The Devil_s Garden

by Richard Montanari

  “What would you like for dinner?”

  The girls exchanged a guilty glance, looked back. “McNuggets,” they said.

  Abby watched the door at the top of the stairs, and waited. She had always feared for her daughters, as any mother would. The stranger in the car, the terminal childhood disease. She had also feared the legal ramifications of what they had done. She had even rehearsed what she might say if ever called before a judge or a magistrate, the pleadings of a woman desperate for a child.

  But never this.

  A few minutes later Aleks came downstairs. Abby had long ago stopped struggling against her restraints. Her limbs had fallen numb.

  “Do you need anything?” he asked.

  Abby Roman just glared at him.

  “We are going to leave for a while. We will not be long.” He crossed the room, sat on the edge of the workbench. Abby noticed that he had gelled his hair. What was he getting ready to do?

  “Kolya will remain here. You will obey him as you obey me.”

  Abby noticed he was carrying a manila envelope. She saw her own handwriting on the front. It was the envelope that had Charlotte and Emily’s adoption papers in them.

  Her blood turned to ice water. “You can’t do this.”

  “Anna and Marya were stolen from their mother’s bed in the middle of the night. They are mine.”

  Abby had to ask. Perhaps, in the answer, she would find something she needed. “Why do you call them Anna and Marya?”

  Aleks considered her for a few long moments. “Do you really want to know the answer to this question?”

  Abby wasn’t sure. But she knew she needed to keep him talking. If he left an opening, any opening, she would take it. She tried to keep the fear from her voice. “Yes.”

  Aleks looked away, then back.

  “It is the story of a prince and his three sisters…”

  Over the next five minutes Aleks told her a story. What Abby had feared – that she was dealing with a dangerous but rational individual – was not true. This man was insane. He believed he was this Koschei. He believed that, with his daughters, he would be immortal. He believed that his soul was in the girls.

  The part that stole Abby’s breath, the part that frightened her to the limits of her being, was that the girls knew. They had been looking at pictures from the same story in the library.

  When he finished telling her the story Aleks stood, watched her for the longest time, perhaps waiting for some sort of reaction. Abby was speechless for a moment. Then:

  “You’ll never get them out of the country. Someone is going to catch you.”

  “If I cannot have them I will take their essence,” Aleks said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Aleks touched the vials around his neck.

  My God, Abby thought. The vial filled with blood. The two empties. He was going to kill the girls if he had to.

  As Aleks climbed the stairs, Abby felt her heart break.

  She would never see Charlotte and Emily again.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Desiree Powell was hungry. Whatever was cooking in the kitchen – it smelled like a pork roast with rosemary and garlic, three of her favorite things – was making her salivate. She’d forgotten to eat lunch. It often happened in the tornado of the first twenty-four hours of a homicide investigation.

  The ride up to Putnam County had been stop and start, due to construction. Fontova had taken a nap, a skill Powell had never been able to cultivate. She barely slept in her own bed, at night, with a righteous snort and 5 mg of Ambien as a chaser.

  But now a question hung in the air.

  Powell stared at the woman, tapping her pen on her notebook, waiting for an answer. With her hooded, eyes and unwavering gaze, Detective Desiree Powell knew she was all but impossible to read.

  Powell had dealt with many social workers and behavioral therapists in her career. She knew the mindset. She knew that Sondra Arsenault had spent most of her adult life exploring people’s motives, ferreting out their agendas, divining their purpose. She was probably good at these things. Powell knew that she presented Sondra Arsenault with a cipher. By nature, social workers asked the questions. Today, it was Powell’s job.

  When Sondra had called the local police department they had sent around a pair of uniformed officers to take down a report regarding the man who had broken into her home. When she told the uniformed officers that there might be a connection between the break-in at her house and the murder of a New York City lawyer named Viktor Harkov, they had wrapped things up quickly. They told her that someone would be contacting them soon.

  Powell asked again. “So, the only people in the house were your daughters and yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything? No breaking glass, no door being kicked in?”

  Powell knew that the uniformed officers had looked at all the doors and windows, and written down that there had been no forced entry. It never hurt to cover it again.

  “No.”

  “You walked into you daughters’ room, and there he was.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the man doing?”

  “He was just standing there, at the foot of the bed,” Sondra said. “He was… he was watching them.”

  “Watching them?”

  “Watching them sleep.”

  Powell made a note. “Was the light on in the bedroom?”

  “No. Just a night light.”

  “I know you described this man to the officers, but I need you to tell me. Once again, I’m sorry to put you through this. It’s just routine.”

  Sondra didn’t hesitate. “He was tall, Caucasian, broad shouldered. He had close-cropped sandy hair, almost blond. He wore a black leather coat, dark jeans, white shirt, black vest. He had a small scar under his left cheekbone, a few days of stubble, light-blue eyes. He was in his thirties.”

  Powell stared at her again, unblinking. “This is a remarkably precise description, Mrs Arsenault.”

  Sondra remained silent.

  “And you saw all this with just a night light?”

  “No,” Sondra replied. “After I entered the room he turned on the overhead light.”

