After Yekaterina Read online

  And that was impossible because, when he entered the girl in the computer, a flag for a missing person’s case would have shown against her name.

  “Do you know who he spoke to?” Kazakov asked. It was not unheard of that an officer was slow in entering information in the police information system…

  She shook her head and the couch seemed to consume her. “What is this about? What has happened? Is Yekaterina all right?”

  Finally, she asked the right question. Stranger and stranger. Why did her concern leap so quickly to her husband when she had a missing daughter? He took a deep breath and took the liberty of sitting down in the chair. “Mrs. Bure, when was the last time you saw your daughter?”

  Her gaze fell to her hands. “It was Friday at supper. We were at the table and my husband scolded her. She was acting silly—almost giddy. My husband told her to mind her table manners or she could go to her room.” Mrs. Bure bit her lip almost as if she knew what was coming. “She chose her room,” she whispered.

  These were the times he hated his job. The disaster. The pain that would overwhelm a loved one’s eyes. But there was no use in delaying. It had to be done. “Mrs. Bure. I regret to inform you, but we found your daughter’s body this morning in Potemkin Park. She had been stabbed. Yekaterina is dead.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “That cannot be.”

  He reached across a small coffee table and caught her hand. “I am sorry, but it was her. She had her identification.”

  She went statue still, her face rigid. Then she yanked her hand away and stood. “No. No. Not Yekaterina. No.” She paced the floor between the mantel and the door, then stopped abruptly, still dry-eyed. “I must call my husband.”

  Kazakov stood. “A good idea. While you do, may I examine your daughter’s room?”

  She met his gaze, her lip quivering almost as if she was angry. “At the top of the stairs. The second door on the right.” Then she left him for the back of the house that must be the kitchen.

  Kazakov clumped up the stairs, considering. Most mothers would be in tears. Most mothers would be with him right now, sobbing about how their daughter was a good girl, demanding to know how and where and why this had happened and who would do something like this to their child. At the top of the stairs he paused to listen. Silence ticked around him in the darkened hallway, but from downstairs came the sound of harsh whispers. They rose and fell in the staccato of anger. Not grief, but fury.

  §

  The second room on the right had a closed door, but daylight placed long panels of light on the hall floor through the others. The first room on his left was clearly the parents’. Kazakov ducked his head inside. A double bed with quilted cover in a patchwork of shades of red. A curtained window. Built-in drawers along one wall. A wood heater against the winter cold and another orthodox icon hung on the wall. This one did not have the gold gilt of the one downstairs, but the lustrous paint said it was still old. Neat. Tidy. Well cared for.

  He went down the hall to Yekaterina’s room and opened the door.

  The spice he’d detected at the front door caught him full in the face and he shook himself at the heady scent. It was like catching a face full of church brazier incense. Was the girl very religious? The body hadn’t worn a crucifix, but there had been that photo in the white dress.

  He stepped inside. A girl’s room. Magazine pages of the latest shaggy-headed boyband from Anglia taped to the wall. A narrow bed with a blue bedspread under the window. A desk. A straight-backed spindle chair. A small bookcase filled with books.

  Closing the door behind him, he stood there hoping to get a feel for his victim, but from the look of things, Yekaterina Weber was a typical schoolgirl. He opened the drawers of her desk but found only paper and pens—odd in itself. Didn’t girls usually stuff odd sundry things into such places? There was nothing that told of Yekaterina or her friendships here.

  The closet gave no more clues: a few straight-cut skirts like her mother wore. Blouses. A sweater of navy blue. No pink fluffy sweater. Nothing like that at all. As if the pink sweater next to her body was special? Perhaps something she purchased herself because it made her feel pretty, while these clothes bore the straight-laced, utilitarian stamp of being purchased by her mother?

  The bookcase held novels and schoolbooks. There was a slim empty space that he would bet his paycheck had once held the slim diary of Yekaterina of the yurts. He checked each of the remaining books, but found nothing. Where were her school notebooks? The binders teenagers used? She was in school. There had to be something of that kind.

