“Can you check the wounds and see if they correspond?”
“Not with the dead boy. I wasn’t allowed to take photographs, and the body was taken away, God knows where. But there’s one thing I haven’t told you.”
“What’s that?” I asked, sensing that Usupov might be able to give me my first solid lead.
“The dead boy wore an identity band. From an orphanage.”
I sat back as his words started twisting new patterns and theories in my head.
“So what happened then?” I prompted.
Usupov looked at me for the first time. The fear and shame in his eyes was almost too much to watch.
“God forgive me, Akyl,” he said. “The man handed me the false death certificate. And I signed.”
Chapter 10
I decided to call Gurminj Shokhumorov, to see if he had any knowledge of local people with an unhealthy interest in children. Orphanages are often targeted by pedophiles; it’s a lot easier to pick out children who don’t have loving parents to care and watch over them, and fewer people care when they disappear.
His cell phone rang, but went to voicemail, so I decided to head over there. The mountains crouched behind a mask of rain, the air damp and cold. I kept trying Gurminj’s phone, and I grew more worried each time I pressed the redial button. A police car was parked at an angle outside the building when I arrived, and I knew something was badly wrong. As I got out of the car and approached the front entrance, a ment I didn’t recognize held up his hand to stop me.
“Crime scene. You can’t enter here,” he said, in the pompous voice all small men use when they’re in charge.
“What sort of crime?” I asked, the feeling of doom settling in my stomach.
“Police business,” he replied, put his hand on my chest to prevent me going any further. My jacket swung open, and I made sure he saw the butt of my gun on my hip. He gasped, started to reach for his own gun. I grabbed his wrist, held it tight, pulling him toward me.
“I’m Murder Squad,” I told him, staring past the fear and suspicion in his eyes, “so police business is my business, da?”
I used my other hand to fish my ID out of my pocket, held it in front of his nose. The fear left his face, the suspicion remained.
“I didn’t know, Inspector,” he muttered, as I let go of his wrist. “I was told to keep the scene intact, not let anybody through.”
“Okay, bad beginning,” I said. “We both forget this. We start again, Officer… ?”
“Kurmanov,” he said, taking a step back, holding out his hand. We shook, awkward, unwilling to admit how close we’d come to a problem of our own making.
“I’m here to see the orphanage director, Gurminj Shokhumorov,” I said.
Kurmanov looked puzzled, then wary.
“How did you know, to get here so quickly?” he asked. “We only found the body half an hour ago.”
The director’s office was still lined with the tidemark of children’s shoulders, and the president continued to glare down from the wall behind the director’s desk. But now a splash of red paint had stippled the patterned wallpaper, and dripped from the glass of the picture frame. Except it wasn’t paint.
Gurminj Shokhumorov lay face down upon the papers scattered on his desk. Spilled red ink stained his hair and bare arms, and pooled a few inches away from his head. Except it wasn’t ink.
I could smell cordite, blood, and brains, the singed hair blackened around the wound, where the bullet had worked hard to drain his skull. The room was silent, holding its breath in shock. Gurminj’s desk calendar had all his appointments and meetings circled in red, now overlaid with a deeper scarlet already turning black. The gun, a Makarov, lay on the floor just behind his chair.
A uniformed officer was idly sifting through the papers on Gurminj’s desk, looking up as I entered. I held up my ID, playing the big city Murder Squad guy, and his nervous fingers touched the peak of his cap.
“This is a crime scene. Don’t touch anything until the forensic pathologist’s inspected the body.”
“It’s a suicide, sir,” the ment said, holding up a paper. “Even left a note.”
“Which bit of ‘Don’t touch anything’ did I not make clear? Contaminating a crime scene could earn you a bunk in Penitentiary Number One, officer.”
The ment dropped the paper as if it had suddenly caught fire. I jabbed my thumb at the door.
“And shut it behind you,” I ordered as he headed out of the room. I walked over to the desk, the smell of blood and shit getting stronger. I’ve always wondered how despair could so overpower a person that death seemed better than any alternative. Even after Chinara had died, I didn’t consider killing myself. Maybe I had too much guilt and remorse not to serve the full life sentence due to me. Perhaps every death seems like a betrayal to those of us left behind.
I used a pencil on the desk to turn Gurminj’s note, and read it. The words were barely legible, quickly scribbled down.
Akyl, enough. I want it to end here. I can’t answer is why. I honestly don’t know. You said balance is overrated; believe me, you should weigh everything, because balance is where answers might be found. G
I tucked the paper in my pocket, looked once more around the room. A framed degree certificate from the American University of Central Asia, next to a row of photos, showing Gurminj with his wife, Oksana, eating pelmeni in the local restaurants, hiking through Ala Archa National Park, walking holding hands along Chui Prospekt, Oksana’s long black hair hurled upward by the wind. I never knew Oksana; she had died in a car accident the year before I met Gurminj. The loss had almost destroyed him, driving him into his work at the orphanage to fill the hole in his world.
I turned as a senior officer from the station entered the room.
“Our pathologist is on his way, then we can move the body,” he said. “If that’s okay with you.”
I nodded, and took a photo down from the wall. Gurminj, head thrown back, roaring with laughter, surrounded by the smiling orphans he’d cared for, encouraged, given a home they’d never known in their uncertain childhood. For Gurminj, I knew balance was everything. Which made me certain about how he had died.
A single tear-shaped fleck of blood smeared the glass. I wiped it away with my thumb, added the photo to the note in my pocket.
“That’s good,” I said, and gritted my teeth. “I want a complete report from the officer who found him. And you might ask yourself how the director put a bullet in the right side of his head, being as he only had a left arm.”
Chapter 11
Even as I let myself into Gurminj’s spartan apartment with the keys I’d found in his desk, I could tell the place had already settled into a sense of loss. I touched the side of the half-empty bowl of chai on the kitchen table. Cold, to be rinsed out and forgotten. Time, for all its uncertainties, doesn’t linger when we die.
It was clear to me that whoever had killed my friend wasn’t too bothered about making it look like a convincing suicide. Probably relying on the stupidity or indifference of the local officers. And that was maybe a clue in itself.
I sat down and looked around the room, open as to what I might find. Clues to a murder are usually all too evident; the bloody knife, broken bottle, bruised throat. But sometimes you have to stare, unthinking, simply letting the scene whisper its secrets. You have to hear the full confession before you can start to separate truth from the lies.
The apartment was almost obsessively tidy, the bed neatly made, plates washed and stacked on the sink. Three chairs stood shoulder to shoulder against the far wall, a table with neatly piled paperwork, a battered coffee can holding pens and pencils.