  Powell scribbled another note, asked another question, one to which she already had the answer. “May I ask if you work outside the home?”

  “Yes. I am a social worker. Part of my job is to observe people.”

  Powell nodded. “Here in Putnam County?”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “It’s not only people in the city who need counseling.”

  Attitude, Powell thought. She left it unchallenged. “You said he spoke to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said: This is not Anna and Marya. I have made a mistake. If I have frightened you, you have my deepest apologies. You are in no danger.”

  She pronounced the name Ma-RYE-a. Powell glanced at the photograph of the twins on the mantel, back. “Your daughter’s names are Lisa and Katherine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who are Anna and Marya?”

  Sondra said she had no idea. The look on her face, along with the way she worried one finger around another, told Powell that deep inside, where fear makes its nest, she probably had the feeling she was going to find out.

  “After this you say he slipped out the window, and you never saw him again.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did you watch where he went? Did you see if he got into a car?”

  “No,” Sondra said. “I did not.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I closed the window, drew the blinds, and turned off the light. Then I held my daughters.”

  “Of course.” She made another note, took a few moments, then glanced at James. “May I ask where you were when this happened, sir?”

  James cleared his throat. It sounded like a stall. Powell knew all the delay tactics – clearing the throat, scratching the lo
wer leg, asking for a simple question to be repeated.

  “I was at the school where I teach. Franklin Middle school on Sussex Avenue.”

  Powell flipped a few pages back. “You were there at nine o’clock at night?”

  “We had a parent-teacher meeting that night. I was helping clean up.”

  Powell wrote this down. She would contact the school to see if James was telling the truth, as well as plug this information into the timeline surrounding the murder of Viktor Harkov.

  “And what time did you get home?”

  “I think it was just before ten.”

  “The school is an hour away?”

  “No,” James said. “We stopped for coffee.”

  “We?”

  James gave Powell the names of two of his colleagues.

  “And your wife said nothing about this incident when you got home?”

  “No.”

  “Does this person she described sound familiar to you?”

  “No.”

  Powell turned back to Sondra. “Have you cleaned the bedroom since the incident, Mrs Arsenault?”

  “No,” Sondra said. She looked slightly embarrassed by this, as if by implication it made her a bad housekeeper.

  “I have a forensic team standing by,” Powell said. “Would it be okay if they processed the room for DNA and fingerprints?”

  “Yes,” Sondra said.

  Powell took out her cellphone, dialed the weather, listened. She would not be able to get her own CSU team out here for at least two hours, but the Arsenaults did not need to know that. When she got the forecast, she said a few perfunctory, official sounding phrases. She clicked off, took a sip of her coffee, which had grown cold. She leaned forward in her chair, a sure sign of intimate friendship, and continued.

  “You both strike me as decent, intelligent people, so I think you know what I have to ask you next.”

  Here it comes, Sondra’s face said.

  “A man breaks into your house,” Powell continued. “It appears he does not steal anything, or harm anyone. It appears he thought your daughters were little girls named Anna and Marya. Have I gotten this right so far?”

  Sondra nodded.

  “So why do you think this has anything to do with the murder of a lawyer in Queens?”

  Sondra took her time answering. “The newspaper account said that the lawyer handled foreign adoptions.”

  “Yes,” Powell said. “He did.”

  “And when the man – this intruder – spoke, he had an accent. Eastern European, Russian, perhaps Baltic.”

  Powell pretended to consider this for a moment. “Mrs Arsenault, with all due respect, there are a lot of Russian people in New York. A lot of people from Romania, Poland, Lithuania. You’ll forgive me if I don’t see the immediate connection.”

  Sondra tried to hold Powell’s gaze. She withered. “We… we knew Mr Harkov.”

  Powell felt her pulse kick up a notch. “You mean professionally?”

  “Yes.”

  “He did some legal work for you and your husband?”

  Sondra took James’s hand in hers. “You could say that.”

  “What would you say, Mrs Arsenault?”

  Tears began to gather in Sondra’s eyes. “Yes. He did some work for us.”

  “I have to tell you that when we got the call from your local police department, we looked through Mr Harkov’s files, going back twelve years. We didn’t see your name.”

  Powell did not wait for her to respond.

  “Tell me how you came to meet Mr Harkov.”

  Sondra told him about the process. How they had tried to adopt, three different times, and been rejected. How Sondra had heard about Harkov from a woman she had befriended at a medical conference in Manhattan. She recalled how Harkov said that he could get around certain things, that being their ages, and how they wanted a baby, not a child of five years. For a fee.

  “Are you saying that Mr Harkov may have done something off the books? Something illegal regarding the adoption of Lisa and Katherine?”

  It appeared that Sondra Arsenault might have had a million words to say, but in the end only three words found her lips.

  “Yes,” she said. “He did.”

  Powell looked at the woman. It was the break she had been waiting for. She glanced at Fontova, who had been sitting quietly on a rather severe-looking Danish modern dining-room chair. He moved his head an inch to one side, then back. No questions.

