'Do we have Sokolov's DNA on file?' asked Juez Parrado.
'That's what I'm not sure about,' said Cortes. 'I wasn't involved in the case, but I think Sokolov and this guy who was killed on the motorway, Vasili Lukyanov, were friends and they were both being processed as a result of an assault on a local girl. Blood samples would have been taken for DNA purposes, prior to the girl dropping the charges and the men being released. I'll check with the Sex Crimes squad in Malaga to see if they've still got them.'
'That was a rape charge,' said Falcon. 'I remember Comisario Elvira mentioning it when I gave him my first report on Vasili Lukyanov's accident.'
'So Sokolov was into sexually assaulting women on that occasion?' said Ramirez.
'I think he was more interested in violence against women,' said Cortes. 'I'll check the case history and get back to you.'
'Well, that's progress on Marisa Moreno,' said Parrado. 'If we can match the DNA and find the suspects.'
'We've done some limited work on that,' said Ramirez. 'Before the incident in Las Tres Mil occurred, our two detectives, Serrano and Baena, were in Seville Este, trying to find out where one of these Russian groups are holed up.'
'Why Seville Este?'
'We believe that Vasili Lukyanov was defecting from Leonid Revnik to join a renegade gang run by Yuri Donstov. The GPS in Lukyanov's Range Rover had an address in Calle Garlopa in Seville Este.'
'Any sightings of Yuri Donstov?' asked Falcon. 'Or any Russians?'
'There are a lot of apartment blocks on Calle Garlopa and, so far, no Russians and no reports of having seen any.'
'It was probably just a meeting point,' said Cortes. 'I can't see him putting an address into his GPS. They've been more careful since Operation Wasp.'
'I have a source who tells me that Yuri Donstov could be in the Poligono San Pablo,' said Falcon.
'They don't advertise their whereabouts,' said Diaz.
'Let's move on to the two murders in Las Tres Mil,' said Parrado. 'Sub-Inspector Emilio Perez is the investigating officer, I believe.'
'I'm not in possession of a fully confirmed ballistics report yet,' said Perez, starting off in his characteristic fashion.
'But you have what we need to know, Emilio, so tell us that,' said Ramirez.
'Oh, right, Inspector. The autopsy revealed that the two dead bodies were killed by nine-millimetre rounds, which we assume were fired from the same gun, but this has not been confirmed yet.'
Ramirez tried to speed him up with quick turns of his fingers.
'The weapon found at the scene was a Beretta 84FS Cheetah. This is a.380-calibre weapon and only one round had been fired, which was found embedded in the living-room wall opposite the window. I have the plan here.'
'Keep going, Emilio,' said Ramirez.
'It is believed that this round wounded the assailant holding the nine-millimetre weapon. Preliminary findings from the autopsy reveal that the trajectory of the bullets entering Miguel Estevez, the Cuban victim, meant that the gun was fired from the floor, which encourages us to believe that the shooter has been injured. The first bullet smashed Estevez's spinal column at the sixth vertebra, the second hit his fourth rib and penetrated his heart.'
'Blood?' said Ramirez.
'Three blood samples were recovered from the apartment. One belongs to Miguel Estevez, the second to Julia Valdes, who was El Pulmon's girlfriend, and the third is unknown, but corresponds to the samples found on the floor and wall of the living room where the.380 round was found, the threshold of the door to the bedroom from where Julia Valdes was shot, the stairs up to the apartment block and the pavement outside. They're working on generating the DNA now. We have not had time to derive El Pulmon's DNA from hair and bristles found in his bathroom, but we believe that…'
'He wouldn't shoot his own girlfriend,' said Ramirez. 'What about the Beretta?'
'Ballistics say that it was fired lying flat on the table with the screw within the trigger guard. There were other screws holding the barrel in place. They think it was covered by the magazine. The recoil had sent the gun back to the window.'
'The knife?'
'The hunting knife had Estevez's fingerprints on the handle. The knife which stabbed him was not found.'
'Conclusion?'
