The Death Trust Read online

  And then, as has happened often enough to me in the past, I had a revelation that came out of nowhere and hit me like a phone book, about those photos up in Scott’s garage. Perhaps seeing the picture of Peyton again, smiling his soon-to-be-dead smile, prompted me. In all of those photos, Harmony Scott made not a single appearance, not even a cameo. It was as if the woman hadn’t existed in the life of the father and son, not even when Peyton was a kid. Was that natural? No.

  I considered questioning Varvara about the relationship General Scott had with his wife but decided against it. The answers I’d get were more likely to reflect Varvara’s feelings about Harmony than Scott’s.

  Varvara talked to the cab driver in English, telling him to go left and then right and so on. Before long, we pulled up outside her apartment building. I paid the driver and levered myself out of the car. The recent bedroom Olympics made me feel like I’d ridden bareback cross-country for a week. “Do you think I’m walking funny?” I asked as we arrived at the front security door and Varvara waved her pass card at a sensor buried in the wall.

  She shrugged. “How do I know this is not your normal walk?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  The elevator ride was swift, the invisible speakers playing Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” Mooged to the point where it had about as much soul as air-conditioning hum.

  The kerosene fumes only hit me when the elevator arrived at Varvara’s floor and the doors slid open. The place smelled like the apron at Ramstein Air Base when those ageing Turkish F-4s were spooling up. A couple of people in their pajamas were milling around the hallway like lobotomy patients, looking dazed and confused. The fumes were telling them something was wrong, but what? Varvara put her key in her door and turned it. “Ah!” she exclaimed when her fingers brushed the metal handle.

  I touched the door. It was hot. There was a fire on the other side. And then the alarm went off, a howling screech that turned into a siren and then back to a screech. The sound gave the growing crowd in the hallway something to think about and they bumped into each other as panic took hold. “Get out!” I yelled at them, and swung back toward the door.

  I briefly reconsidered the wisdom of opening it. Doing so would feed the fire beyond with oxygen. I decided to wait somewhere safe for the fire brigade, like outside. “We have to leave,” I yelled.

  Varvara had different ideas. “No!”

  “Come on,” I insisted.

  “My cat,” she said. “We must save it.”

  Risk two lives to save a feline. Yeah, that made sense. But I owed Varvara, didn’t I?

  “Get down,” I told her. With Varvara on her knees behind me, I pushed the door open. The room was ablaze. I heard a roar as a ball of flame rolled across the ceiling and burst through the doorway above our heads. There was a sprinkler system. Why wasn’t the damn thing sprinkling? The smell of kerosene was pungent.

  I was about to close the door and retreat to the fire escape, along with the residents now heading there at a sprint, when Varvara ran past me into the blazing room. Shit. I followed.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled over the alarm and the noise the fire was making as it chewed through her belongings. I glanced around, hoping to see her cat. Black and gray smoke boiled off the floor.

  “There!” she yelled over the alarm, pointing at a small bookcase happily turning itself into charcoal as the fire ate it.

  “I don’t see a cat,” I said. It was hard to breathe.

  “The last one on the end. You must get it,” Varvara yelled, coughing, pointing at a large, old book.

  Whatever I was going to do, it had to be done quick. There were no fire extinguishers or handy wet blankets lying around, but there were plants. I picked up one and threw it against the wall above the bookshelf. The pot shattered and damp earth showered the flames, giving them something to think about. I picked up the other pot and repeated the throw. The flames retreated some more. I ran forward and plucked the book from the shelf. It was hot, but hadn’t begun to burn. The heat and smoke were unbearable and I was starting to feel dizzy. Varvara was on her knees, gagging. Hacking and coughing, I scooped her under my arm and staggered into the hallway, my eyes streaming with tears. “I’m sorry about your cat,” I wheezed. “I don’t think it made it.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, sucking in clean air between gasps. “I don’t have one.”

  A roadblock had been set up by the local police to keep the sightseers clear of the area and give the firefighters unobstructed access. Several fire engines were on the scene with more on the way, their sirens competing with each other to disturb the sleep of as many people as possible. A couple of television helicopters were also hovering, no doubt hoping to get some footage of people leaping to their deaths. But the building had been evacuated in a relatively orderly fashion and everyone seemed to be accounted for. I gave Masters a call. Her phone rang unanswered so I left a brief message.

  The two apartments on either side of Varvara’s were well alight before the first fire trucks arrived, which meant hers had been consumed by the flames. We stood watching as they fought to get the blaze under control, lashing it with high-pressure water from cannons atop their truck-mounted extending ladders.

  Varvara shivered beside me with shock and mild exposure, clutching her book. A woman from a neighboring building draped a blanket over her shoulders and muttered a few words of comfort I didn’t catch. The majority of the evacuated residents milled around aimlessly or stood mesmerized by the activity, immobilized by the realization that most of their possessions were being ruined by the deluge of water cascading from the floors above. A small but fast-flowing river passed through the foyer and ended in a waterfall down the front steps. A red sneaker rode the current onto the sidewalk.

