3

The translator, David Krumer, arrives early Monday morning. A young LAPD officer born in the Ukraine, he immigrated to the United States when he was three, and grew up speaking Russian at home. One of only four Russian speakers in the department, he has spent the past year patrolling the Valley in a squad car. He is clearly excited about his new assignment.

After McCartin and Knolls deliver a synopsis of the case, they provide Krumer with the phone numbers for Luda’s mother and husband in Kiev. Start with the husband, Knolls tells Krumer, even though they were separated.

McCartin calls the manager of Luda’s apartment building. When he hangs up, he is chuckling. “You know the first thing the manager says?” he asks Knolls. “He asked me what the victim’s ‘backstory’ was.”

“Everyone’s gone Hollywood,” Knolls says.

McCartin carries the videotapes from the apartment building upstairs to the LAPD electronics lab. He wants freeze-frame images of everyone who entered the apartment the day of the murder.

Krumer talks to the husband, Igor, for about fifteen minutes. “He already knew she was dead,” Krumer tells Knolls. “He got an anonymous call last week. He sounded very calm. Not upset at all. He told me that Luda studied to be a hairdresser, but ended up working in an open-air market in Kiev, selling food products. He said the economy there sucks.”

Next, Krumer calls Luda’s mother. “Hello, this is David Krumer from the Los Angeles Police Department. Have you spoken to Igor, regarding your daughter? … Well, I have very bad news. It turns out your daughter has passed away.…”

Krumer hangs up, looking unnerved. Responding to hot shot calls from a squad car has not prepared him for informing a woman that her daughter has been murdered. “The mother didn’t know she was killed,” Krumer tells Knolls. “She was really crying and wailing. The first question she asked was odd. She asked: ‘Did it happen outside or inside her apartment?’”

Knolls deposits several boxes of Luda’s documents, photographs, travel receipts, letters, and notebooks in an interview room. Krumer will begin translating the papers, while McCartin studies the videotapes and Knolls works the phones and organizes the murder book.

In the afternoon, the detectives stop by the Troyka market. Krumer, whose father owns a San Fernando Valley bakery, is familiar with the market: as a teenager he delivered crates of his father’s bread here. At the edge of a Russian neighborhood in Hollywood, the Troyka is tucked into a Sunset Boulevard strip mall that also houses an Indian tandoori restaurant, a Chinese noodle shop, and a Russian bakery; across the street are a taco stand and a Thai restaurant.

From a distance, Krumer could pass for a Homicide Special detective. But a closer look reveals a patrol officer fresh off the streets. He is twenty-eight—most detectives in the unit are in their forties and fifties—and his bristling, street cop buzz cut makes him look younger. He is not accustomed to dressing up for work. He owns one suit and one sports coat, and instead of a dress belt, he wears the thick black service belt that usually straps around his uniform.

The owner of the Troyka is a middle-aged, brittle-haired blonde in a leopard-pattern blouse and gray apron. When Krumer asks the woman, who speaks no English, her name, she furiously waves a hand and whispers, “Nyet!”

Krumer talks with her for a few minutes and then translates. “The lady says she’s afraid word will get around that she spoke to us. That’s why she doesn’t want her name used. But she’ll answer our questions.”

She leads the detectives to a corner of the market, behind a glass cooler filled with mushrooms, pickles, meatballs, and cooked cabbage. Garlicky sausages hang from the ceiling. The shelves are filled with jars of beets, mustard, onions, and horseradish, Russian newspapers and magazines line a periodical rack by the entrance.

Krumer interviews the owner over the din of the electric slicer as the butcher carves sausages for a customer. He shows her photographs of Luda, Mischa, Leyla, and Mher.

“She says Mischa did meet Luda here,” Krumer tells the detectives. “He’s a regular customer and one day she came in. She was a long way from her apartment and he offered to give her a ride.”

“At least he told us the truth about one thing,” McCartin says.

“Luda used to stop by the market once a week to buy phone cards,” Krumer says. “The owner and Luda struck up a conversation because they’re both from Kiev. The last time she saw Luda was in early June, the day she met Mischa. She recognizes Leyla because she used to come in and buy phone cards, too, but she cannot identify Mher. By the way Luda dressed, she suspected she was a prostitute. In fact, the girls who work at the store had a running bet on whether she was one or not.”

Knolls tells him to ask the woman if she knew about the murder. “She did know about the murder,” Krumer says. “The guy who sells phone cards told her.”

