The Russian - SETTING

by Patterson, James

  Ott had a small set of tools in his pouch. Mostly screwdrivers and small wrenches. But he also had the sharp Gerber knife, the same one he’d used on Elaine, the one that came in handy for stripping wires and opening boxes.

  Ott was gripped by the impulse to stick the knife into this girl’s heart. He glanced around the computer room. There were a dozen people in it, but everyone was focused on their own books or screens. He wondered if they’d have enough privacy if he backed her up into the row of journals she was organizing. It would take only ten seconds. The wild card would be keeping her quiet.

  He thought about slashing her throat, like he’d done to the midwestern receptionist. But if he did that, she would definitely make some noise. And there would be a lot of blood in a much-too-public space.

  Ott managed to get hold of himself. This was not the time or the place. But there would be a time.

  Soon.

  Chapter 21

  Hollis drove me home that evening in a city-issued Crown Victoria. I was grateful for the ride. Driving when you’re as tired as I was is as bad as driving drunk. People are killed by dozing drivers every day.

  As Hollis drove, I prepped him for our morning assignment: a visit to Elaine Anastas’s parents. Police procedure dictated an in-person interview with a victim’s next of kin. It was going to be a rough one.

  I went through the door to my apartment and gave Chrissy her daily swing in the air. Said hello to the kids who were at home. Seeing their smiling faces revived me…for about three minutes. Then I sat down to watch the news, and the next thing I knew, Mary Catherine was sitting next to me.

  I started, looked at my fiancée, and said, “What are you, a ninja?”

  She laughed. “A sumo wrestler could have waddled up next to you and you wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “About forty minutes. Dinner is in another ten. I can see by the look on your face that it’s best I don’t even ask you about your day.”

  “Thanks. Nothing worth discussing. How about you? How was your day?”

  Mary Catherine frowned. The downcast expression didn’t suit her. Maybe it’s because I was used to her normally cheerful demeanor, which was arguably as classically and stereotypically Irish as her face.

  I said, “Cut through the chitchat and tell me what’s wrong.” I wasn’t sure I had the stamina to sit through a long story anyway.

  Mary Catherine said, “Aside from Jane and her constant babbling about her boyfriend, I’m still worried about Brian. He disappeared again today. Just got home a few minutes ago.”

  “You can’t expect someone recently released from prison to sit in the apartment all day. I’m sure he’s just excited for the freedom to move around.” I knew there was more to the story. I could tell by the way she hesitated.

  “Trent was looking for a library book in their room, and he found Brian’s savings account statement. He’s withdrawn a total of fifteen hundred dollars since he’s been home. I think we should talk to him about it.”

  This was a lot to come at me out of the daze of a short nap. I tried not to sigh as I considered potential outcomes. “I’d like to let it wait,” I said. “It’s important Brian knows we trust him. He’s not going to like the idea that his brother was snooping on him either.”

  Mary Catherine didn’t particularly agree with my decision. That was another aspect of her Irishness. She could not hide her emotions. Ever. From virtually anyone, and especially me.

  I decided to fill her in on a little bit of my day. I jumped right in by saying, “I saw Emily Parker today. She’s trying to help me with the homicide case.” As I waited for a response, I felt myself tense a little bit. The beauty of the Irish soul can never be underestimated. Unfortunately, it also encompasses an Irish temper. The problem was never knowing what would set it off.

  But Mary Catherine looked calm. She took a moment, brushed some hair out of her face, and said, “Emily seems like a good FBI agent. I like to see you getting help. I know you two have history, but what’s the point of marrying you if I can’t trust you?”

  This beautiful Irish girl never failed to surprise me.

  Chapter 22

  At about seven thirty the next morning, I stumbled into the kitchen, foggy from not nearly enough sleep. I mumbled “Good morning” to some of my family, grabbed my notebook, and slipped out the door.

  And there was Brett Hollis sitting in the Crown Vic, right where he’d said he would be. I was impressed.

  The second surprise was that he had stopped by Dunkin’ Donuts, and had a cup of coffee and a donut stick for me.

  Even so, I’ll admit feeling a flash of annoyance that the young detective, who had been keeping the same schedule as me, looked so fresh and ready to go. Even the bandage on his nose looked neater and more secure than before.

  I slipped into the passenger seat and nodded a greeting. “On time, ready to go, and not complaining? This already feels like it’s going to be a good day.”

  Hollis said, “Woodstock is about a hundred miles north of the city. I have a route mapped out, and I talked to one of my buddies with the state police. I know where they’re patrolling today. We’ll make it in record time.”

  I said to Hollis, “I’d like to get there and back alive. I appreciate your interest in efficiency, but I’ll make good use of the time in the car.” To his credit, Hollis didn’t try to make chitchat. He focused on the road and, even though it made me a little nervous, turned I-87 into some kind of speed trial.

  By the time we turned west off the interstate near Hurley and I looked up from my notebook, I was rewarded with a wide-angle view of upstate New York greenery. Pastures and woods were not what I grew up seeing every day, and they were lovely to look at. I gazed out the window and said, “Not much has happened in Woodstock since the music festival.”

