Spring Betrayal Read online

  Sometimes the job’s simply about keeping an open mind, rearranging facts until you start to see patterns. But over the years, I’ve learned dreams can hint at something, even if I can’t always work out what it is. It’s more than simply sifting clues or watching how seemingly random patterns form a new way of seeing things.

  Dreams let me step away from myself, allow me to reach an understanding with my surroundings, the smells, the sounds, the mutter of wind stirring the grass on the high jailoo. The cynical might call it grasping at straws, or following a hunch, or desperation. I call it listening to the songs of the dead, telling me how they died, why, and who stole their breath.

  And sometimes it’s about seeing the world through the eyes of the thief.

  I spent the next two days making phone calls, using the list that Gurminj had given me of all the orphans whose identity bands were in front of me as I spoke. None of them seemed connected to each other, and a couple hung up on me once I started to explain the reason for my call. None of them had been in the same orphanage at the same time as anyone else on the list. Four men, three women, living in different parts of the country, with nothing in common apart from their time in the care of the state. A time that didn’t seem to have many happy memories for them.

  I also contacted their local police stations, to see if there was anything against them. One man accused of selling weed, a couple of car crashes, nothing that tied them to seven small bodies.

  Usupov was due to go back to Bishkek the following day, taking the bodies with him, to store in the morgue in the hope that we might find out their identities. My new boss in Bishkek, the replacement for the chief, a paper-pusher and political appointment called Lavrov, had already called me twice, stressing the need for a quick solution to the crime. I did think about asking him if he had any ideas, but the only investigating he’d ever done was looking for his car keys.

  Which meant it was time to find out exactly what Usupov wasn’t telling me.

  “Kenesh, I need to know what’s going on.”

  We were in the hotel lobby, empty apart from the two of us and a receptionist engrossed in texting her friends. It made sense to talk here; I know enough about wired interrogation rooms to avoid having a conversation in any police station. I sat back on the lumpy hotel sofa and stared at Usupov, saying nothing. All too often, it’s what you don’t say that gives you the edge.

  Usupov looked around, his usual calm gone, avoiding my eyes, his glasses catching the harsh mid-morning light from the window. His unease infected me, and my fingers touched the cold metal of my Yarygin.

  “Akyl, the best thing you can do is tiptoe away, and make sure the door doesn’t slam behind you. This is a crime you don’t want to solve.”

  His unusual use of my name was even more disconcerting than the warning he gave. In all the years I’d known him, the formality with which he’d called me “Inspector” had defined our relationship. Now, I didn’t know where I stood with him. I lit a cigarette to buy myself some time to think, and watched the blue-gray smoke as it hung in the air.

  “Kenesh, I’m not a virgin. Tell me.”

  Usupov shrugged. I picked a fleck of tobacco off the tip of my tongue and stubbed out my cigarette.

  “You know I can’t just walk away from this. I do and I’m fucked. Lavrov will have me up on the Torugart Pass, inspecting license plates on the trucks that cross over from China.”

  Usupov said nothing, and I felt anger starting to rise.

  “If you know something, and I don’t, you’re a witness, maybe even a suspect,” I said, “and no one’s going to question me if I put you up in a cell for a few days. Maybe with someone you’ve testified against.”

  It was an empty threat, and we both knew it, but I needed to remind Usupov that this was a murder case, and there weren’t going to be any get-out-of-jail cards.

  “I don’t know much,” Usupov said, staring down at his hands. I noticed that they shook slightly.

  “So you do know something,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Not know, more something I suspect.”

  “You tell me what you suspect, I’ll find the evidence to back it up,” I said.

  “You’re coming up against some very powerful men, Akyl.”

  I shrugged; I’d expected nothing less. And putting a stone in the shoes of the rich and powerful is more satisfying than confiscating some alkash’s bottle, or collecting breakfast money fines for speeding.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time, Kenesh, you know that. It’s my career specialty.”

  He shook his head, sucking his teeth at my criminal stupidity.

