The Sin Collector

MASHA

It didn’t take Masha too long to pull all the archived files for the last two years of murder cases. Nobody in the office paid any attention, but they weren’t overtly hostile, either, like that detective in denim. What had she done to make him hate her so much? Good thing she’d been quick-witted enough not to ask him to take her along to the crime scene. He had made it perfectly clear: no field trips for her, just some statistical report nobody cared about.

How had she ever imagined she’d be in the thick of things? Maybe not chasing down a suspect, pistol in hand, but at least standing among the famous Petrovka detectives and their perfectly trained German shepherds, making brilliant deductions. They would exchange awed glances. How young she is, they’d say, and yet soooo smart! Masha understood, of course, that all her knowledge was just theoretical, but didn’t they want to make use of Maria Karavay, valedictorian? Masha sighed, not realizing how much she looked like her father as she jutted her chin out proudly. To hell with him! Twice as stormily stubborn as before, she dove into the coroners’ reports and crime-scene photos.

Until she suddenly ran up against something very strange. Here was a report on a murder along the Bersenevskaya waterfront. The file said three people had been killed in the basement of an old electric station, now a tram depot. Two men, one woman. Masha peered closely at the photographs, and after a stealthy look around—naturally, everyone was still ignoring her—she pulled a magnifying glass out of the cup on Andrey’s desk. Yes, just as she’d thought. There were numbers on the victims’ T-shirts. Damn these black-and-white photos. What were they written with, blood? The shirts were all covered with it, and blood was pouring out of the victims’ mouths. Masha averted her gaze for a second. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing the pictures weren’t in color. She moved on to the interrogation reports. The chief witness, the man who found the bodies, was a security guard, an I. N. Ignatiyev.

Masha jotted down the name in her notebook and turned back to the pictures, magnifying more details, one after the other: the tied-up legs, the big, loud earrings on the woman, the chairs arranged in a semicircle, and those T-shirts… they were enormous, unsightly, one size fits all. They obviously did not come from the victims’ own closets. No. The murderer must have brought them—the big white shirts were the perfect canvas for those Arabic numerals, written in blood: 1, 2, 3.