Dangerous Evidence

“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.”

“The note about the pimp,” the expert reminded. “‘Boris is a jerk,’ remember..?”

“Okay. What do we have?” Petelina sat back down at her desk. The thin pencil in her hand began to produce arrows, circles and question marks on a blank sheet of paper. “Katya meets her father and suddenly runs off to get up on the roof. But why? Boris Manuylov, her pimp, is waiting for her up there to commemorate the suicide of Stella Sosuksu. However, Katya has decided to kill her pimp in front of her father.”

“I don’t think that pimps are so sentimental,” remarked Misha. “He couldn’t care less about commemorating a dead girl.”

“Let’s say you’re right. Then here’s another possible version. What if the father had come to loathe his prostitute-daughter? We only have Grebenkin’s words for what happened. The car owner and his friend saw him with his daughter. But they have absolutely no sense of how much time passed. For instance, how many minutes passed between the girl entering the building and falling? And what was Grebenkin doing in this interval? They don’t even remember whether he remained in the courtyard. Then, after the body hits the car, they’re in utter shock and remember nothing whatsoever. Like, for example, how quickly did Grebenkin appear? What if he pushed Katya off the roof and then took the elevator down?”

“Not to mention that Grebenkin was heard threatening the pimp.”

“This fits the theory of blind revenge. Both the debased daughter and her seducer.”

“Grebenkin seems more like a simpleton than some adroit revenger.”

Elena Petelina nodded, glanced over the doodle she had made and sighed.

“Nothing but questions.”

“Wouldn’t be much fun if there weren’t any.”

Before leaving, the Tadpole nodded toward the framed photograph on the detective’s desk.

“Shall I leave you the doll? For your daughter?”

Elena looked at the photo of Nastya on her first day of first grade, holding a bouquet of flowers and wearing a great big bow in her hair.

“Oh, Misha,” she smiled. “She’s given up dolls and taken up curling. She prefers 40 pound granite rocks to dolls these days.”

As soon as the forensic expert had left, the office phone rang. The detective picked up the receiver and heard a polite question.

“Detective Petelina?”

Petelina was happy to hear the voice of Ivan Ivanovich Lopakhin, the medical examiner. She did not know exactly how old he was but was sure that he had performed autopsies and written up findings for detectives who had long since retired. As Lopakhin liked to quip, “The best surgeon in the world hasn’t got a thing on me. Not one of my patients has ever complained.”

“I was just thinking of you, Dr. Lopakhin.”

“Speak of the devil and he shall appear. Sometimes I get the impression that I’m working in his waiting room.”

“That would make me the travel agent who books your patients.”

“One-way tickets only – no round trips.”

Elena liked to chat with the medical examiner and assumed that it was only thanks to his self-effacing irony that Lopakhin had managed to hold out at his job for so long. However, it was time to get down to business.

“Dr. Lopakhin, I have arranged for the body of Ekaterina Grebenkin to be delivered to you. Please pay special attention to her epithelial tissue as well as any fibers under her nails.”

“Actually, I called you precisely because I am so attentive. The poor girl’s body was first delivered to the nearest morgue. We were forced to arrange for her to be delivered here, to the police morgue. And here is what the orderlies told me…”

“I’m all ears.”

“Imagine this, Detective Petelina, there were already two men who came to visit the girl at the hospital morgue today. One said he was her friend, the other her uncle. They came separately. The common thread was that each one wanted to look at her belongings, especially her purse.”

Elena frowned and looked over at the couch. There, in a plastic bag, lay the dead girl’s purse. Elena had automatically dropped it there upon entering her office and turning on the light. Here was the price you paid on the first day of work after a vacation!

“Thank you, Dr. Lopakhin. As soon as you find anything…”