“Did she hear any details?” McCartin asks.

“Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!” the woman says.

“Does she think Armenians were involved in her murder?” McCartin asks.

“She says, ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know,’ ” Krumer tells the detectives.

McCartin hands the woman his business card and says to Krumer, “Tell her if any of Luda’s friends come in, have them call me.”

As they walk out the door, Krumer points out a loaf of his father’s black bread on the shelf. The label reads, “Soldier’s Bread,” and the package features a drawing of Krumer’s father in a Russian army uniform. The bread is sold by the half loaf, Krumer explains, because that is the ration a Russian soldier carries.

The next morning, the detectives in the squad room angrily dissect a Los Angeles Times article about a federal judge who has ruled that the LAPD could be sued under an antiracketeering law. The ruling stems from one of the worst scandals in the department’s history: more than a hundred convictions have been overturned and five officers so far have been arrested and criminally charged.

The scandal centers on the LAPD’s Rampart Division, headquartered in a gritty neighborhood west of downtown with a large Central American population. Officers have been charged with beating and threatening suspects—and in one case shooting an unarmed man—as well as with planting weapons and drugs on them and with lying in court.

The Homicide Special detectives are proud to work in the division, proud they have been selected to work in a unit with such a storied reputation. Many have immaculate records. Yet they fear those reputations have been tarnished along with the dirty cops’. During the past year, it seems to them, all news about the LAPD has been bad. They support the arrest of crooked cops, but to label an entire police department of more than nine thousand officers a criminal enterprise is an outrage, the detectives complain.

Otis Marlow, one of the few veterans remaining in the unit, strides through the squad room door shortly before eight o’clock, salutes the detectives sharply, and announces cheerily: “Good morning, fellow racketeers.”

In a homicide squad room, black humor usually trumps melancholy. Now, the morning’s ugly mood quickly dissipates. The detectives chuckle and return to their homicide chronologies, or witness statements, or murder books, or crime scene photographs.

After several days holed up in the interview room, Krumer walks the detectives through his translations. First, he points to a document that appears to be Luda’s trick sheet. Neatly drawn columns list the names of johns, the times of the appointments, the fees—about $200 to $300 per customer—and the split with the madam, which was usually fifty-fifty. Beneath the name of every john, Luda wrote brief descriptions: “producer,” “lawyer,” “shy,” or “rabid.” From May 24 to June 9, she netted $3,300.

Krumer also translated Luda’s route to the United States. She traveled from the Ukraine by train, arriving in Moscow on April 9. Two days later, she arrived in Frankfurt, and then flew to Mexico. She spent about three weeks in Mexico City, Tecate, and Tijuana. On May 5, she was smuggled into the United States. After five nights in San Diego, she arrived in Los Angeles. Three and a half months later she was murdered.

The detectives praise Krumer’s thorough work and then crowd around a photo found at Luda’s apartment, a shot of several scantily clad, provocatively posed young women. Knolls speculates about whether Luda was smuggled into the United States with these girls, or whether she earned extra money procuring customers for them. Krumer shows them other paperwork that indicates Luda owed Mher $5,000.

“Interesting,” Knolls says. “Maybe Mher was tired of waiting for his money and wanted to teach the other girls a lesson.”

“Or if she was running her own business, that could have pissed off the competition,” McCartin says.

Krumer points out several diary entries and an unmailed letter from Luda to her mother, sister, and daughter: “I love you a lot. I am lonely here without you. It’s very frightening. I only wish to make money faster and bring you to me. It’s all possible. All it takes is time. Here it’s very beautiful. Freedom is everything. A lot of our own are here. I relax every day, sunbathe in the pools.… When I see small children in the pool, I see my own Anastasia and imagine how I will relax with her.… Everything is great. The only thing missing is you. Kissing you. Hard hugs. Protect Anastasia and hope she does not forget me. Bye. I love you all.”

When McCartin first gazes upward at Ivan, the eighteen-year-old who called Luda’s apartment repeatedly on the day of the murder, he immediately recalls the pathologist who described a punch so powerful that it bruised Luda’s brain. Ivan, who is six foot seven, is big enough to have delivered that blow. And clearly, he is terrified. Nervously, he strokes the stubble on his chin while responding to the detectives’ preliminary questions. He immigrated several years ago and attended two years of high school in Los Angeles, so his English is excellent.

