"Smith, Martin Cruz - Gorky Park" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

'Pulverized. What's left is in another container. But there are some items of real interest that are not on the preliminary report, if you'd care to have a look.'

Clam-gray cement walls, stains around the floor drains, aching fluorescent lights, white flesh and pubic ruffs came into focus. The investigator's trick was to see and not see, but  Three dead people. Look at us, the masks said. Who killed us?

'As you see,' Levin said, 'the first male shows a heavy bone structure with well-developed musculature. The second male shows a slight physique and an old compound fracture of the left shin. Most interesting.' Levin produced a feathery tuft between his fingers. 'The second male dyed his hair. Its natural color is red. It will all be in the complete report.'

'That I'll look forward to.' Arkady left.

Levin caught up at the elevator and slipped into the car with Arkady. He had been a chief surgeon in Moscow until Stalin shook Jewish doctors out of the trees. He held his emotions like gold in a fist; a sympathetic expression on him was out of place, a tic.

'There must be another investigator to handle this,' he told Arkady. 'Anyone else. Whoever cut those faces and hands knew what he was doing. He'd done it before. This is the Kliazma River all over again.'

'If you're right, the major will take over the case by tomorrow. They won't let it get so far this time, that's all. Why are you so worried?'

'Why aren't you?' Levin opened the doors. Before they shut, he repeated, 'The Kliazma River all over again.'

Ballistics was a room with most of its space occupied by a four-meter-long water tank. Arkady left the bullets and went on to the Central Forensic Laboratory, a hall room of parquet floors, marble-topped tables, green chalkboards and knee-high ashtrays embraced by lead nymphs. Separate tables were set aside for each victim's clothes, and different teams worked over the damp remains. In charge was a militia colonel with slick hair and plump hands called Lyudin.

'Not much but blood so far.' Lyudin beamed.

Other technicians looked up at the investigator's arrival. One of Lyudin's men was vacuuming pockets; another brushed crust from ice skates. Behind them was a pharmacopoeia colorful as candy in glass jars-reagents, iodine crystals, silver nitrate solutions, agar gels.

'What about the origin of the clothes?' Arkady asked. He wanted to see good-quality foreign merchandise, signs that the dead trio were criminals involved in the kind of black-market smuggling the KGB has to investigate.

'Look.' Lyudin directed Arkady's attention to a label inside one of the jackets. The word on the label was 'jeans'. 'Domestic thread. All of it junk, what you could buy in any store here. Look at the bra.' He gestured to another table. 'Not French, not even German.'

Lyudin, Arkady saw, wore a wide, hand-painted tie inside his open lab smock. He noticed it because wide ties were not available to the general public. The colonel was pleased with Arkady's frustration over the victim's clothes; forensic technicians became important in direct ratio to an investigator's frustration.

'Of course, we have yet to employ the gas chromatograph, spectrometer, neutron-activation sampling, but that kind of testing is very expensive for three separate sets of clothing.' Lyudin raised his hands helplessly. 'Not to mention the computer time.'

A big production, Arkady reminded himself. 'Colonel, there is no budget on justice,' he said.

'True, true, but if I could have something signed, authorization to conduct a full gamut of tests, you see.'

Arkady ended up signing a blank authorization. Colonel Lyudin would fill it with unnecessary tests he wouldn't conduct and then sell the unused chemicals privately. He was an expert technician, though. Arkady had no right to complain.

The technician in the ballistics room was shuttling bullets through a comparison microscope when Arkady returned.

'See?'

Arkady leaned over. One slug from Gorky Park was under the left eyepiece, a second under the right, the two fields of vision abutting. One slug was heavily damaged from its transit through bone, but both had the same left-hand rifling, and as Arkady rotated them he picked out a dozen points of similarity in lands and grooves.

'The same gun.'

'All the same gun,' the technician agreed. 'All five. The 7.65 caliber is strange to me.'

Arkady had brought only four slugs from Levin. He removed the two slugs from the microscope. The one in his right hand was unlabeled.

'Just came in from the park,' the technician said. 'Metal detectors found it.'