Читать книгу: «Dangerous Evidence»

Шрифт:

Translated from the Russian
by Boris Smirnov

Translator Boris Smirnov

ISBN 978-5-4496-1551-0

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Annotation

The Noose is a series of detective novels about a woman detective. Protagonist Elena Petelina is a tenacious, creative and decisive woman with an unsettled personal life. Besides investigating crimes, she must solve the problems afflicting her loved ones and delve into the secrets of the past – all while she strives to love and be loved.

Book1: Secret Target

Book2: Dangerous Evidence

Dangerous Evidence. A young woman’s suicide sets off a whole chain of mysterious crimes. Detective Petelina is being blackmailed to destroy a vital piece of evidence. Her former husband has been ruined by a conman, and her close friend is accused of a crime he did not commit. Only a rapid and effective investigation can restore her normal life. And Petelina decides to take a risk. She befriends the killer in order to expose him – but the cunning and respectable criminal figures out her plan.

1

The dirty snowbanks at the entrance to the apartment building were melting into puddles. Igor Vasilevich Grebenkin double-checked the address on the piece of paper in his hand. The feckless 50-year-old father had come to Moscow for the first time in his life to see his grown daughter. A faded ushanka hat – made of muskrat fur and long since unfashionable – betrayed his provincialism. Seeing that he was at the right place, Grebenkin began waiting patiently in front of his daughter’s apartment building as they had agreed on the phone earlier.

The entrance door slammed and a young woman with a black mane of finely-curled hair flitted out of the building. Grebenkin gasped to himself: How pretty she is! An unzipped red jacket with a fox-fur lining, a white blouse revealing ample cleavage, a black leather skirt and maroon boots with high heels all underscored the girl’s sex appeal.

“Katya!” exhaled Grebenkin, moving toward the girl.

Noticing the crimson welt on her cheekbone, he knit his brows.

“Who did that?”

“I got into a fight with Boris. Nothing is ever enough for that bastard.”

“Look, I know all about the line of work you’ve been forced into. I’ve come to put an end to all that. Just wait till I get ahold of him!”

“You don’t know the first thing about what’s going on. This is my life.”

“To hell with a life like that! Everything’s going to be different now.” Grebenkin rummaged in his pockets and produced a small box with a worn lid. “Here – this is the ring I wanted to give to your mother. It’s yours, Katya.”

“That’s a lie! You never had any ring for her. Otherwise, why’d you run off as soon as I was born?”

“I was transferred to a different unit. As an officer I couldn’t – ”

“You men always seem to have some excuse handy.” Katya slipped on the ring with the blue stone and twirled her hand. Her face softened a little. “Alright, forget it. Women are no angels either. Wait till I tell you this one thing…”

The girl tipped her head back. She craned her neck and squinted, trying to make out something on the roof above them.

“What’s wrong?” Grebenkin asked anxiously.

“I have a surprise for you! A major surprise!” the girl babbled. “Wait here and you’ll see in a second… Dad.”

Katya held out her arm to keep her father from following her and darted back into the building. Left alone, Grebenkin began stamping between the puddles. He recalled that it was April Fools’ Day. What kind of a surprise had Katya prepared for him? It had been many years since he had found any joy in silly pranks.

Nearby, two middle-aged men stood smoking beside a spotless silver Skoda. The proud owner was lovingly showing off the car’s polished paint job.

“Check it out, neighbor. Look how perfectly they smoothed out the roof. I had to change all the windows, had it painted in a paint-shop and then polished. All of it on my dime!”

“Sure. Can’t get much from a suicide girl.”

“From the goddamn sixteenth floor, the bitch. Couldn’t be bothered to fall even a foot to the side.”

“At least the car looks brand new now. Aren’t you afraid to park it in the same spot?”

The Skoda owner smirked.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Lightning doesn’t strike in the same place – ”

But here, a woman’s scream – high-pitched and strident like the sound of shattering glass – forced both men to look up. Seeing the unimaginable, they staggered back. A second elapsed – and a female body slammed flush onto the newly repaired car right before their eyes. The glass crunched, the alarm went off, the men’s jaws dropped. A smoldering cigarette tumbled from the neighbor’s lip. The owner went weak in his knees and lowered himself onto the snow.

