The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series)

by Daria Desombre

  For the first few months of his life in the capital, Andrey had spent the weekends cabbing around the city in his old Ford, trying to make a little extra cash while getting to know the place. Andrey had never really known what to do with his free time. He didn’t read much, he hated TV, and he definitely hadn’t been raised to frequent the philharmonic. Andrey was a practical kind of guy, so he got into the habit of using breaks in his work schedule to fix things up at the dacha he was renting. He chopped firewood for the stove or did laundry. But that kind of thing wasn’t much fun, either, so he was always glad when they piled on work at the office.

  Andrey vaguely understood that he was one of the lucky few in the world who found real satisfaction in the job he got paid for at the end of the month. This satisfaction was just as strong as, say, the pleasure his father had gotten from his weekend drinking bouts, or that his mother seemed to get out of gossiping on the phone for hours. So for Andrey, the commute to work at Petrovka was a secret source of joy.

  And then there was the fun of driving. Just a second ago he had cut off a sporty BMW with a snotty-nosed kid at the wheel. What was she going to do with all that horsepower, anyway? Andrey had a good reason for having a souped-up engine, not to mention the pleasure he got from seeing the shock on people’s faces when his cheap-looking car left them in the dust.

  “So your daddy bought you a car and a license, but not a brain?” He laughed. “Come on, you can do better than that!” he scolded the anonymous father, who looked, in his imagination, like the Monopoly Man.

  Andrey turned skillfully into his usual parking spot. The phone squawked in his pocket, and the low voice of Andrey’s boss, Colonel Anyutin, barked an order: “Report to my office in five minutes!” Andrey scowled.

  Five minutes later, he pushed open Anyutin’s office door—only to behold, of all things, a girl. He’d never seen her before, but she was just the type of brat he loved cutting off.

  “Ms. Maria Karavay,” the Colonel announced. “Soon-to-be graduate of the law school at Moscow State.”

  Well, sure, Andrey thought, his irritation growing. It wouldn’t be some technical school in Nowheresville.

  The girl stood up and extended a narrow hand. Andrey ignored it and just nodded once.

  “Andrey Yakovlev.”

  “Andrey is one of our top detectives,” said Anyutin, the compliment dripping with honey.

  Would you like a little lemon with that, Mr. Chief? Andrey asked his boss—silently, of course. Anyutin normally spoke in the sort of choppy prose you’d expect from a soldier, and usually for the purpose of making heads roll.

  “I’m entrusting you to Captain Yakovlev. You’ll be working together,” Anyutin continued in a melody like a nightingale’s song. “He should be able to teach you a good deal.”

  Teach her? Who is she? wondered Andrey.

  Then Anyutin turned to him.

  “Ms. Karavay is working on her honors thesis—”

  So that’s what her daddy bought her, Andrey concluded.

  “On a very interesting topic,” Anyutin continued. “Serial murders passed off as accidents. She’ll be a wonderful assistant to you!”

  Andrey forced himself to look at the girl again. She was writing a paper on serial killers? Kid must be sick in the head.

  This last thought must have been written all over Andrey’s face, because Anyutin politely asked the girl to step outside a moment. As soon as the door closed behind her, Anyutin spun around to face Andrey. The fatherly expression was gone.

  MASHA

  Masha leaned against the wall outside Anyutin’s office. It wasn’t hard to imagine what was going on inside. Anyutin was spelling out for the disagreeable dude in cheap Turkish jeans that she was payback for some unofficial deal (as if the guy hadn’t already figured that out) and that he would have to let the payback pretend to help him.

  Worst of all, she really was part of a deal, a pawn in someone else’s game. But without that deal she would never have gotten this internship at Petrovka, and she simply had to be here. After having her forced on him like this, Masha thought gloomily, the guy with the jeans was sure to hate her and gossip with all the other male detectives about her, and Masha would be the dumb kid nobody would deign to trust with anything important. Everyone would look at her with that knowing chill in their eyes, and wait impatiently until she finally relieved them of the burden of her presence.