  “What music festival?”

  I flinched. Surely my young partner couldn’t be so cut off from the cultural past as to have never heard of Woodstock. I gave him a sideways glance, then said, “Are you messing with me?”

  He smiled. “A little.”

  “So you have heard of Woodstock, right? Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin?”

  Hollis shrugged and said, “My grandma told me all about it.”

  I had to laugh at that and mumbled, “You little shit.”

  The home belonging to Elaine Anastas’s parents sat on the edge of a wide field about fifteen miles south of Woodstock. We passed the mailbox, which leaned to the southeast like the Tower of Pisa, and bumped over the dirt road toward the house. I stopped counting abandoned refrigerators after the first seven.

  The patch of grass in the front yard was covered with broken plastic toys, old tires, and a stake with a chain attached to it that I hoped was used for a dog.

  Hollis mumbled, “Elaine did well to get out of here.”

  A woman of about forty-five answered the door. She had the blotchy complexion and red eyes of a grieving mom.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said to Mrs. Anastas as she let us inside.

  Her husband, wearing the same lost expression, answered for both of them as he wandered into the main room from the kitchen. “It was too soon.”

  Talking to the parents of murder victims is probably my least favorite part of my job. Having to talk to strangers about a child recently lost to a violent crime seems unusually cruel.

  I sat with Elaine’s parents on the couch in the front room and gave them an update on the case. The couch looked like it might have been salvaged from the woods when they dropped off a refrigerator. Two dogs barked and howled from another room, but that didn’t seem to bother the Anastases.

  During the conversation, Elaine’s mother said, “We weren’t crazy about Laney moving to the city, but all she talked about was how great living there was and how she couldn’t wait to get out of school and get a job in communications.”

  I listened intently, then asked, “Mrs. Anastas, did Elaine kn
ow a lot of people in the city?”

  “She had two roommates, and she had made a lot of friends at her internship,” she said.

  “How did she meet her roommates?”

  “They were friends from college. Nice girls. One of them is in grad school, the other one interns for the Yankees.”

  The mention of the Yankees made me think of the bobbleheads I’d seen. I wondered if those had belonged to the other girl rather than Elaine.

  I nodded, then followed with the crucial question. “Did she mention anyone she didn’t get along with? A coworker, or maybe a man she met on a bad date?”

  “No, nothing like that. She would have told me.”

  I didn’t believe her. I doubted that she and Elaine discussed difficult subjects.

  I looked at the weary, grieving woman and realized that she had treated her daughter almost exactly the same way our family was treating Brian. We didn’t broach any problems with him for fear of scaring him away.

  Maybe I needed to rethink how I was dealing with my oldest son.

  Chapter 23

  Even with Brett Hollis doing his best impersonation of a NASCAR driver on our return, we weren’t back in the office until the afternoon, and I felt the loss of every working hour. We were at a point in the investigation where we were eliminating possibilities rather than chasing leads. That was never a great position to be in.

  I still hadn’t gotten any FBI information from Emily Parker about potentially similar cases around the country, though I did request and receive crime-scene photos and police reports on the two murders in San Francisco. It was a reach to think we might link these, but I was game to try.

  I looked up when I heard the booming voice of Victor Kuehne, a precinct detective who’d been in and out of our office for the last couple of weeks, working with one of our homicide detectives on a case unrelated to ours. Kuehne was known for his gregarious personality and off-color jokes. He was both loved and hated throughout the department.

  He was also known for picking on detectives. And enjoying it. I thought he was a bully. Now he turned on Hollis.

  “Hollis, man, are you hiding a nose job from us? That bandage seems like it’s been on your face a long time.”

  I opened my mouth to explain that it had been only a couple of days but decided to let Hollis speak for himself.

  He didn’t, just smiled and shook his head.

  Kuehne wasn’t deterred. “Didn’t you graduate from NYU before you hit the Police Academy? What are you doing, bucking to make chief before you’ve even gotten your hands dirty?”

  Hollis still didn’t take the bait.

  “Lay off, Kuehne,” I said. “He’s working on a real case. If you’re not careful, we’ll get you assigned to it and stick you with a thousand crank leads.”

  Bullies are rarely interested in dealing with someone who stands up to them. Kuehne was no exception. He didn’t say another word as he turned toward the desk he’d been using.

  A moment later, Hollis stepped over to my desk and sat in an empty chair. He said, “I appreciate your concern, but I can handle myself. You stepping to my defense just convinces that moron he was right about me. He already thinks I’m not tough enough to be a cop. Now he thinks I’m not even tough enough to defend myself.”

  He wasn’t wrong. All I could do was nod my head and say, “Understood.”

  What I should have said was that I’d never seen a detective make a tougher run at a fleeing suspect than Hollis had with Billy Van Fleet, but the moment had passed.

  A few minutes later, Kuehne strolled by our desks. He considered Hollis for a moment, then finally said, “So tell me, is the nose job just to cover the fact that you got a small pecker?”

  Hollis didn’t bother looking up from his report. He said in an easy tone, “Your mom didn’t mind it last night.”

  I didn’t even try to hide my grin.