Luda had been in the United States for just two weeks when she visited the shoe store where Ivan works part-time. They chatted and exchanged phone numbers. Ivan insists that their relationship was never sexual; he merely showed her the sights of Los Angeles. He kept calling her the day of the murder because they had planned to spend the afternoon at the Magic Mountain amusement park.

McCartin taps his pen on the metal table. Leyla had told them that she and Luda planned to buy hair-care products that afternoon at a nearby mall. Mischa claimed that he and Luda had planned to buy a television at a pawnshop. Now Ivan says they had planned to visit an amusement park. McCartin wonders who is lying.

Luda did not have a job, Ivan says, so Mischa probably paid some bills. He was also under the impression that someone in the Ukraine sent her money.

“I don’t believe a friggin’ word you’ve said.” McCartin throws the pen down.

Ivan nervously pinches his calf.

“She was a prostitute, and you know it. You better start leveling with us, or you will be in trouble.”

Ivan stares at his shoes for several minutes, looks up and says, “I’m afraid of these people. When I was in Russia, I saw how these people worked. I saw people killed.”

“It’s not my job to investigate one murder and end up with a second one,” McCartin says.

Ivan scratches his chin and jiggles his foot.

“Who do you think killed her?” Knolls asks.

“She was always saying: ‘This guy doesn’t want to give me back my money.’ But I don’t know who she was talking about.” Ivan then says that at Luda’s birthday party a girl named Olena told him about being threatened by a Russian mafia thug.

“She told me at the nightclub that this guy warned her that if she didn’t work for him, he’d send some black guys to rape her and he’d kill all her family in Kiev. But she didn’t tell me any more about it, or any details.”

McCartin spreads out on the table the photographs found at Luda’s apartment. Ivan identifies the prettiest, youngest, and most voluptuous of the girls as Olena. She is topless—her crossed arms partly cover her breasts—and she wears white lace panties and thigh-high white stockings. Ivan does not know her last name.

The detectives speculate that the thug who threatened her was Mher. They show Mher’s enlarged driver’s license photograph to Ivan, but he cannot identify him.

“Could this guy who threatened her have been after Luda too?” McCartin asks.

“Maybe.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

At the end of the interview, Krumer speaks up. “Let me ask you something, just for myself. Did your mother tell you not to say anything to the police?” This is a question, Krumer later points out, that perhaps only a Jewish cop would ask a Jewish witness.

Ivan pauses, looks as if he is about to nod, but instead quickly shakes his head.

After Ivan leaves, McCartin and Knolls decide that the Russian thug belongs on their rapidly expanding list of suspects. Now they have to identify him. And the quickest way to do so is to interview Olena. But first they have to find her.

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, Krumer calls a couple in Denver who were friends with Luda and her husband in the Ukraine. He found their phone number in Luda’s papers. “Luda confided in them in the past,” Krumer tells McCartin and Knolls. “She told them about a run-in she had with some Russian-Armenian guy. He threatened to kill her over a business deal.”

In the afternoon, one of the FBI agents investigating Russian prostitution calls and tells McCartin that he has a Russian informant who knew Luda’s business associates. The informant told the agent that he heard Mher was there when Luda was killed, although he did not know how, exactly, Mher was involved. He also heard that a boxer had something to do with the murder.

The detectives picked up the case two and a half weeks ago and still have more questions than answers. Is the Armenian gangster who threatened Olena the same one who threatened Luda? Is Mher the Armenian gangster? Is Ivan an obsessed, spurned suitor? Did Mischa the sugar daddy have a reason to kill Luda? And, finally, is this a run-of-the-mill hooker murder, or a complex investigation inextricably entwined with the Russian mafia?

Russian organized crime, the detectives realize, is a misnomer. The criminals are neither Russian nor organized. Many are immigrants from Armenia, the Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics. Unlike the Italian Mafia, with its large criminal families and hierarchy, the Russian mob has no centralized organization and consists of many small syndicates, known as brigades. All pursue their own illegal schemes, but collectively, they are known as the Russian mafia.

During the 1970s, when Soviet authorities allowed hundreds of thousands of Jews to immigrate to the United States, a number of criminals—including some with marginal Jewish status or who simply passed as Jews—set up their operations in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Because they had lived in a totalitarian state and had extensive experience evading Soviet regulations, the Russian mobsters soon became adept at defrauding the U.S. government and corporations. These immigrant criminals specialized in crimes such as medical and insurance fraud, tax scams, credit card forgery, and check kiting.