Igor Grebenkin dashed up to the car. His gaping eyes instantly recognized the maroon boots and red jacket. The woman’s rear had landed on the seam between the windshield and the roof; the back of her head had struck the hood. Though her curls covered her face, a puddle of blood was already beginning to seep from beneath her head. On her limp hanging hand, Grebenkin recognized his topaz ring. Unwilling to believe his own eyes, he pushed the black curls from the girl’s lusterless face – and howled in agony.

His daughter Katya lay lifeless on the dented car.

2

The first day back at work after a vacation feels like the first day on the job – everything seems somewhat familiar, but you don’t feel like it belongs to you and so you’re compelled to acclimate yourself to your surroundings all over again. And then sometimes you get a feeling like you’ve just emerged from the sleeping car of a high-speed train which has traversed half the planet while you were inside lounging. Or you feel like a Formula One rookie, in a car that hasn’t warmed up enough, pulling out onto the racetrack where your fellow drivers are already counting off laps at breakneck speeds.

This is approximately how Senior Detective Major Elena Pavlovna Petelina felt as she climbed the stairs up to her office. She had naïvely assumed that her coworkers would be happy to see her – that they would at least mention her Thai suntan. As if..! A preoccupied lieutenant colonel brushed past her. “Hello.” “Good day.” It was as though they had seen each other just yesterday and she hadn’t been gone for two weeks. And people considered him a meticulous detective!

By lunchtime, however, her work started falling in its groove. The mail had been checked, the documents had been arranged and organized, all the necessary calls had been made. During a water break, the girls had apprised her of all the new office gossip. They had, naturally, asked her all about her vacation – especially since Elena had spent the two weeks on sunny Phuket Island not just with her daughter Nastya, but with operative Marat Valeyev as well. Accordingly, she was now forced to entertain the girls’ “And so how is he?” and “You don’t say!” as well as come to grips with the officious-sounding “your common-law husband.”

“Lenok, finally you’re back!” Elena’s ex-husband Sergey Petelin burst into her office.

Elena had divorced the businessman five years ago, unable to cope with his constant cheating and his constant accusations that she put work ahead of her family. Thirteen-year-old Nastya remained the only link between the former spouses.

“Who let you in, Petelin?”

“Why, they’re about to open a criminal investigation into me! I’ve been coming and going here at the Investigative Committee like I work here.”

“What criminal investigation? Can you speak more calmly?”

Sergey Petelin was the owner of a trucking company. Like any other businessman, sometimes he encountered problems and would therefore turn to his ex-wife for consultation. Besides having plenty of experience, a senior detective also has some pull, after all.

“I’ve put my foot in it this time. But for real!” Sergey Petelin plunked himself into a chair and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“Are you going to explain what’s going on or not?”

“A while back, I got an order to deliver a large batch of pharmaceuticals from Moscow to Volgograd – from the vendor to a buyer. Your ordinary, everyday job. Loaded up two trucks and sent them on their way. In the documents, the delivery address was a warehouse lot called The Southern at 15 Industrial Street. Here’s the paperwork.”

Elena glanced over the paper certifying that the goods had been received.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“Hang on. So my drivers get to Volgograd late in the evening. They drive up to the warehouse lot and see some people waiting for them, so they unload the trucks!”

“I can see that. What then?”

“This! The buyer is a company called ‘Pharma-Prod.’ But they handed the freight over to a warehouse called ‘Pharma-Prof!’ Check out the seal!”

Elena could see that the last letter in the buyer’s information indeed did not match the last letter of the receiver’s seal. It followed that the two were utterly different legal entities.

“The drivers didn’t notice a damn thing and went back to Moscow. And here, at this point, I start getting complaints – where’s the cargo? We started to look into it. The warehouse where they unloaded is empty! ‘Pharma-prof’ doesn’t even exist! Whereas ‘Pharma-prod’ is right there next door, as it has been for a hundred years!”

