“Yeah.” Her eyes trail off. “Right, Lindsey. It was the Mercy Group, or something like that. Yeah, it was, like, maybe ten or twelve stories, something like that” She looks at me again. “Why?”
“They might want to talk to Cassie’s doctors.”
The waitress refills her coffee. Gwendolyn smiles at her. I have hardly touched mine because it’s weak, like the stuff at work.
I sit back in my chair and try to digest this. Looks like Cassie and Professor Albany had something going on. Cassie was pregnant. She must have had an abortion. Her doctors were located in that building in Sherwood Heights where Fred Ciancio transferred the week of the murders.
“You need to talk to the police,” I say.
She nods, though she’s not exactly jumping at the prospect.
“Are you staying here with Nat?”
She seems surprised by that. “I just got into town. I was planning to go back.”
“Talk to Detective McDermott” I take a business card and write his cell number on the back, as well as my own. “Don’t go far, Gwendolyn,” I tell her.
WITH A TREMBLING HAND, Natalia Lake signs the consent form and hands it back to McDermott.
“Thank you, Mrs. Lake.”
“You will let me know what comes of this, I trust.” Her eyes search his face for something. McDermott has seen that look too many times. Family members of victims, looking for the cop to tell them it will be okay, that if they close their eyes and pray their loved one will come back.
“Of course I will.” He takes her cold hand and holds it an extra beat.
When he turns for the door, she grabs his arm. He looks back at her. She looks as if she has aged during their conversation, the composed, well-groomed woman replaced with a grieving mother with memories that have returned with a vengeance.
“You think that what is happening now is because of this? Because of Cassie’s abortion? Someone is covering this up?”
McDermott offers what he can, a compromising expression and generic words of comfort. He does not know the answer. And in many ways, he doesn’t care. He is not here to solve a sixteen-year-old case.
He is here to find Leo Koslenko.
ONCE BACK INSIDE Shelly Trotter’s apartment, Leo slides the glass door closed again and wipes the sweat off his forehead. He takes a moment to catch his breath. What to do first?
He looks back into the living room, where the chain saw rests in his gym bag. Then he checks his watch.
Soon. Very soon.
42
McDERMOTT WALKS into the station at a barely controlled pace. Powers comes up to him and tells him, “The affidavits are on your desk. Albany will be here any minute.”
McDermott checks his cell phone, hears a message from Riley.
“We’re looking for Harland Bentley, too. There’s a G-lady here for you?” He gestures to McDermott’s desk. “Got a real mouth on her, that one.”
McDermott allows himself a smile. That much is true.
“Hey, Mickey.” Special Agent Jane McCoy gets out of her chair and winks at him.
“‘Mickey’?”
“Yeah, it’s my new nickname for you.”
“You got tired of ‘Shithead,’ did you? How’s business in CT?”
“Business is booming. Can we talk somewhere?”
The cops and the FBI are generally none too friendly with one another. But years ago, when McDermott was a new detective and McCoy was in Narcotics, they worked together on a large-scale bust of a west-side street gang.
Nowadays, McCoy is in counterterrorism. Since she’s the only fibbie he knows, and it’s close enough to immigration, he called her in on this.
They sit in the same conference room that McDermott has taken over as his own, filled with information on Terry Burgos. McCoy, never one to miss much, manages to take it all in without comment.
She throws a file on the desk. “This is the A-file on Leonid Koslenko. You’re not supposed to have this. Copy what you want. Give it all back.”
McDermott takes the manila folder and nods. “Thanks, Jane.”
“The guy at ICE who ran Koslenko retired ten years ago. He was kept in a general assignment pool after that.”
McDermott shakes his head. He doesn’t get the meaning.
“Meaning,” McCoy says, “since he’d been in the country for ten years without incident, there was no one in particular assigned to look at him. Sounds like maybe there’s a reason to look at him now?”
“That’s a fair statement.” He smiles at her.
“You’re talking like a fed now, Mickey. You’re scaring me.” She tucks her curly hair behind her ear and holds her stare on him a moment too long. Then she blinks it off, turning serious. “Leonid Koslenko was born in 1967 to a wealthy family in Leningrad. When he was fifteen-1982-he was sent to an institution in Lefortovo. He was released almost exactly two years later.”
“An institution? You mean an insane asylum?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “Asylum, prison-sometimes hard to tell the difference in the Soviet Union. But the records showed it was a mental illness, yes.”
“Okay. But he was released after two years?” McDermott recoils. “What, he was cured?”
McCoy is with him on that, one side of her mouth curling up. “He was diagnosed with ‘creeping paranoid schizophrenia.’”
“Which means?”
“Which means, from what I understand, absolutely nothing. Understand, back then, the Soviets locked up political dissidents, Christians, all sorts of people they didn’t want in the general populace. But they didn’t lock them up in prisons. They locked them up in loony bins.”
He winces. He used to use phrases like that, too.
“They used bullshit diagnoses like ‘creeping schizophrenia.’ They would keep them for years that way.”
That makes sense. But the difference here is that American doctors have also diagnosed Koslenko with paranoid schizophrenia. He tells McCoy so.
She shrugs. “So maybe he really did belong there. Regardless, he escaped from the Soviet Union in 1986 and applied to the United States. His parents helped him. And that was the excuse he used. He said he’d been persecuted for religious and political beliefs, and that was why he did time in Lefortovo. And, apparently, the fancy lawyers who helped him out convinced our government that he was telling the
