Genie for Hire (12 page)

“The chocolate’s the best part, you dumb rodent,” Biff said.

The squirrel looked up at him and chittered.

Biff sat down on his chaise longue and popped a piece of
halvah in his mouth, then pulled the lamp close to him, holding it in one hand.

Who had killed Sveta and Ovetschkin? And why?

Until he heard those two shots, he had believed this case
was all about the files. But had he been looking at things wrong? He had known
from the start that Ovetschkin was a member of the Russian Organizatsiya. Had Ovetschkin
been the intended victim, and Sveta just collateral damage? Suppose one of his
rivals had followed him to the studio, catching him off guard while he was threatening
Sveta.

But who? He hadn’t paid enough attention to the evidence
left behind by the killer. His senses had been distracted by the blood and
death, but he was better than that. He should be able to go back there and
identify the killer by his – or her – body cells.

He let go of the lamp, feeling moderately refreshed, then pulled
off one of his pointy-toed slippers. The sole was scarred, and he rubbed his
right foot absently. Was it too late already? Loi was there with his evidence
kits, his Luminol and disinfectants. It would be a lot harder to pick out who
had been there when he had to remove him and everyone else who had tramped
through the area.

He wouldn’t be able to get back into the studio until all
the police were gone. What else could he do? He dialed Jimmy. “Loi finished
yet?”

“Almost. The ME’s office just took away the victims. Loi is
cleaning up now.”

“You need anything more from me?”

“Not right now. But stay in touch, all right?”

“You got it,” Biff said.

He picked up the brass lamp again and held it in his hands,
feeling its warmth and power surge through him. His plan was to get back into
the workroom as soon as he could, and see what kind of information it could
reveal. Sveta had been his client, and he felt responsible for her. If avenging
her meant finding out who had killed a lowlife like Kiril Ovetschkin, too, then
that would be a freebie for the Miami-Dade police.

He smiled and handed another piece of halvah to the
squirrel.

The squirrel, dozy from the halvah, rested on a small pillow
beside the cabinet that held the samovar. Biff focused on sounds from Sveta’s
studio, and when he was satisfied that Loi had packed up all his gear and left,
he stood up.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said to the squirrel.

It rolled on its back and waved all four paws in the air,
then flopped to one side and looked at Biff through its small dark eyes. “This
is my office, not your bathroom, all right?” Biff said.

The squirrel yawned.

“Seriously. If I have to clean anything up when I come back,
your ass is out of here. I killed you once and I can kill you again.”

The squirrel chittered something, then closed its eyes. Biff
shook his head and walked outside.

Loi had taped up the studio’s front and back doors, but that
didn’t matter to Biff. He slipped inside and stood in the darkened studio. He
had no need of light to examine the portraits of smiling babies and children,
the matte backdrop or the carpeted posing platforms. It still struck him as
strange that Sveta had two such different sides to her business—the kids, and
the boudoir shots.

He opened his third eye and began a painstaking survey of
the room, looking for any evidence that might pertain to Sveta’s murder. There
was no trace of Ovetschkin; he must have come in the back door, before Sveta
had opened the studio for business.

Biff gave up on the studio and stepped through the beaded
curtain into the workroom. The power and range of the scents there was so strong
that he had to stop and steady himself. He was glad he had rubbed the brass
lamp; he needed the extra energy.

The room was roughly square in shape, with no windows, just
the single metal door that led to the back service drive. Biff didn’t turn on
the overhead lights; he could see well enough to make out the shelves of
cameras and other supplies, the light table, and the desk where Sveta sat at
her laptop computer, now gone.

A portable clothes rack held a range of nightgowns, feather
boas and towels. It seemed that the customers brought their own underwear, for
which Biff was grateful. Beyond the clothes rack was a small sewing machine on an
old kitchen table.