“And? What now?”

Sergey sighed heavily.

“It’s curtains for me. I accepted the goods as an issuing carrier and then delivered them to god-knows-who. The buyer and the vendor want money from me – but it’s three million dollars!”

“Legally they’re in the right.”

“But this is highway robbery, Lenok!”

“Any way you can take care of it under the table?”

“Those days are long gone. They’re going to take me to court and they’re going to win.”

“Feeling nostalgic for the protection rackets of old? The mobsters would’ve straightened it out.”

“It’s no laughing matter, Lenok. Better tell me what I should do.”

“You need to file a fraud and grand larceny complaint. They’ll start a criminal investigation. Assuming you get a solid investigator – ”

“Well you’re an investigator!”

“Petelin, I deal with completely different cases in a completely different city.”

“The vendor is from Moscow – he’s in cahoots with the buyer, I’m sure of it!”

“Good for you, but you’ll need to prove the criminal conspiracy, in addition to the fraud and the grand larceny.”

“So help me, Lena.”

“You don’t get it, Petelin.” Elena placed her hand onto the stack of folders on her desk. “I only work the criminal cases that the brass assigns me. In your case, the investigation will be assigned to the detectives in Volgograd.”

“So you’re refusing to help the father of your child?” Petelin asked, offended.

“I can make a call, lodge a request. No more.”

“No more,” Sergey aped. “Did you have fun vacationing in Thailand with your lover on my dime? No doubt you and Marat had a good laugh at my expense. Sure. I mean, why not? You have a nice patsy to pay for your little trysts.”

Elena stood up.

“Alright, here’s the deal, Petelin. You gave me money for our daughter’s vacation. Marat and I paid for our trip with our own money. And he’s not my lover, just like you’re not my husband!”

“So then who is he? A male specimen reserved for casual encounters? When the female feels like it, she just raises her tail and – ”

“Get out!” Elena boiled over.

Sergey Petelin stood up and gathered his papers.

“Three million bucks is a big sum for me. If I lose it, you can consider me ruined. Neither you nor Nastya will see another dime from me. At least think about that.”

Sergey Petelin was no penny pincher. He had provided a nice apartment for his daughter and ex-wife. He paid the monthly alimony regularly and frequently treated Nastya to various presents. He hadn’t scrimped on his daughter’s vacation either and Elena knew it.

But money doesn’t give him the right to insult me!

“You’d better leave, Petelin,” Elena ordered, reining in her anger.

Her phone rang loudly on her desk. Based on the ringtone – The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” – Elena knew that it was Marat Valeyev. Sergey recognized the photo on the screen and muttered a curse. Elena did not hurry to cover the photo which she had taken on a Thai beach when Marat, tanned and with a lusty look on his face, was making his way towards her.

“Both of you can go to hell!” Her ex-husband walked out, slamming the door.

Elena calmed herself before answering the song’s cloying lyrics:

Love, love me do…
You know I love you…
I’ll always be true…
So please, love me do.
Whoa, oh, love me do!

Marat had purposely set this ringtone on her phone. He frequently whispered similar sweet nothings into her ear during their closest, most intimate moments.

This time, however, his voice sounded anxious.

“Welcome back, Lena. We’ve got a suspicious suicide on our hands here. A young woman. Can you come out here?”

3

General Konstantin Viktorovich Bayukin had not seen his son Aleksey for almost five years. The initial rift between father and son happened because the general had divorced Aleksey’s mother for putting on too much weight. The rift was exacerbated when, not long thereafter, a frenetic and enticing hussy – about Aleksey’s age – moved into the general’s apartment. The final straw came when the father refused to help his officer-son move ahead in the service. While Bayukin Sr. luxuriated in the air-conditioned climate of his comfortable office in the Main Housing Department of the Ministry of Defense, Aleksey Bayukin – attached to a motorized rifle brigade – choked on dust and grit in restive Dagestan.