  He checked under the bed, but there was nothing there, not even dust. When he stepped out of the room, her mother was waiting.

  “My husband will be home in a few minutes. He would like you to wait for him.”

  He nodded. “She has a very neat room. Unusual in a teenager.”

  Her chin lifted a little. “I expect my child to have high standards.”

  “I see.” He nodded. “Does she keep a briefcase or a school backpack? I noticed that there are no school notebooks in the room.”

  Mrs. Bure went still. “She had one. It was a blue courier bag—the latest fashion. We got it for her last Christmas.”

  “And it is not in the house?” he asked.

  “If it is not in her room, then it is not here.” Her closed expression did not leave room for more questions.

  His footsteps sounded hollow as he went down the stairs after her and soon a black Ziln limousine pulled up at the curb. Kazakov stiffened by the parlor window as a man climbed out of the front and held the door for a passenger. Bure. Kazakov remembered now. Bure was a government functionary who was now being groomed for something greater. The newly formed Reformation Party had great things planned for him. Great enough to command a car and driver to bring him home.

  Boris Bure was a man of middle height who seemed to command the hallway as soon as he entered. Perhaps it was his breadth of shoulder. Perhaps it was the rigid way he held his ramrod-straight back and white-haired head. Perhaps it was the metallic scent that came with him when he entered the room, as if he generated an electric charge. He had pale blue eyes and large white teeth that he exposed almost as a warning as he shook Kazakov’s hand. Even though Bure was a good six inches shorter than Kazakov’s six feet two, Bure seemed to look him eye-to-eye.

  “What’s this all about, then? I reported Yekaterina missing two days ago and haven’t spoken to a detective since and now you arrive telling my wife her daughter is dead.”

  Her daughter. Not his.

  Kazakov bowed his head. “I am sorry to bring this bad news. Yekaterina’s body was found in Potemkin Park this afternoon. She was murdered.”

  Her mother’s hand came to her mouth as if she finally believed. Bure did nothing as if letting the news settle in. Then he nodded.

  “Terrible news. Terrible.” He caught his wife in a hug. “I know how this must upset you, love.” He patted her back as if she might break, but if Kazakov was waiting for emotion in Bure’s voice, it wasn’t there.

  The man made no move to take them back into the parlor either. It was more as if he expected Kazakov to leave.

  “Mr. Bure, your wife tells me that you last had dinner with Yekaterina on Friday. Can you tell me about that?”

  Bure shrugged, still holding his wife. “We ate. She was being foolish. I told her she could either act like a proper lady or she could go to her room.”

  Kazakov nodded and made a note of Bure’s statement. “Can you tell me what she was doing that was so foolish?”

  Bure and his wife looked at each other.

  “It was nothing. She was talking nonsense.”

  “What, precisely, did she say?”

  Bure released his wife to turn to Kazakov. “Detektiv, do I look like a man who would remember foolishness? Now my wife has had an awful shock. I would like to tend to her. Perhaps you could leave us in peace in this time of grief.”

  Bure eased past Kazakov and ope
ned the door, inviting him to leave. Kazakov had gotten as much as he was going to from this odd couple, but it was stranger still that they did not want more from him. Now he just had to determine what this oddity meant.

  §

  It was at two thirty the next afternoon on his way to an appointment at Yekaterina’s school that his radio crackled and he was called to the second body.

  This one was on the far side of New Moscow in the old Islamic quarter. Square mud-and-stucco houses leaned together around hidden central courtyards. Once the houses had been the graceful villas of the Muslim caravan merchants, for the Silk and Tea Roads had both wound through Fergana generations ago, but now each house held four or five impoverished families; it seemed the new Russian economy had no place for Muslim employees. Television antennas and clotheslines filled the flat rooftops. Narrow streets barely wide enough for a single car wound through the maze of buildings, the streets still sometimes blocked by a donkey carrying burlap bags of limes or an enterprising businessman who had spread his goods under awnings into the street.