The next wave of Soviet criminals entered the United States in the early 1990s during the economic turmoil and political upheaval accompanying the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Many pursued white-collar crime, like their predecessors. But they also branched out into more traditional criminal enterprises, including drug smuggling, auto theft, prostitution, counterfeiting, and extortion, and some were infamous for their brutal methods.

Brooklyn is still the hub, but Los Angeles, which has the nation’s second-largest Russian population, is another major hot spot.

The detectives, disheartened by the sluggish pace of the investigation, decide to leapfrog over the peripheral players and interview someone closer to the epicenter—Serge, the man who boasted that Luda waived her usual fee because they had had such passionate sex. He told the North Hollywood detectives, who found his telephone number at Luda’s apartment, that he met her at a coffee shop; McCartin and Knolls are convinced he is lying. They know that Serge is a target of a joint investigation involving LAPD auto theft detectives, the FBI, and the U.S. Customs Service, focused on a crime ring that ships stolen cars to Russia and smuggles Russians into the United States.

McCartin tells Knolls that unless they have some leverage over Serge, the interview will be fruitless. He suggests the “cold poly” approach. When he worked in South-Central, he polygraphed a number of gang murder suspects first and questioned them afterward. If a suspect failed the polygraph, McCartin believed he gained added clout and authority during the subsequent interrogation. He suggests employing this method with Serge. Knolls is skeptical, but McCartin insists.

Polygraphs cannot determine guilt or innocence; they are merely indicators of a subject’s veracity and are not admissible in court. Investigators often use them, however, to assess the truthfulness of witnesses, verify data, and develop leads.

Knolls and McCartin are edgy all day as they prepare for Serge’s arrival. He could be the key to their investigation. If he “lies and denies,” McCartin tells Knolls and Krumer, they might be chasing leads on this murder until they retire.

In the late afternoon, Serge breezes into the squad room, looking blase, checking out the detectives with an expression of curiosity, rather than concern. He is in his mid-thirties, tall, tan, and broad-shouldered, with close-cropped light brown hair. He wears jeans, a tight T-shirt, and black boots. He might be considered handsome, except that a constant smirk and his eyes, which glitter with calculation, give his sharp features a reptilian cast. Serge grew up in Russia, but his family was allowed to leave the country during the wave of Jewish emigration in the 1970s, he tells the detectives, in lightly accented English. He is a car dealer, he says, but is between jobs.

“This is going to be a tough one for you,” he says in a slightly condescending tone. “All the Russian prostitutes in L.A. are so scared they went underground.”

His cocky manner irritates McCartin, but he contains himself, casually asking Serge whether he minds taking a polygraph before the interview. McCartin assures him that this is a standard procedure. After a split-second hesitation, Serge agrees. They walk down a back corridor and wait for a service elevator. Several garbage cans overflow with trash, and the floor is strewn with newspapers and candy wrappers.

Serge surveys the clutter and sniffs, “This isn’t what I expected.”

On the fourth floor, the polygraph examiner escorts Serge to a small chamber and leads him to a seat. The examiner then hooks a blood-pressure cuff around Serge’s arm, attaches small metal plates to the ring and index fingers of his right hand, and wraps rubber tubes around his chest and stomach. The instruments are attached to a computer, which will analyze Serge’s heart rate, blood pressure, breathing patterns, and perspiration levels. The detectives watch the exam on a video monitor in a room down the hall.

“How much sleep did you get last night?” the examiner asks.

“Ten hours,” Serge says.

McCartin grumbles, “Lucky bastard. I had to get up at four o’clock this morning to make it to work in time.”

While the examiner asks Serge several preliminary questions, McCartin tells Knolls and Krumer about one of the dimmest criminals he ever interviewed. The suspect, who continually called the test a “polycure,” wanted the examiner to ask him whether he loved his girlfriend—so he would finally know definitively how he felt about her.

Prior to the polygraph, the detectives had outlined several basic questions for the examiner: Did you inflict any of Luda’s injuries? Were you present when Luda was shot? Do you know for sure who shot Luda?

After the first round of questions, the examiner leaves the polygraph chamber to go over the results with the detectives. “Oh, man!” he says, falling into a chair. “I don’t like these results. The charts are going in both directions at once. They aren’t consistent. The new terminology for this kind of result is ‘no opinion.’ We used to call it ‘inconclusive.’”