How hard was it for a father to arrange for his son’s transfer to a good post in Moscow? Many other fathers would do so without a second thought. But General Bayukin was a self-made man who believed that the exigencies of service in a combat zone would be edifying to his sole offspring. Such assumptions enraged Aleksey to no end. He was already thirty and still a captain – a captain with a general for a father. Hearing the stories of his “proper Pops,” Aleksey’s brothers-in-arms twirled their index fingers next to their temples and screwed up their eyes.

The dominant aspect of General Bayukin’s character, however, was not so much his sense of duty as his a natural proclivity to caution. Working towards his goals, he was simply terrified of losing it all over nothing. The general had learned his lessons from those of his colleagues who had “flown too high”: Affecting humility was quite profitable – until the right time. Take care of your business and don’t stick your neck out. Eventually, the right moment will come, and you will reap the fruits of your caution.

The doorbell sounded from the entryway and the general, already expecting it, hurried to get the door. His son had arrived in a weathered pilot’s jacket with a ripped-off badge and a traveling bag over his shoulder. His wind-blown eyes groped at his father with a wary sullenness.

“Come in, come in,” fussed Bayukin Sr., slapping his son on the shoulder. “Straight to the kitchen. We’ll have a drink to celebrate.”

He sat Aleksey at the kitchen table, decked with a bottle of vodka and some light snacks. The general poured some shots.

“It’s good that you’ve come. To our meeting – cheers!”

Aleksey looked around.

“Where’s your – ”

“Forget it,” the general anticipated the rest of the question. “I kicked out that tease a long time ago. The young lady turned out to be a proper bitch. Wasted my money and cheated on me. Eh, you know what they say: ‘It is what it is!’”

General Bayukin swallowed his shot and took a bite of a pickle.

“I live alone now. When it comes to the deed… Well, I don’t really get the itch very often. Once a week, I have a call girl come over. She’s younger and doesn’t get on my nerves – it’s cheaper in the end too. What are you staring at me like that for? These days, it’s simple to arrange – not like years ago with party committees and all the other Soviet claptrap. Drink up, Aleksey.”

Bayukin Jr. took his shot and wiped his lips with the back of his fist.

“So basically, you’ve traded mom for a whore.”

“Don’t start, Aleksey.”

“You kicked her out and didn’t help me a damn either. I’m fighting in hell itself down there, while back home I’ve got neither an apartment nor a future. I don’t even have a place to invite a girl to – and yet here’s my Pops, bragging about how he bangs hookers in his palatial chambers.”

“What’s done is done! I didn’t help you for your own good.”

“Really?” Aleksey flapped his eyelids sarcastically. “Could you elaborate, general, sir, for the benefit of this stupid captain?”

“Come on, let’s just have a drink like we used to. Remember how we got you your lieutenant’s epaulets?”

“I couldn’t give a damn about your remembrances!”

“Stop yelling at your father and let me finish!” The general took another drink and so did his son. “Do you watch TV? Do you understand what the situation is these days? Did you forget what my position is? Claims, verifications, comparisons of income and expenditures – eh, it is what it is! You think I can’t spare an apartment for my son? No! But I’m under constant watch. The slightest inconsistency and they’ll charge me with corruption and lock me up – and take your apartment away to boot.”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re the only honest person in the Ministry of Defense?”

“I’m the most cautious.”

“Let’s drink then to the ostrich’s caution!” Aleksey raised his glass. “See no evil, hear no evil – but whoever comes along may treat my backside as he pleases.”

“What a fool you are, Aleksey!” The general drank again. His face was beginning to flush. “I haven’t been sitting on my ass here, you know. I got some irons in the fire. Do you know how one may misappropriate housing intended for service members who’ve been transferred to the reserves? It’s a nice con! The directives for issuing state housing to these soldiers are incredibly long documents. It’s normal to simply draw up authorized extracts from them. What I do is make up a fictitious extract authorizing the issue of housing. Another person forges a rental agreement with the district public housing office. As you probably know, according to Russian law, a tenant renting from the government can apply to privatize their apartment. So we have a lawyer petition a court for the right to privatize the real estate in question. The judge, who’s also with us, rubber stamps the petition. A title is issued and that’s that – go ahead and list your new apartment on the market.”

