Dangerous Evidence

“I warned you,” the orderly apologized, noticing the visitor’s initial reaction.

Alex suppressed the spasm in his stomach and ripped the entire sheet from the body. Despite the internal fractures and the splotches of hematoma, he could appreciate the girl’s body. Dad’s bouncing around with young girls – the dog – while I’m forced to hit on some fat-ass sales girl.

“Flip her,” Alex nodded to the orderly.

“For… are you sure..?”

“Flip her, I said!” Malice flashed in the visitor’s eyes.

The orderly groaned a bit but did as he was told. Alex was trying to avoid looking at the fractured head and the legs which were positioned unnaturally relative to the torso. His eyes fixed on the tattoo on the girl’s lower back. He aimed his phone and took a large photo of the butterfly.

“Where’s her clothes?” Alex asked, once they had emerged from the cold chamber.

“She’s not going to catch a cold in there, you know,” scoffed the lanky orderly, unhappy with having had to flip the bag of bones.

His abrasive reply, however, was the final straw for the already-irate Alex. He punched the orderly in the stomach. The orderly sighed and doubled over and Alex brought his joined hands down on the back of the poor man’s head. The orderly collapsed. Alex began to kick the fallen man, demanding he show him the girl’s clothes.

An unshaven and muscle-bound orderly came running in response to the racket. Striking Alex from behind, he knocked him off his feet and twisted his arm, stiffly pinning him with a knee to the back.

“Keep it up and we’ll find a berth for you too,” threatened the stubbly orderly and turned to his injured colleague, “What does he want?”

The lanky orderly got up from the floor and wiped some blood from his lip.

“I don’t know! He’s a psycho!” Outraged, he kicked his assailant as hard as he could. “He wanted to see the stuff of the girl that came in today.”

“A psycho, eh?” The unshaven orderly looked Alex in the eyes.

“For sure!”

“Better let him see it then.” Before releasing the violent visitor, however, the beefy orderly twisted Alex’s arm to its limit and warned him, “You get one look and then you get the hell out.”

The lanky orderly tossed Alex a large black bag. Alex looked through the jacket pockets, went through the rest of the clothes and even stuck his hand into the boots. The envelope was nowhere to be found. Alex cast a glance at the orderlies who had remained standing over him.

“Where’s her purse?”

“Will you just look at this guy? Bud, that dead hooker there is the subject of a criminal investigation. You should ask the detective – or the pimp. Leave us alone. We work here, man.”

Recognizing that any further fight would not be a fair one, Alex made his way out. When he emerged into fresh air, he sent his father a message with a photo of the tattoo. His dad called him back almost instantly.

“That’s her, that’s Katya!” the father grew animated. “I remember the butterfly on her waist pretty well. Was the envelope on her?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“It’s not among her clothes. But she had a purse too. Ask your lawyer who the detective in charge of the case is.”

“You think that they already got the purse?”

“Either the detective has it or the pimp does. I’ll try to find the pimp. What do you know about him?”

“The girl mentioned some kind of Birdless Boris. But I’ve never seen him.”

“Well, how’d you find her?”

“I came across that damned thief through the Gentle Lily modeling agency. They offer either modeling services or escort services or some other kind of services – but, hey, either way, they have grade-A whores. I found them on the Internet.”

“Then I’ll find them too,” Alex reassured his father.

7

In the bar located on the 31st floor of the Radisson Royal Hotel, formerly known as Hotel Ukraine, a sixty-year-old gentleman sat at a glass table situated beside a panoramic window. His rare, obviously dyed hair was slicked back on his head. His lengthy sideburns, thin mustache, tweed jacket, satin neckerchief and delicate white cane, which stood leaned against his armchair, all endowed him with an old-fashioned but elegant look. The man was the holder of an Estonian passport and his name was Tarmo Keelp.

At the moment, Keelp was agitated. The Estonian was sick to death of looking at the steely surface of the Moscow River, the Russian White House and the giant Gazprom sign crowning the neighboring building. The armchair across from him was empty. He was waiting for Katya the prostitute. As per custom, they would not go to his room right away. They would first have a cocktail. Keelp would take a Viagra and wait a little until the stimulant began to take effect. At his advanced age it was better not to experiment and deal with one and the same girl, who knew how to produce the required result.

