After Yekaterina Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

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  The Detektiv Kazakov Mystery Series

  About the Author

  Fantasy and Mystery by Karen L. Abrahamson

  Copyright

  Sneak Preview

  Chapter 1

  Romance, Mystery and Fantasy

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  Chapter 1

  My parents named me Yekaterina after Our Lady. Yekaterina is my secret name, the one I wear on my heart. To everyone else I am Kadija, after the Prophet’s first wife, in case the invaders find us again.

  My village has no name. It sits at the base of the Tian Shan mountains like a tick on the neck of a mangy dog. It has always existed, according to the elders, though its population has waxed and waned.

  In the night, in the snug warmth of the hide yurt my father’s father built outside the village’s mud walls, my parents whisper tales of a different day. The days when Our Lady Yekaterina reigned like a goddess in her golden palace, until the heathen Saracen raged through our country. Of how, out of the ashes of Muscovy she rose again and escaped to lead us through pestilence and famine on a march so horrible most of us died in the winters. It was her strength that flowed into our veins, her will that kept us alive and she loved us as if we were her children—until her strength ran out.

  It was at her death, when all hope died and the warring captains fought for her simple robe and scepter, that my grandparents fled, for the pestilence had returned and our numbers dwindled further. My grandparents and their friends came here, to the country of Fergana, the promised land.

  The tattered history textbook page caught in the wind as Detektiv Alexander Kazakov stood at the edge of the crime scene. The walls of mountains to the south and east were white today, pouring cold air into the wide Fergana Valley, and he pulled the karakul fur collar of his coat tighter around his neck. At four o’clock, the October light was faded. Winter was coming. The aspen and walnut trees had dropped their gilded leaves almost overnight and the golden geese formed V phalanxes overhead as if heavy bombers ranged south.

  Again.

  Except the geese were nigh on silent, just the distant haunting honking as they dared the mountain passes that kept the Chinese if not at bay, at least at a distance. The war between the Ottomans to the west and the Chinese to the east had been going on so long it was almost impossible to imagine a time without war, though the feints and attacks overhead had waned these past few years. History said that the Germans had eaten into the remains of what had once been Holy Russia until they met their allies, the Ottomans. The Anglos and Germans had joined together to overcome the small French general. But Russia was no more—as the old text book bore testament to. And the tiny democracy that was Fergana had grown out of Russia’s remains prepared to hold back invaders, but the invaders didn’t come.

  Not yet, not yet, blew the wind.

  The original Yekaterina’s aspirations led to her downfall.

  “And what did you aspire to that lost you your life, little one?” he said, studying the photo identification in his hand. The only answer was the rush of traffic from Suvarov Way just beyond the line of trees that blocked the broad boulevards of new Fergana.

  He ducked under the police tape and trod the desiccated grass of Potemkin Park, named after the man who had been the original Yekaterina’s strength until the Ottomans slew him. The park lay on the eastern edge of the city center amongst three-story walk-ups that were slowly being eaten up as New Moscow’s business core grew. In warmer weather the place would be filled with young couples and with mothers besieged by flocks of children. Now it was almost empty, which accounted for the body only being spotted late this afternoon by an officer on patrol.

  The girl lay naked, face up under the cold October sun with the white-clad M.E. crouched beside her. The blue sky tinged the pallor of her skin. Her eyes were milky white as if she’d been here for some time. A skein of pale hair fanned around her head and twisted around her neck. Her pale pink mouth was half open to the air as if she would drink it in. A northern girl, in police parlance, a true Russian. Not the dark-haired beauties of the area’s original Kyrgyz and Uzbek tribes.

  He glanced down at her ID locked in a plastic bag. Kazakov had found it in a bundle of carefully folded clothing—slim, gray skirt and a pink fluffy sweater—just inside the police tape along with the history book and a school diary schedule. No one had touched it except him. Yekaterina Weber. German-sounding name. Strange, or perhaps not given the Anglo-German Empire’s arrogant citizens apparently had a God-given right to travel wherever they wanted these days. She was sixteen years old.

  “What have we got?” He knelt beside the M.E., Dr. Khalil Khan.

  A small brown man with a thick thatch of dark hair and black, slightly slitted eyes, Khan was a Muslim anomaly—a direct descendant of Fergana’s historic people in the usually orthodox Christian government machine. He glanced up at Kazakov, then down at the I.D. The victim was lucky to have the little dark man attending. Where most government M.E.s didn’t give a damn about their jobs, Khalil Khan was skilled—and he cared.

  “That her?” Dr. Khan asked.

  “Yekaterina Weber, yes,” Kazakov said.

  Khan rolled the body over on its side so Kazakov could see the deep lash marks and a puncture wound on her back. He let her slump back down on the grass and her face turned to Kazakov as if to ask him a question.

  How long are you going to leave me here? How long before Our Lady Yekaterina rises again? How long before the legends come true?

