THE OFFICE GREW stuffy and silent, lost in its mid-afternoon lull as the detectives chased leads and the lieutenants schmoozed their way through protracted lunch meetings. A desk fan batted tufts of stale air around the room. Walter amused himself by exhaling lungfuls of smoke into its whirling blades, coating everything in its path in a funnel of carcinogenic mist. He studied papers in between puffs, his cigarette working its way jauntily from one side of his mouth to the other.
David stared at the file spread open on his desk. In it rested the life story, from a law-enforcement perspective, of one of the missing perps Derek had mentioned. Thin stuff, as leads went, but the meaty bits of this case had long since been gnawed to the bone. David felt like a man sifting through a joke word search, the kind where the goal isn’t to find as many listed words as you can among the thicket of characters, but to figure out there aren’t any words hiding in there at all.
“Anything interesting?” asked Walter.
David scanned the text, hoping to snag something he’d glossed over on previous read-throughs. “Nah. You?”
“Pfff. None of these guys scream ‘vengeful assassin’ to me. No associations with Ballaro, good or bad, no crimes more serious than a bit of petty bullshit.”
David grabbed the next file. Luka Volchyin. Old Lucky Luke, as Derek had called him. Guy doesn’t look so lucky to me. Volchyin had a pretty thin rap sheet, nothing out of the ordinary for a Niagara Falls thug. A couple of rescinded juvenile charges, a bust for possession of marijuana, some drunk and disorderly. Only real time served was eighteen months for beating up a fellow lowlife in a downtown bar. This sort of riffraff drifted in and out of town all the time, riding the winds of whatever con or easy fix they could sniff out. David wasn’t sure why Derek might find his arrival noteworthy.
David chewed on the lid of his pen, gnarling the plastic. “Hmm.”
“What’s up?”
“Something about this guy seems familiar.”
“You run into him on a case or something?”
“No, nothing like that. I’d recognize his face if I did. It’s something else. Luka Volchyin. Volchyin . . . ” The pen lid tapped out a snare beat on David’s desk. It paused mid-strike, trembled like a compass needle finding magnetic north.
Volchyin. Could it . . .
Calmly, David set the pen on the desk and rifled through his file cabinet. A clutch of folders bulged from a section marked Stanford Acres. David’s fingers danced nimbly over its carefully alphabetized index, gliding past Photos and Suspects to Victims. He withdrew a slim manila folder, inside of which sat a list of the names and pertinent facts associated with the twenty-one residents who’d died in the fire. His gaze skipped to the Vs, where a single entry rested in faded typeface: Volchyin, Sonya.
“Well, shit,” said David.
Walter, ears honed to catch the sound of leads, ambled over. “What you got?”
David passed the folder to Walter. Walter clucked his tongue.
“Well, shit,” he agreed.
“Lucky Luke rubs Ballaro the wrong way in the spring. An old folks’ home goes up in flames in the summer, counting among its victims one Sonya Volchyin. Volchyin goes underground, and nasty things start happening to Ballaros a couple months later, right around the time Lucky rears his not-so-lucky head.”
“I’d hold off typin’ up the warrant just yet, Columbo. This ain’t exactly a smoking gun.”
“Of course not. But it’s a thread. A clear motive running through all the bullshit we’ve shovelled.” David’s fingers felt like worms beneath an overturned rock, wriggling in the sudden burst of sunlight. He clamped them between his thighs. Walter noticed, squeezed David’s shoulder.
“It’s a good catch, Davey, but don’t go off the rails here. We don’t even know she’s related to the guy.”
“There a lot of Volchyins in this city that you’re aware of?”
“I’m just saying. Even if the motive pans out, this thing’s still far from solved. We got a pissed-off goon with an axe to grind. How does he go about butchering a house full of wise guys and skip off scot-free?”
David ran his fingernail under the word Volchyin. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
One of many, anyway.