Slowly and painstakingly, he sifted through the range of
smells and sensations in the room. Loi had changed to a coconut shampoo, and
had a new piercing, with a bacterial infection. He recognized the scents and
signatures of the two techs from the medical examiner’s office, a man and a
woman, who had come to pick up the bodies. Both of them smelled of sweat and antibacterial
wipes, and neither wore cologne or perfume.

Jimmy Stein had been in and out of the room. His energy signature
was so strong and so familiar to Biff, a combination of determination, respect
and kindness, accompanied by the smells of a human male body in its
mid-fifties.

By the time he had categorized each of the scents related to
the police, and isolated them, he was tired. But he continued. There had to be
a clue under everything, something that the human techs could not have found.
Something that only he could discover, with his range of super-human senses.

Sifting farther below the surface, he identified Sveta’s signature,
and that of Ovetschkin. Igor Laskin’s scent was still there, too. Was that a
residue of his visit to steal the files? Or had he been with Ovetschkin?

The air still reverberated with fear and anger, the kind of
emotions that took a long time to dissipate. Biff had been to battlefields that
still resonated with the sensations of the wounded and dying decades, even
centuries later. It was sad to him that positive emotions like love and desire
faded so quickly, when the negative ones lingered.

There was no one else. No one beyond those he had identified
had been in the workroom within the past twenty-four hours. By process of
elimination, that pointed to Igor Laskin as the killer. Biff knew, however,
that his evidence would hardly hold up in a court of law. He could barely
explain to himself how he was able to recognize so many different smells and
emotions and apply them to individuals. He certainly couldn’t communicate that
process to a judge or jury—not even to Jimmy Stein.

He slipped out the back door of the studio. As he walked to
his car, he called Jimmy. “You find Laskin?”

“Not yet. Got the super to open his apartment and it looks
like he took off quickly. I put out an APB for his car, and we’re checking his
known associates now. I don’t think we’ll come up with anything. I don’t have
enough yet for a warrant, but he’s definitely someone I want to talk to.”

Biff hung up and drove down to Laskin’s apartment. It was
getting to be such a familiar drive he could almost go there on autopilot. He parked
behind the Epicure gourmet grocery again, next to a pickup painted hot pink,
with a bumper sticker that read
Grow Your Own Dope: Plant a Man
. He walked
down the street to Laskin’s building, with all senses on alert for traces of
the bodybuilder or his expensive cologne.

He stopped at Laskin’s parking space, recognizable by the profusion
of skin cells around the area where the driver’s door would be. But the latest
traces were hours old.

The neighbors down the hall from Laskin’s apartment were
still arguing, most likely just another skirmish in a long war. He stood in
front of Laskin’s door for a moment, his hand poised as if to knock, and made
sure there was no one inside the apartment. Then he slipped through the narrow
space between the door and the jamb.

The first thing that struck him was the absence of the Matryoshka
dolls. The atmosphere in the apartment was so benign, so different from what it
had been the last two times he was in that living room. He stepped over to the
shelf where they had rested, and sure enough, there were six circles in the
dust, of decreasing size.

What was in those dolls? Something evil, for sure. Was the
demon inside the dolls controlling Laskin in some way? Or were Laskin’s motives
only human—greed, jealousy, envy—all those sins that religious people had been
warning against for centuries?

He did another complete survey of the apartment, quickly
eliminating the energy signatures of the cops and the landlord. He noted that the
clothes in the closet no longer hung in perfect symmetry. Many of the shirts
and suits were missing, and a pair of pants had fallen to the floor. Jimmy was
right; Laskin had left the apartment in a hurry.

The door to the safe under the tie rack hung open, and the
gun, cocaine and cash that had been inside were gone.

He walked back to the living room and stood next to the
shelf where the dolls had sat. Either something was inside one or more of them,
or they had been imbued with some kind of energy by a master like the one who
had enchanted his lamp.

The police who had gone through Laskin’s apartment wouldn’t
have noticed that the dolls were missing, and it struck him as very strange
that a man on the run would pick up a cluster of knickknacks to take with him.
So that meant the dolls were important, and Biff was the only one who could
figure out why, because humans could only be influenced by the power; they
couldn’t understand it.

