Maksim considered the bleakness that occasionally surfaced across his client’s expression and the way his old eyes didn’t match his appearance. Perhaps the guilt that Maksim sensed had little to do with criminal activity, after all.
“You only served six years,” Nilsson observed. “Not cut out for Recon?”
“I guess not.”
“What rank did you achieve?”
“E-4.”
The detective lurking in the shadows finally spoke. “What do Corporals earn nowadays, Marine?”
“About 50k.”
The detective whistled. “That’s even less than we make. Not a lot for all they ask you to do, is it?”
“I didn’t have a family to support or anything. It was enough.”
Maksim leaned over and put his mouth against Val’s ear. The faded scent of mint shampoo tickled his nose. “Don’t offer any extra information. You just opened a new door for them.”
“Speaking of family…” Nilsson made a show of shuffling a few papers as if she were searching for something. Calculation whirred in her eyes. “I see here that you have no living relatives. Your mother committed suicide in November and your father was murdered just last month. I’m sorry. That must have been difficult.”
The Adam’s apple in Val’s throat worked hard, bobbing up and down as he swallowed convulsively.
“You probably took care of them while they were alive. Seems like they were getting on in years. Had you late in life, hm?”
Val said nothing.
“That father of yours, he needed some looking after. Got himself into trouble now and then, huh? Let’s see… charged with check fraud in ’99 and then again in 2002. There was an embezzlement charge in 2007. Somehow, the charges always got dropped. Fancy that.” Her smile was more of a grimace. “That must have been real stressful for a good son like you.”
“Is this train ever going to reach a station, Detective?” Maksim drawled. “Or are you enjoying twisting the knife?”
Nilsson raised her hands palm up in a pacifying gesture but immediately followed up with a quick verbal combo punch to his client’s gut.
“The last bit of trouble your father put his foot in was an arrest last summer. Corruption of a minor who was turning tricks out of a strip club called Bare Essentials. Much nastier than his usual petty crime. But, oh, look at this!” Her eyes widened in mock surprise. “The charges were dropped yet again.”
“Surprise, surprise,” sneered her partner.
“You know who posted his bail? That’s the kicker. It was the owner of the club, Mr. Robert Esposito. The man from whose apartment we caught you fleeing this morning.”
She leaned back in her chair and spread her hands wide in a helpless gesture. It was an invitation for Val to jump in and explain, to fill the incriminating silence with words.
Maksim reached beneath the table and rested a hand firmly on his client’s leg. The hard muscle beneath his palm was bunched and quivering. No matter how Val schooled his expression, his tense body language screamed conflict, and the detectives weren’t deaf.
Maksim ran interference. “You can understand why my client is so distressed, Detective Nilsson. Not only has he lost his entire family in the span of a few short months, your officers then informed him that the man he intended to visit – a former friend of his departed father – was brutally murdered.”
“He didn’t need to be informed. He saw the body.”
“Did he?” Maksim gave the leg beneath his hand a warning squeeze. Val’s thigh twitched. “Did he admit to such?”
“He was fleeing the scene.”
“He was walking down a street near an old friend’s apartment. Perhaps he changed his mind about a visit. Perhaps he thought it was too early to wake the victim. Did you find his prints?”
“Forensics is still processing the scene.”
“Did you discover a weapon on him?”
“There are plenty of places to stash something like that.”
Maksim knew his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “And I’m sure your officers are running through each of those places with a fine-tooth comb, to no avail as yet.”
He enjoyed this part. The part when his opponents smelled blood in the water and realized it was their own.
The junior boy scout holding up the wall in back did a poor job of hiding his discomfort, but Nilsson merely looked annoyed.
Maksim aggravated her further by asking, “Surely there must have been witnesses to his leaving the apartment? Since you’re so sure of his presence there?”
Nilsson clenched her teeth. “We’re going over statements and reviewing camera footage.”
“Indeed. At this point, any one of those witnesses is just as plausible a suspect as my client. Is this a fishing expedition, Detective?”
“The victim was stabbed multiple times and his carotid was slit,” the male detective snapped. “Esposito wasn’t a small guy. With his training, your client is one of the few who could pull off something like that.”
Maksim had already heard Val’s withering assessment of the killer’s methods. He didn’t always trust clients to open their mouths, lest they incriminate themselves, but Valentine Rivetti had shown himself to be a young man of considerable restraint. His professional disgust with the overkill was both disturbing and convincing.
Val looked at him askance.
Maksim raised a brow. It was an uncharacteristic show of trust, allowing his client an unscripted response.
Perhaps he was coming down with something. The flu had been tearing through his office for weeks, and the constant rain made it impossible to shake the January chill.
Then again, perhaps he was overworked, and people like Phil-the-desk-sergeant were correct when they declared him on a one-way ticket to burnout.
“My training…” Val licked his lips. “I’m cross-trained in Recon and the Scout Snipers. I wouldn’t even need to be in the same room to kill him. Or I could get behind him and snap his neck before he knew I was there. Why would I use a knife? And if I did use a knife, why wouldn’t I just slit his throat? Why stab him? That’s classic amateur overkill.”