  “They’ll brush you aside and forget about you the next minute. Traffic duty in Torugart Pass? You’ll be lucky not to be in a shroud lying next to your wife.”

  Perhaps that was the meaning of my dream, a warning or a prophecy. The ticking of the clock behind the reception desk was very loud. Silence hung between us like a spider’s web, ready to snare the unwary.

  “These powerful fuckers, what is it they want, Kenesh?”

  Usupov stared past me, and I could have sworn there were tears in his eyes.

  “You can’t fight them, Akyl.”

  “Let me ask you again, and this time with my Murder Squad cap on. Chief Forensic Pathologist Usupov, what is it they want?”

  Usupov paused, sighed, world-weary, sickened.

  “Fresh meat, Inspector. Young meat.”

  He stirred his lukewarm tea, raised the cup to his mouth, put it down again untasted. His eyes were bleak behind his glasses.

  “They want children.”

  Chapter 9

  “It was around this time, about a year ago,” Kenesh began, his eyes avoiding mine. “I’d been called out in the middle of the night by the duty officer at Sverdlovsky station. They’d found a body just off Chui Prospekt, it was being shipped to the morgue for me to examine. He wouldn’t give me any details, except to say it was important the autopsy be done right away.

  “I wasn’t too pleased; we’d been celebrating the spring festival, Nowruz, and I knew I had a busy day ahead. But he told me orders from the top, with a police car outside my front door within ten minutes. So I got dressed, a ment drove me across town to the morgue.

  “The body had already arrived, laid out on the table, covered, just as usual. But what was different was the man sitting on the next table. He was wearing a suit, smart, expensive, so I didn’t think he was a policeman; a lawyer maybe, a government official, whatever. But he didn’t have that nomenklatura look. He was thickset, maybe forty, with the face of a former boxer, all shadows and scars. He sat there on one of the tables, legs swinging, smoking as if he didn’t have a care in the world, in his favorite bar with a cold beer in front of him.

  “I told him that I didn’t allow smoking in the operating room. He looked at me, then at the end of his cigarette, raised an eyebrow.

  “‘You’re worried about his health?’ he said, waving the cigarette in the direction of the body.

  “‘No, but I’m worried about mine,’ I said. He just smiled, looked at his cigarette again, and gusted a blue cloud in my direction. His smile never managed to climb as far as his eyes.

  “‘I think you’ll find the cause of death was a heart attack,’ he said. ‘Tragic in such a young man.’

  “I pulled back the sheets, and looked down at the body.”

  Usupov paused, then reached over and took a cigarette from my pack that lay on the table. He lit it with the uncertain gesture of a nonsmoker, coughed as he swallowed the smoke.

  “Bad?” I said.

  Usupov nodded, swallowed, trying to recapture his normal air of detachment.

  “I’ve seen a lot of shit that people do to each other, Akyl,” he said, and I watched the burning end of his cigarette tremble, as if caught in a sudden wind. I waited for him to speak. From a man who’d spent so much time in the presence of the dead, his silence told me more than I wanted to know.

  “He was a
bout twelve, I guessed, but hard to tell from the bruising on his face and chest. Small, undernourished, thin enough so I could see the broken ribs outlined against his skin. The left cheekbone shattered, so his face had collapsed in on itself. Two teeth on the right side slicing through his cheek. His facial injuries came from a hammer; I could see the circular imprint.”

  Usupov paused, snapped his fingers to drag the receptionist away from her phone.

  “Vodka, the good stuff,” he said. I shook my head, watched the girl walk away. We waited in silence until an open bottle and brimming glass sat in front of him. Usupov emptied the glass in one swift movement, shuddered as the alcohol blazed in his mouth and throat.

  “Go on,” I said, quietly, not wanting to break Usupov’s rhythm.

  “Bite marks—from more than one mouth—on the boy’s thighs. A compound fracture of the left tibia. And bruising from what looked like heavy boots. Not just kicking but stamping, so I could see the tread on the soles. More than one pair of shoes.”

