Which Tess spotted.
We’d lived through enough wild adventures together for her to know how my brain worked. It made her sit up a little more and give me that inquisitor’s look.
“Sean. What are you planning?”
If I was going to go ahead with it, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let Tess in on it. Or Aparo, for that matter. In both cases, I didn’t have a choice. Not knowing would protect them, given that I was about to break the law.
With Tess, it was an easy decision. I didn’t tell her everything about the job, and she didn’t necessarily want me to. I didn’t exactly work at Willy Wonka’s, and there was no need to bring that ugliness into our private lives. We’d already had more than our fair share of that. In fact, Tess, who’s an archaeologist, had also recently become a bestselling novelist whose first books were based on some of those wild adventures. I hoped her next oeuvres would come out of her imagination, but knowing her and the kind of stuff she liked digging her nose into, I wasn’t holding my breath.
With Aparo, it was a different matter. Nick was my partner. If and when I ever got to a place where I needed help, there was no one else I’d want riding shotgun with me. But initially, keeping him in the dark would also protect him if it all went belly-up. I knew that when I eventually did tell him, assuming I did go ahead with it, he wouldn’t see it that way at all and he’d be all pissed off at me for not sharing with him from minute one. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” I told Tess.
She gave me the narrowed eyes for a moment longer. “Why don’t I believe you?”
“Because your imagination’s way too active and the wheels in there are always going loco,” I said, gently tapping her forehead. “Now, go back to sleep.”
She leaned over so her face was inches from mine, and let her body curl into me. “Too late,” she whispered.
I could feel her warm skin on mine-any kind of bedwear was verboten in our household, by mutual decree. It was a lovely and highly addictive feeling that never failed to get all kinds of endorphins going haywire inside me.
“You’re not helping me fall asleep,” I said.
“I wasn’t trying,” she replied as her hand reached over and settled on my chest. “Far from it, truth be told.”
I chuckled, then dove in.
It felt good to give my mind a break and consign everything back to the vault and enjoy the kind of shared, carefree moment that made life worth living. It was also good to let go, since my mind was already made up.
I was going to follow through with my plan.
Regardless of the consequences.
10
Who took this?” I asked.
It was around eleven in the morning on a fine Tuesday, and we were all huddled around Aparo’s desk: Nick, me, and the two other agents assigned to the case with us, Kubert and Kanigher, watching a video clip on my partner’s laptop.
Someone called Cuppycake12 had filmed it on a smart phone outside the Sokolovs’ apartment building and uploaded it to YouTube during the night. And a good thing they had, too, since so far, the clips and images we’d collected from our canvassing hadn’t revealed anything new.
Background checks on Leo and Daphne Sokolov also hadn’t kicked up anything noteworthy. The two of them seemed to be living normal, uncomplicated lives. No runs-ins with the law, no financial problems. Nothing. The apartment was rent controlled, they’d never missed a payment. Credit scoring was fine. They seemed like model citizens in every way.
We’d also gone through the CCTV footage from the hospital, and hadn’t spotted anything suspicious or helpful on it. Daphne had left the hospital and headed in the direction of her bus stop pretty much as she did on every other day. There was also nothing about her body language that indicated any kind of stress or furtiveness going on. The footage we’d collected off a few cams on ATMs and such hadn’t yielded any epiphanies either, and neither had the statements that Adams, Giordano, and their troops had collected off the people at the scene.
This clip, however, was interesting-and gruesome. Gruesome, because whoever took it wasn’t squeamish. It began at what must have been only seconds after Yakovlev hit the ground. The clip starts with the kind of breathless, shaky footage of someone who’s just switched on his camera and is rushing across the street and down the sidewalk to get to the scene itself.
There, he lingers on the dead man’s body. You can hear horrified wails coming from other bystanders, a lot of sobs and “Oh my God” and “Is he dead” and “Someone call an ambulance”-all of it punctuated by Cuppycake12’s own breathless commentary. Cuppy also tilts up and pans across to show us the people standing around ogling the body, some turning away, others unable to tear their eyes off him, the whole thing filmed with the frenzied visceral energy that these off-the-cuff clips often bring with them.
“Right here. Watch this,” Aparo said as he hit the Pause button. “This guy right here,” he added, tapping the screen.
He was pointing out a figure-adult, male. I couldn’t really tell much more because the image was grainy due to the jittery cinematography. The man had appeared behind some of the people who had congregated around the body.
“Keep your eye on him,” he told us before resuming the playback.
The guy looks over the shoulders of the first row of bystanders. He lingers there for a beat. Then he looks up, toward Sokolov’s apartment, which is where the body obviously fell from. Then he looks at the body again, and turns away and drops out of view behind the wall of people.
“He disappears for a while,” Aparo explained. “But watch this.”
Cuppy gets bored of his gruesome shot and goes around to try to get a more comprehensive reportage of what had happened. So he steps out onto the street and tilts the camera up, taking in the building before zooming in on the sixth-floor window that, from way down there, you can just about tell is broken. Cuppy has a good eye. Then a car surprises him, there’s a nudge of a horn that makes him jump, and Cuppy’s camera angle drops away from the window and goes all over the place as he hustles out of the car’s way. Clearly, this doesn’t go down well with Cuppy, who lets rip with some colorful language directed at the impatient driver before following him down the street with his zoom.
Which is when Cuppy captures the bit that caught Aparo’s eye.
The guy he’d pointed out is also in the frame. We see him come around a parked SUV, get in, and drive off. In a hurry, just charging out and almost colliding with a passing car. Like he just wanted to get the hell out of there.
Which I thought merited closer inspection. Not because he was leaving in a rush. He could well have been distraught, freaked out by what he’d seen. Anyone would. That would be a healthy response. But it was his body language that made us take notice. He was all business, focused. Not distraught. More like furtive. Which wasn’t as wholesome, response-wise.
“Nice,” Kubert chortled. “Maybe the guy’s squeamish. Maybe he wet himself.”
“Very likely,” I said. “On the other hand, maybe he was waiting for Yakovlev and decided to bail fast when the diplomat took the shortcut down.”
“If he was with him, why not go upstairs and get whoever did it? Or at least call the cops?” Kanigher asked.
“Maybe their little visit wasn’t official,” Aparo speculated.
“Maybe.” I nodded. “Anyway, we’ll know more if the lab can get a decent close-up of the guy’s face and his license plate. And we need to try and marry it up with traffic-cam footage and see if we can get a fix on which way he went.”
“I’ll ship it down to them,” Aparo said. “Oh, and get a load of this. The couple who live just below the Sokolovs in 5C? Seems their dog went loco that morning and bit the husband. Like, mangled him, got him in the forearm and wouldn’t let go. Right about the time Yankovich-”