“Come on, girls.”
“You are even more beautiful than I imagined.”
Abby dropped the jar of strawberry preserve at the sound of the man’s voice. A strange man’s voice. She spun around. In front of her, just a few feet away, stood a tall, broad-shouldered man. He wore a long black leather coat. His face was rugged, chiseled, and bore a ragged scar on his left cheek. He did not brandish a weapon of any sort. Instead, in his right hand, was a red rose.
The reality dawned. There was a stranger in the hallway.
A stranger. In her house.
The girls.
Abby opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. It was as if her ability to make a noise was somehow stillborn within her. She darted around the man, toppling a chair in the process. Somewhere behind her another glass shattered on the floor. The man did not move in any way to stop her.
“Girls?” she yelled.
She ran into the living room. They were not there. The sense of panic soon swelled to an overwhelming feeling of terror.
“Girls?”
She looked in the bathroom, the downstairs bedroom. She ran to the back door, opened the sliding glass door leading to the patio, her heart racing to burst. In the backyard she saw another man sitting on the picnic table. A younger man, strong looking. Charlotte and Emily stood at the back of the property. They were holding each other, their eyes wide with fear. A few seconds later the man in the house stepped up behind Abby. He did not touch her, did not raise his voice. His voice was almost reassuring. He had an accent.
“That young man is with me. Trust me, no harm will come to you or your family if you do as I say.”
Trust me. It sounded unreal, like dialogue in a movie. But Abby knew it was real. Everything she had dreaded the night before was now in front of her. Somehow, the fact that it was broad daylight did not make it any easier.
“It is important that you do exactly as I say.”
Abby turned to face him. He had stepped back, into the hallway leading to the kitchen. The anger began to bloom inside her.
“Get out of my house!”
The man did not move.
The gun, Abby thought. Her eyes flicked to the stairs. She would never make it past him. She glanced at the kitchen counter. The scissors sat there, gleaming in the afternoon sunlight, daring her to reach for them. They looked a hundred miles away.
“You must try to remain calm,” he said.
“Who the fuck are you?” Abby screamed.
The man seemed to wince at her profanity. Then his features softened. “My name is Aleksander Savisaar.” He closed the sliding glass door, slid the bolt. He turned back to Abby. “Before we go any further, I would like you to do something for me.”
The man spoke with a quiet authority that chilled Abby to the bottom of her soul. She did not respond.
“First, I would like you to calm down. As I said, nothing bad is going to happen to you, your husband, or your lovely home. Can you calm down for me?”
Abby tried to stop shaking. She stood staring at the man. Crazily, she thought of the time her brother Wallace fell off a jungle gym at the school playground, breaking his arm, twisting it at an unnatural angle behind his neck. Abby had been only five years old at the time, and had known that something bad had happened, but she had been immobilized by the sight of his arm doing something it could never do. He looked likea broken doll.
She felt that way now. Frozen by the idea of what was happening. In a second, it occurred to her that this man, this man who did not belong in her house, her life, her world, had asked her a question.
“What?” she asked, returning to the moment.
“Can you remain calm for me?”
Calm. Yes. She remembered helping Wallace – big, goofy, ungainly Wallace – back to the house, where her mother had called an ambulance. She had taken charge. She would take charge now.
“Yes.”
The man smiled. “Good. Next I want you to go into the backyard, and tell the girls not to be afraid. Tell them that Kolya and I – Kolya is the young man – are friends of the family, and that the girls have nothing to fear from either of us. Will you do this?”
Abby just nodded.
Aleks looked out the window, nodding to the man in the backyard, then returned his attention to her. “You have nothing to fear either, Abigail.”
The sound of her name was a sudden twist of the knife. “How do you know my name?”
“I know many things,” he said. He held forth the rose. Abby noticed a single drop of dew on one of the petals, the way one of the thorns had broken off.
Funny that, she thought. The things you notice.
“And there is no need to worry.” When Abby didn’t take the flower from him, he put it down on the dining-room table, then slipped back into the shadows of the hallway. When he turned away from her his coat fell open. On his hip was a large knife in a leather sheath.
This was everything Abby had ever feared, and it was all happening. Right this minute.
“If you do everything I say,” the man who called himself Aleksander Savisaar added, “Anna and Marya will be just fine.”
FIFTEEN
People’s Legal Services was on the second floor of a sooty brick building on 31st Street, near Newtown Avenue. On one side was a Russian market; on the other a twenty-four-hour bail bondsman.
This day there was yellow crime-scene tape strung out onto the sidewalk, wrapped around two parking meters, and back. The sidewalk was blocked, much to the inconvenience and consternation of the people walking up 31st Street. Profanity in an assortment of languages floated just below the maddeningly enticing aroma of borscht coming from the market.
Michael had driven to the Ardsley-on-Hudson station in Irvington, and taken the Metro North train. He got off at Grand Central and took the uptown 5 train to the 59th Street/Lexington station, then caught the R to Astoria. For New Yorkers, life was a series of numbers and letters, the alphabet-soup language of riding the subway. It seemed you spent half your time discussing the best and alternate routes to get where you were trying to go, and the other half stuck on trains, lamenting the fact that you didn’t take another path. Today, Michael did it all by rote. He almost missed his stop.
