The Devil_s Garden

NINETEEN

Michael sat in the passenger seat of Tommy’s Lexus RR5, his mind outracing his heart. But not by much.

Abby had sounded distracted. Whenever she tried to make cocktail chatter with him, something was up. He had wanted to ask her why, but he knew he’d have to get off the phone quickly, because if he didn’t, she would read him, and he would have been forced to tell her about Viktor Harkov. He hated to lie to her. He didn’t lie to her. All he could hope for was that she didn’t see it on the news before he could tell her. She rarely watched television news, so this was in his favor.

When he did tell her about the murder, he wanted to have a lot more information. There was only one way that was going to happen.

Tommy made his way through the traffic. He opened the driver’s side door, but did not slip inside. He looked a little shaken. He took a few seconds. Tommy Christiano never took a few seconds. Especially with Michael.

“What’s up, man?” Michael asked. “Talk to me.”

Tommy looked up. “You sure you want to do this?”

Michael did not want to see it. He felt he had no choice. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

The smell hit him first. It wasn’t as bad as some of the ripe corpses he had encountered in his time in the office, but it was bad enough. Many of the crime scene personnel walking in and out of the office wore white masks.

They stood in the hallway. They were waiting for the investigating detectives to invite them in. There was a time when anyone authorized to be at a crime scene could walk onto the scene at any time. No longer. Enough contaminated crime scenes leading to forensic evidence being tossed out at trial had changed all that.

Michael could hear conversations inside the office. He strained to understand what was being said. He heard scattered words: Telephone… voltage… serrated… eyelid… blood evidence.

Michael did not hear anything about files, stolen or otherwise. He did not hear the word adoption. There was a glimmer of hope in this.

Five minutes later, Detective Powell waved them in.

When Michael met Viktor Harkov, nearly five years earlier, the man had walked with a limp. A long-time diabetic with a litany of other physical ailments, Harkov’s body seemed frail even then. But not his mind. Although Michael had never squared off against the man in a courtroom, he knew a few lawyers who had, including Tommy, and they all agreed that Viktor Harkov never walked into Kew Gardens unprepared. He was much sharper than he looked. It was all part of the act.

Now Viktor Harkov looked hardly human.

The dead man slumped in his chair behind the desk. The sight was horrific. Harkov’s skin was paper white, leached of all color. His mouth was open in a slash of terror, baring yellowed teeth, gums thick with dried blood and saliva. Where his left eye had been was now a charred bubble of flesh, a red bull’s-eye at the center. A thin column of phlegm leaked from one of his nostrils.

As Michael passed to the left of Harkov’s desk, he had to look twice to be certain what he was seeing was true. It appeared as if Harkov’s trousers had been ripped or torn away. The area surrounding his genitals too had been burned, the flesh there blackened and spilt. Michael had seen many indignities in homicide victims – from the targets of sexual predators, to gang hits that left little to identify, to the nearly superhuman violence of murder done in a jealous rage – and in each there was a mortification to the way these people were seen in death. Perhaps a violent demise was in and of itself the final humiliation, one the victim could not avenge. Michael had always thought that this was part of his job as a prosecutor. Not to necessarily exact revenge – although anyone on the state side of the aisle who denied vengeance was part of their motivation would be lying – but rather to stand up in a court of law and restore some measure of dignity to those who could not rise.

What was done to Viktor Harkov was as brutal a humiliation as Michael had ever seen.

On the desk was a desk phone, an older touch-tone model, a nicotine-stained avocado green popular in the Seventies. From beneath the phone extended a pair of long electrical wires; one snaking across the desk and attached to one of Harkov’s toes. The other wire, ending in an alligator clip, lay along Harkov’s left leg. The alligator clip was scorched black.

But that was not the worst of it. The reason that the desk was covered in dark, drying blood, was that whoever had tortured this old man, whoever had killed this man, had thought the act of murder was not enough.

He had cut off the old man’s hands.

Michael looked up from the mutilated corpse, his eyes roaming the scene, for what? Perhaps some respite from the horror. Perhaps for some justification to why this man had been so destroyed in his place of business. Then it hit him. He was looking for something that would tell him to what degree to be worried. For a moment he felt deep shame, realizing he was leaping over the horror of what had happened to Viktor Harkov, and thinking about himself. As he glanced around the room, his gaze landed on Desiree Powell. His heart skipped.