“And so then where does your caution lie?”

“In that I forge my supervisor’s signature but don’t get any money in return.”

“There it is – your saintly charity! You angling to become Pope or something?”

“In return, I get something else entirely – something no less valuable.”

“Gold and diamonds?”

“Nope. Just a slender little envelope that’s easy to slip across the border.”

Bayukin Jr. took another drink, poked around the salad with a fork, chewed the greens with one side of his mouth and glanced at his father askance.

“What’d you call me up here for? I can munch on vodka down there just as well.”

“They’ve launched an investigation into the embezzled apartments – and it’s looking serious.”

“‘They’ll put you away – that’ll teach you not to steal!’” Aleksey parried with a famous quote from Beware of the Car, a classic Soviet movie.

“Don’t talk to your father like that, Aleksey!”

“I prefer it when people call me Alex.”

The general took another shot, chased it with a bite and studied his son from under his brow.

“In two weeks I’ll be fifty-five, in case you remember. A good age to get out of dodge, before it’s too late. I’ve already submitted the paperwork for my discharge. I’ll retire on my pension, buy a house in Lithuania and apply for citizenship. I won’t be taking anything with me. You’ll get this apartment which, may I remind you, is in a prestigious generals’ building. I’ve already hired a lawyer to deal with any problems that may crop up. His name is Denis Gomelsky. He’s preparing the documents as we speak. All you have to do is sign them and the apartment is yours! I’ll also see to it that you’re transferred to a post here in the city. There are two options – ”

“What options! Are you even aware that I was concussed in a blast? That I have PTSD? I spent two months lying around the hospital; then, a week ago, I got a medical discharge!”

“It’s that serious?”

“There are times when it all comes rushing back and…” Alex glared and knocked on his head bitterly. “It’s like there’s a worm in my head. And then I’m ready to tear everyone apart!”

“Alright, alright. There are good positions available in civilian life too. We’ll think of something.”

The general poured some water in his glass and drank it slowly, furrowing his eyebrows.

“One more thing.” Bayukin Sr. looked up at his son. “I’ll be honest with you. Gomelsky, the lawyer, warned me that if the investigation turns towards me, they may search the place. I need to get rid of any incriminating evidence. I don’t keep any money or valuables around here; however, the envelope… It’d be better if you take it and stay with your mother for a bit.”

“What envelope?”

“The one I mentioned. The one that’s better than money. I got rid of two others – but this third one is the most valuable.”

“I don’t understand a damn thing.”

The general smiled slyly.

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

Father and son entered the spacious living room. The general approached the bookshelf. He pushed apart two books, froze for a second, and then began to frantically riffle through the neighboring volumes.

“What the hell? Where is it?” he exclaimed. “It was here just yesterday!”

Books began tumbling from the shelves onto the floor. Once the bookshelf was empty, Bayukin Sr. dropped his arms.

“The envelope isn’t here. It’s vanished.” He thought for a moment. “Katya! It couldn’t have been anybody else.”

“Who’s Katya?” Seeing the state his father was in, Alex became worried himself.

“The prostitute. She was here last night and left this morning. She was the only one who could have taken the envelope!” The general grabbed his son pleadingly. “Alex, you have to find the envelope and get it back. This is insanely important! No one knows who you are. You can act freely. I can’t stand out.”

“What do you mean by ‘freely?’”

“Kill the bitch, if you have to – just get that envelope!”

“It’s that valuable?”

“I’ll pay you half-a-million rubles.”

“What about the apartment? Is it mine too?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, alright then. How can I find her?”

“Okay, remember this: She’s young – about twenty-something. She has a nice figure: tits, waist, ass – everything’s in the right place and in proper proportion too. She’s about up to your nose in height. She’s got wavy black hair that reaches below her shoulders. Dark, hazel eyes. Puffy lips and a straight nose. On the whole, she’s a sultry little piece. She was wearing a red jacket with fox fur last night – and knee-high boots.”

“Better tell me where the hell I’m going to find her!”

“Right.” The general grabbed his phone. “There’s a surefire way to locate her. I can find out where she went after she left.”