The Body of David Hayes

THIRTEEN

BOLDT FOUND TRUE POLICE WORK electrifying. Now that he carried a lieutenant’s shield, such moments came rarely and so when encountered proved all the more meaningful. For him detection was a mathematical process, and therefore very much related to his music, which he thought of as a mathematical language. As a detective you connected A to B and B to C and therefore A to C, and around and around it went, simple algebra and geometry applied to everyday problem-solving.

The problem had been to approach his interview of Malina Alekseevich with more than a hunch and a whim. For Boldt, several disparate pieces of evidence came together in the men’s room midway into his morning routine at work.

Standing at the urinal, going about his business, he heard the distinct click of the door’s deadbolt being thrown and glanced over his shoulder to see a woman locking the lavatory door.

“Wrong door,” Boldt called out, his right hand fishing to return himself to his shorts. “This is the men’s room.”

When the woman told him she needed two minutes of his time, and called him by rank, Boldt hurriedly zipped himself up. In all his years of policing, he’d never been ambushed in a men’s room.

She was a handsome woman in her early thirties, strong-bodied and big-chested. She wore her blond-tinted hair as bangs in front and cropped at her shoulders, lending her coif the look of a helmet. He searched for a name to go with that pleasant face but couldn’t find it. He washed his hands as she moved over to him and spoke quickly and softly.

“Sorry for the cloak-and-dagger, but I couldn’t think how else to ensure privacy.”

He apologized for having forgotten her name.

“Olson,” she replied. “Maddie Olson. Organized Crime.”

Boldt was glad for the moment it took him to yank a couple of paper towels from the box and dry his hands, for it gave him time to think. He’d put the request through to OC earlier this same morning, attempting to establish the torture scenes as signature crimes, hoping OC might have someone on file who liked to pull fingernails. And now here was Olson, delivering information in a quirky, and exceptionally unusual way. He did not question her motives, except to know that if she’d gone to these lengths, she must require an enormous amount of secrecy.

He realized too that she was right about her choice of methods. Any detective from OC visiting a Homicide lieutenant was going to be noticed, even if they took a minute together in a conference room. The safest way was to force an encounter outside the offices, but Boldt went from his car to his office to his car and home. He didn’t offer a person like Olson much chance to corral him.

“Okay, I’m listening,” he said.

“Your inquiry this morning: Rohypnol, duct tape, and fingernail extraction. You’re not going to get anything out of OC on that.”

“I’m not,” he said, trying to follow her.

“No. You’ll nudge us again in another few days and we still won’t have an answer for you.”

“I don’t have a few days.”

“I know that. I’m in the cubicle next to Marcel. I overheard your request.”

Marcel Malvone, on OC nearly as long as Boldt had been Homicide. Boldt had taken the request to Malvone directly, knowing that penetrating OC’s hierarchy could be difficult at best.

Olson glanced quickly toward the men’s room door, as if expecting an interruption. She then turned on the water in the sink to increase the background noise.

Boldt felt his palms sweat. He dried them on a fresh paper towel.

“The thing about OC,” she said. “We’re worse than Internal Investigations half the time. We live by the covenant no one can protect you better than you can protect yourself. It’s not so much about misinformation as it is disinformation. When someone pushes a hot button we make sure that information is lost.”

“I pushed a hot button,” Boldt said, working with what she was telling him.

“No one’s going to give you this. If I’m proved wrong, so much the better. But when I overheard your time constraints, I decided to act. Maybe you repay the favor someday.”

“Will if I can.”

“That signature you’re looking for would come back for a CI,” civilian informant, “that’s currently working a case for us. No way anyone’s going to give him up for you and yours.”

“No one but you.”

“But me,” she confessed. “My sister’s stepson.” Here it comes, Boldt thought. Olson had the favor ready at hand. “He’s on the buying end of a drug deal in the backseat of a car when the skel riding passenger decides to pull a piece and blow away a corner dealer. Car’s pulled over and everyone in the car is charged with manslaughter except the shooter, who wins himself a capital murder charge. My nephew’s a good kid. Wrong place, wrong time. Drugs. He deserves a bad rap, maybe some time, but not the manslaughter.”

Boldt actually knew of the case. He promised to look into it, to do his best.

“That’s all I ask.”

“Done.”

