Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (38 page)

“We’re just closing it now,” the workman yelled over the wind.  “Too narrow for salt trucks and plows.  Not heavily trafficked, so it’s freezing over, and the traffic on the highway is such that any minute now people might start trying to use it as a shortcut.  They do that.  With that packed ice, you’d have wreck
s within half an hour.  You can take another road, about a kilometer up—
hey!
”

Shcherbakov was already out of his car and jogging to the mouth of the street.  He slipped and almost fell, but he managed to get his cell phone out.  His eyes had seen what they needed to see, even from far off.  A single line of tracks headed in, and another headed out of
Ekaterininskaya Ulitsa.  The worker was calling to him, saying this was a dangerous area and no place to park his car.  Shcherbakov knelt beside one patch of tire tracks and compared them with the pictures in his cell phone that he’d taken of the tracks at the cabin. 
Same
.  He stood and jogged over to the tire tracks in the far lane, going the other way. 
Different
.

The Grey Wolf smirked. 
He entered, but didn’t leave this way
.  He stood and addressed the worker running up to him, cutting off the man’s protests with a silencing hand.  “This road you said was a kilometer up.  Is it Kurakina?”

“Yes.  Now please, move your car.”

He knew Kurakina Ulitsa.  It went around a large suburban neighborhood, but eventually went to Pisinksi Prospekt, which ran parallel to the Miass River and went straight out to the docks.  “Do you expect Kurakina to still be open by the time I get there?” he said to the worker.

“It should be.”

“No more road closings?” he hollered, hustling back to his Priora.

“None that I’m aware of.”

“Thank you.”  Shcherbakov almost collided with a small Nissan when he merged back onto the street.

Unfortunately for Detective-Inspector Rideau, Lieutenant Tattar had indeed been right when he said it would probably take more than half an hour.  It was fortunate, however, that Tattar’s cellular phone was somehow getting service, for Rideau’s wasn’t.  The lieutenant kept up with the road closings and was able to use various GPS, map services, and even a phone call to police HQ, to find the routes currently available.

The
Bogema Apartments were covered with as much ice as they were police.  It shouldn’t be so overrun, not for a simple murder, and it seemed the media knew that.  Chelyabinsk Police would have sufficed for any intrusion and murder, no matter how brutal.  But there were three large unmarked SUVs, and two large roving forensic labs that didn’t have Chelyabinsk Police markings.  The FSB had gotten here very quickly, unsurprisingly. 
The Grey Wolf’s involvement is more than just speculation, then
, Rideau surmised.

They parked beside one of the SUVs.  The FSB must have been informed that she was coming, because a gray-suited
man in a black, buttoned long coat was walking over to her, flanked by five other men and one woman dressed similarly.  All of them were wearing blue footies around their shoes, which meant they had been to the crime scene.

Detective Yudin hopped out of his front seat and moved to open the door for Rideau, but she opened it too quickly for him and was out and shaking hands with the lead FSB man.  “How do you do?”
she said.  “I’m Detective-Inspector Aurélie Rideau.”

“Blok,” he said,
expressionless, not specifying if he was Agent, Special Agent, Detective or something else.  And it didn’t matter.  Rideau could see instantly that the man was used to filling all of those occupations and duties.  Blok was tall and grim, not an uncommon look for a Russian, especially amid such a harsh winter, and he had deep, inset eyes of cold slate, with bushy black eyebrows going gray, along with the rest of the hair on his head, the same close-cropped hair just hidden beneath his ushanka.  “I can show you up.”

No pleasantries, no other introductions.  Rideau just nodded to the only other woman and gave a brief smile as she walked past.  Blok led her and Lieutenant Tattar away from the
main stairs.  The steps had been cordoned off; numerous pictures were being taken of the snowy ground by a feverish group of forensic photographers.  “Footprints?”

Blok spoke without looking back at her, leading
their retinue to another set of stairs at the side of the building.  “The first responders were pretty competent.  The detective that contacted FSB was told to lock down the area.”

“Since Rubashkin was a person of interest in their investigations, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“And have you found any?  Footprints, I mean.”

“We’ve isolated one set of footprints that don’t match the foot size or known footwear of anyone living on her same landing,” Blok said.  “Size forty-one-and-a-half.”  That was Russian measurements, roughly a size 11 in U.S. standards, a size 45 in France.  That was about what she knew of Yuri Shcherbakov’s shoe size, collected from various other crime scenes around the globe, particularly those in the Dutch revenge killings.

“Who found her?”

“A maintenance man.  He came around to complete a yearly inspection on smoke alarms.  It was a coincidence.  All the apartments here are undergoing such inspections at this time.  If it hadn’t been for that, it could have been weeks before anyone noticed.”  They came around to the landing from another way, on snowy open paths that had dozens of sets of footprints.  “We decided to establish this path here as our approach to the crime scene, since there were no footprints at all along here when detectives first arrived on the scene.”

They carried on in silence until they came to the apartment door.  Just inside, there were bags of fruit spilled, and a few markers that the forensic team had set
around the various oranges, apples, and pears, establishing where everything had been when they first arrived.  Rideau removed her shoes before entering, and stepped into a pair of blue footies like the other agents.  They were all supplied rubber gloves, and Rideau snapped hers own as she crossed the threshold.

The room
smelled of smoke, and also, quite frankly, like someone had passed gas, or had ruptured a sewer line.  There was a reason for that, and she would see why in a moment.

The apartment
was filled with halogen lights, a few investigators moving around with blacklight wands, and gloved men carefully pushing chairs, tables, and paintings to one side and examining them by flashlight.