Keelp had not chosen this bar because of its vista onto the Russian capital. The drinks menu here included the “Green Fairy,” a 140-proof absinthe served the way tradition prescribed: A special perforated spoon is placed on the rim of the empty glass along with a sugar cube. Drop by drop, the absinthe is slowly poured over the sugar cube. Then, the cube is set alight. The sugar turns to caramel and streams down into the strong spirit.

Tarmo Keelp had made sure beforehand that if enough of the liquor was in the glass, one could accidentally set it on fire. His current calculations were based precisely on this effect. It would be in this green flame, as if by accident, that the invaluable envelope brought to him by the girl would ignite.

The Estonian checked his watch. Katya was running very late. Where was she, goddamn it!

Keelp retrieved his cell phone and dialed the girl’s number, but the call went straight to voicemail, just as it had been doing for the past hour. What was going on? Where was the envelope that the girl was supposed to bring? They had had an agreement after all!

The Estonian swiped his fingers along the phone’s screen. He looked up the Gentle Lily website and dialed the phone number in its contacts section. The secretary, upon hearing Keelp’s request, transferred him to Boris, the agency’s manager.

“I am a longtime customer,” Keelp explained. “I am waiting for Katya, but she is very late and isn’t answering her phone. What is the meaning of this? When will she be here?”

“Katya jumped off a roof, the dumbass,” interrupted the man on the other end of the line.

“What?” the Estonian asked startled. “How?”

“She fell from the sixteenth floor. To her death.”

“I am expecting her and she… Where did this take place? I must see her.”

“What do you care, you old stump? Just go to the site and pick out some other girl.”

“But I want – ”

“Oh, get lost!”

Boris Manuylov, alias Birdless, flung aside his phone. God, how sick he was of these stupid clients. He wished he had their problems! If you can’t have one girl, just grab some other! That’s what whores were for – to foster diversity!

Boris angrily crushed his cigarette butt in the overflowing ashtray, tousled his long hair and jumped up off the couch. Once upon a time, he had banged Katya real good on this very couch. She had just come to Moscow, hoping to become a model. It took him a long time to impress on her stupid ass what position one needed to assume to make decent dough in the capital. But finally he had broken her down. Then, he had set her up in heavenly conditions and sent her around to the richest clients – and then today the ungrateful skank pulled all this!

And on top of it all, this was the second such incident! One bad apple spoils its fellows, as they say. Thankfully, everything had worked out with the first suicide, but he knew that it would be much harder to get the fuzz off his back this time around. Someone had already called his personal phone and he had been forced to turn it off. But if the cops didn’t catch up with him today, it’d be tomorrow. Then he’d have to face all sorts of unpleasant questions.

Birdless started: The video intercom to the agency’s front entrance buzzed annoyingly. He glanced at the screen. Well, speak of the devils…

Waiting at the door were too men. He had no doubt that they were operatives. The pimp had often tangled with law enforcement and had learned through hard experience to recognize cops by their shifty looks, their splayed arms with the pieces underarm and their postures which reminded him of hunters. Say what you like, but a government issue piece sitting snug in a shoulder holster sure does change a person.

“Captain Valeyev,” the visitor introduced himself. “Open up, we need to talk with Boris Manuylov.”

How quickly they’d put it together!

Birdless quickly threw on his leather jacket and checked the inside pocket – the envelope was still there. His salvation lay enclosed within. He pulled a colorful scarf in a tight noose around his neck, grabbed his car keys and darted out to the hallway.

On the way to the rear exit, he ran into the girls.

“You haven’t seen me!” hissed Boris. “Keep your lips sealed, you bitches!”

8

The young woman in the blue jacket and the lilac cap pulled snuggly on her forehead emerged from the subway station near Kazan Train Station. As she walked, she kept glancing around herself fearfully. The square was full of people, which both worried and reassured her. On the one hand, the scary man could be watching her even now. On the other hand, he wouldn’t dare attack her here, the way he had near her house. Back there, he had grabbed her from behind and strangled her, demonstrating that her fragile life lay utterly at his mercy.

