Dangerous Evidence

The girl entered the train station and headed for the ticket counter. This station had service to Sochi and in Sochi there was a gentle sea and pretty mountains and also true honest-to-god spring. There, she could spend a wonderful summer in the lovely resort city – far, far away from the preoccupied clients, the bastard pimp and the greedy Moscow cops.

To hell with the past! I want the good life! I want others to serve me for a change!

On her way to the ticket counter, the girl took her passport from her purse. She opened it and read the name – Elizaveta Malyshko. Ooof! After all her recent close calls and narrow escapes, it was small wonder that she had momentarily forgotten her own name.

“How much does a ticket to Sochi cost?” Lisa asked the ticketing agent after waiting briefly in line.

“Would you like a seat, a berth in a compartment, or a sleeping car? We have different types of trains as well.”

“What’s the very best?”

“Sochi Premium Express. Leaves tomorrow morning. A sleeping car ticket costs…”

Lisa was surprised by the amount. That was almost all the money she had! She thrust her hand in her purse. Her manicured fingers stubbed against the thick envelope. There it was – her new estate!

“Miss? Would you like to purchase a ticket?”

“I’ll come back later,” the girl promised. “Are there any computers with Internet access around here?”

“This isn’t the information desk,” the ticketing agent said through her teeth. “Next!”

Lisa wandered around the station until she found some kiosks with paid Internet access. The girl liked the fact that each computer was separated from its neighbors with a divider. She scooted her chair as closely as she could to her desk, made sure that no one was around and carefully opened the envelope.

Her first few searches on Yandex were fruitless. Nope! Nope! Was it really all in vain? After a few minutes, though, she got a hang of what she was looking for and found the site she needed. Her eyes bored into the screen. Would you look at that!

Lisa carefully studied several niche sites, tucked the envelope back in her purse and pressed the purse itself tightly to her chest. Now she needed to carefully consider how she would manage the wealth that had so suddenly come to her. Soon enough, she had made her decision.

She wasn’t going to pinch pennies shirking comfort and would travel to the sea in the best train available! She had earned this new life with suffering from the very day she had been born. If she managed this business carefully, she’d have enough money for anything she desired. But first, she had to arrange a safety net. She knew better than to go wandering around Moscow with an priceless purse on her shoulder.

Lisa found the station’s post office and bought an ordinary letter-sized envelope. As surreptitiously as she could, the girl transferred all the contents of the old envelope to the new one, sealed it and began thinking about a good address to send her treasure to.

Her wandering gaze alighted on the number of the post office she was in. Lisa wrote it on the new envelope and added her name with “care of” before it.

The envelope, with its new precious weight, slipped into the slot and dropped to the bottom of a blue mailbox affixed to a column.

9

A mid-luxury sedan rolled up to the gates of the hospital. Sitting at the wheel, Tarmo Keelp lowered the window and waved a bill at the security guard. The guard brushed some crumbs off his whiskers and slunk over to the visitor. The bill changed hands, the boom gate swung up and the expensive car drove off in the direction of the morgue.

The sixty-year-old gentleman was shaking with grim anxiety. Boris, the manager-pimp, had told him about the tragedy – Katya had died. The best thing to do was to forget, put the girl out of mind and switch her for some other young slut. But not everything in life was that simple.

The Estonian liked Katya. She provided quality services to him in bed, didn’t fail to praise him when everything went the way it needed to go and paid little attention to male foibles. Paid sex, however, was not the most important thing in their relationship. Keelp had brought Katya into his confidence and entrusted her with an important assignment. The day for her to fulfill her assignment had come. Today, Katya was supposed to bring him a certain envelope and receive an ample reward in return. For an uneducated girl, the envelope’s contents could not have meant very much, but for him, they were extremely valuable.

Tarmo Keelp parked the car beside the morgue van and made his way to the two-story nondescript building. In the hallway of the smelly facility, the Estonian beckoned with his finger to a lanky orderly with a busted lip.

“Tell me, my friend,” Keelp opened his wallet, demonstrating his readiness to share its contents with the orderly, “you had a girl delivered here this morning, a suicide, isn’t that so? She is my favorite niece.”

“Yeah?” the orderly agreed reticently. After the rambunctious Alex, he was assessing this new visitor with suspicion.

“I’d like to say farewell to her.” Keelp twirled a couple thousand-ruble notes in his fingers. “Unfortunately, I am due to fly out of the country soon and won’t be able to attend the funeral.”

“For sure,” nodded the orderly.