“This CI is planted deep. It’s a joint effort in-house with Special Ops. U.S. Attorney’s Office and INS are even in on it. But this signature you described… I know for a fact he’s into manicures,” she said, meaning the extraction of fingernails. “The Rope, that’s news to me.” She meant the use of Rohypnol. “So maybe it just skews to him but isn’t him. I can’t say. That will be Malvone’s justification in not sharing him with you-if you ever bring it back onto us. The Rope is not part of his gig, not on his sheet. They can withhold him from you for this reason. But the tape and the manicures-that’s him, for sure.”

“The case?”

“These guys are into everything, Lieutenant. We’re talking fraud, smuggling, black market retail. Money exchange. Money laundering. Anything and everything to do with a buck. No drugs, no prostitution, nothing for Narcotics or Vice. But racketeering? Shit, Lieutenant, this guy-the boss, I’m talking about, not the CI-when they wrote the definition for racketeering, they had him in mind. They run a fucking empire. This guy is the fucking Brando of the Russian immigrant community. And he’s Dangerous, capital D. That would be another reason they wouldn’t steer you into this: It’s a fucking one-way street to the graveyard to mess with these people. Our guy, our plant, he’s a gold mine. Constantly funneling information. Reliable, bankable, good information. Compromising him would be a serious setback. We’re picking up foreign networks, massive laundering. The mother lode. That’s how I know you’ll never get him out of us.”

A crashing sound as someone banged into the door expecting it to open. This was followed by a sharp knocking. “What the fuck?!” came the complaint.

“A name?” Boldt asked, his heart dancing in his chest. The Russian community, she’d said. Russian cigarettes from the ash found at Foreman’s torture. A Russian name on a partial print from Bernie Lofgrin. Click, click, click, went the pieces. He loved this job.

She lowered her voice so that even Boldt could barely hear her above the rush of water into the stained sink. “Yasmani Svengrad. The Sturgeon General.”

“Sturgeon General,” Boldt clarified the irregularity.

“He imports caviar. Or did… ”

“Let me guess,” Boldt said. “S &G Imports.”

She leaned back, impressed. “Well… yeah.”

More banging on the door. Boldt shouted for the guy to cool it. He said to Olson, “Your CI. He’s called Malina Alekseevich.”

Her lips parted in surprise. She had nice teeth.

“How’d you know that?”

“He’s sloppy,” Boldt answered.

He told her to take a stall and lock the door. He’d knock on the bathroom door when the coast was clear.

Boldt then unlocked the main door to a disgruntled detective who quickly changed his attitude in the presence of a lieutenant. Boldt hovered by the water fountain in the hall until this detective left the men’s room. Boldt knocked, and Olson slipped into the hall, walking quickly away, never looking back.

The mother lode, she’d said. And that was how Boldt thought of it.

Most of Seattle’s former canneries and icehouses, the brick boathouses and sail-making workshops, had long since been razed and replaced with co-op housing, restaurants, or tourist traps. A few structures remained, some rusted, some crumbling, the majority along the northern shore of Lake Union’s ship canal, the last salty smell and briny taste of a history that would never return. Computer chips had replaced tins of smoked salmon; software, for soft-shelled crabs. Boldt rode in the passenger seat of John LaMoia’s Jetta as LaMoia turned down an alley. The southernmost boundary of Ballard was a seawall containing the canal and the seagull-white-stained wooden pilings supporting it. The empty lanes of litter-encrusted blacktop running between vacant buildings were reminiscent of the tumbleweeded streets of the Old West. The wind that rose off the water whispered like sirens in Boldt’s ear.

“That’s the place.” LaMoia pointed out a set of barely legible numerals above a rust-red door on the side of a corrugated-steel building with a tin roof.

Boldt removed his department-issue Glock, a weapon that had replaced the Beretta 9mm two years earlier. He checked out the gun, an uncharacteristic act.

LaMoia had spent the ride over going on and on about his terrorism seminar, part of a continuing education course, once again expressing his concern over the devices believed to be in terrorists’ hands. Nearing the end of the course, he had one last session late afternoon that he described as a “field trip” to watch demonstrations of some of the explosives and triggering devices. “But the weirdest weapon puts out something called Electromagnetic Pulse, EMP.” LaMoia’s enthusiasm could make anything sound interesting.

“You tried to explain this before,” Boldt interrupted. He was interested in technology only if it fit his own needs-he didn’t need to try to understand everything that was out there. He dumped water on LaMoia’s flames before suffering an explanation of EMP. Thankfully the water rolled off LaMoia’s back.

