“‘We passed the fifteenth Torment: Magic, Sorcery, Poisoning, and the Summoning of Demons.’”
“That’s Adelaide, the psychic eaten by ants!”
“Super,” Andrey said glumly. “How many are left?”
“Five,” Masha answered quietly.
ANDREY
They didn’t have to wait long. Artyom Minayev had been torn in half between two trees near the Florus and Laurus Church, close to the former site of the Myasnitsky Gate. While they were getting the corpse down out of the trees, Andrey pondered the logistical difficulties. The killer had to choose trees with two important qualities: not old enough to break, and not young enough to stay bent under the weight of the body. Minayev wasn’t a big guy, maybe one hundred thirty pounds, and it occurred to Andrey that the sinner’s size might have been decisive in attracting the Sin Collector’s attention.
There was no doubt that the victim had, in fact, sinned. Only the most serious tollhouses were left now, where the demons interrogated their captives for bigger transgressions than verbal diarrhea. But as terrible as Minayev’s sins might have been, Andrey couldn’t think of a single crime bad enough to justify getting torn apart alive.
As he climbed the stairs to Minayev’s apartment, he noticed the frightened but curious faces of two little boys peeking out from a doorway one floor below. An unsteady female voice called from inside, and the small faces disappeared behind the upholstered door. Andrey made a mental note to have a talk with them afterward. Kids that age notice everything.
Minayev’s place was a typical bachelor pad. Maybe a little tidier than most, Andrey had to admit, thinking of his own mess and vowing to clean soon. After all, he might be getting a visit from one Masha Karavay—something he still couldn’t quite believe. Minayev’s refrigerator held just enough to feed one person a basic lunch and dinner for two days, so he probably hadn’t been expecting company. A plate with the remnants of some smoked fish from the night before was sitting in the living room, stinking up the whole place. But Andrey agreed with the forensics guys: he’d smelled worse. He took a slow stroll through the room.
Nothing much, just an imposingly big computer with a separate hard drive. Cartoon fish swam lazily across the big screen. Andrey gave the forensics expert nearby a questioning look and got a nod in response. He touched the mouse, and the screen came to life. A video window was open on the desktop. Andrey clicked “Play.”
Music started up, a rhythmic, thumping beat, and the action on the screen was rhythmic, too. Andrey was soon surrounded by curious colleagues. It was obvious from the first frame that it was porn, but the man standing with his back—and thrusting buttocks—to the camera seemed strangely large compared to his partner. When the camera moved, someone next to Andrey gasped.
“But that’s just a kid!”
Andrey rushed to click “Pause.” The boy’s face looked strangely familiar, and Andrey tried to will away his nausea. It was one of the kids downstairs. He minimized the window and spotted two more behind it with the same sort of content.
As he saved them onto a flash drive, he noticed that each video lasted eighteen minutes. What had Masha said yesterday? They were past the fifteenth tollhouse. He didn’t want to tell her about this. But he knew that he’d have to eventually, so it might as well be now. Besides, he needed to consult her and the neat table in her notebook.
“Hey!” breathed Masha into the phone, in such a sleepy, gentle voice Andrey couldn’t help smiling. His whole heart felt warmer. Maybe he hadn’t been dreaming? Maybe everything that happened yesterday was real.
“Hi!” he answered, already regretting his next words. “We have another body. At Myasnitsky Gate.”
Masha took a sharp breath.
“Could you tell me again what the sixteenth tollhouse is supposed to be?”
There was a rustling of paper. “The Torment of Fornication. Inappropriate dreams or thoughts, lustful touches. Does that fit?”
“Yeah,” said Andrey, “but not completely. What’s the seventeenth?”
“Adultery, rape,” read Masha in her honor-student voice.
“Go on,” said Andrey.
“How many bodies do you have there?” she marveled, but obediently kept reading. “Eighteen is the tollhouse of Sodomitic Sins: miscegenation, masturbation, bestiality, and sins horrible and unnatural.”
