by Frank Zafiro
Her words touched him in a way no other person could. Now that she was widowed, Marina was his. It would only be a short matter of time before he would move into this house with her and Pavel. She would be his woman, his companion. He would take care of her, love her, cherish her, and she would do the same for him. He would keep Natalia or some other suka on the side for certain needs, but in all other ways he would be loyal to his sister. His Marina.
Val smiled.
TWELVE
1123 hours
Renee sat in her office, reading through the first reports on the Battaglia homicide. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a Seattle Mariners T-shirt with the number eleven and her favorite ballplayer’s name on the back. Behind her, the coffeemaker gurgled and hissed.
She’d seen the light on in the chief’s office. The parking stalls belonging to several of the top brass, usually empty from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, were all full. It didn’t take a fortuneteller to know they’d be having a high level meeting today, given last night’s events. And it was just as sure that she’d be getting a call at home anyway, so it made more sense to come in on her own and get her ducks in a row.
She’d identified the guy with the shotgun almost immediately as the same Russian that Katie MacLeod had fought over a week ago during a domestic violence call. Ivan Cherny was his name. He had a local arrest history, and a triple-I check came back with several arrests in Seattle before he emigrated east to River City. She had a request in with Interpol, but that’d take several weeks to come back. Maybe she could get the chief to call and explain that they were investigating a slain officer. That might speed things up a bit, but she didn’t see the point. Cherny was a thug. He was muscle.
Sergey Markov was another matter.
As near as she could tell, he didn’t have any convictions in River City. Or even arrests. Or either one anywhere in Washington or the United States. She wondered what Interpol would have to say about him. If he had any arrests, they were probably a long time removed.
Markov owned nothing. His car and home were registered to his wife, Marina. He’d filed a tax return the previous year as a business consultant with very modest earnings, but enough to support the home and the car, barely.
And yet, when she’d asked Detective Tower about Markov’s clothing and jewelry, he told her that the dead man was wearing custom cut designer clothes. He had at least twenty thousand dollars worth of gold and diamonds in the necklaces and rings he wore. Plus, he’d been found dead in a white Mercedes that cost more than he supposedly made in a year.
Sergey Markov was a boss. She was sure of it. Proving it would be another matter.
Renee sighed. The last gasping sounds of her coffeemaker filled the room.
“Good,” she said. “I’m going to need the help.”
And then her phone rang.
1207 hours
The chief of police sat behind his large mahogany desk. His usually spartan desktop was scattered with piles of papers, which annoyed him. He went to great lengths to make his life orderly, and this mess was anything but.
Captain Reott and Lieutenant Crawford sat in front of him. Renee, the crime analyst who had proven to know her business better than some of his commanders, sat off to the side. He was secretly delighted to find her already at work on a Saturday when his secretary called her to come to this meeting.
He contemplated for a few moments. “What do we know that we didn’t know three hours ago?” he asked, looking at Captain Reott first.
“Not much,” the patrol captain answered. “We’ve still got troops on the perimeter to assist Homicide in the investigation, but our part as anything other than supporting the dicks is largely finished.”
“And you’ve notified the widow?”
Reott winced slightly at the description. “Yes. The chaplain and I were out there a little after 0100 hours.”
“She understood why it was you and not me?”
Reott nodded. “She’s a cop’s wife. She understood.”
The chief pursed his lips, thinking. It bothered him not to have been the one to tell Mrs. Battaglia that her husband had died in the line of duty. But he’d been in the early stages of a major crime investigation. It had been what he and his fellow military officers used to call a shooting war. And you didn’t stop to notify widows and orphans while the bullets were still flying.
He turned his attention to Lieutenant Crawford.
“We’ve got CFSU up at both scenes, processing the evidence,” he said. “I have lead detectives at both scenes, along with two support investigators at each scene. They have almost completed the canvassing at the hotel. Finch and Elias just finished debriefing Agent Leeb, the FBI agent from the hotel, about an hour ago.”
“That’s what you’re doing. What do we know?”
Crawford didn’t miss a beat. “Leeb couldn’t positively identify the dead scumbags over at the warehouse, but he said the car was the same one that left the hotel. Since Chisolm jumped on the Mercedes just as it was leaving the hotel, that gives us a good connection. More importantly, the two shooters at the hotel were armed with a shotgun and a large caliber handgun. The two dead mopes at the warehouse had a shotgun and a .44 Magnum.”
“But two got away?”
Crawford nodded. “That’s what Chisolm says. Two men. One of them fired at him inside the warehouse. We found 9 mm casings, so whoever fired was probably not the guy who shot Battaglia through the door. The cop killer was dead in the back seat of the Mercedes.”
“Chisolm shot them both?”
Crawford shrugged. “Hard to tell until the ballistics come back. Chisolm said he never saw the guy in the back seat until he came back out of the warehouse. Agent Leeb fired rounds into the Mercedes as it was leaving the hotel, so it could’ve been him.”
“The FBI agent shoots a 9?”