“Liz was sleeping with this guy David Hayes,” Boldt said. “Six years ago, when it all fell apart on me? That was Hayes. There’s a videotape. A sex tape. This guy, Svengrad, may have it. So if that comes up in the discussion, that’s why. I don’t want you looking surprised.”

LaMoia sighed, glancing away uncomfortably.

“You’re allowed to be surprised now.”

“I am.”

“It would be nice to keep it off the Internet, off the evening news, out of the bank’s next board meeting.”

“I imagine it would.”

“And you might think that’s why we’re here.”

“I might.”

“It isn’t. We’re here to bring Alekseevich in for questioning. We have a partial-never mind that it’s inadmissible.”

“Doesn’t bother me.”

“We not only have a Russian brand of cigarette but, as it turns out, S &G, Svengrad’s company, has the exclusive import contract for the entire West Coast. What we want, what we need, is to put a pack of those cigarettes into Alekseevich’s pocket. That, and the partial, give him to us.”

“He might come voluntarily.”

“Right,” Boldt said with a snort. “That’s a strong possibility.”

“If things go south in there?”

“No matter how badly this goes, we talk our way out. We walk out. The people behind this-and maybe that’s Svengrad-have gone to great lengths to avoid class A felony charges. That speaks volumes, I think. They’re not going to hassle two cops. They’re extremely careful. We do our job. We grab up Alekseevich if he’s in there, and we leave.”

“Not my style,” LaMoia said. “I’d rather shoot it out.”

Despite the various burdens weighing on Boldt’s shoulders he found room to laugh.

“You’re a bundle of laughs, Sarge.”

“That’s what they say.”

“No… that’s not what they say.”

Boldt flashed him a look. “Then what do they say?”

“I think I’d like to keep my job.” With that, LaMoia popped open the door and headed toward the building.

As they approached through a light drizzle, Boldt said, “Seventeen million reasons for lying to us, don’t forget.”

“You think?” LaMoia asked, wondering if the embezzlement trail led to this rusting building.

“We’ll find out soon enough.”

LaMoia knocked and they entered a small office area containing a pair of ancient gunmetal-gray steel desks loosely shaped into an L, a woman receptionist in her late forties with big hair and red nails, some whiteboards on the wall scribbled with colorful reminders, and four large color posters, all showing busty women with pink tongues. Caviar ads, but oddly targeting readers of Playboy. The receptionist called through on the telephone. Boldt could hear an extension ring out back.

“Silicon Valley,” LaMoia said, pointing to one of the girly posters, a nearly naked black woman barely out of her teens working a jackhammer on a city street. The implants grafted to her chest accounted for LaMoia’s comment. She wore a yellow hard hat that bore the American flag. The words above her read: “If it smells fishy… ” The jackhammer aimed into the seam of a superimposed can of caviar, beneath which it read: “… you’re in the right place-Svengrad, Beluga Negro.”

They were admitted into a cool warehouse that smelled sour with fish. Their escort was a well-dressed, darkly complected man in his early thirties with a fairly thick accent. Not Alekseevich, according to the sheet in Boldt’s inside coat pocket.

Steel mesh shelving was crowded with carefully arranged cardboard boxes. The shiny gray concrete floor was marked with bright yellow lane lines courtesy of OSHA, while overhead mercury vapor lights lent human skin a sickly green tinge. To Boldt’s disappointment, the warehouse was quiet, void of human activity.

“It isn’t every day we get a visit from Seattle’s finest,” their escort said.

He had the right lingo and had done a good job of wearing down the edges of his accent, all of which told Boldt he’d probably been in the States for some time. The nice suit was somewhat unexpected though not surprising, given Beth LaRossa’s description of the two who had pressured her husband. The man led them across the warehouse floor to a glass box of an office from where a muffled recording of a soprano’s voice carried. Boldt liked opera.

Their escort opened the door for them but did not enter himself.

The office reminded Boldt of his own-a space within a space, and little more. It was a place of business, heaped with paperwork. The man behind the desk was broad-shouldered with pinprick black eyes, a barroom nose, and a salt-and-pepper beard, carefully trimmed. He too wore a dark, tailored suit, but a pair of more workmanlike, rubber-soled black shoes revealed themselves from below the large, leather-top desk, a piece of furniture incongruously out of place. Boldt knew better than to automatically assume this man was Svengrad. A manager perhaps. An employee.