“There!” declared Andrey. “That’s the one.”
“But that means—”
“That means he skipped two victims, or we missed them,” Andrey confirmed.
“I’ll be right there,” Masha said. “What’s the address?”
“You can’t tell Mama,” said Petya, the younger of the two boys. The older one had scowled with worry when Andrey told him Minayev was dead, and run off into the apartment.
“I won’t,” Andrey promised, and he meant it.
“Mama drinks. She’s not an alcoholic. It’s just because of the divorce is all. Papa left her the apartment,” the little boy told him, in a very dignified tone of voice. “And the car. But she sold the car,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “It was such a cool car! A Hyundai, with a really big engine!”
The apartment had been nice at one point, but a dozen small details—darker patches on the faded wallpaper where pictures must have hung, an awkward empty space on the TV shelf—made it clear that this household was not as well-off as it once had been.
“Tell me about Minayev,” he asked Petya.
“He’s Kolya’s best friend. Mine, too!” the little boy told him proudly. He wrinkled his nose again when he corrected himself. “Was our best friend. Kolya used to go watch movies at his place and he gave him books about ninjas. They’re these Japanese guys.”
Andrey smiled. “Yeah, I know.”
“He gave us food, too! Mama forgets to buy groceries sometimes,” he said with a disarming grin. “We hid it. It was fun. And we went to the planetarium one day, too. Kolya and him were friends. He went over there every day.”
“What about yesterday?” Andrey asked, trying not to react to the idea of “friendship” between Minayev and Kolya.
“Then, too. He left us some food, and Kolya said he had to go say thank-you. He didn’t take me with him. But I ate all the candy, see?” Petya pulled a handful of brightly colored wrappers out of his pocket.
“I need to talk with your brother,” Andrey said, standing up.
“But he doesn’t want to!” objected Petya.
“It’s okay, I need to try, anyway,” Andrey told him.
“Kolya!” called Petya, running off toward the kitchen, and Andrey heard a muffled conversation coming from behind the door.
Andrey walked into the kitchen himself, and found a woman with red eyes and matted hair spreading butter on slices of bread, which she followed, for some reason, with a layer of mayonnaise.
“You stay away from my kids,” she told Andrey, assaulting him with the stale booze on her breath. “He says he doesn’t know anything!”
Andrey paid her no attention. “Kolya?” he coaxed. “I just want to ask you one question: What did you see yesterday evening? You need to tell me so we can find out who killed your neighbor.”
Kolya turned silently to the window.
“I said go!” The mother pushed him toward the door. “Get out! Go figure it out yourself!”
Andrey turned and left. He could have insisted on interviewing the kid, but the idea made his heart ache, and besides, he was ashamed. Ashamed that nobody had identified the pedophile earlier, but even more ashamed that this was the kind of shitty world where a predator could be a lonely child’s only friend. Andrey walked outside and smoked a cigarette, thinking Masha should be there any minute.
The door banged behind him, and Kolya ran out, probably hurrying off to school. Andrey watched him carefully as he passed by, went maybe twenty steps, then turned around and ran back.
“I didn’t see anyone,” Kolya said. “But I heard something. The voice was, like, thin. He was saying something w
eird. Kind of in Russian, but I couldn’t understand it really.”
“Can you try to remember?” asked Andrey.
Kolya frowned. “Something about demons in dirt and stench. Do you know what stench means?”
Andrey nodded. “Yeah. It’s a bad smell.”
“Ah.” Kolya nodded. “Like it stinks?”
“Something like that. Do you think you could recognize that voice if you heard it again?”
Kolya, serious, nodded again. “Oh yeah. It was really squealy, like somebody was hurting him. Okay, bye, I’m gonna be late to school!”
Andrey watched the little figure run off. He probably needed a therapist more than he needed school. Andrey made a note to put a social worker on the case.