  This was Russia, or what remained of it. Even two hundred plus years since Yekaterina made the mistake of trying to take the Black Sea’s Crimean Peninsula from the Ottomans couldn’t erase all that history and yearnings of a people. But then this was a people descended mostly from soldiers, servants, and serfs. Not intelligentsia. Tales of the old hag Baba Yaga, the foolish priest, and glass slippers were still told and perhaps even believed. He’d been raised on such magical fictions. In them Baba Yaga was both the witch who ate children and their savior. A lot like the true Yekaterina. With such creatures, how and whom did one trust?

  Dearest Yekaterina, he thought as he studied the girl: It could take a long time, if it happens at all.

  “The lashes look like they were perimortem. Whip, most likely. Done with anger? The puncture wound probably killed her. It was most likely a knife-like instrument. She may not have died here.”

  Kazakov nodded. “Not enough blood on the ground. Even though the ground’s not frozen, there should be some sign of a pool. So, the killing was emotionally motivated. When the whipping wasn’t enough, our murderer killed her.”

  Dr. Khan nodded. “You’re learning.” He lifted her arm. “By the lack of rigor, I’d say that she’d been here a few hours at most; but it’s harder to judge with the cold. It could be as long as twelve hours. You can see the process has started in the tightness of the eyelids and the jut of the jaw.” He nodded down at the girl. “Funny
how a smile makes all the difference.” The girl in the government school ID was dressed in a pink fluffy sweater and her hair was swept back behind her ears. A broad white smile was aimed at the camera.

  Khan was right. The smile made her look like a schoolgirl, ready for her future.

  But in the grass, she was just another Yekaterina: past tsarina, long dead diarist, they were all just dead on this chill October morning.

  §

  In the cold concrete office of the New Moscow politseyshiyuchastok, the police station, Kazakov sat with the girl’s schoolbook and identification open before him. The drafty room housed ten detectives, the small city’s entire squad, dealing with all forms of crime from drugs to murder in the city center and old city. Other squads, housed elsewhere, dealt with crime in the suburbs, and still another specialty unit dealt with corporate crime. Seven of the room’s nine other cold metal desks were unoccupied at the moment. Apparently, most cases had been solved by six o’clock today.

  The two other occupied desks held Antonov and Alenin, the A and A team—partners who had worked together the past ten years. Antonov was a granite block of a man with sullen blue eyes and scowling, downturned lips that could turn themselves upright at the blackest of humor. But a frown and a black sense of humor weren’t something to be held against him—Kazakov shared them, as did most detectives in New Moscow. Antonov was a fine investigator who had graduated from training a year before Kazakov—and never failed to remind Kazakov of it.

  His partner, Alenin, was five years Kazakov’s junior and the antithesis of Antonov’s body type—tall, with an athelete’s broad shoulders and lean muscle slowly gathering the weight of middle age. He had pale blue eyes and a ready smile that offset the dourness of his partner.

  Kazakovsighed and inhaled the stink of cold tea and the cheap, unfiltered Ottoman cigarettes preferred by the squad and most of the country. He had quit smoking, or so he told himself, though he still kept a single cigarette in his wallet against emergencies.

  “That was a deep sigh, friend,” Alenin said, looking up from where he was reading a document over Antonov’s shoulder. “Have you finally found a girl who will have you?” He grinned.

  It was the same teasing refrain that had hounded Kazakov since he and his wife split up and he hadn’t immediately taken another woman.

  “I suppose you could say that,” Kazakov played along. “Except this one is sixteen years old and dead of stab wounds.” He met Alenin’s gaze. “Who else will have her?”

  “Maudlin bastard,” Antonov muttered. “Let him have her, Sergei. We have other fish to fry.” The big man gave a small nod to Kazakov. They had worked a few cases together long ago. There was still respect between them, though their outlook on many things had diverged.

  Kazakov turned back to his evidence. He sipped his cold, sweet tea as he considered. The schoolbook was one he remembered from his own childhood, a treasured diary of one of the first generations of Russian refugees to make the lush fields of the Fergana Valley their home.

  The flood of migrants had come at a price. The traditional Kyrgyz and Uzbek villagers and their animistic beliefs had at first been welcoming, but then had been pushed out by the sheer numbers of displaced people who had come east. Those villagers had taken to the higher mountains, while a Muslim minority had stayed as the desperate Russians settled around them.

  The Russians had been starving and dying from the plague that descended on them after the Ottoman war destroyed all infrastructure and food sources. It was on that desperate diaspora following the Tea Road across the continent that blessed Yekaterina gave the devastated remains of her people the gift of democracy for their petty states. For a few of them, like those in Fergana, the gift had held. Yekaterina had always held that Russians were different from all others.

  But why was the girl carrying this particular book? It was a two-hundred-year-old book, read to elementary school children; and Yekaterina Weber was certainly older than twelve.

  And what was she doing in Potemkin Park? Less than twelve hours dead at most, Khan had said. That would mean that she’d been out before five in the morning. An unusual time for a girl that age. Most teenagers preferred to be up in late morning. And why left there and naked? It was as if the killer was making some point. He would have to wait on Khan’s report to know if it was a sex crime, but the lack of clothing suggested it.

