She had recently investigated a case in North Corona where the victim, a forty-nine-year-old white male, a family man with a wife and three children, was found lying on his backyard, middle of a nice summer day, his head bashed in. There was no weapon found, no witnesses, no suspects. There was, however, a ladder leaning up against the back of his house. The man’s wife said when she left for work that day, her husband told her he was going to replace a few shingles. CSU found blood on the roof, in the gutter as well, which led them to conclude that the man had been bludgeoned on the roof, and not in the backyard as they had originally thought.
Desiree Powell mused: Who climbs a ladder, bludgeons a man, watches the victim roll off, then climbs back down? Why risk being seen by the entire neighborhood? Why not wait until the guy was on the ground, or in the house?
Three times during the neighborhood canvass Powell found she’d had to stop for a moment and wait for the jets overhead to pass. The neighborhood was directly in the flight path of LaGuardia airport.
When the case stalled, Powell reached out to an old friend in TSA, who in turn called a few of the airlines and discovered that, on the day the man died, a cargo plane had reported some engine trouble on takeoff from LaGuardia. Powell visited the hangar and discovered that a piece of metal had come off the engine housing, a piece never recovered by investigators. She also discovered that the plane had passed directly over the community of North Corona. She brought back CSU, and they did a search of the chimney. Inside, they found a chunk of metal near the flue, a ragged piece that fit the engine’s housing perfectly. It was caked with the dead man’s blood.
Airplane, Body, Chimney.
ABC.
Sometimes Powell scared herself.
Marco Fontova walked into the duty room, dropped into his chair on the opposite side of the desk, one of nine or so desks in the small, paper-clogged office. He glanced once at the whiteboards on the wall, the board displaying who was in court that day, who was on the range. He checked his box for mail.
“Nice suit, by the way,” Powell said. She didn’t really mean it, but the kid was a peacock, and she liked to keep him happy. “New?”
Fontova smiled, opened up the jacket. The lining was mauve paisley. “Like it?”
It was a special brand of ugly. “Very becoming. What do we have?”
Fontova had a thick sheaf of paper in his hand, as well as a CD in a clear crystal case. “We have a printout of some of the files on Harkov’s computer, along with a copy of the original data files.”
“That was fast.”
“You want the big half or the small half?”
“I’ll take it all. You know I love this stuff.”
Fontova gave it to her.
Powell looked at the files. It was a database, a listing of Harkov’s clients. The dates went back ten years, and had to contain three hundred names. There were brief notations regarding the nature of the work Harkov had done for these people. Most were civil matters, but there were a number of criminal matters.
Was their killer in here somewhere?
The brutality of the murder suggested something other than a robbery. This was revenge. No one took the time to do what was done to Viktor Harkov just because they had a few hours to spare.
There were really only a few reasons to torture someone. Two, actually, that Powell could think of. One, the hatred for the victim ran so deep, the sense of vengeance was so strong, that nothing less than a slow, painful death would salve the loathing. The other reason was that you wanted information from that person, information the person was not ready to give up. That was pretty much it. Unless you just happened to have a taste for it, which, even for New York City, was fairly uncommon.
According to the database, Viktor Harkov was only a mediocre criminal defense attorney. He had won only half the criminal trials in which he was involved. Of the cases he had lost, the longest prison term imposed on one of his clients was a five-year stretch at Dannemora.
Was that a long enough sentence for someone to want to extract this depth of revenge upon release? Powell imagined it was possible, depending on the person.
Their initial canvass of the scene and the neighborhood had produced nothing. Once again, a ghost had floated through the crowded streets of New York City, committed murder, and floated out.
“Let’s run the people whose cases he lost,” Powell said. “Maybe someone thought he didn’t provide a vigorous enough defense and had it in for him.”
“You mean like in Cape Fear?”
Powell just stared at him.
“Cape Fear? The movie?”
The last movie Desiree Powell had seen was Jaws. She hadn’t been to the movies, or Rockaway Beach, since. “Right,” she said. “Exactly. Just like Cape Fear.”
Powell glanced at the crime-scene photos. This was a monster, this guy. A real boogeyman. And he was currently walking the streets of her city, breathing her air, which was just unacceptable.
Not for long, she thought.
Not for long.
The courtroom seemed dreamlike, an alien landscape populated with strange apparitions. Yes, the bench was where it always was. The defense and prosecution tables were just about where they always had been. The court reporter sat at her station, machine on its tripod, her nimble fingers at the ready.
Michael had entered this room hundreds of times, had held the lives of both victims and defendants in the balance, had navigated the rocky shoals of justice with skill and precision and no small measure of luck. But each of those times he had been in control.
Be wise, Michael. I will contact you soon.
Michael ransacked his memory, trying to place the voice he had heard on the phone. He could not.
My full name is Aleksander Savisaar. I want you to call me Aleks. I am telling you this because I know you are not going to contact the authorities.