  A couple of fire investigators arrived on the scene. They quickly ascertained in which apartment the fire had started by asking a knot of residents. Fingers pointed at Varvara. The men made their way over. Both were well over six feet—I’m talking girth—and either close proximity to fire played havoc with the capillaries on their noses or both these guys were on the German drinking team. They spoke in German until Varvara said, “Ich verstehe nicht. Sprechen Sie Englisch?” whereupon they switched to an accented English that made me think they were doing Schwarzenegger.

  “Vee believf it vass in your apartment zat zee fire started in?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  They turned to me. “Who are you? Do you liff here?”

  I badged Tweedledum and Tweedledee and told them Varvara was a witness in a case I was investigating. I also told them that I believed an accelerant—kerosene—had been used to kick the fire along. That got their interest, arson being the sexiest word in a firefighter’s lexicon. That’s when Varvara joined the conversation and spoiled the party.

  “I had a kerosene heater. I might have left it on,” she said between chattering teeth.

  “What?” I said, thrown completely.

  “You haff a kerosene heater?” repeated one of the investigators.

  “I don’t like warm wind from air-conditioning. It dries the skin, no? So I turn it off,” said Varvara. “I was cold. I put the heater on before I went out. And I left it on so that my apartment would be warm when I came home.”

  The investigators took this in with a mood shift that included a roll of their eyeballs. A ditzy female who forgot to turn off her heater gave them a professional soft-on. Varvara’s admission made me look bad, and I half expected the firemen to tell me to run along. In my own mind I was seeing a couple of guys in black spreading kerosene around the place before flicking a match onto the Axminster, rather than Varvara firing up a heater before she stepped out into the night because she was cold, wearing nothing but a raincoat and a smile. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fire might have been a genuine accident. Maybe this case was getting to me. Maybe I was starting to see bad guys where there were only shadows. Next thing, I’d be checking under the bed for monsters before I p
ut out the lights. And yet, the timing of the fire didn’t feel right, down in my gut, no matter what Varvara told the locals. House fires were cropping up a little too often to be coincidental, it seemed to me. And in my book, coincidences are on the same page as the Easter Bunny.

  “I think the sprinkler system failed,” I said when the question-and-answer session with Varvara slowed.

  “Ja,” said the beer barrel taking notes. “Vee know. Zee system zey haff used in ziss building—vee haff had problems viss it before. Danke.”

  There were a few more questions about insurance policies and a Smokey-the-Bear lecture about fire-safing appliances before leaving the home, and then they wandered off to talk to other witnesses.

  “Did you leave your heater on?” I asked when the investigators were out of earshot.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then why say you did?”

  “You don’t realize what is going on.” Her tears had made her mascara run, giving her raccoon eyes.

  “So fill me in.”

  “She wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be able to give you anything Abraham had written.”

  “‘She’ being Harmony Scott?”

  “Of course.”

  “So you make up some fairy tale about your heater. And let’s not forget the cat. You know, when they finally go in there and have a look, they’ll know you were lying. And then they’ll want to know why you were lying.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, tell me why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you lie?”

  “I have reasons.”

  I sucked in the sweet night air. My brain needed oxygen to kick it back into gear after breathing the equivalent of a hundred packs of Marlboros. So Varvara’s apartment had been torched. That accorded with my worldview that there are no such things as coincidences, but having my own beliefs reinforced didn’t provide much comfort in this instance. A pattern had emerged and the blackened top floor of Varvara’s apartment building had cemented it. I was dealing with some kind of conspiracy. That, in policing terms, is a bit like defining a symphony as a tune with lots of notes. I had no idea what kind of conspiracy I was dealing with, or who was involved in it. As far as Varvara was concerned, Harmony Scott was the puppet master, but I wasn’t convinced.

  “Do you not want to see this book?”

  I caught a glimpse of the cover. Gone with the Wind. “No, thanks. Caught the movie.”

  Varvara ignored me and opened it up. It wasn’t a book at all, but a compartment for holding valuables disguised as a book. Inside was a German passport.

  “Whose is that?” I asked.

  “I’m from Deutschland, didn’t you know?”

  “No, I didn’t.” If that passport was false, it was reason enough for Varvara to throw the fire investigators off the scent. Setting a person’s home on fire was not usually considered a random act. By calling it an accident, she had deftly sidestepped a whole other police investigation that would put her under the magnifying glass. I was about to ask her about that passport when a small folded note fluttered out of it. Varvara caught it mid flight.

  “This is enough proof,” she said, handing it to me. “You read it.”

  Dear Varvara

  I’ll meet you at departures at 1730.

  A

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “Abe wrote this to me when we went on a trip several months ago.”

  “Yeah, but what am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “Now look at your letter,” she said impatiently.

  I pulled the bag from my pocket and walked under a streetlight to compare the two.

  “Do you see it?” she asked over my shoulder, excitement in her voice.

  “See what?” Aside from the suicide letter being signed “Abe” while this note was signed “A,” to this untrained eye—mine—the handwriting appeared identical.

  Varvara growled in frustration. She stabbed the note with a red, manicured fingernail. “Can’t you see?”