He lifted his oilcloth apron and pointed to the pocket of his blue jacket. The money was deposited in the indicated place. Not much later, Keelp was standing over the body of the girl who was supposed to be appeasing him in bed that very moment. Her face was battered. The exquisite lips which the girl had so expertly used to raise both his member and his spirits had transformed into a dried bloody scowl. Only her dense black hair retained its former attractiveness.

Covering his nose with a handkerchief, Keelp scrupulously examined the body. He was particularly interested in the girl’s hips. The visitor kept frowning, either from dissatisfaction or the unpleasant atmosphere.

Straightening out, Keelp asked the orderly to flip the body. The orderly eloquently lifted his apron again and indicated the pocket-depository. Keelp nodded his assent and gestured the lanky orderly to hurry up.

The butterfly tattoo was quite familiar to Keelp. In his youth, tattoos were a testament to one’s membership in the criminal underworld. These days, they had become an industry for decorating the bodies of the unfettered youth. The Estonian was a conservative in many ways; however, he quite enjoyed tattoos – so long as they adored young nubile bodies. He had therefore remembered Katya’s ethereal “butterfly” in detail.

Back in the hallway, Keelp recalled the main thing and reached back into his pocket for the wallet.

“I would also like to examine my niece’s belongings.”

“For sure.” After his brawl with the psycho, the orderly was happy to do business with an understanding person.

The girl’s clothes revealed nothing new. Keelp became downcast.

“What about the purse? Did she have a purse? You see, Katya had in her possession a private letter of mine. I am prepared to pay good money to see it returned.”

The orderly’s greedy mind stumbled across an entrepreneurial inspiration – why not bring this old geezer someone else’s purse? Surely, he won’t figure it out! Yet, remembering that the visitor had referred to a specific letter, the orderly had to confess, “That’s all she had with her, mister. Or – on her, rather.”

Back in his car, Keelp fell deep in thought. He was tormented by well-substantiated doubts. His life experience – replete with plenty of risky situations – spoke to him unequivocally: An unexpected death at the most critical moment cannot be an accident! In any affair, there is always some interested third party. If that is the case, then he must wait for the next move – and assume it would be the least pleasant one when it came.

The Estonian got out his phone and made a call.

“Benjamin, hello. This is Tarmo. I have a favor to ask. If in the next few days someone brings you anything out of the ordinary, give me a call. And try to arrange matters so that the persona in question and I can cross paths – What are you looking for? Well, you’ve got a trained eye, Benjamin. Believe me, when you see it, you’ll understand. And be assured that I will express my gratitude not merely in words.”

10

The workday had long since drawn to a close, yet in Detective Petelina’s office, all the lights remained on. Elena was sitting behind her desk, her back to the darkened window. The wall clock that her irritated husband had given her as a present many years ago lay in a box on the bottom shelf of her bookcase. This is how she created the illusion that the day was still alive and she could go on working as calmly as ever.

Petelina was examining the unpleasant photographs on her laptop that Mikhail Ustinov had taken at the scene of the incident. Or, was it the scene of the crime after all? Had the girl jumped off the roof on her own or had someone been there to help her? Who could profit by her death? Inevitably, Elena felt a certain professional anger whenever a young girl was killed.

The detective opened the passport of Ekaterina Igorevna Grebenkina. It had been issued in the district center of Grayvoron, in Belgorod Region. The girl in the photo was only fourteen, one year older than Nastya. The shy teenager did not much resemble the twenty-year-old woman who had met her demise on the hood of a car. Despite her battered face, it was clear that she had been attractive. It was unfortunate that she had made such a poor professional choice, but this could be written down to her parents’ lack of oversight just as well. Her dad had only recalled her existence when he was fifty, while her mother eloped to seek her fortune abroad.

The door cracked open and the gaunt and, as per usual, disheveled Mikhail Ustinov slipped into the office. They had agreed that Petelina would stay late and await his preliminary findings.

“What do you think, Misha?” asked Detective Petelina and instantly went on to share all the doubts she had accumulated. “For a suicide, this girl acted much too quickly and decisively. She met her dad, promised some mysterious surprise, climbed to the roof and… If she had wanted to hurt her father, then she would have at least yelled something from the roof – forced him to feel guilty and to try to talk her down. Young women, as a rule, spend a long time deciding to take that final step. It’s not only the end result that’s important to them: They care about how they’ll look after the fact… But in this case – well, it’s just a nightmare and no more.”

“Are you considering the murder option?” the Tadpole entered the conversation, taking a seat across from the detective.

“It could be an accident. Maybe she bent over to shout something to her father, slipped and – ”

“That, I completely agree with,” the forensic expert asserted decisively.

Petelina interlocked her fingers and looked the self-sure expert directly in the eyes. The Tadpole had a tendency to speak in riddles, expecting his interlocutor to figure things out.