As he walked up Ditmars Boulevard, he found that the buildings and people and pavement had melted away, replaced by a single mental image:
His father, smiling, handing a loaf of brown bread to old Mrs Hartstein, antique even then, her rouge a deep scarlet sunburst on paper-white skin.
Ghosts walk here, Michael Roman thought. He did not glance at the building at number 64.
In the years following the murder of his parents, the bakery and the apartment above sat vacant. A few tenants tried to make a go of the downstairs space, but most prospective tenants, after learning of the horrors that had taken placeat 64 Ditmars Boulevard, moved on. The upstairs apartment had never been rented again.
Four years earlier, on their first wedding anniversary, the first phase of Abby’s trust fund kicked in, and at dinner that night she presented Michael with the deed to the building. If Abby’s parents had not initially been enamored with Abby marrying Michael, their reaction to Abby taking the bulk of her check for $750,000 – one of two she would receive, the other to be given on her thirty-second birthday – and buying an ugly brick building on a struggling block in Astoria, had all but caused them apoplexy.
Michael had no idea if and when they would ever do anything with the property. At first he wasn’t sure how he even felt about the gesture. Over time he came to understand that it somehow kept his parents closer, and for that he could never thank his wife enough. It was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever done for him.
To this day, he had not been back inside.
Tommy was waiting for him in front of Angelo’s. He had on his court face.
“Hey,” Tommy said.
“Hey.”
“Fucking city.”
“Fucking city.”
Tommy told him what he knew about the case, which was not much. The 911 call had come in at 4 AM that morning.
All 911 calls for the entire city of New York were routed to a central Manhattan-based location. After the location of the call was determined, the call was routed to the local precinct and sector therein. In Astoria, it would be the 114th precinct.
The detective assigned to the case would be the one next “up” for the assignment, which was, by tradition, selected by rotation throughout the squad. Michael had never been a fan of the system, which was deeply entrenched in the NYPD, because it sometimes led to the most challenging cases being assigned to the detective with the least imagination and initiative. Detectives were 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade, with 1st being the highest. Promotion of grade was based on another tradition, a combination of time-in-grade, seniority, office politics, performance and timing. Injustice was sadly the all-too-frequent result.
When Michael saw the tall, regal figure standing in the doorway leading up to People’s Legal Services, it was good news and bad news. The fact that Detective First Grade Desiree Powell was the lead investigator into the suspicious death of Viktor Harkov was good news for the friends, family, and loved ones of the deceased, among whom Michael Roman could be probably be counted. It was bad news for anyone who had anything to hide, anyone who had even the most peripherally shady dealings with the lawyer, of whom Michael Roman might also well be grouped. If it was there, Desiree Powell would find it. She was relentless.
The scene was crawling with uniforms, suits, forensic investigators, brass. It wasn’t that Viktor Harkov was a celebrity victim, or that this case was necessarily going to make headlines for more than a day, but Harkov knew a lot of people, on both sides of the law, and whenever a defense attorney was killed, the ripples went far and wide. The NYPD wanted a ring around this potential circus as soon as possible.
As Michael and Tommy crossed the street, toward the building that housed Viktor Harkov’s office, Powell looked up from a report at which she was glancing. She gave a slight dip to her chin, acknowledging Michael. Michael waved back, knowing that in the next few minutes he would talk to Powell and everything he said would become part of the record, part of the maelstrom surrounding this place where evil had visited, and once again left its indelible mark.
SIXTEEN
Desiree Powell was a striking woman – soft-spoken, fastidious in her dress and speech, a legendary ballroom dancer. She was of Jamaican descent, born and raised in a small village in the Blue Mountains north of Kingston.
Powell had now been a police officer for twenty-four years, the first seven in uniform on the streets of the 103, patrolling Hollis and South Jamaica in those hard years when crack came to south-eastern Queens.
When you’re a female police officer in your twenties you get it from all corners – suspects, witnesses, fellow officers, ADAs, judges, CSU techs, chiefs, captains, commanders and, providing it was not a homicide, quite often from the victims themselves. When you’re just shy of six feet tall, you get even more. More than once she’d had to mix it up, and in all the years, she had not lost that edge.
These days, on the good days, when the light hit her right and she put in her forty-five minutes on the treadmill, she could pass for a decade younger than her forty-six years. Other days she looked and felt every second, plus. She knew she could still turn heads, but sometimes the effort wasn’t worth the whistle.
Standing on the corner of Newtown and 31st Street, directing a perimeter, Powell knew that it may have been her gold badge that gave her access, but it was her manner that gave her authority.
What she had seen in that blood-splattered office was in every way wrong. The worse the scene, the more she wanted it.
Two men from the DA’s office approached. Michael Roman and Tommy Christiano. Powell had worked with both of them. The Glimmer Twins. They were stars in the office, and, although the police and DA’s office were in theory on the same side, sometimes ego trumped justice.
And, Detective Desiree Powell thought, there was definitely ego to spare on this corner, on this day.
