Vanishing Act

by Linsey Lanier

  “I have not been able to identify him yet.”

  “What about approximate age?” Miranda asked.

  “He wasn’t elderly. That is as close as I can get right now.”

  She pressed further. “Do you think he could have been around thirty-two?”

  The doctor appeared a bit insulted. “As I said, I cannot tell yet. But I will keep trying. That is all I have to report. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must continue my examination of your victim.”

  Gurka gave the doctor’s arm a soothing pat. “Thank you, Doctor. Your information is very helpful.” He turned and led his guests out of the building.

  As they made their way through the hall and back to Gurka’s Prius, Miranda’s heart sank with a new wave of hopelessness.

  Was that Sasha lying back there?

  Gurka started the car and exited the lot. Her mind began to fill with doubt.

  What if the doctor couldn’t determine anything more about the man from the river? What if they could never identify him? Sasha’s family would be exactly where they were. They would never have the closure they needed.

  She wanted to kick something. “What do we do now?”

  “I think the electronics might be dry enough,” Parker said a strange kind of calmness in his voice.

  Gurka made a turn onto a main street. “Let’s go back to the station and see if you can get them to work.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Twenty minutes later they were back in the guest chairs in Gurka’s office.

  The rubbing alcohol had done the trick and all the components were now bone dry. Miranda had just finished assembling the cell phone, but that was as far as she could get.

  She sat back and growled, staring at the thing in her hand. “Of course, after two or three months it doesn’t have charge. No way we can even turn it on.”

  Gurka held out a thick hand. “Let me see it.”

  She handed the cell to him.

  He studied it a moment. “I believe our lab may have a charging cord for this model.”

  “It might be wise to change the battery as well,” Parker said.

  Gurka nodded. “I’ll check on that in a moment. First I want to see what is on that flash drive.”

  Parker held the small silver stick in the palm of his hand. “I’ve done the best I can with it. But I’d be careful about inserting it into a machine, since we have no idea what’s on it.”

  He was referring to viruses, some malicious code that could do untold damage if it made its way into the police system.

  Gurka reached under his desk for a second laptop to the one already on it. “I have a spare machine. It is not connected to any network.”

  The Inspector was full of surprises. “A standalone, then.”

  “Yes.” He turned it on and after a moment, it came to life. “Are we game?”

  Miranda raised her palms. “We won’t get anywhere just staring at it.”

  “Good point, Ms. Steele.” Gurka took the drive from Parker’s hand and inserted it into the computer’s USB port.

  The three of them held their breath as an anti-virus program scanned the drive and told them it was okay.

  “We have passed the first hurdle,” Gurka said. He seemed to be enjoying this.

  Miranda glanced at Parker and shifted her weight, bracing herself.

  “What do we have there, Inspector?” Parker said.

  Gurka clicked around and opened the folder of the drive. His face fell. “There is only one file.”

  Miranda got up and leaned over to read the screen. It was in Cyrillic.

  Gurka let out a cynical laugh. “The name of the file is Names.”

  “Do we dare open it?” Parker challenged.

  “That is why we are here.” Taking a deep breath, Gurka double-clicked the file.

  A grid of rows and columns appeared. It was a spreadsheet. With three long columns filled with Cyrillic letters.

  Miranda let out a groan and sank back into her chair.

  Gurka scowled at the screen. “The filename was correct. These are names.”

  “Names of whom?” Parker wanted to know.

  Gurka rubbed his chin. “A very good question, Mr. Parker.”

  That was all they needed. Another lead that led nowhere, dashing their hopes to pieces once again. Maybe Parker was right about giving up and going home.

  A knock on the door jolted Miranda out of her miserable thoughts.

  “Come in,” Gurka called out still staring at the screen.

  Miranda turned around in time to see the blond-haired technician from the crime scene enter the office with a folder in his hand. “Sorry to disturb you, sir.”

  “No problem, Anton. What is it?”

  “I thought you would want to see this right away.” He shuffled to the desk and laid the folder in front of Gurka. He opened the folder, removed a plastic bag, and dangled it in the air.

  Gurka scowled. “What is that?”

  “We have been working to restore the things found in the satchel from the unidentified body from this morning, sir.”

  Gurka took the bag and scrutinized its contents. “A business card.”

  “Maybe not any business card.” Miranda dug in her pocket and pulled out the card Sergei had given her last night. She held it next to the bag.

  The card in the bag was frayed and faded, but a faint partial image of an MMA fight cage was on the right side of it. It matched the logo on Miranda’s card.

  “The deceased had a business card from Udar,” Parker said.

  Miranda’s heart beat faster as she imagined one of the men who’d attacked them last night putting a bullet in Sasha near the river.

  “And there’s more.” Anton pulled out several papers from the folder.

  Looking surprised, Gurka eyed the papers. “You ID’d the body?”

  Anton grinned. “Yes, sir. We managed to get the number off the passport and ran it through the system. This is his personal data.”

  Miranda sucked in her breath and glanced at Parker. While Gurka studied the papers more carefully they both waited.

  At last the Inspector spoke. “His name is Vladislav Stefanyk Zelenko.”