'The first shot from the Beretta injured the shooter. Estevez tried to stab El Pulmon, who in turn stabbed him and then turned the Cuban so that he was between El Pulmon and the injured man on the floor. The shooter hit Estevez twice. Powder burns on the shirt suggest that the second shot was fired as Estevez was pushed back on to the shooter. El Pulmon escaped. The shooter then killed Julia Valdes and left the apartment himself.'
'Good,' said Ramirez. 'Any witnesses?'
'Just the one,' said Perez. 'Carlos Puerta, one of El Pulmon's clients, who the Inspector Jefe mentioned earlier.'
'Four gunshots go off in an apartment in the middle of the barrio and we have only one witness?' said Juez Parrado.
'It's Las Tres Mil,' said Perez, hopelessly. 'The only person who was prepared to say anything was the tenant above El Pulmon, who told us he'd heard the gunshots at about one p.m. When it comes to seeing people running around with blood all over them, especially when drugs are involved, then everybody is suddenly deaf and blind in Las Tres Mil.'
'So what did Carlos Puerta see?'
'He saw two men pull up in a dark blue car. He didn't notice the model or the number plate. They went into the building. One fits the description of the Cuban, Miguel Estevez, and the other this person we now know is the Russian weightlifter, Nikita Sokolov,' said Perez. 'He heard three shots. Puerta saw El Pulmon run out wearing a T-shirt covered in blood and heard a fourth gunshot. Then the weightlifter came out, got into the car and drove off.'
'And Carlos Puerta didn't report the shooting?' asked Parrado.
'He's a junkie,' said Perez, by way of explanation.
'What about El Pulmon?' asked Falcon. 'He being our most valuable witness of all.'
'I spoke to Serrano and Baena before I came here and they've come up against the same brick wall,' said Perez. 'El Pulmon was late with his product, so there would have been plenty of his clients out on the street. He'd also have been running and with Estevez's blood down his front. There must have been fifty people who saw him. Only Carlos Puerta has come forward.'
'So why was Puerta prepared to talk?' asked Parrado.
'He said he was a friend of El Pulmon,' said Falcon. 'He was very upset about the girl, Julia Valdes, getting killed. There's more to his story than he's prepared to admit, but getting it out of him is a different matter.'
'I'll go back to him later this evening or tomorrow with the Narcs,' said Perez.
'So, Puerta is unreliable, which means we have to find El Pulmon,' said Parrado.
'If I was El Pulmon, I would go to ground as far away from my regular haunts as possible,' said Ramirez.
'We do know he owned a car,' said Perez, 'but it's not in Las Tres Mil any more. Traffic are looking for it.'
'In that case he could be out of Seville by now,' said Ramirez.
'He used to be a novillero,' said Falcon. 'Find the name of his sponsor and see if he has any old friends in that community.'
'He hasn't been in the bullfight game for years,' said Perez.
'Work back, Emilio,' said Falcon. 'He's not going to go anywhere near his drug contacts. Family is equally unlikely. So it's old friends, and the ones from the bullfight game are the most likely to stick by him in his hour of need.'
'Especially if they've got gypsy blood as well,' said Ramirez.
'I'd like the DNA from the blood samples belonging to the nine-millimetre shooter,' said Cortes. 'If, as I'm hoping, we've still got Sokolov's DNA on file and we can get a match, that would put him at the crime scene in Las Tres Mil and then the girl who saw him in Calle Bustos Tavera would put him at the Marisa Moreno scene, too.'
'I'm not sure the witness we've got, who saw him and his two "comrades" in Calle Bustos Tavera, is re
liable enough for court,' said Ramirez.
'Why not?' asked Parrado.
'Saturday night – she'd been using drugs.'
'If we can put Sokolov there, it will at least inform us,' said Cortes.
'Both Marisa and El Pulmon had direct contact with Russians. We believe that Marisa had been coerced, through threats to her sister who was working for the Russians as a prostitute, to start a relationship with Esteban Calderon and fulfil certain tasks related to the 6th June bomb conspiracy,' said Falcon.
'And El Pulmon?'