SEVENTEEN
Powell glanced between them, back and forth. She wore an impeccably tailored black suit, lavender blouse, a simple gold chain around her slender neck. Her nails, which she had wisely cut short – a necessity for fieldwork – were highly polished, the color of her blouse. She and Michael were the same height.
“Do we have a suspect in custody I don’t know about?” Powell asked.
As a rule, any number of officials could be summoned to the scene of a homicide – Squad Commander, Chief of Detectives, Crime Scene Unit, Medical Examiner. Representatives of the district attorney’s office were routinely called only when the suspect was detained or arrested at the scene. There were, however, many exceptions to this.
“No,” Tommy said. “I just can’t resist a woman in a suit.”
“Where’s Paul?”
She was asking about Paul Calderon, the originally assigned ADA. “Paul needed some personal time,” Tommy said. “So lucky you. You got me.”
“A girl could do worse.”
“I have two exes who would disagree.”
Powell smiled, glanced at Michael. “And the Stone Man himself,” she said. “Been a while.”
She and Michael shook hands. They had not seen each other in nearly a year. It happened that way sometimes. “How have you been?” Michael asked.
“Better days.” Powell gestured over her shoulder, at the crime scene. “Some fuckery this, eh?”
“Bad?” Tommy asked.
“Bad.”
“What happened?”
Powell teased her short hair. It was perfect to begin with, but Desiree Powell was nothing if not fussy about her appearance. Michael had not once seen her in jeans and running shoes. “We don’t know too much yet. But it looks like he was tortured. Burned.”
“Burned?”
Powell nodded. “This is not the worst of it either.”
Worse than tortured, burned, and murdered, Michael thought. What the hell happened up there? More importantly, why?
“Was it a robbery?” Tommy asked.
Powell shrugged. “Too early to say. Place was not ransacked. There was money in his wallet. Only one drawer in the file cabinet was open. It wasn’t pried.”
Michael felt his heart skip a beat. The fact that a file drawer was open didn’t mean anything. Yet.
“Who called it in?” Tommy asked.
“The son. He stopped by on his way home from work. He’s a night man on the MTA. When he could not reach his father on the phone, he became concerned.”
“Are we looking at the son?” Tommy asked.
Powell shook her head. “Not now. Viktor Harkov had some shady dealings, though, I believe. He knew some bad people, did some bad business. Some times these t’ings come back to haunt you, ya no see it?”
Michael had forgotten how Powell sometimes slipped into her Rastafarian jargon. He had seen the woman on the stand many times, and when the proceedings called for it, Powell could speak like a professor of linguistics. On the street though, she sometimes spoke in her patois. Desiree Powell could work a group, big or small.
The conversation gave way momentarily to the traffic sounds, the hum of the street, the apparatus of a crime scene. Powell glanced at Michael. “So how have you been?”
“I am well,” Michael said. He felt anything but.
“You are both working this,” Powell said.
There was a direct question in that statement, a question more for Michael than Tommy. It hung in the air like smoke in a darkened theater.
“I knew him,” Michael said.
Powell took a few moments, nodded. She probably knew this. She probably knew a little more about Michael and Harkov, but out of respect for Michael’s position, she didn’t press it. For the moment. “I am sorry for the loss of your friend.”
Michael wanted to correct her – Viktor Harkov was by no means his friend –
but he let it drop. He knew the less he said at this time the better.
“What did you get from the son?” Tommy asked.
“The son says he last saw his father last night. Says he brought the old man a bowl of soup. I think he knows a little bit more than he is saying. I’ll have him in the chair later today.”
“But you don’t like him for this,” Michael said.
Powell shook her head. “No. But I think he knows some reason why this was done. I’ll get him talking. Like they say in Kingston, the higher the monkey climbs the more him expose, eh?”
“Des?”
It was Desiree Powell’s partner, Marco Fontova.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said, stepping away.
Fontova was around thirty, disposed to striped suits a size too small and a bit too much cologne for daytime. His hair was short and spiked, a style maybe five years too young, but he pulled it off. Michael did not know him well, but knew that Marco Fontova was part of the post 9/11 class of investigators on the NYPD. And that meant, to people who didn’t know better, mostly in the media, he was lacking.
Michael learned early on that detectives, good detectives, did not learn what they knew from the academy, or manuals, or the bosses. Detectives were schooled by the older cops. Techniques of interrogation and investigation were passed down from experienced detectives to rookies in a ritual as old as the department itself. But when 9/11 happened, a good bit of that changed. On that day, and for weeks and months afterward, law enforcement in the city of New York – and to a certain extent, criminal activity – shut down. Every available detective headed down to ground zero to help out.
The result was that a lot of detectives near their twenty-year mark accumulated so much overtime, that they retired that year. The further result was that the next crop of city detectives did not have rabbis from whom they could learn, and there were some who felt that many investigators on the job for the past seven or eight years were not up to the task.
Desiree Powell was not one of these detectives. She had come up on her own at a time when women, especially black women, were not welcomed into the club that was the gold shield detective. Michael could not think of anyone he would rather work with. By the same token, he could not think of anyone he would rather not go up against.
The Devil_s Garden Page 12
