Rasputin's Shadow Read Online Free PDF

responders got it off his wallet. Hang on, I have it here.” He flicked a page back on his notepad and found it. “Name’s Fyodor Yakovlev. It was confirmed by the rep from the Russian embassy who’s around here somewhere.”
    “Confirmed, as in he knew him?”
    “
She
knew him,” Harding corrected.
    “What was the time of death?” Aparo asked.
    “Eight twenty, give or take a minute or two,” Harding said. “He almost hit a couple of pedestrians. They were the first to call it in.”
    I checked my watch and knew what Aparo was getting at. It was almost eleven. Our victim had died around two and a half hours ago. Which meant that if this was a murder—which seemed kind of obvious at the moment—it meant we were coming to the party late, which was not an ideal place to start.
    I looked around, then asked what had become the key question in a situation like this. “Did you find a cell phone on him? Or anywhere around?”
    The coroner’s face scrunched up curiously. “No, at least, not on him. And no one’s handed anything in.”
    Not great. But there were ways for us to recover what he had on his phone, once we had the number. Assuming the Russians gave it to us, which was unlikely, given that he was a diplomat. “We need to make sure the area’s properly searched in case it fell out of him on the way down.”
    “I’ll get the guys to do another trawl.”
    We finished up with the coroner, left the tent, and headed into the building.
    As we walked into the lobby, I noticed that there was a voice intercom by the front door, but no security camera. The lobby area was tired, but clean. No CCTV cameras in there that I could see, though I didn’t expect there to be any in that building. There was a grid of lockable mailboxes on the wall to our right, some with names and others with just apartment numbers on them. We were going up to 6E. It was one of the ones that didn’t have a name on it.
    We rode the rumbling elevator to the top floor and were greeted by a uniform as we stepped out. The landing had three apartments on it, with 6E being the one farthest to the left. I imagined the immediate neighbors would have already been interviewed, although given the time of day it had happened, some of them may have already been at work.
    We stepped into the apartment. The place was dark and had a kind of faded grandeur to it. Like many of the better prewars, it had some charming, old-world features—thick hardwood floors, high ceilings, arched doorways, and elaborate crown moldings . . . stuff you didn’t get in newer buildings. Its décor—all dark wood and floral and lacy and cluttered with knickknacks—even its smell instantly conveyed a strong sense of history. Its occupants had obviously been living there for many years. A framed photo on a side table in the foyer fit the place’s aura perfectly. It showed a smiling couple in their mid-sixties, posing in front of some great natural arch, the kind you find in national parks out west. The man in the picture, short and round-faced and with a thin tuft of white hair around his balding pate, was clearly not the dead man downstairs. On the wall above it hung a trio of antique religious icons, classical depictions of Mary and a baby Jesus painted on small slabs of cracked wood.
    There was also a woman’s magazine on the side table, where one would normally leave the mail. I noted the name on its subscription mailing label—Daphne Sokolov.
    The foyer led to the living room, where three guys—two suits and a uniform—and a woman were standing and chatting by the shattered window that looked out on to the street. It was immediately obvious there’d been a tussle of some kind in the room, as attested to by the broken coffee table, shattered vase, and flowers strewn on the carpet by the window.
    Quick intros informed us the suits were indeed the detectives from the 114th Precinct, Neal Giordano and Dick Adams. The uniform was an officer by the name of Andy