Then, he had hissed in her ear, demanding that she give up the pimp. She had figured out who the assailant was quickly enough and was happy to tell him everything she knew about Birdless Boris. She told him about Gentle Lily and about Wild Kitties, the strip club where that four-fingered jerk liked to hang out. She had also mentioned his white Honda and given the man Boris’s phone number. Having obtained the required information, her assailant vanished. The girl felt her throat. She had survived. Now all she could do was hope that the cruel man would channel his wrath against Birdless and leave her alone.

Soon enough she would go far away. Then, she would become wealthy and start a completely new life!

The girl entered the train station and headed for the ticket counter. This station had service to Sochi and in Sochi there was a gentle sea and pretty mountains and also true honest-to-god spring. There, she could spend a wonderful summer in the lovely resort city – far, far away from the preoccupied clients, the bastard pimp and the greedy Moscow cops.

To hell with the past! I want the good life! I want others to serve me for a change!

On her way to the ticket counter, the girl took her passport from her purse. She opened it and read the name – Elizaveta Malyshko. Ooof! After all her recent close calls and narrow escapes, it was small wonder that she had momentarily forgotten her own name.

“How much does a ticket to Sochi cost?” Lisa asked the ticketing agent after waiting briefly in line.

“Would you like a seat, a berth in a compartment, or a sleeping car? We have different types of trains as well.”

“What’s the very best?”

“Sochi Premium Express. Leaves tomorrow morning. A sleeping car ticket costs…”

Lisa was surprised by the amount. That was almost all the money she had! She thrust her hand in her purse. Her manicured fingers stubbed against the thick envelope. There it was – her new estate!

“Miss? Would you like to purchase a ticket?”

“I’ll come back later,” the girl promised. “Are there any computers with Internet access around here?”

“This isn’t the information desk,” the ticketing agent said through her teeth. “Next!”

Lisa wandered around the station until she found some kiosks with paid Internet access. The girl liked the fact that each computer was separated from its neighbors with a divider. She scooted her chair as closely as she could to her desk, made sure that no one was around and carefully opened the envelope.

Her first few searches on Yandex were fruitless. Nope! Nope! Was it really all in vain? After a few minutes, though, she got a hang of what she was looking for and found the site she needed. Her eyes bored into the screen. Would you look at that!

Lisa carefully studied several niche sites, tucked the envelope back in her purse and pressed the purse itself tightly to her chest. Now she needed to carefully consider how she would manage the wealth that had so suddenly come to her. Soon enough, she had made her decision.

She wasn’t going to pinch pennies shirking comfort and would travel to the sea in the best train available! She had earned this new life with suffering from the very day she had been born. If she managed this business carefully, she’d have enough money for anything she desired. But first, she had to arrange a safety net. She knew better than to go wandering around Moscow with an priceless purse on her shoulder.

Lisa found the station’s post office and bought an ordinary letter-sized envelope. As surreptitiously as she could, the girl transferred all the contents of the old envelope to the new one, sealed it and began thinking about a good address to send her treasure to.

Her wandering gaze alighted on the number of the post office she was in. Lisa wrote it on the new envelope and added her name with “care of” before it.

The envelope, with its new precious weight, slipped into the slot and dropped to the bottom of a blue mailbox affixed to a column.

9

A mid-luxury sedan rolled up to the gates of the hospital. Sitting at the wheel, Tarmo Keelp lowered the window and waved a bill at the security guard. The guard brushed some crumbs off his whiskers and slunk over to the visitor. The bill changed hands, the boom gate swung up and the expensive car drove off in the direction of the morgue.

The sixty-year-old gentleman was shaking with grim anxiety. Boris, the manager-pimp, had told him about the tragedy – Katya had died. The best thing to do was to forget, put the girl out of mind and switch her for some other young slut. But not everything in life was that simple.

The Estonian liked Katya. She provided quality services to him in bed, didn’t fail to praise him when everything went the way it needed to go and paid little attention to male foibles. Paid sex, however, was not the most important thing in their relationship. Keelp had brought Katya into his confidence and entrusted her with an important assignment. The day for her to fulfill her assignment had come. Today, Katya was supposed to bring him a certain envelope and receive an ample reward in return. For an uneducated girl, the envelope’s contents could not have meant very much, but for him, they were extremely valuable.