  He poured more vodka, watched it spill over the lip of the glass.

  “All the time I was examining the body, the man watched without a reaction. I might have been preparing dinner. Then I turned the body over.”

  Usupov emptied the glass in a single shot.

  “He’d been raped, Inspector, by more than one man, from the amount of sperm I found. Penetrated with something sharp. There was blood on the back of his legs, more bite marks on his shoulders. Twelve, Inspector, that’s how young he was. The same age as my eldest.”

  I said nothing. There are times when the dead bear witness to such horror that silence is the only possible alternative to a scream of despair. I pushed the thought of a vodka for myself to one side. The clock continued to tick, like a pulse refusing to give up.

  “The man said, ‘I told you, a heart attack,’ and he stood up, mashed his cigarette out on the floor. It left a blue-black mark on the tiles, the same shade as the bruises on the boy’s face. The man stood in front of me, the tobacco on his breath heavy on my face. He had a killer’s cold eyes, black, impossible to read. He held up a crumpled piece of paper, pushed it against my chest.

  “‘The boy’s death certificate. I’ve saved you the trouble of filling it in. Heart attack. Mitral stenosis. It says so in black and white,’ he said, ‘and if it bothers you, well, his isn’t the only blank death certificate I have. Understand?’

  “I asked if the body was to be released to relatives, and he told me not to bother my head with things that didn’t concern me. ‘Concentrate on slicing up the dead,’ he said. ‘And avoid joining them.’”

  Usupov stared at the wall, not seeing anything, and we sat in silence.

  “What makes you suspect there’s a connection to the case we have here?” I asked.

  “You saw the bodies we autopsied,” Kenesh said. “There were bite marks on some of them. Blows from a hammer. Similar wounds. Done in a frenzy, maybe rage, maybe sexual, I don’t know.”

  “So you think there’s a serial killer responsible for this?”

  “More than one, judging from the boy’s body,” Kenesh said. “He’d been raped many times.”

  “Can you check the wounds and see if they correspond?”

  “Not with the dead boy. I wasn’t allowed to take photographs, and the body was taken away, God knows where. But there’s one thing I haven’t told you.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, sensing that Usupov might be able to give me my first solid lead.

  “The dead boy wore an identity band. From an orphanage.”

  I sat back as his words started twisting new patterns and theories in my head.

  “So what happened then?” I prompted.

  Usupov looked at me for the first time. The fear and shame in his eyes was almost too much to watch.

  “God forgive me, Akyl,” he said. “The man handed me the false death certificate. And I signed.”

  Chapter 10

  I decided to call Gurminj Shokhumorov, to see if he had any knowledge of local people with an unhealthy interest in children. Orphanages are often targeted by pedophiles; it’s a lot easier to pick out children who don’t have loving parents to care and watch over them, and fewer people care when they disappear.

  His cell phone rang, but went to voicemail, so I decided to head over there. The mountains crouched behind a mask of rain, the air damp and cold. I kept trying Gurminj’s phone, and I grew more worried each time I pressed the redial button. A police car was parked at an angle outside the building when I arrived, and I knew something was badly wrong. As I got out of the car and approached the front entrance, a ment I didn’t recognize held up his hand to stop me.

  “Crime scene. You can’t enter here,” he said, in the pompous voice all small men use when they’re in charge.

  “What sort of crime?” I asked, the feeling of doom settling in my stomach.

  “Police business,” he replied, put his hand on my chest to prevent me going any further. My jacket swung open, and I made sure he saw the butt of my gun on my hip. He gasped, started to reach for his own gun. I grabbed his wrist, held it tight, pulling him toward me.

  “I’m Murder Squad,” I told him, staring past the fear and suspicion in his eyes, “so police business is my business, da?”

  I used my other hand to fish my ID out of my pocket, held it in front of his nose. The fear left his face, the suspicion remained.

  “I didn’t know, Inspector,” he muttered, as I let go of his wrist. “I was told to keep the scene intact, not let anybody through.”