  She wondered if she really should have taken a court internship like everyone else, making copies and coffee. That dark train of thought was interrupted by the door swinging open. Yakovlev flew out, his expression even surlier than she’d expected.

  “Follow me,” he snapped, then led her down several long corridors to the door of a different office. She took in a windowsill sporting a long-dead cactus, a couple of desks piled with overstuffed folders, and about ten people who paid Masha no attention whatsoever.

  Masha felt a glimmer of hope. Having outside parties around made it remotely possible that the detective’s anger would dissipate a bit and that Masha would have a chance to join the team, who, she desperately hoped, would treat her a little better than this clod.

  The captain, meanwhile, shoved some files to one side and pointed to the newly cleared patch of tabletop.

  “This is your workplace,” he told her drily, putting invisible quotation marks around “work” to make it clear that working was the last thing he expected her to do.

  People who got to Petrovka due to their connections were only supposed to sit there and wear out the seat of their pants.

  ANDREY

  What a pile of crap, Andrey thought as he snuck an occasional glance at his unwelcome neighbor. Sergey sure had picked the wrong time to be out sick. If he were here, they would have dumped this little brat on somebody else.

  They say there’s such a thing as love at first sight. Andrey didn’t think he had ever experienced such a phenomenon. But what he felt now was the exact opposite. There she was, this Maria—Karavay, was it? Even her last name sounded idiotic! Sitting at the desk like she had every right to be there. She was tall, which happened to be in style right now (Andrey didn’t like tall girls on principle—the operating principle, in this case, being his own height). Her hair was straight, her eyes some light color that was hard to define, her nose annoyingly proportionate to her face. He was never going to be able to get any work done with her sitting there irritating him. Everything about her pissed him off! Her face, bare of makeup; her hands, nails cut short, no rings; her black T-shirt, black jeans, and moccasins. She sat there looking at him, and waited. What for? he wondered.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” the girl said. Her voice was soft and serpentine. “I know I must seem like a burden.” Andrey felt himself blush, and his Adam’s apple jumped. “But . . . do you think you could give me some sort of assignment?”

  What is this, kindergarten? Baby needs an assignment? Fine, Andrey thought, and gave her a smile he thought must be laden with meaning.

  “You’re not a burden, Intern Karavay. As for an assignment . . . it should be something to complement your academic research, right?” And he grinned even wider, crocodile-style. “Why don’t we have you collect information, let’s say a statistical report, on all the homicides passed off as accidents over the past two years?”

  The girl frowned. “Is that something you really need?”

  Andrey sighed and gave her another false smile.

  “In the work we do, Intern Karavay, anything at all might come in handy. We can get drunk on water.”

  That moment, the telephone rang. It was urgent. The police had found a body downtown. Fished it out of the Moskva River, pretty much directly in front of the Kremlin walls.

  “On my way!” Andrey pushed his chair back noisily and grabbed his denim jacket.

  The girl looked at him, eyes shining with hope. Obviously, she was already imagining how she might get out of her assignment. Moscow State honor student, my ass. Andrey smirked and preten
ded not to notice.

  He had to park some distance away from the cordoned-off scene and push through the crowd of gawkers. An ambulance was already there to cart away the corpse. They were just waiting for him. Andrey took a look at the body and immediately noted that the victim, a middle-aged man, must have worked out a lot. A prison tattoo on one muscular arm caught his eye: a ring with a snake design.

  “He did time,” a young forensic expert confirmed.

  Andrey took a couple of pictures on his phone, for his own use, of the man’s arms and the frozen grimace on his face. Then he gave a nod to the men standing off to one side, smoking. While the corpse was being loaded into the vehicle, the man’s head suddenly lolled over, and Andrey caught sight of a number shaved into the hair at the back of his neck: 14.

  “Wait!” Andrey hurried over and took another picture. That’s when he noticed two kids, maybe fourteen years old; the girl nestled her face into the boy’s shoulder, and the boy stood there uneasily, his own face white as a sheet.

