Free Rasputin's Shadow by Raymond Khoury Page A

those wild adventures. I hoped her next oeuvres would come out of her imagination, but knowing her and the kind of stuff she liked digging her nose into, I wasn’t holding my breath.
    With Aparo, it was a different matter. Nick was my partner. If and when I ever got to a place where I needed help, there was no one else I’d want riding shotgun with me. But initially, keeping him in the dark would also protect him if it all went belly-up. I knew that when I eventually did tell him, assuming I did go ahead with it, he wouldn’t see it that way at all and he’d be all pissed off at me for not sharing with him from minute one. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
    “Nothing you need to worry about,” I told Tess.
    She gave me the narrowed eyes for a moment longer. “Why don’t I believe you?”
    “Because your imagination’s way too active and the wheels in there are always going loco,” I said, gently tapping her forehead. “Now, go back to sleep.”
    She leaned over so her face was inches from mine, and let her body curl into me. “Too late,” she whispered.
    I could feel her warm skin on mine—any kind of bedwear was verboten in our household, by mutual decree. It was a lovely and highly addictive feeling that never failed to get all kinds of endorphins going haywire inside me.
    “You’re not helping me fall asleep,” I said.
    “I wasn’t trying,” she replied as her hand reached over and settled on my chest. “Far from it, truth be told.”
    I chuckled, then dove in.
    It felt good to give my mind a break and consign everything back to the vault and enjoy the kind of shared, carefree moment that made life worth living. It was also good to let go, since my mind was already made up.
    I was going to follow through with my plan.
    Regardless of the consequences.

10

    W ho took this?” I asked.
    It was around eleven in the morning on a fine Tuesday, and we were all huddled around Aparo’s desk: Nick, me, and the two other agents assigned to the case with us, Kubert and Kanigher, watching a video clip on my partner’s laptop.
    Someone called Cuppycake12 had filmed it on a smart phone outside the Sokolovs’ apartment building and uploaded it to YouTube during the night. And a good thing they had, too, since so far, the clips and images we’d collected from our canvassing hadn’t revealed anything new.
    Background checks on Leo and Daphne Sokolov also hadn’t kicked up anything noteworthy. The two of them seemed to be living normal, uncomplicated lives. No runs-ins with the law, no financial problems. Nothing. The apartment was rent controlled, they’d never missed a payment. Credit scoring was fine. They seemed like model citizens in every way.
    We’d also gone through the CCTV footage from the hospital, and hadn’t spotted anything suspicious or helpful on it. Daphne had left the hospital and headed in the direction of her bus stop pretty much as she did on every other day. There was also nothing about her body language that indicated any kind of stress or furtiveness going on. The footage we’d collected off a few cams on ATMs and such hadn’t yielded any epiphanies either, and neither had the statements that Adams, Giordano, and their troops had collected off the people at the scene.
    This clip, however, was interesting—and gruesome. Gruesome, because whoever took it wasn’t squeamish. It began at what must have been only seconds after Yakovlev hit the ground. The clip starts with the kind of breathless, shaky footage of someone who’s just switched on his camera and is rushing across the street and down the sidewalk to get to the scene itself.
    There, he lingers on the dead man’s body. You can hear horrified wails coming from other bystanders, a lot of sobs and “Oh my God” and “Is he dead” and “Someone call an ambulance”—all of it punctuated by Cuppycake12’s own breathless commentary. Cuppy also tilts up and pans across to show us the people standing around ogling the