A Spring Betrayal

Chapter 1

We uncovered the last of the dead children in the red hour before dusk, as the sun stained the snowcaps of the Tien Shan mountains the color of dried blood and the spring air turned sharp and cold.

Seven small bundles, tightly swaddled in plastic bags, all buried in a hurry, just a few inches under the soil. They lay huddled together as if for warmth or comfort, at the foot of an apple tree, one of three bunched in the north corner of a potato field next to the canal. Not a clever disposal: the bags were swollen with the gases of decay, elbowing their way through the sour earth like a crop of misshapen mushrooms.

It was the rancid smell loitering in the dawn air that caught the attention of the farmer who found the first corpse. To begin with, he thought it was a dead hare, wondered why anyone would bother to bury it. A closer look revealed a clump of thick black hair and one small hand, fingers curled into an ineffectual fist. Then he noticed a couple more waxen bundles, decided to go against all his myrki peasant instincts and contact the authorities.

He called the menti, the local cops, who contacted Murder Squad, asked for an inspector. Since there’s only one Murder Squad officer in Karakol, that meant me.

I’d been in Karakol for three months, serving out an unofficial internal exile in the far east of Kyrgyzstan, payback for the chaos I’d caused the previous winter investigating the brutal killings and mutilations of several young women. A lot of blood and trouble had been splashed around in my attempts to head off a potential coup by the politicians deposed in the last revolution. The local head of the Circle of Brothers mafia ended up facedown in a snowdrift, and I helped the minister of state security “disappear” the man who’d ordered his daughter’s murder and mutilation.

The man who also happened to be the chief of Sverdlovsky police station, and my boss.

The public was sold some nonsense about a tragic car accident that claimed the life of one of Kyrgyzstan’s top policemen; there was talk of posthumous medals, even a state funeral. Being Kyrgyz, everyone greeted the news with the indifference for which we’re famous. Truth is, unless it affects our lives or our pockets, we’re not too interested in who sits at the big desks, collecting the bribes for favors done. There’s always someone who’ll do that, whoever’s in power. We’re too busy wondering how to put plov on our plates and vodka in our glasses.

The guys at the top decided it was best if I was out of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, for a while, and Karakol was the ideal spot, being as far away as you can get in my country without a visa. And there are worse places than Karakol; at least I hadn’t been posted to the Torugart Pass, the desolate mountain crossing between Kyrgyzstan and China.

There’s not a lot in Karakol for an ambitious cop; arresting a few locals overwhelmed by vodka after the Sunday morning animal bazaar is the highlight of most weeks. But my ambition had pretty much died the day I buried Chinara, my wife.

Until the call came in.

I was an hour’s rough drive north of Karakol, outside Orlinoye, one of the small villages that cling to the landscape like burrs on a sheep’s wool. Faint evening mist spilled over the edges of the irrigation canal, a half-transparent shroud over the damp grass and the relics of seven lives ended before they’d really begun.

I’d called Kenesh Usupov, Bishkek’s chief forensic pathologist, when I heard there were “multiple objects of interest.” It’s a ten-hour drive from Bishkek, but by late spring the roads are clear of snow and any rockfalls. With the police flashers on all the way, he’d have no problem making the journey.

Even so, I was surprised when I saw an ambulance making its way up the rutted track toward the nearby farmhouse, stopping in the yard beside the police car that had brought me here earlier. Usupov got out of the back, clutching the black leather briefcase he takes whenever he’s called out on a case. It contains the basics for a scene of crime investigation; basics because that’s all we have in this country.

As Usupov walked through the field toward us, the last of the sunlight flashed and glinted off his glasses, making his usual impassive expression even harder to read. His sense of humor is best described as dry and rarely used, and spending an evening together over a few drinks wouldn’t be my ideal night out, but he’s good at what he does, methodical and honest and incorruptible, for what that’s worth. Like me, he thinks the dead deserve better than a supporting role as chess pieces for the living, that we owe them the dignity we never bestowed upon them when they were alive.

I smiled when I saw the two plastic grocery bags Usupov had tied over his shoes, to protect them against the elements. And then my smile faded into a scowl as I looked down at the other plastic bags by my feet.

“Inspector.” Usupov nodded as he joined me. He didn’t offer to shake my hand: the burns I carried from my last case were pretty much healed now, but the scarring still looked bad, as if I’d been bitten by one of our mountain wolves. He looked at the two junior police officers, watching from a few feet away, and raised an eyebrow.