Rideau put a hand to her nose, guarding against the aroma.  Blok said, “Here,” and handed her a bottle of mint-smelling cream to put under her nose.
  She accepted it gratefully, smearing some of it over her top lip, just beneath her nose.  The cream smelled strong, but it was better than breathing the alternative.

Rideau paused at the kitchen, where a line had been drawn around a small, furry animal. 
A dog.  A terrier, if she wasn’t mistaken.  A couple of markers were around it, and one forensic photographer snapped multiple angles of it, then opened the cupboards and took snapshots of the contents.  “He killed the dog?” she asked.

“Yes,” Blok answered impassively.

“Suppose it was making too much noise,” Tattar commented.

The unid
entified female agent muttered, “It was strangled first, then its neck was broken.”

“How
can you tell?”

“The bottom of the neck has been recently shaved, you can see extreme ligature marks.”

But Rideau was hardly listening to either one of them now.  She’d rounded the kitchen countertop and was now standing at the threshold of the living room, looking through a gap in the evidence collectors and photographers, stunned.  If she had thought her past in hunting wanted criminals and locating mistreated children had prepared her for everything, or had given her the ability to divorce herself from any scene, she now had that illusion suitably obliterated.

What
Aurélie Rideau was looking at now was inventive, precise, and undeniably brutal. 
Thought out well in advance
, she thought. 
Nothing like this could be spur of the moment
.  The knots were done with supreme care, the tube in the anus
hadn’t
been inserted with any vicious thrust, and the tube itself had one end still smoking from a burnt fuse.  The room smelled of that smoke, and it coiled with the gastric spillings of Vasilisa Rubashkin.  The conclusion was a flimsy thing, only needing to be tacked on for paperwork’s sake. 
Another message
.

Her belly was a ruin.  The
rats had had their play.  The body was twisted backwards.  Rubashkin strangled herself fighting against what had been unleashed inside of her.  The lower abdomen was mauled, like a tiger had gotten hold of her.  The stomach was like a ripped plastic sack on the floor, and parts of the intestines had bubbled out.  The floor and part of the nearby couch were stained red from what must’ve been a shower of blood when the rats first burst through.

The rats
.  One of them was squealing away inside a plastic box a gloved forensic woman had brought up.  The creature covered in blood and viscera, scratching and clawing at the box’s translucent walls, angry and driven mad by its ordeal.  Rideau didn’t see the other rats. 
They must’ve run
. 
Under the bed somewhere, or out the door when no one was looking
.

Someone stepped into the room behind her, began murmuring to the agents and lieutenant.  “We’ve isolated two separate kinds of tire tracks in the snow that don’t belong to any resident’s vehicle.”

“Anything else?” Blok asked.

“Not in the parking lot, sir, no.
  But we’re still looking.”

“Have you canvassed all the neighbors?”

“All but one, and the neighbors say he’s visiting family in Izhevsk for the week.  The others say they saw nothing.”

Rideau moved around the body, gave it a wide
berth.  She looked into Rubashkin’s eyes.  They were half closed, like she was getting a little drowsy, and was thinking about taking a nap.  The eyes looked very rheumy.  The toxicology report would probably come back with some paralytic or sleeping agent used to put her down.  The Dyneema rope around her throat, wrists and ankles had cut deep; severe bruising was already happening.  The putrid smell of intestinal and stomach gases were heavy, even with the cream directly under her nose.

What were her last moments like?  How she must’ve prayed that someone in the apartments above her or below her would hear her screams, or that
some random delivery person had come knocking
. 
Think if that maintenance man had come to check the smoke alarm just a little sooner
. 
Might she be alive?

Rideau was familiar with
Rubashkin’s story.  She was a young model with some promise, having worked the business since she was a little girl in Saint Petersburg.  She had a small part in a made-for-TV movie recently, and signed on with the Tivoli Talent Agency in Moscow.  Things had been going well until she had seen a few things the Mafia probably wished she hadn’t, pimps and dealers pushing the models around her into prostitution, even occasionally helping with smuggling of certain items across borders—Customs agents rarely bothered a girl with a pretty face. 
And she was such a lovely thing
, Rideau noted.

As a potential witness in a growing scandal, Rubashkin had been
advised by both FSB and Moscow Police to relocate to someplace else, preferably where no one knew her, at least until they could build a proper case against the men she was accusing.  She had also hinted that she suspected women were being trafficked elsewhere, young girls lured into the Tavoli Talent Agency, which she had come to believe was Mafia-owned, with dreams of hitting it big.

Vasilisa
Rubashkin had turned down all offers for witness protection.  She just wasn’t that frightened.  She thought a change of address would do just fine.  Even though she had suspected the men around her of trafficking and forced prostitution, she hadn’t believed them capable of murder.  Rubashkin’s tragedy was common enough: Perceptive enough to have picked up on what was going on once the girls started vanishing, yet still so young and naïve as to believe the pimps around her weren’t all that bad.  So wide-eyed and innocent.

And beautiful
.  The Grey Wolf hadn’t completely robbed her of that.  Even in this twisted mess she was in, Vasilisa Rubashkin’s soft, smooth skin and lovable round face were obvious, a strange island of beauty, despite her unpleasant state.  And her eyes and nose, though streaked with mascara, were so perfectly proportioned. 
You took a lot from her
, she thought,
but you didn’t take those
.

It was of little consolation, but Rideau took consolation where she could find it.

She looked at the ligature marks, the blood stains, made an assessment.  “A little under two hours ago?” she said to Blok, who had silently materialized right behind her, watching and waiting.

“Yes,” he said.  “That’s
our best estimate.”