hurrying things along. 'Do you remember a novillero called El Pulmon?'
'Roque Barba, you mean. El Pulmon was the name they gave him after his accident,' said Paco. 'I remember it. Got a horn in the chest. When they moved him back to Seville after his initial surgery, I went to see him. I told him if he needed any help to call me. That was three years ago. I saw him a few times in the months after he first came out of hospital. I tried to persuade him to come up to the farm to work. Then we lost touch.'
'A lot has happened since then, Paco, and not much of it good,' said Falcon. 'He became a heroin dealer in Las Tres Mil.'
'A dealer? Shit, that's bad.'
'The thing is, we need to find him.'
'This sounds like trouble.'
'He is in a lot of trouble, but not from us,' said Falcon. 'He's gone into hiding after a Russian gangster tried to kill him.'
'I've just seen something on Canal Sur about a shooting in Las Tres Mil. Two people dead,' said Paco.
'That was the incident. And now we need to find him before the Russian gangster does.'
'Well, he's not here, if that's what you're asking.'
'I want you to use your contacts to find out if he still has any friends from his novillero days. Somewhere he could hole up and get watered and fed,' said Falcon. 'That's all I want you to do. I don't want you to talk to him, Paco. That's important. I just want some ideas about where he might be, and we'll do the rest.'
'He didn't kill either of those people in his apartment, did he?'
'No,' said Falcon. 'The gangster did that.'
'What's the worst that can happen to him?'
'That the gangster finds him first.'
'And from your side?'
'We want to protect him because we want him to testify against the gangster. The worst charge against him will be possession of an illegal firearm.'
'I'll see what I can do.'
Falcon went back to the table. The others finished their calls. Parrado came back into the room. The meeting resumed.
'Anything else we should talk about now?' asked Parrado.
'I've just heard that the hair and semen deposit from the paper suits does not match any of the Russian DNA we have on our CICO database,' said Diaz.
'That was quicker than you thought,' said Parrado.
'The database is smaller than I thought,' said Diaz.
'I spoke to the Sex Crimes squad in Malaga and Nikita Sokolov was definitely Vasili Lukyanov's partner in the assault on that local girl. He beat her up and held her down, but insisted he did not have sex with her,' said Cortes. 'The good news is that they do have a sample of Nikita Sokolov's DNA.'
'Felipe in Forensics has confirmed that he'll have the DNA from the blood samples of the unknown in El Pulmon's apartment generated by eleven p.m. tonight,' said Perez.
'Good. Get that together with Cortes,' said Parrado. 'Now we know the direction we're heading in, let's find Nikita Sokolov and El Pulmon before they find each other.'
18
Santa Maria La Blanca, Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 20.15 hrs
They were sitting outside in the square in front of the church of Santa Maria La Blanca, which had just turned golden in the late evening light. Jackets were on the back of their chairs, top buttons undone, ties loosened. Beers stood in frosted glasses in front of them and a girl offloaded plates of jamon, fried anchovies, patatas bravas in a piquant tomato sauce, and some bread and olives. The talk was of Nikita Sokolov, but it was vague, amused, slightly fatigued after a working weekend and a long Monday.
'OK, so let's think about this scientifically,' said Ramirez. 'How tall do you think Sokolov is?'
'He's small – one metre sixty-six,' said Cortes. 'The closer you are to the ground, the less distance you have to lift the weights. And he's probably at least ten kilos heavier than he was in his Olympic days. I'd say closer to ninety kilos. I think a.38 is the bare minimum you'd need to knock someone like that over.'
'How high is the table in El Pulmon's apartment, Emilio?'
'Seventy-five centimetres.'
'Add two for the gun, that's seventy-seven,' said Ramirez. 'Where would a bullet have hit a guy one metre sixty-six tall?'
'In the leg or hip, if you're normal,' said Falcon. 'But Carlos Puerta didn't describe Sokolov as limping when he got into his car after the shooting.'
'Puerta's not reliable.'
'He could have been hit on the hand or wrist,' said Falcon.
'But would a hand or wrist injury have knocked him over?' asked Cortes.
'He might have dropped to the floor as a reflex action to the shock of the noise,' said Falcon. 'It was hot, no air-con in the apartment; El Pulmon would have been in a shirt, nowhere to pack his gun, so he hid it under the magazine. All he wanted was a bang to distract everybody in the room and make his move. Sokolov hit the deck as an evasive action.'
'But he was hit,' said Ramirez. 'A wrist or a hand shot is a better explanation of the dripping blood. Bleeding from the leg would get soaked into the trousers, the drips wouldn't be so consistent in the room or going down the stairs.'
'All the drips were on the right-hand side of the stairs going down,' said Emilio.
'OK, right hand or wrist, maybe right leg or hip,' said Ramirez. 'The next question is: who is Nikita Sokolov working for?'
'If he's a friend of Vasili Lukyanov, and we think Lukyanov was defecting from Leonid Revnik to Yuri Donstov, then…' said Falcon.
'And we haven't seen Sokolov on the Costa del Sol for a while.'
'My intelligence source told me that Yuri Donstov had set up a heroin-smuggling route from Uzbekistan to Europe and chose Seville as his centre of operations,' said Falcon. 'El Pulmon was a heroin dealer. The Narcs say