  Hollis was right. Kuehne walked away, satisfied with Hollis’s proper burn.

  I glanced again at the San Francisco crime-scene photos I’d gotten in. The photos showed two messy scenes that looked eerily similar to the ones I’d been at recently here in New York. The savagely murdered victims, both slashed around the neck, face, and eyes—and the excessive amount of blood deliberately splashed around the rooms.

  I reviewed the case file of one of the victims, a thirty-year-old tech worker who had lived alone in an apartment not far from Fisherman’s Wharf. I flipped to a photo of her living room and noticed that lined up on her mantel were tiny figurines of ballerinas and musicians. Several were pushed to one side, then a gap, and then two more figurines. Interesting.

  The separation between the two groups of figurines reminded me of the similar detail at Elaine Anastas’s apartment—those bloody bobbleheads.

  Was there a connection?

  Chapter 24

  Daniel Ott realized the potential risk in stalking the young librarian who’d spoken to him in the computer room in the New York Public Library.

  He had only recently killed Elaine, the intern. Normally he’d pause between victims. But he felt pressed to eliminate a witness who might be able to identify him in the future.

  He decided achieving that goal outweighed the risk.

  Ott was surprised not to have had an instant response to the email he’d sent. It was the most daring action he’d ever taken in relation to his hobby. Although he recognized the hypocrisy between creating a meticulous crime scene and then taunting the police in private and public ways, Ott couldn’t explain why he had done it. Maybe it was because they were too stupid to understand how clever he was.

  He had already decided the librarian needed to go, so it was easy to forget the fact that he had rarely killed like this before, without preparing his crime-scene rituals and messages.

  It hadn’t been difficult to figure out which door the library staff used to exit their shifts. He got lucky in spotting the young woman after only about twenty minutes of waiting near the door.

  He followed her from the library. She seemed to be a cheerful, friendly young woman. Either that or she knew an inordinate number of people. She waved and nodded hello to dozens of people in the space of three blocks. She was wearing jeans and a plain blouse, nothing remarkable, so he had to keep her long, straight black hair constantly in sight.

  Ott found that the longer he followed the girl, the more she intrigued him. He appreciated how she stopped to help an elderly man struggling to get his walker over a curb. She stayed with the man until he entered a McDonald’s halfway down the block.

  Ott glanced around the street and didn’t see many pedestrians. A taxi whizzed by, none of the passengers paying any attention.

  All he needed was a quiet moment when no one was around. Just a quick blade through the throat or the chest and then he could walk away.

  He thought he’d found that opportunity when she stopped to make a phone call almost twenty minutes after he’d started following her from the library. From half a block away, Ott watched her pace back and forth across an alley. He felt his pulse quicken. He slipped a surgical glove over his right hand as he made his way along the sidewalk, reaching into his tool pouch to pull out the Gerber folding knife.

  He’d already decided to step up behind her and slice her throat horizontally. She would make noise and her blood would spill onto the street, but he didn’t care what kind of mess he made if they were alone. The messier the better was his usual attitude anyway. He imagined she would just crawl into the alley and thrash around until she was dead. With luck, no one would even notice her body for a while.

  He came close enough to hear her voice as she talked on the phone. The same voice she had used to reprimand him. He was almost sorry there wouldn’t be time for one of his dedicated rituals.

  He zeroed in on her. The librarian was facing away from him, chatting away and not paying any attention to her surroundings. Perfect.

  Just as he stepped into the alley, he heard more voices. Three men dressed in white we
re sitting on folding chairs behind a restaurant’s back exit. They were cooks, laughing and talking on a break.

  All three men glanced up at him. He closed the knife and slipped it back into his pouch. Ott tried to alter his course and casually stepped back onto the sidewalk. He walked quickly out of their sight before he paused for a moment and took a breath.

  About thirty seconds later, the young librarian strolled past him without paying any attention at all.

  He had missed his best opportunity.

  Chapter 25

  Daniel Ott followed the young librarian another block until she turned and stepped into a Subway sandwich shop. The chain was the gold standard for people in a hurry or students without much money. Basic nutrition without a lot of flavor. It wasn’t the flashiest business plan, but they seemed to be doing okay.

  Ott was a little confused about what to do next. After feeling his excitement rise when he thought he could reach the librarian in the alley, he had calmed down.

  He stopped at the door and held it open for an elderly Indian woman. The hunched woman walked in a shuffling gait. She looked up and smiled a thank-you. He nodded and helped her inside.

  Ott merged into the line, putting a couple of people between him and the librarian. He glanced up at a TV bolted to the wall, where his murders led a quick newsbreak.

  He wasn’t the only one paying attention to the screen. Virtually everyone in line, including the hunched-over Indian woman, looked up at the newscaster. Ott waited to hear if his latest taunt had been discovered. There was coverage of Elaine Anastas’s recent murder but nothing about his messages—neither the ones he’d left at the scenes nor the one he’d sent via email.

  The snobby intern was garnering more attention dead than she had in her entire life. That made Ott smile. He wasn’t sure what emotion it was he now felt bubbling up inside him. Then he realized: it was a sense of power. Every woman who saw that newscast was afraid of him.