Fan lines edged his eyes as he rose and introduced himself. “General Yasmani Svengrad.” He made no offer for them to sit down, and remained standing himself. “Let me guess,” he said. “You’ve lost something.”

Boldt picked up a trace of British in his speech. The man sucked air between his two front teeth-either a tic or an attempt to fight a painful tooth. Boldt felt taken aback and slightly intimidated, not an easy feat. Svengrad was a perfectly proportioned, enormous man. He stood six foot four or five, with hands like baseball mitts. But where some men looked big, Svengrad’s proportions confused the eye. A trompe l’oeil of a man, like someone from Alice in Wonderland.

But it was more than the personage. Prior to coming here, Boldt had taken what little had been passed him in the men’s room and had dug first into S &G Imports and then into its notorious owner, quickly reading up on the man courtesy of the Internet. The picture that unfolded explained OC’s desire to turn an employee as a state’s witness and catalog the steady flow of information that resulted. Yasmani Svengrad would not fall easily.

A decorated naval officer, Svengrad had proved himself a shrewd politician as well. With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Svengrad had unexpectedly transferred to oversee naval operations in the Caspian Sea, considered an undesirable posting without political clout. It was only later his true motivations had been recognized. As the senior military officer in charge of the Caspian, he had seized control of its waters and filled a power void as management of the Caspian slipped from Mother Russia’s firm grasp. With no fewer than five newly formed governments claiming rights to the Caspian and her all-important sturgeon, Svengrad brutalized his way to dominance, quickly owning the Caspian’s lucrative, multimillion-dollar caviar business. Svengrad’s friends back in Moscow allowed this, even encouraged it, as poachers nearly ended the caviar trade by slaughtering immature fish for their famous eggs and pushing the sturgeon toward extinction. No doubt, Svengrad made sure his friends in Moscow both ate and lived well for allowing a monopoly that continued to this day. From what he’d read, Boldt considered Svengrad both a man of vision and one unafraid of using force to get what he wanted. Many a poacher vessel had been “lost at sea” during the early years of Svengrad’s power grab.

He’d settled in the United States seven years earlier and had been granted citizenship not twelve months ago, a discovery that made Boldt suspect either the intervention of diplomats or the exchange of hard cash. Svengrad had nonetheless never personally been arrested, had never spent a single night in so much as a drunk tank. Most such “Teflon thugs” found themselves targets of federal or state undercover investigations at some point, and as far as Boldt could determine, Svengrad’s time had now come.

Boldt played it carefully. They came without a warrant, and he kept this firmly in mind-if asked to leave they would be obliged to do so. “Lost something? We’re just a pair of public servants doing a favor for INS.”

“A Seattle Police Department lieutenant and sergeant doing a favor for INS?” So the man knew how to read. He handed back the credentials, still not offering them chairs.

“You don’t think our captain, doing a favor for the feds, is going to send a detective to see you, do you?” He could see that Svengrad actually considered this, though not for long.

“How long do we keep this up?” Svengrad asked.

Boldt threw his hands out in an inquisitive gesture that asked, How should I know?

“If you have business here, state it,” Svengrad said. “Or should I play along? What can I do for INS, gentlemen?” He asked this in a schoolgirl voice that instead of comical, Boldt found threatening. “Remind me: Don’t you need a subpoena, a writ, a warrant? Should I call a lawyer?”

“Why so jumpy?”

“We’re here informally,” LaMoia said, jumping into the fray.

“You are at that,” said the man wearing the designer suit as he looked them over. “Do you press those yourself, or send them out?”

LaMoia’s infamous blue jeans finally took a direct hit; if Boldt hadn’t been working to understand, and possibly undermine Svengrad, he might have celebrated the moment.

Boldt calmly removed Malina Alekseevich’s INS sheet and placed it in front of Svengrad. “You’re listed as the employer of record.”

“As I should be,” Svengrad said, not batting an eyelash. “Were that I was.”

Boldt thought he was actually doing OC a favor by making Alekseevich into a suspect, and therefore above consideration as a double agent. Never mind that entities like OC and Special Operations and the INS liked to run control on their civilian informants; Boldt didn’t see much harm coming of this.

