Fairstein, Linda - Silent Mercy

“I’m sure it did,” I said, not wanting her to register my impatience. “You know who his friends are? Can you tell me their names and numbers?”

We were deep into southeastern Connecticut. Long, wooded areas bordered the tracks as we steamed toward Rhode Island, engulfing the colorful train in total darkness, broken by an occasional set of lights at the crossings.

“I don’t know their names.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Oksana. I get the feeling you’re wasting my time. I’m going to step out for a few minutes and then—”

“May I come too?”

“No, no. You stay right here.”

“But I’m being honest, Ms. Cooper.”

“Where are these friends, Oksana? Are they in Florida?” I asked, but got no response. “Do something to help your brother. If you don’t care about the missing girl, do something to help Fyodor.”

“I told you it’s not his fault. It’s these guys he got mixed up with after the accident.”

“At home?”

“No, no. In Georgia. At home, in Florida, he’d have had the church. Our priest would have helped him through anything. He was a deeply religious boy, Ms. Cooper. Our whole family is religious.”

“I have great respect for that.”

“It was only his faith,” she said, and I shivered at the thought of Chat’s sister, waiting out this dreadful ordeal back at the seminary, “that got Fyodor through his adolescence.”

“But now?”

“He rebelled when he was a teenager. Hated my parents’ accent — he so wanted to be an American kid. Hated everything about the circus and our traditions. Rebelled at any chance he had. With no provocation. It was our priest who found a place for him.”

“What do you mean by ‘a place’? Did Fyodor go to jail?” Maybe she was trying to tell me something about a criminal history after all, something that would be useful in our efforts to find Chat.

“Never jail. No. But my parents sent him away for two years. To a really tough school. Far away from home, and sort of like a reform school, I think it was. He was placed there instead of a juvenile jail. He was grateful to come home, to join the troupe, to have a family that cared to take him back and embrace him again. But I think always bubbling beneath the surface was this rage. These new friends must have seen that side of him. Encouraged it. I can’t think what else it could be.”

“Who are these guys, Oksana? These new friends?”

“Fyodor met them at the gym, where he was working out.”

“You know where the gym is?”

She hung her head. “Yuri does. It’s near Atlanta. After the accident, my brother had to find a place to build up his strength again. That’s what our trainer told him. That’s why I think it’s all their fault.”

“Who?”

“These guys. Really crazy guys. They got Fyodor into very dangerous stuff,” Oksana said. She held her hands up at me and twisted them back and forth. “We really need to be strong in our work — our hands and wrists especially — but these guys were teaching him to fight. Like that was a way to build strength.”

“Martial arts?” I asked.

“Exactly. But crazy. Really extreme. Like for combat, he told Yuri.”

Like the Russian combat sport, sambo, and other deadly ways to bring an opponent down that had been demonstrated to us that morning, at the X-Treme Redeemer.

“And church? Did Fyodor give up the church?”

“The Orthodox church, yes,” Oksana said, fingering the cross she wore around her neck. “He told Yuri these friends had a stronger church. That he could only get his life back if he fought for it. That fighting could make him a better person. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“I agree with you.” Totally insane. “Why don’t you rest for a few minutes, Oksana? Let me ask Detective Chapman if there’s anything else we need from you right now.”

I wanted to get the information about the Georgia Pentecostal connection off to Peterson. I wanted to see if there was a juvenile record in Florida that had been resolved with an alternative sentence at a reform school, and where that might have been.

Oksana sat back on her bed and I returned to Yuri’s room. He and Mike still seemed to be facing off against each other, seated and at arm’s length. The questioning was contentious and I guessed that Yuri had held his ground more firmly than his sister did.

“You want to step out for a minute?” I asked, sweeping the small room with my eyes.

“Sure, kid. This prick needs a good tune-up with a barbell to make him talk. Short of that, he doesn’t care that his brother’s headed for the end of the line.” Mike stood up from the desk and started after me, then turned back. He reached for the telephone and yanked out the wire that connected it to the wall.

Yuri Zukov just laid back on the bed and laughed.

I stood on my tiptoes and grabbed the gym bag that was stashed on the luggage rack over the small sink in the corner.

Yuri leaped to his feet and tried to grab it from me, but Mike pushed him onto the bed again.

“Take this, Detective,” I said, passing the gym bag to him. “His sister says he keeps his valuables in it. Of course he doesn’t care if you rip the phone out of the wall. I’m betting he’s got his cell right in there.”

“HERE’Sthe cell phone information for the perp’s brother, Loo. Get somebody to run with it,” Mike said, then hung up with Peterson. “Nice grab on that gym bag, blondie.”

It was after ten thirty and we were working out of a small office in the headquarters of the Rhode Island State Police. Several patrol cars met the train when it reached the freight track at Providence Station an hour earlier. Local cops and troopers had orders to sweep it from end to end, talking to all the troupe members, searching for evidence of a crime or signs that Fyodor Zukov had brought any of the women on board.