  “‘I’ll meet you at departures at seventeen-thirty.’ Yeah, the guy’s meeting you at seventeen hundred and thirty hours. Obviously a romantic.” Some people just couldn’t leave the parade ground.

  “Dubiina! Jebat moi lisiy cherep!” she said, throwing her hands at the sky.

  I could tell that our relationship was in danger of going backward. “What did you call me?”

  “I didn’t call you anything, I just said, ‘Fuck my bald skull’—something we Russians say in Latvia.”

  “Colorful,” I said. “So, now tell me what we risked becoming charbroiled to get?”

  “Abraham spent many years in Europe, dealing with Europeans. He picked up European habits.”

  “Such as?”

  “Crossing the number seven.”

  I looked at the notes again. The seven on Varvara’s note was indeed crossed, while the seven in the date at the top of the suicide letter wasn’t. “That’s all?”

  “Writing number sevens this way was Abraham’s writing. But this way?” She shook her head adamantly.

  As evidence went, it was slim. Was a pen stroke the length of a single piece of fly shit enough to tell General Gruyere that the suicide letter was a forgery and that therefore General Scott had indeed been murdered?

  “Has anyone seen a Special Agent Cooper here?” demanded a familiar voice behind me. The music I knew I would have to face sooner or later was playing. Special Agent Masters had arrived.

  EIGHTEEN

  Jesus, are you okay?” she asked when she joined us.

  “I’m a bit rare on one side. My butt could probably do with another minute or so,” I said.

  Masters ignored me and concentrated on Varvara. “Do you need treatment for burns?”

  “No, we’re okay,” I said.

  “I’m asking Varvara.”

  Masters took a break from attending Varvara and gave me a cursory inspection. “You’ve lost an eyebrow. Singed clean away.”

  I glanced at my forearms. They were black with soot and sweat and the hair on them was also gone.

  “When you said there’d been a bit of a fire,” she said, gesturing at the fire trucks and emergency vehicles, “I didn’t take your call seriously. I could have got here quicker.”

  “Forget it,” I said. I wondered how long it would take Special Agent Masters’s concern to be replaced with the question undoubtedly on her mind: namely, what I happened to be doing at Varvara’s apartment at three in the morning. And then I remembered seeing Masters’s Mercedes parked outside the Pensione Freedom just before Varvara made her spectacular entrance there. If she’d seen the Latvian arrive, Masters probably believed she already had the answer to that one. I gave a mental shrug. She was a grown-up, wasn’t she? Nevertheless, I made a lame attempt to throw her off course. “Varvara came by my hotel earlier this evening to let me know that she could prove the letter was a forgery. She brought me back here and we found her apartment on fire. Ms. Kadyrov believes the fire was started to prevent us using other samples of General Scott’s handwriting she had to compare them with the suicide note.” This, of course, was at odds with what Varvara had told the fireman.

  “Then why didn’t she just bring some of this evidence to your apartment in the first place?” asked Masters.

  There it was. Masters was on the hunt.

  “I was not sure I could trust him,” Varvara said, apparently playing along.

  Masters again. “What changed your mind?”

  Why did I feel like a trap had been set and my foot was poised above its steel jaws? I was about to open my mouth and say something defensive—I have no idea what—when Varvara sprang those jaws shut: “Because we fucked and a woman knows afterwards if she can trust a man, no?”

  Thanks a bunch, Varvara.

  Special Agent Masters fixed me with a look of pure ice and said, “Yes, trust is in short supply these days. Almost as much as professionalism.”

  “We managed to save an example
of the general’s handwriting,” I said, pushing on. Were Masters and I married? No. Was the case officially closed? Yes. Did I feel like I’d let Masters down? Yes. Did I have to be tucked up in bed by eight P.M. with a Dr. Seuss? No. A score of justifications ran through my head, but, the fact was, I felt guilty. “Varvara, you want to show the Special Agent?”

  She nodded and led Masters under the streetlight. The major’s reaction was swift, if not a little more animated than my own. “Are you fucking kidding me, Cooper?” she said, looking up.

  “Can I speak with you a moment, Special Agent?” I said, walking into the shadows.

  Masters followed. “What?” she asked. “And it had better be good.”

  “Whether you or I think that note helps build a case for murder, the fact is someone thought the apartment was worthwhile torching. And what if Ms. Kadyrov had been home when whoever turned up with a can of kerosene and a Zippo? The timing of this is what’s so wrong.”

  “Get to the point,” she said.

  “You know Scott was murdered and so do I. And it’s not just murder: There’s something going on here, something very big—Peyton, the two autopsies, Philippe, Veitch, the journalist…Either we can work together and get to the bottom of it, or you can let the people who did it walk. And, if you do, it’s because the scale of it has you scared. Or maybe you’re just jealous that I got laid.”

  “What?” Masters’s hands went to her hips and a sardonic smile twisted her lips. A storm was building, the proverbial quiet before all hell breaks loose. And then it burst. “I have never met anyone as arrogant as you in my life. You are so sure of your own righteousness it makes me sick! I thought I could work with you. I really tried, but I can’t. You are not a team player. And now this!” she jabbed a finger in the direction of Varvara.