FINDING KATARINA M.

by Elisabeth Elo

  I felt frozen in place, shot through with little needles of emotional pain. I’d always known that my mother thought I worked too hard, but she usually wasn’t so blunt. And it hurt that she assumed I worked only for success. That wasn’t my motivation at all, at least not entirely.

  “Now’s the time to stop and look around,” she went on, the pent-up words tumbling out. “Ask yourself what kind of life you really want. I swear, if you don’t adjust your course soon, while there’s still time, you’ll never be truly happy. Not happy the way you deserve to be.”

  “While there’s still time?” I repeated accusingly. I knew full well what she was referring to, but I wanted to make her say it directly, instead of packing it into a sly little clause.

  “While there’s still time to start a family,” she said baldly, looking me in the eye.

  “I’m not even married,” I said, trying to diffuse the tension with a droll tone.

  “You don’t need to be, not anymore. One of my friends said her daughter ordered sperm from a catalog.”

  “Mom, stop!”

  A few moments of charged silence passed. I could tell she wanted to go on, now that the third-rail subject of my childlessness had been broached, but she held back and eventually managed to find a soft look for me. “It all goes by so fast, sweetheart. You’ll be where I am sooner than you think. I want you to take this trip, okay? Not just because it will mean a lot to me, but because it will mean something to you, too. You’ll get away, far away—do you even remember the last time you got away?—and when you come back, you’ll have a perspective you don’t have now. You need that so you can move forward in your life. In a new way, if that’s what you decide you want. Trust me, darling. This trip will be good for both of us.”

  I felt a little betrayed, like my usually supportive mother had seen an opportunity to air a hidden grievance at last, and had kicked the door wide open, guns out and blazing. Especially galling was the way she’d managed to tie our emotional needs together in one big Siberian bow.

  “I can’t promise anything right now,” I said woodenly. “First, I need to talk to Saldana to find out if this trip is even possible, and then I have to check my schedule to see when I might be free.”

  “Call her right away, darling. Katarina Melnikova is no spring chicken, and there’s not much time left for me either, as you know.”

  That afternoon, I retreated to my couch with a glass of iced tea and my laptop, and started searching the internet for immigration lawyers who could advise Saldana. I ended up nodding off, and was jolted awake at around four o’clock when a shrill noise erupted from one of my devices. I sat straight up, like a suddenly activated robot, and swung my legs over the side of the couch. If there had been army boots on the floor, I would have slipped my feet into them and marched in whatever direction the hospital lay, through a wall if need be. I was entirely capable of issuing orders while half asleep—such were the fruits of medical training. But this time it wasn’t my pitiless beeper with breaking news of a patient in distress. It was the jangling cell phone on the coffee table.

  The caller identified himself as Detective Carl Ruggeri, New York City Police Department. His voice was thick and sweet, like sugared porridge.

  Doesn’t sound like a cop, I thought immediately, and tartly demanded proof of his identity.

  Ignoring my request, he asked if I knew a woman by the name of Saldana Tarasova.

  “Why? Is she under arrest?” I couldn’t imagine what illegal activity a girl like Saldana could possibly be involved in.

  No, that wasn’t the reason for his call. My business card had been found in Ms. Tarasova’s purse. What exactly was my connection to Ms. Tarasova?

  I admitted to being her cousin, the little-used word feeling clumsy on my lips. The fog of sleep was dispersing. Something bad had happened. I reached for the glass of iced tea on the table, changed my mind.

  “Are you the closest family member in this country?”

  “I believe so. She was visiting from Russia.”

  Detective Ruggeri regretted to inform me that Ms. Tarasova had been the victim of a homicide.

  “What?” I said, though I’d heard him perfectly well.

  He repeated it. Victim of homicide.

  I sent a stream of gibberish into the phone: No, that can’t be. I just saw her. You have the wrong person, and so on. Hastily building a wall of denial that just as hastily crumbled.

