“A number of officers have scars on their faces,” he said. “I’ll go check immediately, but I think your witness is probably wrong.”
Spaskov left again, taking his and Sasha’s mugs. He didn’t offer more coffee, but what Sasha had taken in was probably enough to tide him over, especially if he could convince Elena to give him three or four of the aspirin she carried in her bag.
Spaskov came back. In his hands was a file, which he handed to Sasha, and a notebook.
“Assignment reports are bulky,” he said, sitting. “I copied some of the schedules that might fit. You can look through the whole thing downstairs if you like. If the woman did see her assailant and he was a police officer, there were two regular afternoon patrols in that area, same officers for at least five years. Two of the officers were army veterans, joined the force after your witness was attacked. One of the officers on patrol at that time is dead, died in a car accident while off duty a little over a year ago. He can’t have committed the recent rapes, obviously. And the last unlikely suspect is retired now. No scar. He works as a guard at an electronics storage warehouse. I know him well, name is Peotor Grinsk. I can’t believe he could be your man, but here is a file photograph of him, which I would like returned.”
Spaskov handed the photograph to Elena. Sasha leaned over to look. The man in the small photograph had nearly blond hair and no scar.
“Peotor is short, stocky, and, as the data in his file shows, he has blue eyes. He is married, married young, has a granddaughter now. But you are welcome to him as a suspect. Now I must go. The men who passed you in the hall are on the way to the home of a known drug dealer. I should be there, though it will be of little use. We have one hundred ten officers in this district and more than seventy thousand citizens, about a quarter of whom seem to be involved in criminal activity of some kind.”
Sasha and Elena knew what he meant. The drug dealer would have retained one of the new specialists who might be a lawyer. The specialist would know whom to bribe and who had secrets they would not want revealed. The specialist would have information on members of the police and courts. The drug dealer would probably have connections with a mafia. He would be back in business within a week and spend no more than a night or two in the station’s lockup. Sasha and Elena both knew about lockups in Moscow. It would not be a pleasant night or two for the drug dealer, even if he found some guards he could bribe.
“If you need anything more, let me know. I want to catch this rapist. I have a wife and a young daughter. I want him. I want him alone in an interrogation room. But between us, Peotor is not your man, and your witness sounds far from reliable.”
Sasha looked at Elena as if the lieutenant’s words confirmed his opinion.
“I must leave now,” said Spaskov. “You can take the file with you and make a copy. I would like it back.”
Sasha and Elena nodded. Nothing they found in the file was very helpful or new. There was a sheet on each victim with a photograph. Some of the women were battered beyond recognition. All looked blank and confused. None had given a description, only a sense of the man’s size and a vague account of a deep voice that might have been purposely disguised.
Nonetheless, they walked the almost eight blocks in the snow to the apartment of Ludmilla Henshakayova and showed her the photograph of Officer Grinsk. The old woman barely glanced at it.
“That’s not the man,” she said. “I know the man. I’ll never forget him. I have seen him. He is a policeman. I told you.”
“Anyone could be mistaken,” said Elena gently.
Ludmilla looked at the young woman and answered, “About many things, but not about this.”
The morning was growing a bit warmer, but it was still cold and white with snow. Sasha and Elena stood in front of Ludmilla’s apartment. A trolley bus drove slowly by, its wheels crunching tire patterns in the thin layer of snow that had accumulated since the street was cleared early that morning.
“And now?” asked Sasha.
“You know,” she said.
Sasha shook his head and watched the trolley pull away down the street. They would reinterview every victim, try to discover something others had missed, try to build a profile from bits of information, most of which, like Ludmilla’s, would be flawed.
Paulinin rubbed his head. His hair was probably in dire need of washing. But Paulinin was only one odd exhibit in this lower-level laboratory of Petrovka. Iosef had heard about the man and about the place, but now that he was actually inside it, the laboratory exceeded even his more extreme imaginings. Large, yes, and amazingly cluttered. Tables filled the room, and to get around you had to walk through a maze of them and past shelves piled with oddities, most of which Iosef could neither absorb nor identify.
There were shelves of glass jars filled with animal organs, probably human. Brains and hearts were the most common. There were pans piled high in a sink. Books and scrawled notes and reports were scattered everywhere, even on the floor near Paulinin’s desk in a far rear corner of the room illuminated by about a dozen hanging lightbulbs, all covered with green metal shades that reflected downward. The room was remarkably bright. The curiosities were clearly visible: machines of various sorts; a few of them with spaces for or containing test tubes; a cardboard box of bright, untarnished tools ranging from scalpels to hammers and chisels. Iosef had almost banged into a shelf containing boxes of bones.
Before they had begun, Paulinin had offered Karpo and Iosef some tea. They both accepted and Paulinin poured the liquid from a pot on a hot plate near the sink. The tea was served in glass measuring cups. Iosef tried not to think about how well Paulinin had washed the cup or about what had been in it before the tea.
“Behold,” Paulinin said, looking down at the package Karpo and Iosef had retrieved from the mail room. The scientist smiled. “We are dealing with a brilliant technologist. Not a genius. Not as smart as I am, but brilliant, a worthy criminal for a change.”
“And what makes you say that?” asked Iosef.
Paulinin looked at Iosef as if he were first noticing the young man.
“You are Rostnikov’s son,” he said. “I heard you had joined the chaos of mingled purposes teeming over my head, the investigators bumping into one another, contaminating evidence, going to one of those incompetent so- called pathologists with their bodies. Emil Karpo and your father are the only ones who know what they are doing, and sometimes I am not so sure about Rostnikov.”
“The package,” Iosef said.
“He will learn,” said Karpo to Paulinin after drinking some tea.
Iosef drank some tea. It was not nearly as offensive as he had expected. Perhaps it did not contain the essence of some specimen after all.
“No X rays were possible,” said Paulinin. “Can you imagine someone going through the trouble of lining the package with a thin layer of lead, the thickness of a sheet of paper, to prevent X rays? I weighed it to the gram. I smelled it. I calculated contents by density and composition. I did this by inserting a small tube and hypodermic needle into the bottom of the package between the two layers of lead. The tip of the needle just penetrated the envelope. It was a slight risk. I did it inside the bomb squad’s iron tub.”
Iosef was about to ask what the scientist had discovered, but he saw the warning look on Karpo’s pale face and said nothing.
“I was right,” said Paulinin. “There is a one-inch-thick block of birch in the package. It is simply wood- nothing attached to it, nothing inside. There are three sheets of paper. And there is a mechanism made of aluminum attached to a claylike substance.”
“A bomb,” Iosef said before he could stop himself.
Instead of being irritated, Paulinin looked extremely pleased as he turned to the young man.
“No,” said Paulinin. “He anticipated the possibility that someone as capable as I might inspect the package. I inserted a fiber-optic probe through the hole I had made with the hypodermic. I probed gently till I saw enough to convince me. It is a fake bomb. The clay is clay. The mechanism is little more than a flimsy mousetrap device set to click when the package is opened.”
“A joke?” asked Iosef.
“A challenge,” said Paulinin with satisfaction.
Karpo wondered where the scientist had obtained the use of expensive fiber-optic instruments to conduct his probe. The logical conclusion, since Paulinin was almost unfunded, was that he had snuck into a laboratory