When Masha drove up, Andrey opened her car door to help her out, then pulled her close. They stood that way, pressed up against each other’s bodies in an attempt to share the last bit of heat they could muster. But somehow they both felt colder every minute. The problem wasn’t the execution methods, or how merciless the killer was proving to be. The problem was that the further they pursued the Sin Collector, the more horrible the whole world seemed.
MASHA
Masha took a visual survey of the men Anyutin had assigned to help them. They had a team now, the Sin Collector Investigative Group, but Masha still hadn’t shaken her fear that these skeptical detectives would laugh her out of the office. So she’d asked Andrey to brief them on Heavenly Jerusalem. As he laid it out, all the crazy details somehow fell into place, and nobody so much as raised a doubting eyebrow. Some of the men even took notes, which made Masha a little embarrassed. It scared her, too. It was as if, before the name was official, before they had this team dedicated to hunting him down, the Sin Collector had existed solely in Masha’s imagination, regardless of his all-too-real crimes. Like a vampire, or the Abominable Snowman, Masha thought. If one person sees Bigfoot, they’re nuts. But when a big group of serious men at Petrovka take out their legal pads, it’s the real deal.
“I believe,” Andrey was saying, “that we need to go back to the first victims. If even one of them knew the suspect personally, they might have inspired the whole series of killings. Let’s look more closely at Dobroslav Ovechkin. His father was a preacher at the Old Believer church at Basmanny. And the story of the tollhouses, as I’m sure you know”—Andrey smirked, because he was pretty sure nobody in the room had ever heard of it—“is an Old Believer text. They’re zealots. You’ve heard the stories.” Andrey paused, catching Masha’s wry look.
“And now,” Andrey continued, gesturing grandly like a ringmaster announcing the next act, “Intern Maria Karavay will brief us about her profiling of the suspect.”
Masha clutched her notes nervously. Her voice shook a bit as she spoke.
“I’m passing around copies of a table with geographical locations corresponding to these murders. We have an outside consultant working on this for us, a historian. He’s listed locations we’ve already identified with certainty and other sites with potential, too, because we may have missed a few victims, and we also have to assume our suspect plans to keep killing. The second page contains some information that might help us understand the suspect. He is a serial killer, apparently highly organized. As you know, this type is characterized by their self-control. They have a clear plan for stalking and seducing their victims.”
Masha paused and swallowed. The detectives were still listening attentively.
“If a plan breaks down, this killer is capable of putting off his crime for another day. He acts in socially appropriate ways. He’s likely to live with a partner, but in his domestic life, he may be unstable or violent. Geographically, he’s mobile. He follows the news. He returns to the scene of the crime to check on the progress the police are making. He probably drives a big car that he uses to move bodies.”
She stopped to catch her breath and steal a look at Andrey. He was standing against a wall, looking at her with undisguised tenderness and a pride that was almost paternal. Masha barely restrained herself from grinning back at him. Instead, she looked over the rest of the men sitting before her.
“I’d like to talk over every point of this profile with you. You might see something we missed.”
“Is this really supposed to help?” A young man stood up. “Gerasimov,” he introduced himself. “Who cares about the homicidal triad or whatever it’s called? What difference does it make whether the guy wet the bed as a child? Seriously, that’s just intellectual masturbation. It’s a bunch of foreign baloney.”
Andrey had already straightened up to come to Masha’s defense, but she beat him to the punch.
“If the psychological model is a match, it will help us identify the perpetrator, and even if it doesn’t, it can at least help us strike some suspects off the list. Think of how many people the police arrested on false leads before they caught Chikatilo.”
“Our own researchers don’t think profiling is a bad idea, and you wouldn’t talk to them like that,” a gray-haired detective added, frowning at the young man. “Go on, miss.”
“The Sin Collector is a maniacal missionary.” Masha looked around the room again. “He chooses his victims carefully, because for him, it’s not the murder itself that’s important, but the message it sends to humankind. So. Let’s start with general personality characteristics. What can you add, based on how these incidents occurred?”
