Shumakov measured exactly 1.75 meters, approximately five feet, nine inches. He studied the prone figure dressed in brown slacks and rumpled blue shirt. The hands were calloused, rough as pine bark, smudges of black beneath the fingernails. A mechanic perhaps. Definitely not someone who pushed a pencil. He might have been lying there asleep, except for the nasty hole right in the center of his forehead.
"Ask Detective Khan to step out here," Shumakov said.
The burly militiaman summoned Omar Khan, who was jokingly called "Genghis" by some of his fellow officers. He stepped through the doorway a few moments later, a dark, stocky, youthful man with a bland Uzbeki face. It was the militia's job to investigate a case up to the point of arrest, but Khan did not normally handle homicides. Of course, if the militiaman was right, this was no homicide, simply a tragic accident. But Khan had a bad feeling about it. He had asked Investigator Shumakov, with whom he frequently worked, to come over and offer his opinion.
"Khan, would you estimate this man's height about the same as mine?" Yuri asked.
The detective nodded. "No more than a few centimeters shorter."
Shumakov glanced back at the body. "I think we had best look for a motive, my friend."
"No accident?"
"Did you check the position of the entry and exit wounds?"
Khan pointed to the front and back of his own head. "Here and here."
"To get that kind of trajectory, your man must have been showing the pistol by aiming it at eye level." He held his arm straight out, index finger pointed like a gun barrel at Kahn's head.
"Which isn't the way he told it."
People had a tendency to lie about homicides they committed, Shumakov reflected. He motioned Khan to accompany him inside the apartment, where the assailant huddled morosely beside an empty vodka bottle. It took only a few minutes to coax a confession. The deceased, who worked at a motorcycle factory, was a wife beater, according to the brother-in-law. His sister, four months pregnant, had called him over because her husband had been out drinking and threatened to maul her when he returned. She had been sent to her mother's and was not yet aware of the tragedy. The pistol was a 6.35mm TK semiautomatic with one cartridge fired. That was one of the less desirable by-products of democracy, Shumakov mused. Firearms were much easier to come by now than in the tyrannical old days under communism. But the brother-in-law would not likely have used it without the fortification of vodka. That was one fact of life that hadn't changed. Alcohol still lay at the root of most personal tragedy in the Republic of Belarus, formerly Soviet Byelorussia.
Like Omar Khan, Yuri Shumakov normally would not have been involved in this case. Homicide had been his specialty during his early years as an investigator for the prokuratura, or city prosecutor, but for some time now he had been assigned to more complex investigations involving major financial crimes.
"He's all yours, I'm happy to say," Shumakov told the detective when they were finished. He already had twice as much work as he could handle comfortably. "Could I bum a ride?"
"You didn't drive?"
The investigator shook his head. "My old Zhiguli has been undergoing major surgery. The transmission sounded like a meat grinder. It should be ready if you can take me by the garage."
Out in the hallway now it looked like a militia convention. Detective Kahn gave instructions to send the body to the morgue and assigned two officers to take the brother-in-law in for booking.
As they drove toward the garage, the young detective complained about drawing too many assignments that were outside his field. Shumakov leaned back and gazed out the window as he listened. Random splashes of color marked flower boxes blooming beneath windows and on apartment balconies. Here it was well into May and he had been so bogged down with an unbroken string of cases that spring had passed him by almost unnoticed. There had hardly been time to view the roses, much less stop and smell them.
"Thanks for giving me a hand on this," said Kahn. "I know you're terribly busy."
"I was getting writer's cramp from all the reports on my desk."
"They say old Perchik keeps loading you up with difficult cases because he's jealous of all the publicity you get."
Yuri Shumakov had heard the rumors that Sergei Perchik, the current Minsk city prosecutor, derisively referred to him in private as "the Giant Killer." His notoriety had come following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Commonwealth of Independent States. He had developed the case that resulted in the successful prosecution of a high-ranking KGB official, the general who had overseen the internal security apparatus in Minsk and Kiev. The officer had been found guilty of funneling state funds into a Swiss bank account and of pirating state property for sale on the black market.
The case had won Shumakov a promotion to chief investigator. In his new position, he had taken advantage of American offers to provide training assistance to the fledgling state. After polishing up his shaky knowledge of English, he had spent a few weeks at FBI headquarters in Washington, then observed police work in several large cities across the U.S. On his return, he had been instrumental in helping to organize a crime computer network between the major cities in the commonwealth.
When the old city prosecutor died the following year, his replacement quickly tired of hearing about the exemplary work of Chief Investigator Shumakov. He was a highly political animal who did not take kindly to anyone stealing or sharing his spotlight.
"You listen to too many rumors, Kahn," Yuri said.
"Ha!" The detective frowned. "I suppose you think it's just a rumor that Ivan Strelbitsky is getting ready to take us into his new empire."
Yuri shook his head. "The man's a dolt."
Strelbitsky was the highly-publicized, far-right nationalist whose party had won big in the election for the new Russian parliament. Dubbed "Ivan the Terrible" by the Western press, he had called for using nuclear weapons, deporting the Jews, taking back Alaska and absorbing the lost republics into a new "Russian empire." Although Yuri joked about him, what Strelbitsky represented was no small threat. After more than three years of working at independence, Belarus and the other former Soviet republics were still struggling. Unfortunately, Russia controlled such critical commodities as oil. The Russian president, a moderate, had managed to keep the nationalists at bay by courting the generals and modifying the pace of reform.
Now there was a move under way to work out a new arrangement for the CIS, a method of binding the commonwealth states closer together. It would be an attempt to assure that none of the newly independent republics fell by the wayside. A meeting was scheduled in Minsk for July. Some of the controversial steps being proposed included a new common currency, creation of a super-cabinet that would work toward closer economic integration and a new unified military command. One suggestion that had been quickly shot down called for a commonwealth police organization. Memories of repression by the old KGB were still too fresh in most people's minds.
The meeting was to include all the heads of state and their chief advisers. The impetus for the session had come from a "grass roots" movement. Commonwealth Coordinating Committees had been set up in every republic and had lobbied hard for the realignment, arguing that new measures were needed to bring order out of the chaos. Most of the committees appeared to be well financed and run by persuasive political operatives. Shumakov's boss, Sergei Perchik, served as chairman of the Belarus committee.
Yuri was concerned about the state of the commonwealth, but he knew that Belarussians had faced much worse. The Great Patriotic War (known elsewhere as World War II) had devastated their land, wrecked its economy, leveled its cities and wiped out a quarter of its population. Postwar industrialization had provided a firm base for private development under the new democratic state. Yuri had marveled at the process, watching a free enterprise system actually begin to rise, albeit hesitantly, in fits and starts, from the ashes of communism's centrally planned economy. He found it little short of miraculous.