The human wall ornament in the back looked unimpressed, but Nilsson had a speculative twist to her thin lips.
“The more pressing question is how could my client viciously stab a man, make the weapon disappear without a trace, and then depart without a speck of blood on him?”
“We swabbed for trace evidence.”
Maksim rolled his eyes. “Trace evidence, my ass, Nilsson. He’d be covered in blood, and you know it. Did you see his boots? Polished like a drill instructor is waiting to inspect. Stand up, Mr. Rivetti, and show the lady your boots.”
Val had already pushed his chair back when Nilsson snarled, “Stay in your damn chair, Rivetti!” She glared at Maksim. “This isn’t a courtroom, Kovalenko. There isn’t a jury here to impress, so you can stow the theatrics.”
“I’m just making sure we’re all on the same page, Detective. Let’s draw back the curtain and see what’s really going on here. There’s no weapon, no witnesses, no evidence of any sort. You arrested my client for being in the wrong place at the wrong time when an old friend of his father’s was tragically murdered. I’m certain there’s a veritable plethora of suspects with a better motive than my client, considering the victim ran a club that trafficked underage girls.”
“Okay, Mr. Rivetti,” Nilsson attempted to recapture her momentum, but the ball was no longer in her court. Maksim had sent it into the stands, and it wasn’t coming back. Their momentum was broken. “What were you doing outside Mr. Esposito’s apartment?”
Maksim removed the hand he’d kept on Val’s leg for far too long.
They hadn’t discussed a strategy for this question, but he was willing to let it ride for the time being.
He laced his fingers together on the tabletop with the apparent ease of an attorney who knew what his client would say. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d trusted a client not to
fuck up his own case.
Val stared down at his lap for so long it appeared he couldn’t bring himself to answer, but just as Maksim prepared to step in, he said hoarsely, “Pop wasn’t an easy man. He always wanted to be a big shot. He made a lot of mistakes. But he was a real family man, you know?”
His gaze flickered up, but it wasn’t the detectives he looked at.
Maksim gave an encouraging nod.
“He changed while I was away, started hanging around Esposito’s club, sleeping with girls younger than me. Then he got himself killed in an alley outside a damn massage parlor, and I… I just wanted to know what was going through his mind at the end. I thought I could ask around with his old buddies and see where his head was this past year.”
“Before dawn?” Nilsson asked skeptically. If he’d expected his tale to garner any sympathy, he must have been sorely disappointed.
Val scratched his eyebrow sheepishly. “I had a lot to drink the night before. It’s the only reason I came up with the dumb fucking idea in the first place. Like I was going to get any closure talking to the scrub who bilked my pop for all his money at a titty bar.”
“Had you ever spoken to Mr. Esposito before?”
“No.”
Maksim observed warily as Nilsson prepared to shift tracks. She relaxed into her seat, hooked one ankle over her knee, and casually asked, “What do you do for work, Mr. Rivetti?”
“I’m unemployed.”
“Have you had employment since being discharged from the Marine Corps?”
“No, ma’am.”
Maksim suspected that was a boldfaced lie. If he had enough money squirreled away to cover bail, he was doing something off the books to earn it. But many of Maksim’s clients were skilled liars, and they lied about all and sundry, even when there was no need.
Between the hidden income and his father’s known association with the Russo crime family, there was just no way Valentine Rivetti was not mobbed up.
But that was irrelevant to his present case, and while Maksim himself couldn’t willfully lie, it wasn’t his responsibility to police the honesty of his clients. If it were, he would have no clients.
“How do you pay for that apartment of yours?”
“It’s a studio on Division,” Val said wryly. “It doesn’t cost much.”
“Answer the question, smartass,” the male detective snarled. Maksim supposed he would congratulate himself later for his contribution.
“I needed some time to get my head on straight after I was discharged. I’ve been living off my savings while I decide what to do next.”
“Your savings from that whopping 50k a year?”
“I’m single, ma’am, and I lived on base when I wasn’t deployed. It’s amazing what you can save when you don’t have much in the way of expenses.”
“Still, money must be getting tight,” the stooge at the wall theorized. “Maybe you wanted to cash in on one of Esposito’s business ventures, huh? Or maybe you had evidence from your old man that he was running underage girls, and you wanted to hit him up for some dough?”
Val opened his mouth, but Maksim cut him off, drilling the detective with a pointed look. “My client already told you why he was there. Unless you have evidence that says otherwise, I’m going to advise him not to answer that ridiculous line of questioning. I don’t want to be here all day.”
He addressed Nilsson this time. “Face it, Detective. You have no evidence, no weapon, and no motive that isn’t pulled out of your partner’s ass. You’re fishing, and we’re not biting. We both know you don’t have enough to hold my client. Why not release him, so I can go have my morning coffee?”
Nilsson sighed. She closed the file and rose to her feet, tugging the hem of her suit jacket into place. “Mr. Rivetti, you’re a person of interest in an active police investigation. You may not leave town, or a warrant will be sworn out for your arrest.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We will be contacting you for further questioning.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Nilsson gave Maksim a disgusted eye roll. “Get your coffee, Kovalenko, and get out of my precinct.”