'I don't think there's a connection between him and the 6th June conspiracy,' said Falcon. 'This was just business. But it looks as if Nikita Sokolov, the weightlifter, was involved in clearing up the loose end of Marisa Moreno, and he's now made a mistake in failing to kill El Pulmon. If we can find El Pulmon, we can use him to locate Nikita Sokolov, and if we can charge Sokolov with the two killings in Las Tres Mil, that will give us some leverage in the case of Marisa Moreno.'
'Matching DNA from the paper suits to unknowns on a database is going to take longer than seeing if we have a DNA sample for Sokolov and matching the samples from El Pulmon's apartment,' said Parrado. 'So let's do that first.'
'We've still got the problem of finding either of them,' said Ramirez.
'Nikita Sokolov will be very keen to find El Pulmon. He's the only credible witness we might get who'd be willing to place him in his apartment as the shooter,' said Falcon. 'I'll talk to my brother, Paco, as well. After his own accident in the ring he's always tried to help injured toreros.'
The meeting broke up while Parrado was called out for an urgent consultation on another case. Everybody turned on their mobiles, went to the windows to make calls.
Falcon called his bull-breeding brother, worked through the excuses for not having gone out to the farm for months.
'Paco, a question for you on your specialist subject,' said Falcon, hurrying things along. 'Do you remember a novillero called El Pulmon?'
'Roque Barba, you mean. El Pulmon was the name they gave him after his accident,' said Paco. 'I remember it. Got a horn in the chest. When they moved him back to Seville after his initial surgery, I went to see him. I told him if he needed any help to call me. That was three years ago. I saw him a few times in the months after he first came out of hospital. I tried to persuade him to come up to the farm to work. Then we lost touch.'
'A lot has happened since then, Paco, and not much of it good,' said Falcon. 'He became a heroin dealer in Las Tres Mil.'
'A dealer? Shit, that's bad.'
'The thing is, we need to find him.'
'This sounds like trouble.'
'He is in a lot of trouble, but not from us,' said Falcon. 'He's gone into hiding after a Russian gangster tried to kill him.'
'I've just seen something on Canal Sur about a shooting in Las Tres Mil. Two people dead,' said Paco.
'That was the incident. And now we need to find him before the Russian gangster does.'
'Well, he's not here, if that's what you're asking.'
'I want you to use your contacts to find out if he still has any friends from his novillero days. Somewhere he could hole up and get watered and fed,' said Falcon. 'That's all I want you to do. I don't want you to talk to him, Paco. That's important. I just want some ideas about where he might be, and we'll do the rest.'
'He didn't kill either of those people in his apartment, did he?'
'No,' said Falcon. 'The gangster did that.'
'What's the worst that can happen to him?'
'That the gangster finds him first.'
'And from your side?'
'We want to protect him because we want him to testify against the gangster. The worst charge against him will be possession of an illegal firearm.'
'I'll see what I can do.'
Falcon went back to the table. The others finished their calls. Parrado came back into the room. The meeting resumed.
'Anything else we should talk about now?' asked Parrado.
'I've just heard that the hair and semen deposit from the paper suits does not match any of the Russian DNA we have on our CICO database,' said Diaz.
'That was quicker than you thought,' said Parrado.
'The database is smaller than I thought,' said Diaz.
'I spoke to the Sex Crimes squad in Malaga and Nikita Sokolov was definitely Vasili Lukyanov's partner in the assault on that local girl. He beat her up and held her down, but insisted he did not have sex with her,' said Cortes. 'The good news is that they do have a sample of Nikita Sokolov's DNA.'
'Felipe in Forensics has confirmed that he'll have the DNA from the blood samples of the unknown in El Pulmon's apartment generated by eleven p.m. tonight,' said Perez.
'Good. Get that together with Cortes,' said Parrado. 'Now we know the direction we're heading in, let's find Nikita Sokolov and El Pulmon before they find each other.'
18
Santa Maria La Blanca, Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 20.15 hrs
They were sitting outside in the square in front of the church of Santa Maria La Blanca, which had just turned golden in the late evening light. Jackets were on the back of their chairs, top buttons undone, ties loosened. Beers stood in frosted glasses in front of them and a girl offloaded plates of jamon, fried anchovies, patatas bravas in a piquant tomato sauce, and some bread and olives. The talk was of Nikita Sokolov, but it was vague, amused, slightly fatigued after a working weekend and a long Monday.