“Yeah. And Chisolm carries a .40, so we might be able to tell, if we recover any part of the bullet. Also, Tower might be able to tell us something from the blood patterns in the back seat.”
“Like what?”
Crawford shrugged again. “If he took a round at the hotel versus at the warehouse, you might see different smears and patterns. I guess it’s hard to make heads or tails out of sometimes. It’s like fucking voodoo, you ask me, but they say it’s scientific.”
“What’s next?” the chief asked.
“Well, the autopsy is tomorrow.”
“Already? That seems quick.”
“It is,” Crawford said. “But the wife requested that we expedite matters. She wants to bury him Monday.”
The chief nodded. “What else, then?”
“Forensics, mostly. But I don’t know that we’re going to get anything from the scene that will help us much. We may piece together the order of events a little better or confirm that our two dead assholes were in the hotel room, but I don’t know that we’ll get much more than that.” Crawford frowned. “Essentially, this is a solved case.”
“Solved?” The chief looked at him, astounded. “Lieutenant, two men got away!”
“I know,” Crawford said, unfazed. “The driver and the lookout. And I say we rattle every Soviet tree in River City and club the shit out of every Russian that falls out until we find them. But it looks like we already have the shooters. And that’s the core of the case.”
The chief sat and contemplated for a moment. He’d never been a cop nor an investigator, a fact he reminded himself of whenever he thought he might know better than someone who was both. Still, Crawford’s attitude irked him, even if the man was right.
He turned to Renee. “What do we know about these two dead suspects?”
Renee held a stack of paperwork in her hand, but she spoke without referencing it. “The one with the shotgun is Ivan Cherny. He appears to be criminal muscle, based on his arrest record. Most recently, he spent a couple nights in jail after assaulting his wife and then fighting with Officer MacLeod.”
“This is the guy who bro
ke the officer’s leg?”
“Ankle,” Renee corrected. “Yes.”
“And he’s out two days later?”
“Welcome to our criminal justice system,” Crawford interjected. “We bust ’em, the judges let them bail out if they promise to do their homework, feed the dog, and not stay up too late.”
The chief scowled. He knew that jail was largely catch and release, but for assaulting an officer? He shook his head in disgust, then waved for Renee to continue.
“The man in the back seat was different,” she told him. “His name was Sergey Markov.”
The chief squinted at her. The name sounded familiar to him. “Wasn’t that one of the Russians the FBI was looking at?”
Renee nodded. “He was the suspected head, according to the FBI database that I had temporary access to.”
“Do they still think so?”
“I don’t know. When I came in this morning, my access had been revoked.”
“Revoked?”
She nodded.
“At oh-dark-thirty in the morning on a Saturday?”
She nodded again.
That little prick, the chief fumed. The one time having some FBI help might be worth the aggravation of dealing with people like Payne and they revoked her access?
“That sounds like something Payne would do,” Crawford said. “He was at the warehouse crime scene earlier, yelling at Chisolm for screwing up a federal investigation. He even threatened federal charges.”
The chief waved away the comment. He’d take care of Payne later. There was a newspaper reporter in DC who could whisper in the right ears for him, and the guy still owed him a favor from his days at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. And his old division commander worked at the Pentagon now, too. Payne would get his. Right now, though, the chief had some decisions to make.
“What do you think, Renee?” he asked. “Was Sergey the boss?”
She nodded. “Based on everything I could see, yes.”
“So why the hell is he doing the shooting?”
Renee paused for a moment. Then she said, “Well, sir, the witness they killed, Oleg Tretiak, was pretty much a traitor in their eyes. And being the bookkeeper for the operation, he was in a position to do a lot of damage. Eliminating him was obviously a top priority. And if the boss is the one who pulls the trigger and everyone in the organization knows it…”
The chief nodded. “Got it. Lead from the front.”
“Exactly,” Renee answered. “And send a message to the Russian community that you don’t turn state’s witness.”
“And that the boss is one mean son of a bitch,” Crawford added.
The chief considered. “A risky thing to do,” he said, “but I guess Sergey Markov believed the Romans were right.”
“Romans, sir?”
He met Renee’s questioning gaze. “Kill one, terrify a thousand.”
She nodded.
The chief sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, his mind clicking through information. He thought through several actions, anticipating the different dominos that would fall as a result. He considered the political angle, the community reaction, and the morale of the police officers.
Finally he leaned forward again.
“Here’s what we’re going to do.” He pointed at Reott. “I want your patrol officers to work the neighborhoods where the Russians congregate. If anyone so much as spits on the sidewalk or tosses a cigarette butt, arrest them.”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned to Crawford. “Work every single case with a Russian suspect that comes into the investigative office. I don’t care if it’s a felony or not. Hammer anybody with a last name that ends in ‘-ov.’ See if you can get any of them to give up information on this shooting. If someone is willing, you can deal away any charges you need to except for serious crimes against persons.”