Svengrad continued, “Malina’s a hard worker. A good man. He might even have avoided being laid off if Fish and Wildlife had played fair.”

“Laid off?” LaMoia inquired.

Boldt paled. Played fair? Fish and Wildlife? Depending on when Alekseevich had indeed been laid off his job, they had little or no way to connect Svengrad to the tortures of Hayes and Foreman, even if Alekseevich were responsible. Svengrad would simply claim that, unemployed, Alekseevich had resorted to his old ways. More’s the pity. Boldt quickly looked for a bridge that might keep himself and LaMoia in the room long enough to stir the pot. He didn’t see anything obvious.

“He drives for us, or did, before layoffs,” Svengrad answered LaMoia. “He has not gone and gotten a parking ticket or something, has he?” The man grinned smugly. “Date of termination-because that’s the next thing you’re going to ask, yes? Ninety-three days. You may ask the Fish and Wildlife Department.” He met Boldt’s surprise. “Not INS, Fish and Wildlife. They will tell same date.”

“Ninety-two days,” Boldt said, misquoting him. “You track all employees with such enthusiasm, or is Alekseevich special to you?”

“Ninety-three days, Lieutenant. We, our caviar, is under a lockdown. Forbidden from making business. Big mix-up on government’s part. And yes, I do keep track. Certainly. When this affects one’s livelihood, one keeps count of such things.”

“A lockdown,” Boldt repeated, spinning on his heels to look once again at the quiet warehouse behind them. Svengrad’s explanation fit the human emptiness of the place.

Svengrad flipped through a Rolodex and fixed on a card. “We have the same address-for the home of Alekseevich-as does INS.” He handed Boldt back the sheet of paper. “Have a nice day, Lieutenant.”

“You said we were missing something,” Boldt said.

“My mistake. Fedor will show you out.”

“Something, or someone?”

Most people shrank some from a cop’s gaze. Not this man. Svengrad fixed his attention onto Boldt and asked, “You like dirty movies, Lieutenant?”

It wasn’t often that Boldt had to contain himself from striking out at a man.

Svengrad said, “I find them quite a turn-on myself. The home movies on the Internet are the best. Crude lighting. The women always trying too hard to look sexy. The men trying to look hard. Much better than cheap porn, don’t you think? Gives reality TV a new meaning.” He added, “But to answer your question, no: something, not someone.”

Boldt asked, “Do you get these films off the Internet, or do you have the originals?”

“I have my sources,” Svengrad said. “Mature women are the best, don’t you think? They know what they want-what it takes for them-and they aren’t afraid to say so.”

Boldt’s stomach squirted some bile into his esophagus. He coughed through the burning and swallowed it down. He’d have bloody stool if he continued to keep this tension inside: ulcers the size of golf balls.

“Where would I get such a home movie?”

LaMoia shifted on his heels, uncomfortable. He whispered, “Sarge.”

Boldt did not so much as look in his direction. “John,” Boldt said, still eye-to-eye with Svengrad. “Ask the guy out there for a cigarette, would you please?”

LaMoia withdrew from the room, though reluctantly. Once he was on the other side of the glass his attention remained on Svengrad and Boldt, as did the attention of Svengrad’s man.

“You like caviar?” Svengrad asked Boldt, ignoring Boldt’s inquiry. He swept his arm to encompass the warehouse.

“No,” Boldt confessed. “I never acquired the taste.”

“Too bad. Your wife, where do her tastes lie?”

“I will not now, nor at any time, discuss my family,” Boldt said. “And neither will you. To misjudge me in this regard would be a terrible error on your part.”

“I thought we were already discussing your family,” Svengrad said. “Or at least home videos.” Boldt kept the death stare on him. “No matter,” the other said. “Even if I wanted to, I could not give your wife our best Beluga Negro. This is because of some very good forgeries of my company’s labels. These have caused the… interruption in my business.”

“The feds can be a real bother sometimes,” Boldt said.

“Indeed they can.”

“Counterfeit caviar?” Boldt asked. “Seriously?”

“Paddlefish eggs,” the general answered. “Gravely serious. We never heard about it until your Fish and Wildlife service discovered them bearing our label. Paddlefish, at four dollars an ounce, mixed in with our eighty-dollar Beluga. Like cutting cocaine with powdered milk.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Boldt said. “About either.”