Powell was watching him.

They stood in the outer office. Michael looked at the file cabinet. It was a five-drawer steel model. The bottom drawer was slightly open. A crime scene technician was dusting the file cabinet for prints.

“Is that how they found it?” Michael asked. “With only one drawer open?”

Tommy nodded.

Michael glanced below the desk. There he saw an old Dell tower computer, perhaps a Pentium II model from the Eighties or Nineties. It too was covered in black fingerprint powder. Michael knew they would take the entire computer system back to the lab for more controlled tests – including an examination of the data on the hard drive – but with a vicious murder like this, they did field tests to get prints up and into the system as soon as possible. The old adage about the first forty-eight hours of a homicide investigation being critical was not just an adage, it was true.

Whenever Michael rode to homicide scenes, he always stood on the sidelines, confident and somewhat in awe of the job that the criminalists did. He watched how they addressed the scene, always mindful of every aspect and department of the forensic team – fingerprints, hair and fiber, blood evidence, documents. He had never wanted to jump in and help. Everyone had their job, and in Queens County those people were among the best in the city. But now, watching the glacial pace of the physical investigation, he felt helpless and increasingly hopeless. He wanted to tear through the file cabinets and see which files were missing. He wanted to go through the disks and CDs in Viktor Harkov’s desk and delete any mention of the names Michael and Abby Roman. He wanted to drop a match in the middle of this dusty, ugly office, and destroy the essence of the practice. He wanted to do all these things because, if there was any possibility that his relationship with Viktor Harkov became known, there was a real possibility that Charlotte and Emily could be taken away. And that would be the end of his life.

All he could do, for the moment, was stand on the sidelines.

And watch.

Fifteen minutes later, after the body had been moved to the morgue, which was located in South Queens, Michael and Tommy stood next to Tommy’s car. Every other car on the block had gotten a ticket. Tommy had his Queens County DA’s placard on the dashboard.

Neither man spoke for a long minute.

“Go to work,” Tommy finally said. “You have a case to try.”

Before Michael could respond, Tommy’s cellphone rang. He stepped away, answered. While he talked, Michael looked down the street, toward Astoria Park. He watched them working on the huge pool in the park, getting it ready for the summer season. He recalled many a hot July or August day when he was small, jumping into the clear blue water, not a care in the world.

Tommy closed his phone. “We don’t know too much yet,” Tommy said. “First, they lifted a dozen prints off the file cabinet. They’re running them now. Second, it looks like there were no backup files in the office. They took a quick look at the hard drive of the computer, and it was wiped clean.”

“Do you think they’ll be able to salvage anything from it?”

“They’ve done it before.”

“So this was about Viktor’s business.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Tommy said. “But get this. They’re pretty sure that the telephone and the wires were set up as some sort of torture device.”

“The phone?”

“Yeah. I heard that the way it was hooked up was that if the phone rang, it would send a charge through the wires. They think whoever did this had it hooked up to the old guy’s genitals, and his left eye.”

“Christ.”

“Sick bastard. They dumped the phone records from the office, and they found out that Harkov’s office phone got sixteen calls in a ten-minute period, all from a disposable cell.”

“My God.”

“Whatever this guy wanted out of Harkov, the old fucker didn’t give it up easily.”

“What about his hands?”

“They figure it was post-mortem. But just.”

“And this is how Harkov’s son found him.”

“Can you imagine?” Tommy said. “Turns out Viktor moved in with his son Joseph a year ago,” he continued. “I guess they were pretty close.”

“Did Powell get a statement from him yet?”

“Just a preliminary statement. And dig this. Joseph Harkov told Powell the police could not go through the old man’s effects.”

Because Viktor Harkov had something to hide, Michael thought. He felt his stomach churn with every breath.

“As you might expect, Powell is none too happy about this,” Tommy added.

“Where is that warrant?”

“Calderon started working it around eight this morning. It was in the pipe before you called me.”

Michael knew the process. A fresh homicide warrant would be expedited, as time was of the essence. It could come through any minute, or it might still be a few hours.

“Does anyone else live in the Harkovs’ apartment?” Michael asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tommy said.

“Do you think the old man may have kept something at the apartment? Backup files, duplicate files?”

Silence from Tommy. He knew what Michael meant. He glanced at his watch.

“Let’s go.”