He looked at the collected group. “We are going to, as the lieutenant put it, shake a tree and club whatever falls out. But”—he raised a finger—“we do so carefully. We are looking for information, not vengeance. And understand this—we are only going to be able to apply this pressure for so long. After a while, the ACLU will raise a hue and cry. Then the feds will start looking at us. Those idiots probably already think we screwed up their case instead of them getting one of our officers killed. Even so, the last thing I want to deal with is the Department of Justice slapping a consent decree on our agency. Understood?”
Captain Reott and Lieutenant Crawford nodded.
The chief took a deep breath and let it out. “Then that is all, gentlemen.” He glanced at Renee and realized he had just excluded her. “And thank you, Renee.”
Renee gave him a tight smile. “You’re welcome, Chief.”
He watched the three of them file out of his office. Reott closed the door behind them. The chief leaned back in his chair and walked through the dominos that would fall now that he’d issued his orders.
He knew that the troops would rejoice at his orders and carry them out with vigor. He’d get a large boost of respect from them as a result. They’d remember how he turned them loose after their brother officer was killed. Sergeants would allow vehicle pursuits to continue a little longer if there was a Russian behind the wheel of the fleeing vehicle. Any call involving a Russian suspect would get answered. Some officers might find their pound of flesh, if any of the suspects were foolish enough to resist arrest or fight outright. He knew all of that as surely as he knew his own name.
Then, once the furor over the slain officer died down, the pendulum would swing. Activists and liberals would start decrying the “genocide” being perpetrated against the Russian immigrants. Cries of ethnic profiling—an accusation that was one step away from ethnic cleansing on the more radical agendas—would start to drown out the cries of cop-killer. It was sad, but he knew it was the way things would go.
He’d have to walk the fine line, reining in the troops before things got out of hand. He’d seen the riots in different cities throughout the years and there was one thing he knew for certain—any time that happened, the chief of police was the first to go. So he’d have to be careful and know when to throw on the brakes.
But in the meantime, he was going to kick some Commie ass. If only for a little while.
THIRTEEN
Monday, July 21st
1007 hours
Val sat in his coffee shop, sipping a Turkish coffee. The harsh black brew helped wake him up, but he didn’t need it to clear his mind. Everything that he’d hoped and planned for was happening. It didn’t go exactly as he’d laid it out, but that mattered little.
Sergey was gone. Now he was the boss.
At least the police were cooperating. Already he could see the emphasis that they were putting on his people. Last night they had raided Marina’s home—soon he would call it his home—and searched the entire place. For what, Val had no clue. They had Sergey, the one they thought murdered the police officer, didn’t they? Hadn’t they found him in the Mercedes, the murder weapon still clutched in his hand?
Of course, Val’s prints weren’t on the gun. Only Sergey’s. That would stop them from looking too far into this case. Their solution was gift-wrapped with a bow. The police had their killer. And Sergey would become the legend he wanted to be.
Even the way the police were lowering the hammer on all Russians played into his hands. With so much happening, he would be just one more foreign name in a crowd. It would only serve to unify the Russian community against the police. People would be even less likely to inform against him or any of his crew. In fact, most would turn to him and support him, just as they had when the Soviet government and the KGB oppressed the people in Kiev. The harder the police pushed, the stronger Val would become.
Everything had worked out as he planned. And as Sergey had observed, he’d even encountered some measure of luck along the way. Val smiled and looked down at his empty cup. Instead of the wasted, watery grounds of coffee in the bottom, he saw a bright future. Lif
e was about to get much, much better.
He decided to have another. He snapped his fingers for Natalia. When she appeared from the back of the store, he admired the curve of her body. She noticed and accentuated the sway of her hips as she approached the table.
“What can I get you?” she asked, her eyes sultry.
“More coffee,” Val said. He allowed himself to relax a little. His smile broadened. “And then I think we will take a drive, you and I. Out into the countryside.”
She smiled back at him. “That sounds wonderful.”
“Bring a blanket,” he told her. “But first, more coffee.”
Natalia turned and sashayed toward the espresso machine. Val watched her go. Then he leaned back in his chair and stared out the window.
Life in America is good, he thought. I am well pleased.
1032 hours
At the cemetery, Chisolm stood straight and tall as the bagpiper played “Amazing Grace.” The mournful sound pierced him in his chest, but he refused to allow emotion to show on his face.
When the trailing end of the tune came, the priest stepped forward again and spoke of commending their brother’s body to the earth. Chisolm looked around at the assembled group. Most had been at Karl Winter’s funeral, too, four long years ago. It seemed like just yesterday when Chisolm had hoped he was attending a cop’s funeral for the last time. Now, here he stood again.
His eyes settled on B.J. Carson. Her expression was transparent, though she tried to put on a brave face. Her eyes were filled with tears, and her chin quivered.
Chisolm tried to imagine what she was feeling, but he couldn’t, other than in the most general sense.
Guilt. She almost assuredly felt guilt. Did he know that feeling? Oh yes, he did.
He wondered if he’d had a talk with Battaglia sooner, would that have made a difference? Would he have broken it off with Carson?
Probably not. Maybe if he’d talked to her, she would have listened. If she’d ended things with Battaglia, he would have never volunteered to take her spot up at the hotel. Then—