  He waited patiently for my reactions to subside before asking if I would come to New York to identify the body. Barely pausing for my answer, he gave me the address and hours of operation of the city morgue—closed Sundays, open nine a.m. to five p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. He instructed me on such particulars as which door to enter and whom to ask for. I rifled for pen and scrap paper, copied everything down in crabbed, spiky handwriting I could barely read afterward. He said I should proceed to the police department for an interview with him directly afterward, and provided his phone number, which I was asked to call shortly before my arrival there. His mellow, slow-measured tone was sickening, as it indicated how many times he’d recited the litany before.

  I ended the call feeling as if the floor had dropped from under me. Through eyes made glassy by tears, I saw Saldana sitting across from me in her yellow dress, her glossy braid falling over one perfect shoulder. There was gentle sympathy in her eyes, as if I were the injured party. I almost spoke to her. How can you possibly be dead? But the vision gently dissolved, leaving a coldness, an emptiness, in the air. An absence. A desperate wail started in my chest. I wanted her to come back.

  My next reaction was horrified guilt: I’d let her down. She’d thrown herself on my mercy, pleaded for help. She’d been alone in this country—alone and scared—barely speaking English, forced to run away from home, from a nameless threat powerful enough to rip her from her mother’s arms. And what had I done? Scolded her, kept her at arm’s length, allowed her to return to New York with nothing but a hazy, half-assed plan to make some phone calls and meet again in a week’s time. If only I’d listened with empathy instead of a legalistic mind, I might have heard her desperation, truly fathomed the dangerous and terrifying position she was in, and taken immediate action to keep her safe. If only I could do it over again.

  I’d been trained to deal with crises: the greater the stress I was under, the cooler my head became. So I didn’t give in to my feelings right away. I had to function, perform necessary tasks. I phoned my office manager at home and told her to cancel my Monday appointments. A personal day, I said, because I couldn’t explain something that I didn’t believe yet myself. Then I opened my laptop to check the Washington-New York shuttle schedule—a flight departed from Reagan every hour—and booked a 6 a.m. departure. That way, I’d beat the worst of the rush-hour traffic and be at the morgue when it opened. I marched into the bedroom and selected the clothes I’d wear the next day: a linen sheath with a light sweater and flats. I packed my large leather tote with Advil, an extra set of glasses, and my phone charger, and slipped in a few unread medical journals as well.

  Frantically, I cast about for other little jobs I might perform. I emptied the dishwasher, watered the African violet on the windowsill, put on a load of wash. And when there wasn’t one more task to do, not one more distraction to be found, I sat on the edge of my bed and wept.

  Detective Ruggeri looked like a Renaissance cherub who’d expanded gigantically, shed its wings, and sprouted facial hair. He had a large head covered in thick black curls, and oversized features with fat, curvaceous lips. Loose abdominal sagging interfered with the fit of his pants. He was seated across from me at a metal table in a drab interview room, stroking his chin with the darkly distracted air of someone whose mind was pursuing several hopeless ideas at once.

  “Shame,” he murmured, eyes at a lazy slant. “Nice Russian girl. Ballet dancer.”

  If he was worried I’d be uncooperative, he needn’t have been. I was eager to talk. I’d just come from identifying S
aldana’s body, and there was a scream in my chest that decorum prevented me from releasing.

  Saldana’s throat had been slit—an expert cut through the trachea, vocal chords, and esophagus. One perfect slice all the way back to the spinal vertebrae. There would have been searing pain followed by shock and unconsciousness. It would have been over quickly. Which was better, I supposed, for her. But not really. There was no better here.

  “She came to my office Friday evening, said we were related through a grandmother I thought was dead,” I told the detective.

  “You must have been surprised.”

  “Very much so.”

  “Any proof of the relation?”

  “She knew my grandmother’s name.”