He did not recognize the man’s name, either. Was it someone he had once prosecuted? Was it a relative of someone he had put in prison, or upon whom the state of New York had imposed the death penalty? Was this about vengeance? Money? Was this someone with a grievance against the legal system taking it out on him?
The lot of anyone in a district attorney’s office, or anyone in any branch of law enforcement, was to be ever vigilant. You spend your working life locking up criminals, only to have these people one day get out, many times holding you responsible for their miserable lives.
Had he neglected or failed to see this coming, and now his family was going to pay for it?
With all these questions unanswered, Michael was certain of one thing. The man who had called him was responsible for the atrocity of Viktor Harkov’s brutal murder.
Michael glanced into the gallery. At the back of the courtroom he saw the two detectives from the 114 who had initially been given the task of investigating the murder of Colin Harris. It would be so easy to cross the room, lean over, and tell them what was happening.
Be wise, Michael. I will contact you soon.
A few moments later, the jury was led back into the courtroom. Judge Gregg summarized what he had said earlier.
Normally, Michael would watch the defendant at a moment such as this. Instead, he looked at the faces of the jurors, the faces of the gallery, the faces of the police officers and officers of the court scattered around the room. He even watched the court reporter.
Was one of these people watching him?
“Mr Roman,” Judge Gregg said. “You may continue.”
Michael Roman stood, walked around the table, and began to speak. He was certain he apologized to the jury for the interruption. There was no doubt he gave a brief recap to where he had been. Unquestioningly, he picked up essentially where he had left off.
He just didn’t hear any of it. Not a word. Instead, his focus was on the people around him. Faces, eyes, hands, body language.
There was a man, perhaps fifty, sitting in the front row of the gallery. He had a scar on his neck, a military buzz cut, thick ar
ms.
There was a woman, two rows back. Forties, too much make-up, too much jewelry. She wore long fake red fingernails. One nail was missing on her left hand.
There was a young man at the back of the gallery, a stocky kid in his twenties with an earring in his left ear. He seemed to be tracking Michael’s movement across the courtroom with a particularly close scrutiny.
Michael looked at the faces of the people in the jury. He had an ideal juror – all lawyers did, both defense and prosecutors. You always wanted to go with a juror who would be sympathetic to your case. Contrary to popular belief, lawyers did not want anyone on the jury who was free from bias or prejudice. Just the opposite. You wanted someone who held the right bias and prejudice. As a prosecutor, Michael wanted the Con Ed worker, the bus driver, the tax-paying citizen over forty. He wanted the person old enough to have grown weary of crime and criminals and excuses. The last person he wanted was the twenty-three-year-old inner-city school teacher, ever the true believer. For Michael, the less idealistic the juror, the better.
As he scanned the jury, he tried to remember what they had discussed during the voir dire. What a lot of people didn’t know was that the seemingly extemporaneous banter with a prosecutor or defense attorney was as telling, or more telling, than the direct questions. As a rule, this all came to Michael in toto during a trial. But today was a little different, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember a thing.
Had Aleks, the man on the phone, the man who had kidnapped his family, gotten to someone on the jury? One of the alternates? One of the gallery? Had he gotten to one of the officers of the court?
Who was watching him?
“Mr Roman?”
Michael turned. The judge was talking to him. He had no idea what he was saying, what he had said. Moreover, he had no idea how long he had been gone. He turned and glanced at the jury. They were all staring at him, fidgeting, waiting, anticipating his next word. What had his last word been? It was every lawyer’s nightmare. Except today, it was nothing compared to Michael Roman’s real nightmare.
“Your honor?”
Judge Gregg motioned him to the bench. Michael turned, looked at the defendant.
Patrick Ghegan was smiling.
TWENTY-EIGHT
In his mind, in the realm of both near and distant future, often-times centuries into the future, he could not see himself. Not in the sense in which one sees oneself in a mirror or a store window, or even the slightly ethereal vision of one’s face in a body of still water, looking back in a dream, only to be disturbed by a breeze, rippling away.
No, his vision of himself as the deathless one was more in the realm of a god. He had no physical presence, no matter composed of flesh and blood and sinew, no muscle, no bone. These were things organic, things of the earth. He was of the ether.
They say that he was found, swaddled in a white altar cloth, lying in the cemetery next to a crumbling Lutheran church in south-eastern Estonia, thirty-three years ago. They say one winter morning, a gray wolf scratched the rector’s door, and led the man to the baby in the graveyard. The elderly priest took the baby six miles to the Russian orphanage at Treski. They say the wolf sat outside the gate of the home, day and night, for days, perhaps weeks. One day, one of the Russian workers brought the boy, who had begun to regain his strength, to the gate. The say the wolf licked the boy’s face, just once, and disappeared into the forest.
They say that, pinned to the brilliant white cloth had been a piece of yellow paper, a note card with a single word written out in a young girl’s loopy scrawl. Aleksander.
As a child, as he moved like a ghost through the Soviet-run orphanages, he was considered unmanageable, and therefore passed from one home to another. He learned many things. He learned how to hoard and ration his food. He learned how to lie, to steal. He learned to fight.
