"Damn right it is."
"A perfect little package, gift-wrapped, and handed to you on a silver platter." This skinny little lawyer who once made his living building perfect cases just wouldn't let go.
"Too perfect, isn't it?" she asked, bending forward and rubbing her forehead.
"Tell me how many cases you've tried."
"Hundreds. I don't know."
"Any cases where every detail matched up so well? Every date coincides, every witness saw exactly the same thing, every investigator came to identical conclusions? Everything so perfectly, so amazingly lined up? For a supposedly brilliant man, Konevitch left behind an astonishing ocean of evidence."
She was suddenly more deeply miserable than she had ever felt. It was inescapable now. She was fighting back a flood of tears. "No case is ever perfect."
She had reached the end of the journey. Petri sat back for a moment, allowing her to ponder the ugly magnitude of her discovery. Americans were so naive about these things.
He then commented, "We never actually tried the cases in court, you know. Not our job, Kim. We built the perfect little cases and handed them off to others. Those trial lawyers, they all loved us. Such flawless gifts we gave them. They couldn't lose."
"I don't understand. Why hand them off? You said you were a great lawyer. Since you created it, you knew the material better than anybody."
"I often wondered that, you know. They never told us why. Perhaps they thought the man who designs the guillotine shouldn't actually be forced to pull the lever and have to stare at the head in the basket. Communists. They could be so incoherently humane in completely inhumane ways."
Kim wanted to jump out of her chair and bolt. Just run away from this case. Run as fast and as far as her feet could carry her.
He rolled forward in his chair and placed a hand on her knee. "They'll murder them, Kim. Oh, they might go through the motions of a trial… or they might not. They'll kill them, though, as sure as you and I are sitting here."
There was one question left for her to ask, one dark mystery to solve. "But Konevitch could be guilty, couldn't he, Petri?"
"You know the golden rule of my old KGB section?"
She forced herself to stare into his dark, sad eyes, to hear the wisdom of a soul soiled and ruined long before they ever met.
"Never frame a guilty man." The first run at Alex Konevitch came shortly after sunrise. It came three weeks to the day after he stepped out of the dark prison van in Yuma. It came in a large sweltering room filled with sweaty men, less than a minute after Alex loaded his tray with his usual selection of soggy French toast and watery scrambled eggs, only seconds after he sat in his usual seat, at his usual table.
The offer had been smuggled in to the Russians a week before by a balding, nervous-looking guard named Tim. A double divorce drowning under a serious gambling addiction, Tim owed his bookie, Marty, five thousand bucks after a sure-thing pony did the big choke on the backstretch. Before he placed the bet, Tim had vaguely wondered if his bookie had mob connections. Good guess. Turned out Anthony "the Crusher" Cardozzi was Marty's second cousin, a lifelong business associate, and quite serious about men honoring their debts. A month overdue on his vig, Tim now was seriously wondering if his state medical insurance would cover the destruction. Thus, when Marty relayed the offer-a favor for a friend, Marty intimated-Tim almost suffocated with relief.
Five thousand bucks forgiven, and two perfectly functional kneecaps-incredible generosity, just for delivering a simple message. Sure, no problem, Tim replied, vowing to give up gambling, and knowing he wouldn't.
The offer ignited a bitter quarrel among the Russians. Day to day a loose-knit group, they were bound by two common traits-they all spoke Russian, and all had ties of one sort or another to the Russian underworld. The big question-indeed, the only question-was, who would get first crack at Alex Konevitch?
After two days of passing increasingly malicious notes back and forth, the Russians gathered in a tight swarthy huddle in a remote corner of the yard to discuss the offer-a cool half million to whomever killed him within thirty days, declining in value with each passing month. They spoke in Russian, and they sparred loudly and heatedly, with no concern at all about being overheard.
The sooner the better-this point seemed elemental and was quickly agreed among the ten men. Why wait and waste a hundred grand? Point two was almost as easily settled-the first crack would be their best shot. Catch Konevitch before he knew of their intention to kill him. Catch him before he had his guard up. Catch him at his most vulnerable.
If that flopped, future efforts would become increasingly difficult.
The experienced hit men raucously laid claim to the honor. The killing game wasn't as easy as it seemed, one explained, and the other killers nodded with great gravity and solemn agreement. An amateur making his first plunge was likely to do something unfathomably stupid. Two of the veterans confessed how they had choked on their first jobs. Seemingly insignificant details that suddenly ballooned into big problems. A wrong glance here, a careless stutter there, that alerted the target. A case of last-minute jitters that turned paralytic. A lot could go wrong, and often did.
The thieves and pushers and kidnappers weren't buying it. What was so hard? Bring something sharp, pick a vital organ, and poke it. No problem, as easy as cutting steak. The bickering intensified and verged on violence, before Igor, a clever accountant with a talent for money laundering, came to the rescue with a way to buy peace. One hundred grand from the bounty would be carved off and split among the nine Russians who didn't get to stab a hole in Alex.
Everybody wanted to argue about this for a while, but the compromise was irresistible, and inevitably accepted.
Now everybody benefited. And now everybody had a stake in doing it right.
Thus the lottery rapidly whittled down to four. Three had made a handsome living on the outside, killing people. Number four was a blowhard who loudly proclaimed two murders and launched into vulgar, descriptive bragging about his handiwork. They suspected he was lying, and they were right. Nobody could prove it, though; thus he had a tenuous, shaky seat at the table. But having settled on this logic, it was a short bounce to the next argument.
To nobody's surprise, this proposal came from the lips of Lev Titov, hands down the most productive killer in the group, if not the entire prison. It was plain common sense, Lev argued-the one with the most scalps on his belt should have the first shot. Having jumped off to an early start, at age fourteen, fulfilling every schoolboy's dream by strangling his math teacher, Lev went on to compile an impressive pedigree of homicides. He was legendary among certain circles, a remorseless assassin who killed without flair or even a telltale method. He had slain for himself, for the Russian army, for the Mafiya, and occasionally, when his short fuse got the better of him, for the hell of it. He was fussy and painstaking, and able to murder with a bewildering variety of weapons, from a deck of cards to sophisticated bombs. He once killed a man he suspected of cheating at chess by stuffing the checkmated king down his throat. Unpredictability and a certain amount of messiness were his only signatures.
A quick show of hands. Eight for. One puzzling abstention. Only the blowhard against.
Lev was the man.
One hundred grand would be split nine ways; the other four hundred would go into an account of Lev's choosing. A man who smiled rarely, Lev could not wipe the grin off his face. With seven years left on his sentence, he could at least look forward to a little gold at the end of the rainbow.
And so it was that at the moment Alex placed his tray on the table and casually fell onto the hard metal bench, Lev never even turned around. Why bother? After watching and studying his target for four days, he could write a book on Alex's culinary habits. He knew Alex would quietly sip his lukewarm coffee and wait for his big cellmate. Alex liked eggs, his cellmate adored French toast. It was a routine they shared, like an old married couple. The roommate would pour and scrape his runny eggs onto Alex's tray, and the French toast would land on the big guy's before they launched into their breakfasts.