  He raised one bushy eyebrow and held it aloft long enough for me to take its meaning. Maybe he was right: maybe Saldana Tarasova was a con artist who’d found an easy mark in conscientious Dr. March. But I didn’t believe that for a second.

  “Saldana was for real,” I said.

  He nodded reluctantly, as if willing to grant me a minor delusion or two. “Okay…so the long-lost cousin shows up out of the blue. Why? You think she just wanted to meet you after all this time?”

  “Of course not. She wanted my help to defect.”

  Somewhere in the pouchy eyes, a gleam was born. “Yeah. Now that makes sense. What’d you tell her?”

  “I said it was a bad idea.”

  “Smart. I would have said the same.” His tilted smile leaked wry amusement. “Then what’d you say?”

  “That I needed time to think about it.”

  He chuckled. “Of course you did. Young woman—all alone, scared. I probably would have said that, too.” He paused: a different idea had got hold of him. “You want a coffee?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Not a coffee drinker, huh?”

  Why is he wasting time? Sharply, I said, “I am, actually. But I just identified a young woman’s murdered body, so I’d rather skip the refreshments, if you don’t mind.”

  “Don’t mind at all,” he said, ignoring my tone. “By the way, what’d you think of the body?”

  His manner was so flippant that I felt like slapping him. Glaring, I said, “I can tell you that she was attacked from behind by someone who knew how to apply tremendous force at exactly the right place. The windpipe is not exactly easy to sever.”

  “Really? How do you know?”

  “I’m a surgeon. I cut into bodies for a living.”

  His eyebrows went up and down in a short-lived bushy flight. “Always nice to have an expert on board.” But his tone was more annoyed than grateful. Maybe he saw me as just another clueless civilian playing the game of sleuth. “Any other observations while we’re at it, Doc?” He wanted me to get my investigative aspirations out of my system fast.

  “The weapon was a wire garrote, not a knife. A knife serrates the skin; a garrote compresses it. There’s less blood flow because the vessels are squeezed shut.”

  “Interesting,” he dead-panned.

  “It would have been a silent death,” I continued. “Gurgling, maybe; some kicking. But that’s all. And over pretty fast.”

  Ruggeri leaned back, linked his hands behind his head, and stared at me a few beats too long. Skeptical, but curious. “Okay, Doc. You want to solve a puzzle? Try this one: computer and cell phone missing, passport and some cash in a drawer, purse with her wallet and your card still in it on the floor. No rape, no signs of struggle. What do you make of that?”

  “How do you know what he took?”

  “From two charging cords on the desk, both plugged in. Why did you assume it was a man?”

  “Habit, I guess. And the fact that the murderer would have needed physical strength to make that cut.”

  “Are you saying a woman couldn’t have done it?”

  “No. A woman could have done it, too,” I admitted. A dim memory started to stir but quickly settled back into the dark, untraveled recesses of my mind.

  Ruggeri grinned and brought his chair upright, leaning forward in a fluid motion until his elbows landed on the scratched surface of the metal table, and his face was only a few feet from my own. “I’ve been in this business a long time, and there’s one thing I’ve learned. One thing I can always rely on. People tell you who they are. They can’t help it. They’re telling you all the time. You just have to listen.”

  “Where is this going, Detective?”

  “What I’m saying is, I like you. You stick to the facts, you get pissed off if someone changes the subject, and you can admit a mistake. You know how rare a person like you is? These days, most people don’t care about facts. You tell them something true they don’t like, and they just argue like arguing will change it. I don’t even bother talking to people like that. With you, a conversation is possible.”

  I said, “I’m glad I passed your smell test, Detective. But so far you haven’t passed mine. How do you intend to find my cousin’s killer?”

  He laughed a little. “Right you are, Doc. Time for business. So, off the top of my head, I’d say we’re looking at an interrupted burglary. She entered the hotel room and caught the guy in the act; he panicked, strangled her, grabbed the computer and phone, and ran away without finding the cash.”