“He’s pedantic,” Andrey said, starting them off.
Masha thanked him with her eyes.
“Elaborate executions like these require all sorts of preparation, so he must he highly organized, as you said,” the gray-haired detective chimed in.
“He takes charge at the scene of his crimes, because he’s frustrated with his life?” added Fomin, a freckled red-haired guy to his left.
“No,” Masha objected. “This isn’t frustration. It’s more like control. Control over sin and retribution for sins.”
“Like he’s playing God?”
“No,” said Masha, shaking her head. “He doesn’t see himself as God. He’s playing a demon, a toll collector. So he doesn’t think he’s free of sin himself.” Masha suddenly fell silent. She met Andrey’s gaze and could tell he was having the same thought.
“Maybe he’s done time?” Andrey suggested. “Is that where he gets his insider knowledge of law enforcement? Plus, he knows Yelnik, and he’s cruel.”
Masha nodded. She would need to think that over some more, play with it in her head. She went on.
“Now, what about habits? Skills? Any ideas?”
“He probably keeps his house and his car superclean. Sterile. Because he’s so hung up on cleanliness and purity, in every sense,” suggested Gerasimov.
Masha nodded, surprised that the young man had come around so quickly. “I agree.”
Now other members of the group were offering ideas.
“He knows police work inside and out, seeing as he never leaves tracks.”
“He’s strong. Otherwise how could he have quartered that woman?”
“He’s probably middle aged, say between forty and fifty-five. Confident, knowledgeable. People trust him.”
“Where does he live?” asked Masha, then answered her own question. “He’s got a very clear kill radius, the old Bely Gorod fortress walls, which is the Boulevard Ring Road today. He only leaves bodies there, in the middle of downtown. But as you all know, his choice of victims and crime scenes is based on the religious pattern we’ve identified, not convenience. Still, seeing how well he knows the area, it seems to me that our suspect lives and probably works downtown.”
“What about education?” Andrey reminded her.
“Definitely a higher degree. Above-average intelligence. As for profession”—Masha cast a glance at her notes—“his job probably involves decision-making, something where he can be confident that he never makes mistakes. There are several occupations that would give him a feeling of absolute power . . .”
“A teacher!”
called Gerasimov, like the troublemaker in the back of the classroom.
“Physicist or mathematician.”
“No, a historian!”
“Maybe a doctor?” suggested Fomin. “A surgeon! He knows how to dismember people.”
“A crusty old general who doesn’t know the meaning of love and is used to making everyone else follow orders.”
Andrey raised a hand to settle them down. “I think there’s a good probability that he works in criminal justice or defense.”
The men looked doubtful. And frightened. “One of us? For real?” they murmured.
“He got to the governor’s wife too easily, and other powerful people, too,” said Andrey, almost as if he were talking to himself. “We don’t have enough clues. Actually, we don’t have any. Everything is circumstantial. Maybe he has a blue car. Maybe he has a high voice.”
“About that, I don’t think he does,” said Masha, frowning. “I think he’s reciting things from the tollhouse story to his victims before they die. But that’s part of his signature. When he’s in the middle of the ritual, he might feel like another person. Or,” she corrected herself, “a demon. And if he thinks that demons whine and howl, that means he’d naturally make his own voice higher, too.”
ANDREY
Andrey left Gerasimov waiting at the bulletin board outside and walked into the church on Basmanny. Masha had told him this temple was new. But as far as Andrey could tell, there was no difference. It had the same golden onion dome, the same bell tower, the same whitewashed walls.
But he only made it two steps onto church grounds before his way was blocked by a bearded man in a dull-gray suit and a shirt out of Russian folklore. The man asked him, in a formal but perfectly courteous voice, who he was. Understandable, thought Andrey. Compared to the Old Believers, after all, he probably looked suspicious, clean shaven and strange. Andrey showed him his badge, and the bearded man, nodding curtly, suggested they go have a chat next door.
The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series) Page 20