  Children scattered through the streets at the sight of his sedan. In this part of town, no police presence was a good thing—in the eyes of the residents. Kazakov came to a stop where the houses ran out and a field of grass ran away toward the mountains.

  The roadside was clogged with marked police vehicles and the M.E.’s wagon. Kazakov pulled in behind them near a gathering crowd, but instead of expensive suits like Bure had worn, these men wore dusty trousers and woolen work shirts with their small, white, embroidered felt ak kalpak perched on their heads. The women wore scarves, and one ancient grandmother even wore the bright skirts and white, ornately wound elechek turban of the Kyrgyz hill tribes like a ghost out of time.

  Once, these people and their Uzbek cousins had been the only people in Fergana. Now, after the influx of people and two hundred years of large families amongst the Russians, they were a minority in their own land and becoming more so every year. To the point where some whispered that they sympathized with Fergana’s enemies. So far there’d been no trouble, but bad blood festered and there were even rumors of the Krygyz spying in the mountains for the Ottomans against the Chinese.

  Kazakov climbed out to the sound of angry murmurs.

  Police tape had been set up, roping off an area in the middle of the field. The wind off the eastern Tian Shan Mountains ripped at the tape and its metal poles. It rippled the grass in a sea of violent gold and green and whipped the clothes of the police and the onlookers. Kazakov pulled his karakul collar tighter. It was colder than normal.

  Uniformed police officers kept the people at bay. Kazakov waded out into the brittle grass and it rattled and tugged against his pant legs. The earth was hard underfoot and dust rose with each footfall. At the western edge of the old town rose the five peaks of the great Yekaterina’s Mountain turned golden in the setting sun.

  The body lay tangled in the tall grass with the backdrop of the snow-covered Tian Shan range. His arm was outstretched as if he reached for them, and his legs were tangled as if he’d been running. He wore dark trousers and a plain white shirt—one that looked as if it had been pressed to impress someone. The red bloom of a gunshot wound burned through the center of his back.

  Staying to the edge of the police line, Kazakov circled the scene. The victim was young, with that floppy hair the young men were copying from the foreign musicians. His head was turned to one side and his eyes and mouth were open. Beside him knelt Dr. Khan.

  “What do we have?” Kazakov asked as he ducked under the tape and knelt beside the M.E.

  “Male. Young. I’d say about eighteen. Single shot to the back. By the look of it, I’d say it was a large caliber weapon.”

  “A fight? A mugging?”

  Khan lifted his head from examining a hand. “Nothing under his nails. No bruising of the knuckles. I’d say he was running. By his face, I’d say running for his life. Look at the path he left.” He pointed.

  It was true. A path of crushed grass led toward the northern edge of the old town. “Any idea who he is?”

  “The ID in his wallet says his name’s Manas uulu Semetai—Semetai son of Manas.”

  Semetai Manas, but written in the traditional name structure of the Muslim Kyrgyz. Only the most traditional of the Muslim families held names of that fashion and these were even drawn from the heroes of the great oral epic of the Kyrgyz people. Kazakov nodded, stood, and retraced the victim’s path, back toward the old town’s weathered, grey-strained walls.

  The path led right into the maze of streets, as if the victim might have burst from them before being gunned down. Kazakov reached the narrow dirt street and stepped between the buildings. The sunlight disappeared and so did the worst of the wind, though a scuffle of dust blew around his feet.

  The dryness meant that footprints were hard to distinguish. Clearly this was a well-used route because the dusty soil showed many scuff marks. There were no doors in the walls of the buildings here: the doors must give out onto the cross street. No window up above either. Windows would look into the interior courtyards. Inside these buildings were private worlds. Ones that no longer quite meshed with the modern city New Moscow had become. Piles of garbage had been set against the wall to await the irregular pickup. With a foot, he shoved aside the pile of bags and melon rinds and a bright patch of color showed even in the gloom.