  First things first.He needed to contact the family, not a job he enjoyed when the news wasn’t good. Shoving himself up from his desk, he lumbered over to the small desk in the corner and slumped into the seat. The massive machine was the latest investigative tool provided to their office, courtesy of the city council.

  It was a huge, gray, steel-covered block imported from the Germans, almost as tall as a man, with ugly metal on three sides and what looked like a twenty-inch television screen on the front with a keyboard in a small depression beneath the screen.

  Bending to look at the keyboard, he typed in Yekaterina Weber, hit the red send button, and leaned back in the chair. It groaned under his bulk, for though he had always kept fit through his outdoor activities, he had grown lazy in his exercise these past five years since his fortieth birthday. Not for the first time today, he had the urge to smoke.

  Ping.

  The machine had things to tell him, like a fairy tale fish or birds that held the secret truth. He hit the blue receive button. A list of names appeared with the top name in bold, the most likely match for the requested name. The length of the list surprised him. It seemed there were more German Webers residing in Fergana than he’d realized. For a moment, like a shiver at a memory, the realization made him uncomfortable.

  Some said the feeling came when someone walked over your grave.

  §

  The home address listed on the government database had been pulled from government school records and existed beyond the large eight-story towers of the business heart of Fergana and beyond the brightly-painted domed concrete replica of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in the middle of New Moscow. Beyond the walk-up apartments encircling Potemkin Park, a new area had been planted with young trees at the curb. When the trees were grown, this area would be a paradise compared to the flat, grassland steppes of the countryside.

  Neat rows of steep-roofed houses with faux-wood concrete sides were physical echoes of the dacha homes the Russian people had left behind long ago—or at least what they believed them to be. Neat, pocket-sized yards held small vegetable gardens that were now faded and tattered brown with the fall. Here and there, a last wizened tomato blushed forgotten and withered in the cool.

  The Weber yard was surrounded by a hip-high concrete block fence like a halfhearted fortress in the midst of the neighborhood. The yard itself was mostly fallow though a few turnips and winter kale grew at the ends of regimented raised beds that looked newly turned. A small stool sat next to the door with a trowel and a set of gardening gloves, the gloves neatly pulled one inside the other. Everything in its place.

  The porch was swept, the door newly painted, so slick and shiny red he wondered it didn’t come off on his knuckles at his knock. The sounds of footfall echoed within and then the curtain stirred on the window beside the door. There was a moment of hesitation and then the door opened. A woman stood there, slim, with Yekaterina’s silken blonde hair darkened slightly by the years. It was twisted back from her face into a precise figure eight. She was tall for a woman, almost five feet nine in her low, boxy heels with the buckles over the instep. She wore a slim-fitting tweed skirt and a brown cardigan—buttoned—over a crisp white blouse buttoned up to her throat.

  “Yes?” Her eyes were guarded and she held the door as if she planned to slam it shut at the first sign of danger. As if she did not trust strangers.

  “Detektiv Kazakov of the Fergana Politseyshiy.” He showed her his identification. “You are Mrs. Weber?”

  “Not Weber anymore. It is Bure. My first husband passed away and I remarried.” She nodded, but her hand came up to
her collar. “Is something wrong? My husband…”

  Bure. The name meant something…

  “May I come in?” There was something wrong with her response. The cold air of the afternoon swirled around his shoulders. She must feel it, but she seemed frozen where she stood. And no mention of her daughter. Odd.

  Finally, she nodded and stepped aside. He ducked his head to enter and found himself inside…history. Wooden floors and walls gleamed as if someone regularly waxed them. The familiar scents of beetroot, tea, and a slight hint of something sweet and spicy. To one side of the door, a small parlor was dominated by a heavy, ornate couch with embroidered cushions and a high, wingback chair covered in crimson damask. A fireplace mantle was filled with old family photos in silver frames that showed Mrs. Bure and a tall, pale man who looked vaguely familiar. Others showed a younger Yekaterina in a frothy white dress that was typical of religious ceremonies, and a much younger version of the blond man with an older version of himself, and an elegant blonde-haired woman who looked strangely similar to Mrs. Bure. His father and mother, maybe.

  An antique crucifix hung in a corner, and in a niche in the wall hung what looked like a gold-gilt icon of the Virgin vivid with old paint and gold. It looked old. It looked genuine. It looked like something you would see in the treasury section of the Fergana Museum. For all the middle-class outer trappings of their house, this family clearly had come from old wealth. And had brought it with them. Not a soldier, servant, or serf.

  He turned to Mrs. Bure and nodded at the icon. “A lovely piece. It is old, correct?”

  She gave a single nod. “It was in my husband’s family—all they brought out of old Russia.”

  He didn’t quite believe her, but nodded. “Perhaps you should have a seat. This visit, it is about your daughter.”

  “Yekaterina?” She perched on the edge of the overwhelming couch and, if anything, her pale skin went almost the color of her dead daughter’s flesh. “You’ve found her, then.”

  “Found her?”

  “My husband reported her missing two days ago.”