  Miranda sank back in her chair, feeling as if she’d been slapped in the face. “Vladislav? Not Sasha Pavlovych?”

  “No. I am sorry.”

  She felt Parker reach for her hand. She held onto it to steady herself.

  “The victim was twenty-four years old. He had an apartment in Troieshchyna.”

  “Troiesh—?” She couldn’t pronounce the rest of it.

  “It is a large neighborhood east of the city,” Gurka explained. “There is no public transportation to the west side where most jobs are, so rent is cheap there.”

  She nodded, looked at Parker. His expression was unreadable, but she knew he was disappointed. And that he was thinking about that deal they’d made this morning.

  He’d won.

  “Thank you, Anton.” Gurka picked up the cell phone. “See if you can find a battery and a charger for this.”

  “Yes, sir.” Anton took the cell and left the room.

  Miranda sat in stunned silence, still holding onto Parker’s hand.

  “Troieshchyna is about thirteen kilometers away,” Gurka said briskly, glancing at the time on his laptop. “Traffic will not be bad right now. We should get there in about twenty minutes.”

  He got to his feet.

  Miranda blinked up at the man. He wasn’t going to let them go, was he? But they didn’t have to stick around. This case wasn’t theirs any longer. They could take the metro back to the hotel. If they could figure out the signs.

  Gurka grimaced at her hesitation. “Do you mind accompanying me, Ms. Steele? We may find out something about this vile place.” He picked up the plastic bag with the Udar business card, shook it, then put it back into the folder.

  “We should follow through,” Parker said quietly.

  Miranda turned to stare at him. He wasn’t any more
pleased with the lack of progress in finding Sasha, but his sense of justice was kicking in. Whether he had changed his mind about going home, or he just didn’t want to leave any stone unturned, she couldn’t tell.

  But Gurka had a point.

  Just because that body the police had pulled out of the river wasn’t Sasha didn’t mean they weren’t close to finding him. And if the twenty-four-year-old named Vladislav who had been shot in the chest had anything to do with Udar, they might be closer to finding Sasha than they realized.

  She rose. “All right, Inspector. We’ll go with you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As Gurka promised, traffic was light. Still the ride seemed to take forever.

  As they drove across a bridge to the north, Miranda stared out at the wide expanse of the icy Dnieper and thought about being trapped under there for months. Of course, you wouldn’t feel the cold if you were dead, but the thought still made her shudder.

  They reached the left bank, and for a while the multi-lane highway held few attractions other than billboards and gas stations. And then they entered an area where all they could see for miles were twenty-story apartment buildings, one after another after another. A homogeneous forest of concrete. Some structures old-looking, others newer.

  “There are almost a quarter million residents in this area,” Gurka told them. “But it includes a small industrial section. The people who work there do not have to commute across the river. But I am not sure they consider themselves the lucky ones. The hours can be grueling.”

  They rolled under a bridge and did a loop around past a low side wall covered with graffiti.

  “Is this a bad area?” Miranda asked.

  “It has its problems.”

  Nice to know.

  After another kilometer, they went through a roundabout where a shabby looking blue building stood along the street behind barren trees.

  “Is that our destination?”

  “That is a Soviet-era apartment complex. They are mixed in with the modern buildings. No, that is not the address I have.”

  Okay. Maybe it was the unfamiliarity of the place, but it seemed to take forever to get anywhere in Kiev.

  They went on for another ten minutes with no change in scenery. Finally Gurka took a side street, and pulled into a small lot between two older looking high rises.

  He turned off the car and got out.

  “Are we going to hunt down the apartment manager?” Miranda asked as Gurka opened the door for her.

  “Let us see what we can discover first.”

  She liked that idea, but as she caught sight of Parker scanning the area in stoic silence, she realized he wasn’t thrilled with this side excursion.

  They made their way inside the building to an apartment on the fourteenth floor.

  Gurka banged on the door. “Politsiya!”

  He sounded like a Soviet army general.

  He barked out something else that Miranda took to be something like, “Open up.” But she didn’t expect an answer.

  If poor Vladislav hadn’t paid his rent in two or three months, the place was probably vacant. They’d need to get the manager to look around, after all.

  Gurka was about to pound again when the door opened a crack and a slice of a pretty blue-eyed face appeared. She jabbered something to Gurka, sounding very frightened.

  “English, please. I have Americans with me.”

  “Americans?” She might as well as have said “Martians?”

  Opening the door a little wider, she stood on tiptoe trying to see around Gurka’s frame.

  He ignored her question. “May we come in? This is about a murder investigation.”

  “Oh, no. No.” She sounded as if she knew what he was talking about. She moved backward away from the door, leaving it open.

  Gurka gave them a nod and they entered a small living room.

  Done in a bland muted brown-and-beige style, everything looked neat, tidy, and very generic. An IKEA type study desk sat in the far corner next to a comfortable looking rollback sofa. A few pencil drawings of flowers hung on the walls.

  The woman stood in the middle of the room, pressing a hand against her head, her silhouette framed by the light from a floor-to-ceiling window at the other end.

  She had short dark hair and was dressed in gray sweatpants, a matching fleece jacket, and trainers, as if she were about to go for a run.