  Pulling gloves on, Kazakov dug through the sour-sweet rot of melon and the remains of old mutton bones—well chewed by dogs. A blue courier bag lay in the dust and muck, but a sweet spice he recognized cut through the rot. He picked up the bag by its strap and gingerly carried it back the way he’d come. Visiting Yekaterina’s school would have to wait.

  §

  In the concrete cavern of his office, Kazakov considered his desk and the Weber case’s open cardboard evidence box in the center of the top. It held the girl’s clothing, including her fluffy pink sweater—probably something the girl kept for special occasions—her identification, and the schoolbook. Beside it sat the bag he had found near the other murder scene. It fit Yekaterina’s mother’s description of the girl’s notebook bag.

  At eight o’clock in the evening the office was empty, though a still-steaming cup of tea on Antonov’s desk said that it hadn’t been empty long. Crime didn’t occur according to schedule.

  Beyond the lone window across the room, night had long fallen and the wind flattened a few snowflakes against the glass. He contemplated all the things that needed to be done in this strange case.

  Two young people dead, the blue bag a potential connection between them.

  Hands encased in thin rubber gloves, he unzipped the bag and rummaged through it. Its contents included a carefully folded white blouse as if the girl had changed into her pink sweater before she died, suggesting that she had some place special that she was going. There were also a small jar of scented cream reminiscent of church incense and school notebooks with the name Yekaterina Weber printed carefully in the center of the inside of each cover. The outside of the covers had the flower and heart doodles and designs of a typical bored student. He could remember doing something similar himself when he was in school, except his doodles had tended more toward airplanes and guns.

  Guns like the one that had killed Semetai Manas.

  Just what was a school bag belonging to Yekaterina Weber doing in the old town of Fergana? What was it doing so close to a young man’s dead body? Multiple murders didn’t usually happen within twenty-four hours of each other. Not in New Moscow, though up in the mountains there might be more violence.

  He flipped through the pages of the notebooks. Algebra. History: the destruction of an ancient country. The building of Fergana. The tiny new homeland was pressed like a leaf between the Chinese and the Ottomans who, with their sometime allies the Anglo-German, were intent on completing their conquest of China. It would fulfil the Ottomans’ centuries-old ambition of dominating the world. So far Fergana had stood as a neutral space in th
e Great Game between the two empires. If the Ottomans were victorious, Fergana wouldn’t stand a chance.

  But that was tomorrow’s problem. For today he needed to figure out who had killed two young people and why.

  He had tried to interview the Manas family, but in the closed community of the old town, he had wasted three hours before determining that the family had abandoned their last known address. None of their neighbors would talk to him. No one would tell him where they’d gone.

  He pulled out Yekaterina’s old schoolbook diary found at her murder scene and thumbed through it. Why was it there? Why was her bag at the scene of the boy’s murder?

  The bag suggested the deaths were connected, but the classroom schedule contained only class assignments. He examined the notes on the day of her death, but there was only mention of a term paper to be researched. In the bottom right corner was a doodle of a heart next to the letter P.

  He flipped through the pages again and noted the heart repeated many times, while the letter varied between, P, Y and PT. Her body had been found in Potemkin Park. A code of some kind?

  He couldn’t say, and turned to the history book. It contained only page after page of the old story of the past diarist Yekaterina’s escape with her parents and the founding of the Ferganese homeland. It was almost a fable, a creation myth that let people remember there had been another place, another time when they had been a great and noble people under the great Tsarina Yekaterina who had given them freedom. It gave substance to their dreams and to the fables grandmothers told to their grandchildren.

  Of course,a child’s schoolbook didn’t mention how that same Tsarina had brought destruction upon them all by waking the slumbering Ottoman empire with her armies. Or how she had kept her people enslaved as serfs until the extent of the Ottoman destruction was so great that the whole system supporting her kingdom collapsed and she was forced to take refuge with the common people. That was the uncomfortable truth of their democratic freedom that most people failed to remember.

  He went to close the book but something caught his eye. The inside back cover held a simple inscription.