  Witnesses. Unlucky bastards. Andrey sighed. Here they were in the blush of first love, a romantic rendezvous, and out of nowhere, a dead man in the water. What sweet memories they would have.

  Then he remembered his own first love and frowned. He would have preferred a dead guy. Andrey walked up to the young couple.

  “You found him?”

  The boy nodded.

  “See anything?”

  “No.”

  Which was to be expected. Andrey gave him what he hoped was an encouraging smile, like some sort of young Commissaire Maigret; took down their phone numbers; and sent them on their way. He watched the boy wrap his arm very sweetly around the girl’s waist. Andrey snorted and walked back to the forensic experts.

  “So, find anything?” he asked, even though his gut was already telling him there was nothing there to be found. If the murderer had left any trace, the Moskva River would have washed it away.

  That body had been polished smooth as a pebble in the sea.

  MASHA

  It didn’t take Masha too long to pull all the archived files for the last two years of murder cases. Nobody in the office paid any attention, but they weren’t overtly hostile, either, like that detective in denim. What had she done to make him hate her so much? Good thing she’d been quick-witted enough not to ask him to take her along to the crime scene. He had made it perfectly clear: no field trips for her, just some statistical report nobody cared about.

  How had she ever imagined she’d be in the thick of things? Maybe not chasing down a suspect, pistol in hand, but at least standing among the famous Petrovka detectives and their perfectly trained German shepherds, making brilliant deductions. They would exchange awed glances. How young she is, they’d say, and yet soooo smart! Masha understood, of course, that all her knowledge was just theoretical, but didn’t they want to make use of Maria Karavay, valedictorian? Masha sighed, not realizing how much she looked like her father as she jutted her chin out proudly. To hell with him! Twice as stormily stubborn as before, she dove into the coroners’ reports and crime-scene photos.

  Until she suddenly ran up against something very strange. Here was a report on a murder along the Bersenevskaya waterfront. The file said three people had been killed in the basement of an old electric station, now a tram depot. Two men, one woman. Masha peered closely at the photographs, and after a stealthy look around—naturally, everyone was still ignoring her—she pulled a magnifying glass out of the cup on Andrey’s desk. Yes, just as she’d thought. There were numbers on the victims’ T-shirts. Damn these black-and-white photos. What were they written with, blood? The shirts were all covered with it, and blood was pouring out of the victims’ mouths. Masha averted her gaze for a second. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing the pictures weren’t in color. She moved on to the interrogation reports. The chief witness, the man who found the bodies, was a security guard, an I. N. Ignatiyev.

  Masha jotted down the name in her notebook and turned back to the pictures, magnifying more details, one after the other: the tied-up legs, the big, loud earrings on the woman, the chairs arranged in a semicircle, and those T-shirts . . . they were enormous, unsightly, one size fits all. They obviously did not come from the victims’ own closets. No. The murderer must have brought them—the big white shirts were the perfect canvas for those Arabic numerals, written in blood: 1, 2, 3.

  ANDREY

  Everyone should have a friend who examines corpses. Andrey chuckled to himself. Probably some people would disagree.

  People on this particular career path fell into one of two categories. The first type were the mimics. Somebody who hung out with dead bodies all day could start to resemble their clients. Pale and gloomy, basically. The second type just got more hearty and healthy, optimists with a very specific sense of humor. The only thing they all had in common was a propensity for strong drink—and in this, Andrey could deftly provide company to either type. Business dictated that they could often be found together: Andrey; the coroner; and corpses, corpses and more corpses.

  Pasha belonged to the second category. He had three kids and a very practical wife with her own travel business. She covertly supported the family and openly adored her husband, a guy who cheerfully spent his time digging around in dead people’s guts.

  Andrey had stopped by the morgue to pick Pasha’s brain, but the coroner was on his way out; his middle kid had a middle school concert, and these horrific amateur performances—“You’ll understand when you have kids, man”—could not be missed.