Maksim gave her a cream-fed smile and mimicked his client’s choirboy intonation. “Yes, ma’am.”
3
Maksim
“I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.” Andrea Nilsson’s amused voice was loud in the empty break room.
Maksim froze with the coffee pot hovering over the lip of his Styrofoam cup. He glanced over his shoulder at the detective. Then he looked back to the layer of black sludge in the bottom of the burned pot.
He shrugged and poured.
“You like living dangerously, Kovalenko?”
“I take my caffeine where I can get it, Detective.” He only flinched a little when the brew struck his tongue for the first time.
Her laughter was a light sunshine sound that filled the stale air. “If you ever decide to switch to the other side of the table, you’d make a great cop. I’ve always thought so.”
She yanked open the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of green juice.
Maksim turned a critical eye to the decrepit break room. The formica counters were stained, the linoleum torn, and he wondered how desperate a detective needed to be before they lay on the torn — and likely flea-ridden — sofa.
“This room is slightly smaller than my en suite private bathroom.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Nilsson grinned and took a large swig of juice. “It pays to have no conscience.”
He raised one eyebrow. “I prefer to consider my conscience more sophisticated, that’s all.”
She scoffed. “If that’s what helps you sleep at night after getting a bruiser like Rivetti back on the streets.”
“He didn’t seem particularly violent to me. Besides, you had zero basis to hold him and you know it.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not guilty.”
“It doesn’t mean he is.”
She glared at him, and he gave a slow, audacious wink. When she smiled, it looked reluctant as hell. Maksim considered it a personal victory. Any chance to butter up contacts in the police force was an opportunity too good to pass up.
“How about I take you to lunch this afternoon?”
She looked incredulous. “God, you lawyers are posh. You think I’m getting a lunch break today? I’ll be lucky to shove a hot dog in my face while Brent gets us stuck in traffic between interviews.”
“Who’s the new albatross around your neck, by the way?”
“Who? Brent?” She wrinkled her nose, and for the first time, Maksim wondered how old she was. He’d always taken her for his age, but now he wondered if that wasn’t just the effects of fatigue and cynicism. “He just transferred up from Vice.”
“He’s got a lot to learn,” Maksim remarked around a mouthful of bitter, lukewarm coffee.
“Tell me about it.” Nilsson sighed. “He actually busted our vic a couple times, so I hoped he’d make himself useful.”
“Hope springs eternal.”
“Not in this job.” She made a rimshot and sank her empty juice bottle into the trash can. “Be ready. We’ll take another crack at your boy today or tomorrow.”
His eyebrows crept toward his hairline. “You don’t actually think he’s guilty, do you?”
“Let’s just put it this way… I don’t think he’s innocent.”
Maksim toasted her with his cup. “None of us are, Detective.”
* * *
Val
Jesus, that was close.
Val was shaking as he stepped out of the police station and into the gray drizzle of a Portland morning.
A hipster in a tweed sport jacket bumped his shoulder and gave him a nasty glare, but Val barely noticed. He stood there, partially blocking the entrance, and greedily sucked in the miasma of wet pavement and car exhaust.
It wasn’t the murder that shook him. Finding Esposito’s body had been nothing. It was hardly the messiest corpse he’d ever s
een.
The only thing he’d felt when he gazed down at Esposito’s fat, swiss-cheesed body was the same fury that had been dogging him for months.
It had gotten worse when Pop was murdered. A lot worse. The thread he’d been hanging onto ever since leaving the Corps was frayed thin and ready to snap.
The way Val saw it, he wasn’t particularly clever, but he was very good at two things: hurting people and following orders.
Neither skill had gotten him very far this past month. He’d hit a dead end everywhere he looked. Whoever his opponent was in this game understood the rules far better than he did. They were whipping his ass.
If it weren’t for that smooth talking hotshot in the designer suit, Val would probably have been booked for the one murder he didn’t commit.
That was the source of his tremor, he guessed. The idea of cooling his heels in a cell while the person who destroyed his family walked free made him want to throw up.
He’d spoken the truth back in that interrogation room when he’d told Kovalenko he didn’t care if he went to prison. It wasn’t like he had much going for him these days. Hell, maybe it would be a kind of karmic justice for all the sins he’d already gotten away with.
But he couldn’t go down just yet. Not until he found the son of a bitch who had started all this.
“Reveling in your freedom?” asked a cool voice.
Val turned. His attorney was shucking into an expensive raincoat as he exited the building.
When Maksim Kovalenko had first introduced himself, Val had been half certain he worked for the Family. Dominic Russo had strong ties to the Russian mafia, and they helped to expand his racket in Medicare fraud. Kovalenko not only sounded like a Russian name, but the man himself was exactly the kind of slick, arrogant crony who aligned himself with the capos who served Russo.
Val supposed there still was a chance Kovalenko was on Russo’s payroll, or perhaps someone else’s, but he sincerely doubted a man with such a caustic mouth would do very well in organized crime.
He couldn’t imagine Maksim Kovalenko kissing anyone’s ass.
Murder Aforethought Page 2