“Could this mean he was there, but he didn’t do it?” Knolls asks.

The examiner nods. He says that although there are a number of possible explanations, he is certain that Serge knows more than he has revealed.

The examiner returns to his subject. “You didn’t pass the test. You’re not telling me the complete truth.…” He pauses, then bluffs. “Everything points to you.”

Serge, slouching in his chair, legs crossed, immediately sits upright, as if jolted by an electric shock. His nonchalant façade dissolves in an instant. “That freaks me out. It’s just so absurd,” he sputters. He points to the polygraph and says, “That’s an absolutely useless pile of junk. And you should know.”

They return to the RHD interview room and Krumer brings Serge, who is flushed, a cup of coffee. Knolls attempts to calm him down, gradually working up to a few introductory questions. McCartin fingers the FBI’s photos, which he is about to spring on Serge, but Knolls motions for him to wait. McCartin soon grows impatient with Knolls’s leisurely pace. Finally, he barks, “How many girls you bring over?”

Knolls is miffed. He believes McCartin is pushing too hard, too fast.

“We want the truth, not bullshit,” McCartin says. “Tell me what you know.”

“If I talk about illegal things, how do I know you cops won’t get me into trouble?” Serge sips his coffee nervously.

“We’re not here to nail you,” McCartin says. “All we care about is the murder.”

Serge puts his elbows on the table, cradling his chin with his palms. After a few minutes, he says, “Let me try to explain. I had a scam going.…”

Serge begins to tick off the details of his business operation. A group of his associates who own a travel agency in Kiev obtain Mexican visas for Ukrainians. Some pay a fee up front. The young women work off their passage as prostitutes when they arrive in the United States. Serge owns a boat on which he and a female partner smuggle the Ukrainians—as many as twenty-five at a time—into the United States, from Tijuana to San Diego.

“Where’d you get the boat?” McCartin asks.

Serge smiles sheepishly and says, “It was a trawler. I bought it from the Boy Scouts.”

Knolls chuckles. Even McCartin manages a faint smile. Krumer shakes his head and says, “A Boy Scout boat running hookers. I can’t believe it.”

“Is this going to get me into trouble?” Serge asks.

“I could give a rat’s ass about all this,” Knolls says. “All I care about is the murder.”

Serge explains that he first met Luda in Mexico, shortly after she arrived, but he did not bring her to L.A. A group of Armenian smugglers arranged her trip. Luda was a quick study, Serge says. And she was desperate for money because she wanted to bring her daughter to the United States.

“So Luda became my new partner.”

“Your partner,” Knolls says, catching McCartin’s eye. McCartin looks equally surprised.

“Yeah. She had connections in Kiev. I had the boat. She needed me. I needed her.”

Luda, Serge explains, arranged for six Ukrainian women to obtain visas and fly to Mexico. Serge’s trawler transported them to the United States. In San Diego, Luda picked up the girls and drove them to Los Angeles. She “sold” four of them to a madam named Lana, whom she worked for. Two slipped away because they did not want to turn tricks. Serge, who claims he felt sorry for them, found them a place to live. Lana was angry with him and Luda. A few weeks before the murder, Lana called and accused him of stealing her hookers.

McCartin asks him whether he was afraid.

“Not of her. But she was working with an Armenian guy named Mike. He’s some kind of strong-arm type, an enforcer guy. He calls and tells me: ‘You stole my hookers. Do you know who you’re talking to?’ ” Serge pauses. “He’s trying to take over. I heard they did the same thing in New York. Ex-KGB people were hitting on all the hookers and madams, trying to take over their business. Everyone’s afraid of this guy. After Luda was murdered, I heard that Michael told Lana, ‘If things don’t go my way, something will happen again.’”

“Why go after Luda and not you?” McCartin asks.

“Maybe because they couldn’t find me. I live in a pretty remote area of the Hollywood Hills. No one knows where it is.”

“You think Luda had any contact with him?” Knolls asks.

“Yes, but I’m not sure. A few days before the murder she said four Armenians came to her house and asked her who she worked for.”

The detectives know that Mher is also known as Mike. They wonder if the Armenian enforcer is Mher.

“So why kill her?” McCartin asks.

Serge shrugs.

“My opinion is they were pissed off at you and they were sending you a message,” Knolls says.