  “Okay, bad beginning,” I said. “We both forget this. We start again, Officer . . . ?”

  “Kurmanov,” he said, taking a step back, holding out his hand. We shook, awkward, unwilling to admit how close we’d come to a problem of our own making.

  “I’m here to see the orphanage director, Gurminj Shokhumorov,” I said.

  Kurmanov looked puzzled, then wary.

  “How did you know, to get here so quickly?” he asked. “We only found the body half an hour ago.”

  The director’s office was still lined with the tidemark of children’s shoulders, and the president continued to glare down from the wall behind the director’s desk. But now a splash of red paint had stippled the patterned wallpaper, and dripped from the glass of the picture frame. Except it wasn’t paint.

  Gurminj Shokhumorov lay face down upon the papers scattered on his desk. Spilled red ink stained his hair and bare arms, and pooled a few inches away from his head. Except it wasn’t ink.

  I could smell cordite, blood, and brains, the singed hair blackened around the wound, where the bullet had worked hard to drain his skull. The room was silent, holding its breath in shock. Gurminj’s desk calendar had all his appointments and meetings circled in red, now overlaid with a deeper scarlet already turning black. The gun, a Makarov, lay on the floor just behind his chair.

  A uniformed officer was idly sifting through the papers on Gurminj’s desk, looking up as I entered. I held up my ID, playing the big city Murder Squad guy, and his nervous fingers touched the peak of his cap.

  “This is a crime scene. Don’t touch anything until the forensic pathologist’s inspected the body.”

  “It’s a suicide, sir,” the ment said, holding up a paper. “Even left a note.”

  “Which bit of ‘Don’t touch anything’ did I not make clear? Contaminating a crime scene could earn you a bunk in Penitentiary Number One, officer.”

  The ment dropped the paper as if it had suddenly caught fire. I jabbed my thumb at the door.

  “And shut it behind you,” I ordered as he headed out of the room. I walked over to the desk, the smell of blood and shit getting stronger. I’ve always wondered how despair could so overpower a person that death seemed better than any alternative. Even after Chinara had died, I didn’t consider killing myself. Maybe I had too much guilt and remorse not to serve the full life sentence due to me. Perhaps every death seems like a betrayal to those of us left be
hind.

  I used a pencil on the desk to turn Gurminj’s note, and read it. The words were barely legible, quickly scribbled down.

  Akyl, enough. I want it to end here. I can’t answer is why. I honestly don’t know. You said balance is overrated; believe me, you should weigh everything, because balance is where answers might be found. G

  I tucked the paper in my pocket, looked once more around the room. A framed degree certificate from the American University of Central Asia, next to a row of photos, showing Gurminj with his wife, Oksana, eating pelmeni in the local restaurants, hiking through Ala Archa National Park, walking holding hands along Chui Prospekt, Oksana’s long black hair hurled upward by the wind. I never knew Oksana; she had died in a car accident the year before I met Gurminj. The loss had almost destroyed him, driving him into his work at the orphanage to fill the hole in his world.

  I turned as a senior officer from the station entered the room.

  “Our pathologist is on his way, then we can move the body,” he said. “If that’s okay with you.”

  I nodded, and took a photo down from the wall. Gurminj, head thrown back, roaring with laughter, surrounded by the smiling orphans he’d cared for, encouraged, given a home they’d never known in their uncertain childhood. For Gurminj, I knew balance was everything. Which made me certain about how he had died.

  A single tear-shaped fleck of blood smeared the glass. I wiped it away with my thumb, added the photo to the note in my pocket.

  “That’s good,” I said, and gritted my teeth. “I want a complete report from the officer who found him. And you might ask yourself how the director put a bullet in the right side of his head, being as he only had a left arm.”

  Chapter 11

  Even as I let myself into Gurminj’s spartan apartment with the keys I’d found in his desk, I could tell the place had already settled into a sense of loss. I touched the side of the half-empty bowl of chai on the kitchen table. Cold, to be rinsed out and forgotten. Time, for all its uncertainties, doesn’t linger when we die.