Mike and I had trailed the officers through the compartments for a first look at every possible place to conceal anything from a weapon to a body, then left them to their work. Daniel Gersh rode with us to headquarters, in case there was any way he could assist in the ongoing search. Yuri and Oksana Zukov were separated for the ride, and a prosecutor had been called in to discuss whether they could be held overnight as material witnesses.

“No sightings of Fyodor or the truck on the highway?” I asked.

“Nothing yet. You trust that broad?”

“Not entirely. She swore to the lie Yuri told about not having phones. But when we started to talk about Georgia’s death penalty, she really got nervous.”

“So you think he’s headed south?”

“I guess we wait to see if there’s any info on Yuri’s cell,” I said, opening the door to a cop who had brewed a fresh pot of coffee for us and handed mugs in to me.

The television was on in the main squad room, and all the news channels — local and national — were interrupting broadcasts to show photographs of the man wanted for the abduction of Chastity Grant and the possible murders of five other people from Georgia to New York. MANHUNT FOR CLERGY KILLER was the continuous crawl running at the bottom of the screen.

“I’m ready to start mainlining caffeine,” Mike said. “Another hour and it probably makes sense to accept the captain’s offer to drive us back to New York.”

“Whatever you think,” I said, yawning as I settled into a high-backed chair and curled my legs up beneath me.

“Did you reach Mercer?” Mike asked.

“He’s not picking up. I left him a message.”

“Where are you, Coop? You’re thinking something you’re not telling me.”

“The one piece that stumped me was why Zukov was at the trial this week, why he was there when Bishop Deegan testified. He certainly didn’t have his eye on me — I was a surprise guest, the designated hitter stepping in for the young prosecutor.”

“And the bishop?”

“No. Deegan’s his kind of guy. Old-fashioned, misogynist, trying to uphold the dignity of the church. No, no. He was scouting his outcast.”

“Who?”

“The defendant on trial. Denys Koslawski. Think of it, a disgraced priest who had molested children.”

“Yeah, but how would he know?”

“I’ll take the hit on this. There was a story in all the papers about Koslawski — no mention of Deegan’s court appearance at the time because he wasn’t expected to testify — when the original trial was supposed to start.”

“December?”

“Yes, December. There was a feature about rogue priests. And then we had the idea to adjourn the case for three months because juries tend to be so generous to the bad guys around the holidays. I didn’t want a Christmas verdict for Koslawski.”

“So Koslawski goes and waives a jury in the end — wouldn’t have been a problem—”

“And Fyodor Zukov had another pariah to stalk,” I said. “I’m going to put that assignment in your lap when we get home. You check with Bishop Deegan. I’ll bet he doesn’t know Zukov and just nodded to him because he spied the clerical collar and assumed he was a friendly spectator.”

“Sure, I can do that — if you shut yourself off for a few minutes. You’ll be no good to either of us if you’re all worn down.”

I rested my head against the hard wooden slats and closed my eyes. Just a fifteen-minute catnap might help refresh me.

I went out so fast and deep that I didn’t even hear my phone vibrating on the tabletop ten minutes later.

“Just a minute, Faith,” Mike said. It was his voice that woke me up. “I’ll put her on.”

He handed me the cell. “Are you all right?” I asked her, startled out of my short slumber.

“Yes. But I’ve just had a call from Jeanine Portland.”

I sat up. “Is she back on Nantucket? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine, Alex,” Faith Grant said. It sounded like she was choking up as she tried to talk to me. “Chat called her.”

“When? Was that tonight?”

“No. I wish that were so. It was this morning. Late morning, maybe right after her call to me.”

“Why did she call?” The timing made it all the more likely that Chat had been abducted shortly after she left us with Faith at the seminary.

“Chat told Jeanine she needed to talk to her. You see—” Faith’s voice broke, and she took a few seconds to put herself together. “I didn’t know this. I feel like I failed my sister entirely.”

“You know that’s not true. Stay strong for us. Tell me.”

“After they met at Ursula’s play, in December, it seems Chat and Jeanine struck it off. She said she found it easier to talk to Jeanine than to me. That she was — well, less judgmental than I am.”

“That’s not about you, Faith. It was probably easier to unload some of her troubles on a person who wasn’t aware of the whole backstory. You’ve been Chat’s lifeline. You keep that going all through this night, you hear me? She’ll need you more than ever right now.”

“I so very truly want to believe that. I know I can give her all the love, all the support that she could possibly want.”

“You’re the only one who can,” I said. “Did Chat see Jeanine between Christmas and this week?”

“No. That’s why Jeanine said she thought the call was so strange. She went up to Boston yesterday, from Nantucket. She got the call today, saying Chat needed to see her. Urgently.”

“What about?”

“Chat didn’t say. Just that she needed help, and she couldn’t rely on anyone but Jeanine to give it to her,” Faith said. “She asked Jeanine to meet with her tonight.”