  Before leaving, though, Pasha did tell him that the cause of death was asphyxiation under water. That was the first thing. Also, the corpse had been frozen. It could be that the guy had not in fact died just a few days ago, as the condition of the soft tissues might indicate. That was the second thing.

  “Wait!” Andrey grabbed Pasha by his sleeve. “What do you mean, frozen? It’s summer!”

  “Let go!” Pasha twisted out of Andrey’s grip. Running out the door, he answered in a sing-song falsetto. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and not today, as all the lazy men say!”

  And he left Andrey alone in the morgue, rubbing with annoyance at the bridge of his nose.

  MASHA

  Masha perused files until eleven o’clock that night, until it was completely dark outside and the office was empty. She was tired. Tired of the reports, tired of all the terrible photographs, and tired of this undefinable sense of awkwardness, or confusion, or whatever it was. She had the impression there was something else in the files having to do with numbers. But what? It felt as if there were a shadow lurking behind her back. If she just looked behind her, she’d see something, understand it. Something very important. But the shadow kept slipping away, her eyes were exhausted, and the impression was fading. It didn’t make any sense to keep sitting there.

  Masha made photocopies of some of the documents and put them in her bag. She glanced at Andrey’s desk. Where did he go? she wondered. It certainly seemed he wouldn’t be back tonight.

  As she passed through the security gate, she caught sight of an exceedingly familiar man cloaked in an old raincoat.

  “Nick-Nick!” Masha called.

  Nick-Nick turned and beamed at her, baring his poorly made dentures.

  For the first time, it occurred to Masha that Nick-Nick was getting older. He didn’t look so much like a classmate of her father’s anymore, and she thought sadly, Papa would have changed over the years, too. After all, Nick-Nick had always been in better shape than her father was, doing martial arts, playing tennis, even talking Masha’s father into skiing with him once in a while. So, if Nick-Nick was on the decline, what would her father look like now? What does that matter? Masha scolded herself. He’d be however he would be. And whatever that was, it would have made her life so happy and so, well, different, that she couldn’t even imagine it.

  Masha hurried over and gave her father’s friend an enthusiastic kiss on the cheek. Nick-Nick’s bushy eyebrows shot upward.

&n
bsp; “Oh-ho!” He backed away from her a little. “Have you forgotten where you are, missy? It’s Nikolay Nikolayevich here. And no kisses, please! What if somebody sees?”

  Masha glanced around. Sure enough, right outside the building her new boss was getting out of his car. Very careful not to look in their direction, he walked briskly into the building.

  “Oh no!” whined Masha. “You’re right!”

  “Did we blow your cover?” Nick-Nick said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “It’s not funny.” Masha sighed. “Of course, he already knew someone pulled strings to get me in here. He just didn’t know who. Until now.”

  “Not a nice guy?”

  “He’s terrible,” Masha said.

  “Don’t worry. He’ll take another look and realize you’re so much more than pulled strings.”

  “I guess,” said Masha, sighing again.

  Nick-Nick smiled, then very innocently asked the question that Masha suspected was always on his mind. “And how’s your mom?”

  ANDREY

  Perfect! snarled Andrey. Obviously, somebody at the top had pushed Anyutin to take the girl on, but Katyshev himself! Herr Prosecutor! An unblemished reputation, the best of the best, the people’s avenger. Somebody Andrey wouldn’t even be brave enough to ask for a light. And here he and the little honor student were bosom buddies. They might as well be family, the way she kissed him on the cheek.

  Andrey was so pissed he opted to storm up the stairs instead of taking the elevator.

  Only once he reached his office and sat down at his own desk did he start to recover a little. He turned on the electric kettle, opened a window, found a cigarette, and took a drag. While he smoked, he stirred up some instant coffee and dove into the computer. He went to the missing persons database and typed in his search criteria. Last six months, male. Faces flashed on the screen. Lots of people go missing in six months in Moscow.