  “Would a common thief use a wire garrote?”

  Ruggeri tried to grin, but it was more of a disturbed leer. “You want to know a few of the fucked-up weapons I’ve seen used to murder people in my career?”

  “Ah…no thanks.”

  “By the way, where were you Saturday night?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m always serious,” he said with a small, incongruous smile.

  I shook my head at the stupidity of it. “I was in Washington, D.C. I went home after I left Saldana at Union Station and didn’t go out again. My doorman saw me come in.”

  He pulled a small spiral-bound notebook out of his pocket and slid it across the table to me along with a cheap plastic pen. “I need your address and the doorman’s name.”

  “I can give you his direct line if you want.” I had the number stored in my phone.

  “Even better.”

  As I jotted down the information, my fingers started to tremble like they never did in the operating room. I’d seen television shows where the wrong person was accused—surely that couldn’t happen to me. But that’s what every wrongly accused person believed at first, wasn’t it?

  “You’re wasting your time,” I said, pushing the notebook back to him.

  “Procedure,” he said smoothly as the tattered little book disappeared into his pocket. If he really was the expert he claimed to be, he’d probably noticed my involuntary swallowing and the dilation of my pupils.

  “There’s another piece to this whole thing, a pretty important one,” I said, trying to regain my footing. “My cousin came to this country against her will; her mother pushed her into it. Told her that she and Saldana’s brother would be joining her in America before too long. But Saldana didn’t believe it. She was convinced her mother was getting her out of Russia because of some trouble her brother was in.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “She didn’t know. He’d gone AWOL, apparently.”

  Ruggeri shrugged. “So what are you suggesting?”

  “Only that a burglary gone bad isn’t the only possible explanation. She felt strongly that something bad was happening at home. Maybe she was right, only whatever it was, was far worse than she imagined. Maybe someone followed her from Russia and—”

  “Assassinated her?” His eyes rolled.

  “It’s possible.” I paused. “Isn’t it?”

  “Damn those Russkies. Always with the espionage.”

  “Please stop with the stereotypes, Detective. My parents were Russian immigrants, and I’m a little too familiar with the usual slurs.”

  “Okay. I apologize. And I won’t rule out your theory. But without more information, there’s not much I can do. By th
e way, did you mention this possibility to anyone else?”

  “You’re the first.”

  “You ought to keep it that way.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a sticky situation, isn’t it?” he said, wagging his shaggy head. “Folks from the Russian Consulate will be showing up here any minute asking for a report. They’re good people—I got nothing against them personally—but they’re not what we would call transparent. No way of knowing how they’d react to your information that the victim was planning to defect, that the mom back home was behind the plot, and was planning to do the same, with the brother in tow. I sure don’t like hiding relevant facts, but it’d be a shame if the folks back home got in trouble. Lots of unanswered questions here. Know what I mean?”

  I clamped my mouth shut. I definitely didn’t want to make anything worse for Saldana’s family.

  “You ever been to Russia?” Ruggeri asked benignly, our little collusion already swept away.

  “No.”

  “Really? Never wanted to visit the homeland, and all that?”

  “My parents fled that country. I don’t have a good feeling about it. But now that I know I have family there, I may decide to visit after all.”

  “Better hurry, before Putin shuts the whole place down,” he said without noticeable concern. He glanced at his watch and gave a big sigh. “Thanks for coming all the way from D.C. on short notice, Dr. March. If I have any more questions, I’ll be in touch.”

  “Who notifies the family?”

  “When a foreign national dies on US soil, their country’s consulate takes care of that. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from contacting them as well.”

  “What about the body?”

  “We keep it for autopsy, then it goes to the consulate and they follow their procedures.”

  He stood up heavily—there was some arthritic stiffness in his joints—but I made no move to join him. It couldn’t be right to just walk away, leaving Saldana’s corpse on a slab in the morgue, awaiting the grisly hack job known as autopsy.