'OK, so let's think about this scientifically,' said Ramirez. 'How tall do you think Sokolov is?'
'He's small – one metre sixty-six,' said Cortes. 'The closer you are to the ground, the less distance you have to lift the weights. And he's probably at least ten kilos heavier than he was in his Olympic days. I'd say closer to ninety kilos. I think a.38 is the bare minimum you'd need to knock someone like that over.'
'How high is the table in El Pulmon's apartment, Emilio?'
'Seventy-five centimetres.'
'Add two for the gun, that's seventy-seven,' said Ramirez. 'Where would a bullet have hit a guy one metre sixty-six tall?'
'In the leg or hip, if you're normal,' said Falcon. 'But Carlos Puerta didn't describe Sokolov as limping when he got into his car after the shooting.'
'Puerta's not reliable.'
'He could have been hit on the hand or wrist,' said Falcon.
'But would a hand or wrist injury have knocked him over?' asked Cortes.
'He might have dropped to the floor as a reflex action to the shock of the noise,' said Falcon. 'It was hot, no air-con in the apartment; El Pulmon would have been in a shirt, nowhere to pack his gun, so he hid it under the magazine. All he wanted was a bang to distract everybody in the room and make his move. Sokolov hit the deck as an evasive action.'
'But he was hit,' said Ramirez. 'A wrist or a hand shot is a better explanation of the dripping blood. Bleeding from the leg would get soaked into the trousers, the drips wouldn't be so consistent in the room or going down the stairs.'
'All the drips were on the right-hand side of the stairs going down,' said Emilio.
'OK, right hand or wrist, maybe right leg or hip,' said Ramirez. 'The next question is: who is Nikita Sokolov working for?'
'If he's a friend of Vasili Lukyanov, and we think Lukyanov was defecting from Leonid Revnik to Yuri Donstov, then…' said Falcon.
'And we haven't seen Sokolov on the Costa del Sol for a while.'
'My intelligence source told me that Yuri Donstov had set up a heroin-smuggling route from Uzbekistan to Europe and chose Seville as his centre of operations,' said Falcon. 'El Pulmon was a heroin dealer. The Narcs say that the heroin coming into Las Tres Mil always used to be Italian product, then things started changing. It looks to me as if Nikita Sokolov was trying to create an exclusive market for Donstov's product in Las Tres Mil and, for one reason or another, El Pulmon was not in agreement.'
They worked on the tapas for a few minutes, drank beer. Ramirez ordered more.
'CICO in Madrid think Yuri Donstov has been operating since September 2005, which is about nine months before the 6th June bombing,' said Falcon. 'I'm not sure that's long enough to develop a conspiracy of that complexity.'
'All they had to do was plant a small bomb,' said Perez.
'But a lot had to be put in place beforehand. Think about the political element: the Fuerza Andalucia party, the creation of their new leader,' said Falcon. 'I don't think a businessman like Lucrecio Arenas would have allowed anybody into the conspiracy who he hadn't been doing business with for quite some time. I always thought that he was dealing with people whose money he'd moved around the world while he was working at the Banco Omni, but maybe I'm wrong.'
'So you favour Leonid Revnik as the perpetrator?' asked Diaz. 'Except that he'd only been in place since his predecessor fled to Dubai in June 2005.'
'I suppose I do. There's no reason why Revnik and his predecessor shouldn't have been in contact with each other,' said Falcon. 'But having just learnt about Yuri Donstov, I'm beginning to think he might have found a role for himself in a new conspiracy that has its roots in the 6th June bombing. That was an attempt to gain political power in the whole of Andalucia. Now I think the sights have been lowered. Donstov seems to be shaping up to run a major criminal enterprise. The delivery of the disks by Vasili Lukyanov was a crucial element, not just in the enterprise, but in a more localized project. The disks are going to give him leverage, especially with I4IT and Horizonte, whose executives had been filmed in compromising situations.'
'What is this project?' asked Diaz.
'I don't know,' said Falcon. 'But I think this time it's not about political power but more about money.'
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