Tarmo Keelp parked the car beside the morgue van and made his way to the two-story nondescript building. In the hallway of the smelly facility, the Estonian beckoned with his finger to a lanky orderly with a busted lip.

“Tell me, my friend,” Keelp opened his wallet, demonstrating his readiness to share its contents with the orderly, “you had a girl delivered here this morning, a suicide, isn’t that so? She is my favorite niece.”

“Yeah?” the orderly agreed reticently. After the rambunctious Alex, he was assessing this new visitor with suspicion.

“I’d like to say farewell to her.” Keelp twirled a couple thousand-ruble notes in his fingers. “Unfortunately, I am due to fly out of the country soon and won’t be able to attend the funeral.”

“For sure,” nodded the orderly.

He lifted his oilcloth apron and pointed to the pocket of his blue jacket. The money was deposited in the indicated place. Not much later, Keelp was standing over the body of the girl who was supposed to be appeasing him in bed that very moment. Her face was battered. The exquisite lips which the girl had so expertly used to raise both his member and his spirits had transformed into a dried bloody scowl. Only her dense black hair retained its former attractiveness.

Covering his nose with a handkerchief, Keelp scrupulously examined the body. He was particularly interested in the girl’s hips. The visitor kept frowning, either from dissatisfaction or the unpleasant atmosphere.

Straightening out, Keelp asked the orderly to flip the body. The orderly eloquently lifted his apron again and indicated the pocket-depository. Keelp nodded his assent and gestured the lanky orderly to hurry up.

The butterfly tattoo was quite familiar to Keelp. In his youth, tattoos were a testament to one’s membership in the criminal underworld. These days, they had become an industry for decorating the bodies of the unfettered youth. The Estonian was a conservative in many ways; however, he quite enjoyed tattoos – so long as they adored young nubile bodies. He had therefore remembered Katya’s ethereal “butterfly” in detail.

Back in the hallway, Keelp recalled the main thing and reached back into his pocket for the wallet.

“I would also like to examine my niece’s belongings.”

“For sure.” After his brawl with the psycho, the orderly was happy to do business with an understanding person.

The girl’s clothes revealed nothing new. Keelp became downcast.

“What about the purse? Did she have a purse? You see, Katya had in her possession a private letter of mine. I am prepared to pay good money to see it returned.”

The orderly’s greedy mind stumbled across an entrepreneurial inspiration – why not bring this old geezer someone else’s purse? Surely, he won’t figure it out! Yet, remembering that the visitor had referred to a specific letter, the orderly had to confess, “That’s all she had with her, mister. Or – on her, rather.”

Back in his car, Keelp fell deep in thought. He was tormented by well-substantiated doubts. His life experience – replete with plenty of risky situations – spoke to him unequivocally: An unexpected death at the most critical moment cannot be an accident! In any affair, there is always some interested third party. If that is the case, then he must wait for the next move – and assume it would be the least pleasant one when it came.

The Estonian got out his phone and made a call.

“Benjamin, hello. This is Tarmo. I have a favor to ask. If in the next few days someone brings you anything out of the ordinary, give me a call. And try to arrange matters so that the persona in question and I can cross paths – What are you looking for? Well, you’ve got a trained eye, Benjamin. Believe me, when you see it, you’ll understand. And be assured that I will express my gratitude not merely in words.”

10

The workday had long since drawn to a close, yet in Detective Petelina’s office, all the lights remained on. Elena was sitting behind her desk, her back to the darkened window. The wall clock that her irritated husband had given her as a present many years ago lay in a box on the bottom shelf of her bookcase. This is how she created the illusion that the day was still alive and she could go on working as calmly as ever.

Petelina was examining the unpleasant photographs on her laptop that Mikhail Ustinov had taken at the scene of the incident. Or, was it the scene of the crime after all? Had the girl jumped off the roof on her own or had someone been there to help her? Who could profit by her death? Inevitably, Elena felt a certain professional anger whenever a young girl was killed.