  She turned and stared at Gurka with a hollow look in her large brown eyes. “You have come to tell me he is dead, haven’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “Vlad, of course. Is he? Is he dead?”

  “Do you speak of Vladislav Stefanyk Zelenko?”

  She nodded.

  Solemnly Gurka put his hands behind his back in an official stance. “Then, yes. I am sorry to inform you his body was found this morning.”

  She broke into tears and sank onto the couch.

  Her heart going out to the woman, Miranda hurried across the room and sat down beside her. “We are so sorry for you loss.”

  The woman couldn’t answer. All she could do was reach for Miranda’s hand and hang onto it as she sobbed.

  Parker came to the woman’s side and spoke in his most soothing voice. “We apologize for breaking the news so suddenly, Ms.—”

  Wiping her cheeks, she closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe. “My name is Olga. Olga Nikolaevna. I am Vlad’s fiancée. Or I was.” She stared down at the dull brown carpet.

  “Ms. Nikolaevna, if you could possibly bring yourself to answer some questions, it would help us immensely.”

  Parker was smooth, but Miranda knew he felt for this poor woman. Gurka on the other hand, couldn’t help staring at Parker. He was obviously amazed at how easily the man could get information out of people.

  Olga wiped her cheeks with her hands and sat forward. “Of course, I will help. Please sit down. Would you like some tea? Coffee? I have some cake in the kitchen.”

  Even grief couldn’t suppress the Ukrainian impulse to feed guests.

  “Please do not bother,” Gurka said taking a seat in an armchair across from them. He took out a pad and pen. “Tell me about your relationship with Vladislav Zelenko.”

  “My relationship?”

  “How did you meet?”

  She took a few deep breaths. “We met in college and started dating. We fell in love. I knew he was right for me immediately, but Vlad wasn’t as sure. We both graduated last year and decided to move in together here. I got a job as a radiologist at Medicom.”

  “Medicom?” Miranda asked.

  “It is a medical clinic on the west bank,” Gurka explained.

  Olga’s gaze wandered back to the floor. She was still in shock.

  “And what did Vlad do?” Parker prompted softly.

  Olga blinked and stared at Parker as if she were coming out of a dream. “Oh. He was a computer technician. He found a good job with a software company after school, but then…” her voice trailed off.

  Gurka looked as if he was about to press her, but Parker raised a hand, signaling for him to wait.

  After a moment, Olga continued on her own. “One day he met a man at a café. The man told Vlad his company was looking for sharp technical people for a special assignment. He said there could be big potential for Vlad to earn a lot of money.”

  Miranda tensed. Sounded like what the men in suits told those homeless kids. And what the people at Udar told Gurka’s nephew. “Did the man offer him a job?”

  Olga nodded. “When Vlad told me about it, I thought it sounded—how do you say? Too good to be true. I told him he should think more about it, but Vlad was so excited. He did not listen. He quit his job at the software company and went to work for the man.”

  Gurka wrote the information down on his notepad. “When did Vladislav start working for this new company?”

  “About a year ago. At first it was simply servicing the staff’s computers. Nothing that would lead to great wealth. Vlad was disappointed. I
told him he had been duped, and he should try to go back to the software company.”

  “And did he?” Miranda asked.

  Olga shook her head. “About six months after he started, they asked him to do a special project. It required long hours at night, and Vlad was very irritable while he was working on it. We argued and he wouldn’t tell me anything about it. But the money did start to come. Suddenly Vlad could afford all sorts of things. He bought me expensive jewelry. Then he bought me a new car, and himself a motorcycle.”

  Miranda wondered if that had ended up in the river.

  Olga paused to stare out the window, reliving the past in her mind.

  Parker gently touched her hand to bring her back to the present. “Did Vlad ever tell you what the project was?”

  “He finally did. We had a bad fight. I told him if he did not trust me, we should not get married. That was when he told me they were using his technical skills to alter passports. The biometric kind.”

  Miranda frowned at Parker. “What do you mean by alter?”

  “He would change the data on the chip. Change the photograph, the fingerprints, and other personal information.”

  Miranda’s stomach tightened. “Identity theft.”

  “It sounded like it to me.”

  “Something must have gone wrong.”

  Olga dug her palm into her forehead. “It was all my fault. I told Vlad what he was doing was wrong. I told him it was illegal and he could go to jail. He knew that, but he was afraid not to do what they told him. He was afraid they would hurt him.”

  They had hurt him.

  After another deep breath, Olga told them the rest of it. “It was this past November. The Friday after Dignity and Freedom Day. Vlad woke up and was so excited. He told me he had found a way out of his trap. He said there was incriminating information a woman kept in her office. That night when everyone was gone, he was going to take the information and go to the police with it. I remember he kissed me and went out the door to work smiling.”

  “And?”

  She made a helpless gesture in the air with her hands. “And he did not come back. That was the last time I saw him.”

  Silence filled the little room.

  “I wanted to go to the police. I picked up the phone several times. But I was too afraid. What if these people found out what Vlad had told me and came after me? And then I hoped I was wrong. That Vlad had changed his mind and decided to leave me instead. I kept hoping one day he would walk through the door to get his things.”