“Did they know you were screwing her?” McCartin asks.

“It was no secret.”

“Anyone knows what Michael looks like?” Knolls asks.

“One of the girls does. He tracked her down. He went to her apartment and raped her.”

McCartin shows him the picture of Olena.

“That’s the one.”

“Did Mike threaten her family in Russia?” Knolls asks.

“That’s what she said.”

The detectives leave Serge and confer in the squad room.

“You’re being a New York bull again,” Knolls says to McCartin.

“I asked him some questions and he opened up right away,” McCartin says defensively.

“You wanted to show him the pictures right away. Let’s slow down.”

“Why wait? I gotta tell you, there were times when I was trying to establish a line of questioning in there, but you kept interrupting me.”

Worn out, the detectives pause, like fighters staggering back to their corners at the end of a round. Although Knolls and McCartin sometimes seem to work at cross-purposes, Serge is proof that their inadvertent good cop-bad cop routine is becoming quite effective.

Back in the interview room, McCartin produces the pictures of the six women, and Serge confirms that he and Luda smuggled them into the United States.

McCartin then shows Serge a series of the driver’s license photos supplied by the FBI. Serge immediately identifies one unshaven, rough-looking character with a buzz cut: “That’s Boxer.” Boxer, he adds, is now dating one of the six Ukrainian girls transported from Mexico. He is in the naval reserves.

The detectives are intrigued. “Is he helping you out with the boat operation?” asks McCartin.

Serge laughs. “He doesn’t know shit about boats.”

“And he’s in the navy?” Knolls says incredulously.

“That’s right.”

McCartin asks him to contact Olena and help set up an interview with her. Serge insists that Olena would be too frightened to talk to the detectives, but says she might feel more comfortable alone with Krumer, since he is from the Ukraine. The detectives agree, and Serge says he will contact her and propose the interview.

Serge meekly asks the detectives whether they can forget about his smuggling operation because he has assisted them with their homicide case.

“Why would we jeopardize our murder investigation to burn you?” Knolls says.

The detectives do not intend to burn Serge. Yet. To ensure the FBI agents’ continued cooperation, McCartin and Knolls plan to offer them any new information about prostitution and smuggling if they will delay arrests until the Luda case is completed.

Knolls and McCartin know Serge will claim he was framed when he discovers that his statements incriminated him. But detectives may legally deceive suspects in order to determine the truth about a crime. Police can use deception, the courts have ruled, as long as their tactics are not so egregious that they force an innocent person to confess.

At the end of the interview Serge declares in a self-righteous tone, “I do this with a clear conscience. I bring people here who are starving at home and have nothing to lose. They have a better life here.” Before he leaves, he says, “Now tell me, did I really fail the polygraph?”

“You were deceptive,” Knolls says. “You were holding something back.”

Serge shakes the detectives’ hands and says he will contact them about Olena. McCartin watches with satisfaction as he shuffles out the door a lot less confident than when he entered hours earlier.

The detectives return to the empty squad room. Outside, it is dark and the neon lights of downtown glow in the distance. Knolls pours himself a cup of coffee. Krumer finishes off a candy bar. McCartin loosens his tie. The detectives are tired and hungry, but they are buoyed by the interview. After all of the half-truths, self-serving statements, evasive answers, and brazen lies of the past few weeks, they have finally uncovered a semblance of the truth. This is the break they had hoped for. They now have some insight into Luda’s past, her journey to the United States, her life in Los Angeles, and, possibly, her death. She is not the typical hapless-hooker victim. Prostitution was not her only illegal enterprise. The detectives have a possible motive, a potential suspect. And, most important, they have a witness who can identify the suspect.

“All in all, a pretty productive day,” Krumer says.

“This Armenian Mike might be a totally different guy from Mher,” McCartin says.

“I agree,” Knolls says. “But that FBI informant said Mher might have been there. So if this Armenian Mike isn’t Mher, I think Mher might have driven him there and been there during the murder. We got to get Mher in here and poly him.”

“This guy might have come out from New York to take over,” McCartin says. “I don’t think we have his picture.”

“Serge is trying to put us onto Armenian Mike,” Knolls says. “Maybe he’s a threat to him.”

“Could be,” McCartin says. “But I think he was being truthful.”

As the detectives lock their desks, grab their briefcases, and head for the door, McCartin smiles. “Guys,” he says, “we’re getting close.”