Often he was discovered in the small schoolrooms, the sparse libraries, reading the books of older children by candlelight. He was beaten many times for this, deprived of supper, but he never learned the lesson. He did not want to learn the lesson. For it was in these worn, leather-bound volumes that he found the world outside the stone walls, where he learned the history of his country, his people, where he learned of Estonia’s much conquered shores by the Danes, the Norse, the Russians. He would study the photographs of these men, then study his own in the mirror. From whom had he descended? What blood coursed through his veins? He did not know. At the age of eight he decided it did not matter, he would learn to be unconquerable, a nation of one.
At ten, a visiting teacher named Mr Oskar showed him how to play the flute. It was the first kindness ever shown him. He taught Aleks the basics, and every Sunday afternoon for two years gave him lessons. Aleks learned not only the Estonian composers – Eller, Oja, Part, Magi – but many of the Russian and German composers as well. When Mr Oskar died from a massive stroke, the elders saw no worth in the battered old flute. They let Aleks keep it. He had never been given anything.
At eighteen, Aleks joined the federal army. Over six-feet tall and powerfully built, he was immediately deployed to Chechnya.
Soon after completing his basic training he was recruited and trained by the FSK in interrogation techniques. He did not take the lead so much as provide a presence, a phantom that haunted prisoners by night, and shadowed them by day. He learned to sleep soundly as men around him pierced the night with their screams.
Within six months he was deemed ready for the front. They sent him first to the border city of Molkov, but that would prove to be only a stopover. Three weeks later they sent him to place called Grozny.
They sent him to Hell.
The siege of Grozny began on New Year’s Eve 1994, and was a disaster for the Russian forces. At first, the one thousand men of the mighty Maikop 131st Battalion, amassed just north of the city, met with little resistance. They took the airport north of Grozny with few casualties.
But their gains were short-lived. Ill-trained, poorly supplied, the Russian soldiers were not ready for what awaited them in the city. Some commanders were as young as nineteen.
The Chechens, in contrast, were fierce and determined warriors. They were, by and large, trained and highly experienced marksmen, having learned to shoot and handle weapons since they were children. After picking off fleeing and confused soldiers, they would come down from the hills and grab weapons from the dead Russians, bolstering their meager armories. Some managed to steal machine guns from the armored vehicles, turning them on the doomed men inside.
As the day wore on, the Chechen separatists fought back, using everything they could: Russian-made, rocket-propelled grenades, fired from rooftops; Russian grenades thrown into tanks; even the deadly kinzbal, the prized Caucasian heirloom daggers. The number of dismembered and decapitated Russian soldiers all over the city were testament to the effectiveness of these comparatively primitive weapons. It was estimated that in the Battle of Grozny, Russians lost more tanks then they did in the battle for Berlin in 1945.
Over the month of January, federal forces would suffer even greater humiliations and defeat.
In each ill-conceived and executed battle, against clearly underestimated Chechen separatist forces, the bodies fell. All around Aleks, Russian soldiers and Chechen rebels were dead or dying. Yet, many times, while the blood of his fellow soldiers, his enemies, drained into the fields, mingling with the bones of centuries below, only Aleks was left standing.
Three times that January, in three fierce firefights, he emerged with little more than a scratch. His legend began to grow. The Estonian who could not be killed.
Then came January 15, 1995. One hundred and twenty federal soldiers were hunkered down in the marshes, outlying buildings, and silos just south of the Sunzha River. Intel, or what little they could gather with their primitive radios, told them that there were one hundred rebels holed up in the village. Their orders were to wait them out. For three days, with few rations, and even less sleep, they waited. Then the order came to advance.
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At just before dawn Aleks’s unit of twenty began to make their way slowly across the frozen marsh. Some marched with newspaper stuffed into their boots for warmth. They did not make it far.
First came the mortar fire, huge 150-millimeter shells. The outbuildings and silos exploded on impact, killing all inside. Red rain fell. The shelling went on for more than six hours, the incessant roar of the explosions was deadening.
When the quiet came, Aleks dared to take a look. Body parts were scattered up the hillside. The armored cars were destroyed. The sounds of moaning could be heard beneath the staccato of automatic-weapons fire near the river.
Nothing stirred.
Then came the helicopters and their NURS mini-rockets.
In all, one hundred and nineteen Russian soldiers were killed. Most of the village was burned to the ground. Livestock were slaughtered and the streets ran crimson.
Only Aleks lived.
When the smoke cleared, and the screaming stopped, Aleks prepared to return to his base. He walked through the deserted village, now little more than blackened rubble. The smell of death was overpowering. At the end of the main street was a rise. In the near distance was a farmhouse, mostly intact.
As he strode up the hill, on alert, he began to feel something, something that had been growing within him for years. He stood tall, threw his rifle sling over his shoulder. He felt strong, the numbing fatigue and fear sliding away.
The Devil_s Garden Page 17