The detective opened the passport of Ekaterina Igorevna Grebenkina. It had been issued in the district center of Grayvoron, in Belgorod Region. The girl in the photo was only fourteen, one year older than Nastya. The shy teenager did not much resemble the twenty-year-old woman who had met her demise on the hood of a car. Despite her battered face, it was clear that she had been attractive. It was unfortunate that she had made such a poor professional choice, but this could be written down to her parents’ lack of oversight just as well. Her dad had only recalled her existence when he was fifty, while her mother eloped to seek her fortune abroad.

The door cracked open and the gaunt and, as per usual, disheveled Mikhail Ustinov slipped into the office. They had agreed that Petelina would stay late and await his preliminary findings.

“What do you think, Misha?” asked Detective Petelina and instantly went on to share all the doubts she had accumulated. “For a suicide, this girl acted much too quickly and decisively. She met her dad, promised some mysterious surprise, climbed to the roof and… If she had wanted to hurt her father, then she would have at least yelled something from the roof – forced him to feel guilty and to try to talk her down. Young women, as a rule, spend a long time deciding to take that final step. It’s not only the end result that’s important to them: They care about how they’ll look after the fact… But in this case – well, it’s just a nightmare and no more.”

“Are you considering the murder option?” the Tadpole entered the conversation, taking a seat across from the detective.

“It could be an accident. Maybe she bent over to shout something to her father, slipped and – ”

“That, I completely agree with,” the forensic expert asserted decisively.

Petelina interlocked her fingers and looked the self-sure expert directly in the eyes. The Tadpole had a tendency to speak in riddles, expecting his interlocutor to figure things out.

“Alright, let’s have it,” the detective said impatiently.

“Let me explain,” the expert began with his favorite phrase. “I did not uncover any evident traces of a struggle either on the body of the deceased or on the roof – torn clothes or missing buttons, for instance.”

“So it was an accident then. The girl bent over and lost her balance.”

“I didn’t finish.” Mikhail Ustinov produced a plastic doll from a bag.

“What is this now?”

The forensic expert stood the doll on the edge of the table.

“We shall conduct an investigative experiment. Let us assume that the young woman is bending over, losing her balance and plummeting down.” Mikhail illustrated his narrative with the doll. “As she falls, she flips and as a result lands either onto her stomach or onto her back, but with her legs pointing away from the building. Correct?”

Elena got up and circled the desk to see the doll on the floor.

“But the girl was lying – » the detective began to grasp what the expert was getting at.

“Absolutely! Face-up, with her head away from the building. This could only happen if she had originally fallen backwards.” The expert demonstrated his version of the fall with the doll. “What’s our conclusion then?”

“She was pushed.” Petelina grew pensive and then shook her head doubtfully. “Push me.”

“You?”

“Go on and push, Misha. This an investigative experiment, remember?”

The flustered expert raised his hands so as not to press against the detective’s breasts and gave her shoulders a sharp shove. Elena started back but managed to grab the Tadpole by the cuff.

“The survival instinct,” she explained. “You proved yourself the Grebenkina fell backwards, so she could have been pushed only against her chest. The girl had long nails. There must be at least a few fibers caught in them. Did you check under her nails?”

“I’m sorry, Detective Petelina. The incident took place in a residential area. There were kids gawking from the windows – I wanted to be done with the body as quickly as possible.”

“We need to warn the medical examiner.”

“I do have some findings about the brandy.”

“The bottle from the roof?”

“Yup. The bottle was opened immediately before being drunk from. I established this through the absence of oxidization on the lid’s threading. The only fingerprints I found on the bottle belong to Ekaterina Grebenkina, the deceased. I measured the brandy’s temperature when I found the bottle. It was five degrees warmer than the outside temperature. You may recall it was 41 degrees out today.”

The expert paused, awaiting an answer to his unasked question.

“If Grebenkina took the bottle up there in her purse,” Petelina began to think out loud, “then the brandy couldn’t’ve cooled so quickly. If the brandy had been brought to the roof earlier, its temperature would have matched the air temperature. And yet, when we found it, the temperature was still falling to match the ambient temperature. This means that someone was waiting for Katya Grebenkina on the roof with the brandy.”