Page 42

Vera sees it. She pulls the blanket up beneath his chin, and her arm tightens around him. The warning in her eyes stops me before I take another step.

A guard appears behind my shoulder. “Dmitri is in the security annex,” he says, keeping his voice quiet. “He needs you in there now.”

I look at Misha’s open hand, then at Vera. She doesn’t ask me to stay.

I fasten two buttons on my shirt and leave.

Dmitri stands beside the desk with snow melting across his shoulders. He has been out. Abramov waits near the monitor wall, reading updates from a tablet. Neither man comments on my open collar, loose belt, or the fact that I’m moving like an elderly criminal.

Dmitri takes in my fresh dressing, rumpled clothes, and bloodshot eyes. “You’ve had an eventful night.”

I lower myself into the chair. “So have you.”

Dmitri’s expression doesn’t change as he reaches inside his coat. “Marina is dead.”

For a second, I don’t recognize the name.

Then I remember the operative report. Marina Pavlova. Her name appears throughout the operating-room record and again on the transfer to intensive care. She was beside Vera for the entire surgery, which makes her another person who may have seen or heard more than what was safe for her.

Dmitri puts a photograph on the desk. The woman in the photograph is slumped against the driver’s door. Dark hair covers part of her face, and one arm hangs beside the seat. The other arm is still hooked beneath the interior door handle.

“A traffic patrol found her less than an hour ago in her car beneath a railway overpass,” he says. “No phone, badge, bag, or identification. They found empty syringes in the car and logged her as an unidentified overdose victim.”

I look at him. “Then how do we know it’s her?”

“The car is registered to Marina Pavlova,” Abramov says. “Yuri recognized her name from your hospital records, and Ilya confirmed her face from staff photographs.”

Someone removed everything that linked her to Sklifosovsky and left the syringes for the police to find.

I check the clock. Eight in the morning.

“Does the hospital know?”

“Not yet,” Dmitri says. “The police haven’t identified her officially, and no one has contacted her employer.”

Abramov points to her hand. “She tried to get out before the drugs stopped her.”

“Did she use drugs?” I ask.

“No,” Dmitri says, pulling off one glove finger by finger. “Nothing in her medical record suggests drug use.”

I check the timestamp. “This was last night?”

“Between ten and midnight,” Abramov says.

“That means she died while we were getting Vera and Misha out of the apartment.”

“Her calls since my surgery?”

Dmitri places a call log beside the photograph. “Yuri pulled what he could before the hospital system noticed him. Marina called hospital security during her last shift.”

He points to the time. “She spoke to a junior security officer for forty seconds.”

“Where’s the officer now?”

“Missing since ten fifteen,” Abramov says. “His phone is off, and he never reached home.”

“Then he heard enough to frighten someone.”