  Powell stood, walked to the front window. A had just led to B. It was on. She had never gotten past C in her career, had never needed to. When she got to C she had her killer.

  There was a good chance that the man who had destroyed Viktor Harkov had broken into this house. Maybe he had left a fingerprint. Maybe an eyelash or a drop of saliva. Maybe he had been seen by one of the neighbors. They would begin a canvass.

  But who were Anna and Marya? Was there another couple out there in jeopardy?

  And if so, why? Why was a killer looking for two little girls?

  Powell had one more question for the moment.

  “Mrs Arsenault, this woman, the one you met at the medical conference, what was her name?”

  Sondra Arsenault looked at her hands. “I never got her last name, but I remember she was a nurse,” she said. “An ER nurse. Her name was Abby.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Michael put his ear to the motel wall, listened. He could hear a muffled voice coming from the room next door.

  He picked up the remote, turned on the television, all the while holding the volume down button. In seconds the picture came on. Ear still tight to the wall, Michael flipped through the channels. The service was basic cable, and soon he returned to the channel where he began. The sound from the other room did not sync with any of the TV channels. The sound was either a radio talk show or another motel patron talking on the phone.

  He turned off the TV, cupped his ear to the wall once more, concentrated. The rhythm sounded like a man having a telephone conversation, like the man was agreeing with someone. A yes-man talking to his boss. Or his wife.

  After five minutes or so, there was silence. Michael heard the water flowing through the pipe, but he could not be sure it was coming from the next room. He then heard the television click on, a few ads, then the unmistakable rhythms of a game show. After another five minutes the television was turned off.

  Michael heard a door open then close. He stepped quickly to the window, inched over the vertical blind. He saw a middle-aged man in a wrinkled gray suit exit the room next to his, walk over to a red Saturn. He fumbled with keys for a moment, then opened the car door, slipped inside. Michael saw the man unfold a map, study it for a full minute. Soon the car backed up, drove out of the parking lot, pulled onto the marginal road, and head toward the avenue.

  Michael glanced over at the motel sign. The blue Ford with the tinted windows was still in position.

  He crossed the room, put his ear to the wall again. Silence. He held this position for a few minutes, listening. No sounds came from the room next door. He knocked on the wall. Nothing. He knocked louder. Silence. The third time he pounded on the wall, hard enough to dislodge the cheap framed print above the bed in his own room and send it crashing to the floor.

  He listened again. Unless the world’s soundest sleeper was in the next room, it was empty.

  He ran his hands along the wall. It felt like drywall beneath the cheap wallpaper, perhaps half-inch gypsum. There was vinyl cove base at the floor, no crown molding at the ceiling. He wondered if -

  The phone rang. Michael nearly jumped out of his skin. He ran across the room, stumbling over the desk chair, and picked up the receiver before the phone could ring a second time.

  “Yes.”

  “Just checking in, counselor.”

  It was the one called Kolya. Michael knew enough about the world to know Kolya was the accomplice, a lackey, despite his claims to be the mastermind. “I’m here.”

  “Smart man.”
>
  “I need to talk to my wife.”

  “Not gonna happen, boss.”

  Boss. Prison.

  “I need to know she is all right.”

  No response. Michael listened closely to the receiver. There was no background noise. It was impossible to tell where Kolya was calling from. After a few moments pause, Kolya said:

  “She’s a good-looking woman.”

  A sick feeling washed over Michael. He had not considered for a moment that this could get worse. It just did. He battled back his rage. He lost the fight.

  “I swear to Christ if you fucking touch -!”

  “Thirty minutes.”

  The line went dead.

  It took every ounce of discipline within him not to slam down the receiver. He did not need a broken phone on top of everything. He took a few deep breaths, then calmly set the phone in its cradle.

  He set the timer on his chronograph watch. He started it. In an instant the readout went from 30:00 to 29:59. He did not have much time to do what he needed to do.

  He looked around the room for something to use. Something sharp. He opened the drawers in the dresser. Inside one was a yellowed cash-registry receipt, a glossy slip for three pairs of men’s support hose from Macy’s. The other held only the fading scent of a lavender sachet.

  The two nightstands were empty, as were the closets, save for a pair of wire coat hangers. He took them off the rod, then stepped into the bathroom.

  He tried to pull the mirror off the wall. It didn’t budge.

  He wrapped his arm in his coat, turned away his head, and slammed his elbow into the mirror as hard as he could. Nothing. He planted his feet, tried again. This time the mirror cracked. He wrapped his hand in a towel, and pulled off the largest piece.

  On the wall facing the adjoining room there were two electrical outlets, spaced about six feet apart. When Michael was in high school he had worked three summers for a leasing company that owned three apartment buildings in Queens. He picked up a few skills, one of which was hanging drywall in newly renovated apartments. As a rule of thumb, the studs in the wall were sixteen inches on center. If a contractor wanted to skimp, he sometimes placed them twenty-four inches apart. In most residential structures waterlines ran through the basement or crawlspace, coming up through the floor plates to the sinks, tubs, and toilets, leaving only electrical wire or conduit to run behind the plaster or drywall.