He drove back to his office, following a minivan plastered
with the bumper stickers distributed to elementary school students as a kind of
praise. He had no idea what you had to do to be named student of the month;
probably just show up without any weapons.

The squirrel jumped up and chittered at him as he walked in,
dashing outside between Biff’s legs. As Biff watched, it scurried across the
pavement to the base of the palm tree, then scampered up it. He darted halfway out
one frond and squatted.

“At least you’re housebroken,” Biff said, as he watched a
rain of tiny pellets sift through the palm’s fronds. The squirrel leapt back to
the tree trunk, scrabbled down, and then rushed across the sidewalk again and
right back into Biff’s outer office.

Biff shook his head and closed the door. The squirrel darted
into Biff’s office and clambered up the side of the bookcase, his tiny claws
making scratching noises as he climbed. When he got to the top of the case he
raced across and then took a daring leap to Biff’s desk, skidding across the
polished surface until Biff was sure he was going to fly off the far edge.

He sailed off and landed with a soft plop on his cushion,
where he immediately curled his tail around him and went back to sleep.

Biff laughed as he walked to the bookcase. Many of his reference
books were centuries old, written in forgotten languages on sheepskin and
parchment, then bound with leather and sealed with magic. He opened his third
eye and let it roam through the books, searching for an energy signature that
matched the dolls.

His hand came to rest on a relatively new book, from the
early twentieth century, about folk arts and crafts. He pulled it off the shelf
and flipped to the section on figurines. It was written in Russian, and it took
him a moment to adjust to the Cyrillic characters. The first set of Matryoshka
dolls to be shown publicly was carved in 1890, but there had been a folk art
tradition of nesting doll collections long before that.

The Slavic people had no written language before the advent
of Christianity, so their religious beliefs had been passed down orally and in
art. One of the earliest examples of a nesting doll was in the shape of an egg,
with a chicken painted on it. When the egg was opened, another egg was found
inside, this one painted with the image of a baby chick. Inside that was a
third egg, which came apart to reveal a yolk and white.

This nesting egg was used in ancient fertility rituals. With
the advent of Christianity, the egg had evolved into a round doll painted as an
ikon of the Virgin Mother, with a baby Jesus inside. But there were other,
darker manifestations of the nesting doll, and the pre-Christians had used them
to contain evil spirits. When a sorcerer summoned a spirit, it could be tricked
into climbing into the doll—and then the doll would be sealed shut.

That had happened to Biff himself, a few hundred years
before. The grand vizier of Constantinople had attempted to contain the jinns
and enslave their power, and Biff had been caught trying to save Farishta. It took
a decade before the vizier died and Farishta tricked his successor into
smashing the dolls that bound Biff and many others.

Just the memory of his confinement and release shook him,
and reflexively he reached out to the lamp for a boost of reassurance.

He closed his eyes and recalled the dolls in Laskin’s
apartment. He had not looked directly at them, because of the aura they
emitted, but if he concentrated and focused he could recall the details of his
walk around the living room.

He opened his eyes as the memory swept into him. Wolves. The
dolls had painted with wolves. He closed his eyes again and forced himself to
step closer to the row of dolls. The first and largest doll was covered with an
exquisitely detailed painting of a mature gray wolf. It had clearly been done
by a master; Biff could see each of the animal’s hairs, and the strong
musculature under the skin. The wolf’s head was tilted back, and bright red
blood dripped from its open jaws.

The wolf was a powerful symbol in that pre-Christian world.
Some scholars took the prevalence of lupine iconography to mean that the Slavs
believed in werewolves, while others said that the wolf represented all that
was wild and frightening in the world.

The wolf on the second doll was a pregnant female. Again,
she had been painted beautifully, down to the tiniest detail of her swollen
belly. The third doll was a young male wolf howling at a silver moon, the
fourth a young female looking seductively at the viewer. The fifth and last
doll was painted with a newborn pup, eyes closed and mouth open.