“They were here before me,” I explained. “They’ve heard what a great crime scene expert you are, and they wanted to trample all around, give you more of a challenge.”

Usupov only grunted in response; my own sense of humor is a little too frivolous for him. He squatted down on his heels, plastic bags rustling like the leaves on the boughs above us.

“How did you get here so quickly?”

“An ex-US helicopter,” he said, “from Manas Airport. Then ambulance from Karakol. I thought it made sense when I was told there were several bodies to transport.”

I didn’t tell him a large suitcase would have been enough, did my best not to show I was surprised about how he got there. Although America has had an airbase in our country for several years, a vital part of keeping the army in Afghanistan supplied, they’d operated a strict hands-off policy in our internal affairs. They’d left lots of equipment behind when they finally pulled out of Kyrgyzstan, including helicopters, but we had very few pilots who could fly them. Which made me wonder what was so special about a report of finding some bodies on the other side of Kyrgyzstan, and who had the pull to respond so quickly.

Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow, but Usupov simply lowered one eyelid in an almost imperceptible wink, turned his attention back to the bodies. He reached into his briefcase, put on a pair of latex gloves, and with fingertips that barely skimmed the surface of the soil, began to brush away loose earth from the nearest corpse. His delicate, precise touch was more like that of a lover than an explorer of the secrets of the dead.

“Did you find the girl?” he asked.

“Girl?” I said, wondering what he meant, what clue he’d spotted that had eluded me.

“Snow White,” he said, never taking his eyes off the ground. “You’ve found her seven dwarves, so she must be around here somewhere.”

A grim sense of humor may not be essential if you’re a forensic pathologist, but it’s not a handicap either, if you don’t want death to overwhelm you.

“This is where they were found? In the same position, I mean?”

I nodded.

“We uncovered them one at a time,” and I pointed out the order in which the bodies came out of the ground. “All buried at the same time, do you think?”

Usupov got to his feet, and I heard his knee joints crack. Like me, he was getting too old to expose other people’s cruelties and betrayals.

“Hard for me to say here, better to get them back home and on the slab, but I don’t think so. See for yourself.”

He pointed at the smallest package, prodded it with a gloved finger. A viscous squelch made my stomach turn.

“They all seem to be at different stages of decay. But that could be due to having previously been buried in different locations, in soils with different levels of acidity. Tightly wrapped until the bags split, so we won’t get a straightforward timeline from insect and predator activity. But if they weren’t transported here all at once, I’d guess they’ve been buried here one by one, over time.”

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Seven bodies suggested intent, determination, maybe some ritualistic choice behind the location. It also pointed the finger at a local, and village people are infamously closemouthed. “Mne do lampochki,” they say. “I don’t care.”

“Murdered?” I asked, knowing what his answer would be.

“Can’t say. Crib deaths? Stillborn? Who knows, the way infant mortality is around here? But certainly disposed of in suspicious circumstances.”

Usupov turned to the nearest ment, beckoned him over. A burly man, with the brown face and hands of a local farm boy, he didn’t seem keen to approach until Usupov frowned.

“I want plastic sheeting and tent poles to cover the site, a guard here overnight, and the use of a room in your station, understand?”

The ment looked puzzled, as if Usupov had asked for a magic carpet and a dozen Kazakh dancing girls.

“You’re leaving them here overnight?”

Usupov sighed; like me, he’d spent a career explaining himself.

“They’ve been here for quite some time, officer, another night won’t hurt if we cover them carefully, and we can examine the scene when there’s enough light to do the job properly. Uproot them fully now and we might destroy vital evidence. And it’s almost dark.”

The last of the light reflected on the snow was dissolving into darkness, as wind whipped the branches above our heads. It wasn’t a spot where I’d like to spend a long moonless night, alone but for the company of seven dead children.

We left one unhappy ment to his overnight vigil and trudged back down to the farm courtyard. I was staying at the Amir Hotel in the center of Karakol, and I’d booked Usupov in there as well. It wasn’t the Hyatt, but there was hot water most of the time. Right now, washing off the stink of the dead was the least of my concerns.

I needed to find out who was powerful enough to send a helicopter, what they knew, and why they weren’t telling me.