“I am the victim here. But because I am Russian, I must be big mafia guy.” His attempt to come off as an innocent bordered on comical.

“Paddlefish eggs.”

“Bearing my label. Perhaps, when this small problem is resolved, we can work out an arrangement that is mutually satisfying.”

“The most I can do is look into it.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. The right motivation, it’s amazing what a man can do.”

“This late in the week,” Boldt reminded, “I’m unlikely to make much headway.”

“What a shame. For a moment there I thought we had a real connection.”

A knock on the glass window where LaMoia held a pack of cigarettes to the glass. Proletarskie.

The general saw this as well. “Russian brand. We import them along with half a dozen others.”

“Alekseevich smokes this brand,” Boldt said.

“Malina smoke? I do not think so. Too athletic.”

“Sell a lot of this brand, do you?”

“Enough to justify importing it,” Svengrad replied. “The kids at the raves. The colleges. They love Russian cigarettes. Much stronger. They make Camels look like Virginia Slims.”

“How many cartons, cases, a week?”

“You bring a warrant, I’ll gladly turn over this information. Otherwise, no reason to let my competitors know my numbers.”

“I’m not your competitor,” Boldt said.

“Sure you are.”

Boldt understood the general’s tactics then: gun and run. He struck an area of Boldt’s vulnerability, the video, and then came back with his own needs-the lockdown of his caviar-and then got defensive when his cigarettes came into play. Boldt might have enjoyed this more had Liz not been directly involved.

“You like birds, Lieutenant?”

“The winged variety?” Boldt asked, wondering what came next.

“The magpie will watch the same bird nest for hours. Must seem like forever, a brain that small. Patient like a saint. The mother bird leaves that nest, even for a moment, and the magpie eats her eggs. Right there in the nest.”

Boldt felt a warmth run through him, like he’d peed in his pants. He pictured the yellow yolk spread around the bird’s nest the same way the blood had been spilled around the cabin. Svengrad made sure his message was received. “You like art, Lieutenant?”

“Some.”

“I collect WPA-era charcoals. It’s a seller’s market right now. Smart time to watch for forgeries.” Svengrad sat on the word-an elephant on an egg. “The limitation of imitation,” he said. “It’s good of you to have stopped by.”

Dismissed, Boldt thought he meant to say.

Back in the Jetta, Boldt loosened his tie.

LaMoia said, “It’s not so much the salty taste that bothers me, but the way they pop between your teeth.”

“Smelling like low tide doesn’t help,” Boldt said.

“So what happened after I was excused?”

“I had to do that.”

“I understand,” LaMoia said, but his voice betrayed him.

“He wasn’t going to threaten me in front of someone.”

“And did he?”

“Not exactly, no. He wanted to cut a deal: his import business back for the video of Liz and Hayes.”

“Damn,” LaMoia said. He pulled the Jetta out onto wet streets. The sky this time of year was worse than a leaking faucet.

“His caviar business is important to him. We can assume that’s where the seventeen million came from in the first place: some undeclared profits.”

“You think it was his money?”

“I think it was. But his main message was a story about magpies.”

“What-pies?”

“Birds. He took the long way around to explain to me that the Hayes crime scene, the cabin, is a cheap imitation. His guys turned their backs, and somebody took Hayes.”

“You buy that?”

“There’s a second interpretation. This may just be me being paranoid.”

LaMoia waited.

“Liz and I drove the kids out to Kathy’s-my sister’s-in the middle of the night, Tuesday night. We literally took them out of our nest. Maybe I blew it. Maybe we were followed. Maybe he’s warning me not to try to move them again or he’ll take action the next time. Maybe he doesn’t know where they are and he’s looking for me to panic and lead him to them. We both know the Russians have a reputation of working the family when the going gets tough.” Boldt recalled an unsolved child murder, and the suspicion of Russian involvement.

“Holy shit,” LaMoia breathed.

“That’s why I’m likely to make a call asking about the possibility of lifting this lockdown. And I’m going to talk to Bernie about cross-comparing every single piece of evidence from that cabin against Danny Foreman’s crime scene. I think what just happened in there was that Yasmani Svengrad confessed to us that Alekseevich is our guy, but that he didn’t do Hayes at the cabin. My bet is, Svengrad wants Hayes as badly as, or worse than, we do.”

“The merger. The deadline.”

“That’s it,” Boldt said, but his main thought was that this still put Liz squarely in the center.