Day of Wrath

The attitude of the doctor conducting this autopsy, a bored and cynical militia coroner named Rachinsky, only reinforced her dislike of the whole procedure. Right from the start, he’d made it clear that he regarded the process as a colossal waste of time and effort — and that he intended going through the motions only to keep them off his back.

Helen was also aware that outside observers might reasonably conclude that Peter, Koniev, and she were doing much the same thing — going through the motions. So far all the evidence supported the conclusion the Russian government was eagerly drawing: that Nikolai Grushtin had single-handedly caused the An-32 to crash as an act of vengeance directed at his fellow drug smuggler, Colonel Anatoly Gasparov.

Certainly the story fit all the known facts.

The MVD’s experts had compared the suicide note with other samples of Grushtin’s handwriting found in his dacha. It matched. They judged the shaky, uneven nature of the writing to be the result of severe emotional distress — probably compounded by the massive amount of alcohol he had apparently imbibed just before hanging himself.

And nothing other experts had found in the dead Air Force captain’s personal computer files shed much more light on his dealings with Gasparov. There was no list of heroin suppliers or buyers — no day-to-day journal revealing any more details of their freelance smuggling network. Only a slim file containing his financial records had proved to be of interest. It showed four separate wire transfers of $250,000 each to a Swiss bank account in his name. The first payment had been made in early April, the last on May 24.

Unfortunately, none of the file entries indicated the ultimate source of Grushtin’s funds.

Helen looked back toward the table in time to see the coroner step back with a disgusted look on his thin, unshaven face. The overhead lights glittered off his wire-rim spectacles.

Rachinsky snapped off the overhead microphone and snorted.

“As I knew all along, this man was a genuine suicide.” He stripped off his latex gloves and tossed them toward a waste bin in one corner of the room. “You should not have wasted my time.

For God’s sake, there are three thousand murders a year in Moscow now.

That’s eight a day! I have better work to do than confirming what should have been blindingly obvious to any police cadet!”

Helen kept a tight grip on her temper. “Nevertheless, we’d all appreciate a more detailed explanation of your findings, Doctor.”

She glanced across the table at Peter Thorn and Alexei Koniev.

“Right, gentlemen?”

They both nodded.

Koniev added an explicit warning. “This is a matter of the highest importance to the government, Rachinsky. I’m sure you would not want any hint that you had done anything less than your best work to reach the wrong ears in the Kremlin …”

“Oh, very well,” the Russian coroner groused. Moving with an ill grace, he yanked on a new pair of surgical gloves and motioned them closer.

Rachinsky roughly pulled Grushtin’s head to one side, exposing a deep groove across his neck where the noose had been. He spread the gouge apart with two fingers. “You see these marks?

The black-and-blue speckling along this line?”

Helen studied the groove carefully — noting the tiny marks the coroner had indicated. “What are they?”

“Minute areas of bleeding caused by the rupture of small blood vessels in the skin.” Rachinsky shrugged. “They show this man was alive when the noose tightened.”

“What else?” Koniev asked.

“These areas of postmortem lividity.” The coroner pointed to purplish areas on Grushtin’s face, above the neck, and then to others on his arms and legs. “Again, the areas where the blood has pooled and settled are consistent with a death by hanging.”

Helen shook her head. “I’m not questioning the fact that Grushtin died that way, Doctor. I’m asking you what makes you so sure he inflicted that death on himself?”

“What makes me sure of that?” Rachinsky stared at her in disbelief.

“The man was drunk beyond description. He must have known he would be arrested soon. There are no signs of other injuries.

More to the point, he left a note in his own handwriting!

So what else could it be but suicide?”

Helen frowned. Everything the militia coroner said made sense, but something still nagged her about Grushtin’s apparent suicide. It seemed so convenient — almost too convenient. It was like being handed a perfectly wrapped package — one the Russian government was only too ready to accept.

She summoned up a mental image of the Russian captain’s body dangling from the rafters of his dacha. Something about that image seemed wrong, or incomplete, somehow. Something about the stains on the dead man’s uniform trousers … She looked up at Rachinsky. “Captain Grushtin lost control over his bowels while dying, didn’t he, Doctor?”

The coroner’s thin face registered his distaste. “Yes. He expelled feces. What of it? That’s quite common — especially in a death of this kind.”