Free Rasputin's Shadow by Raymond Khoury Page B

body, some turning away, others unable to tear their eyes off him, the whole thing filmed with the frenzied visceral energy that these off-the-cuff clips often bring with them.
    “Right here. Watch this,” Aparo said as he hit the Pause button. “This guy right here,” he added, tapping the screen.
    He was pointing out a figure—adult, male. I couldn’t really tell much more because the image was grainy due to the jittery cinematography. The man had appeared behind some of the people who had congregated around the body.
    “Keep your eye on him,” he told us before resuming the playback.
    The guy looks over the shoulders of the first row of bystanders. He lingers there for a beat. Then he looks up, toward Sokolov’s apartment, which is where the body obviously fell from. Then he looks at the body again, and turns away and drops out of view behind the wall of people.
    “He disappears for a while,” Aparo explained. “But watch this.”
    Cuppy gets bored of his gruesome shot and goes around to try to get a more comprehensive reportage of what had happened. So he steps out onto the street and tilts the camera up, taking in the building before zooming in on the sixth-floor window that, from way down there, you can just about tell is broken. Cuppy has a good eye. Then a car surprises him, there’s a nudge of a horn that makes him jump, and Cuppy’s camera angle drops away from the window and goes all over the place as he hustles out of the car’s way. Clearly, this doesn’t go down well with Cuppy, who lets rip with some colorful language directed at the impatient driver before following him down the street with his zoom.
    Which is when Cuppy captures the bit that caught Aparo’s eye.
    The guy he’d pointed out is also in the frame. We see him come around a parked SUV, get in, and drive off. In a hurry, just charging out and almost colliding with a passing car. Like he just wanted to get the hell out of there.
    Which I thought merited closer inspection. Not because he was leaving in a rush. He could well have been distraught, freaked out by what he’d seen. Anyone would. That would be a healthy response. But it was his body language that made us take notice. He was all business, focused. Not distraught. More like furtive. Which wasn’t as wholesome, response-wise.
    “Nice,” Kubert chortled. “Maybe the guy’s squeamish. Maybe he wet himself.”
    “Very likely,” I said. “On the other hand, maybe he was waiting for Yakovlev and decided to bail fast when the diplomat took the shortcut down.”
    “If he was with him, why not go upstairs and get whoever did it? Or at least call the cops?” Kanigher asked.
    “Maybe their little visit wasn’t official,” Aparo speculated.
    “Maybe.” I nodded. “Anyway, we’ll know more if the lab can get a decent close-up of the guy’s face and his license plate. And we need to try and marry it up with traffic-cam footage and see if we can get a fix on which way he went.”
    “I’ll ship it down to them,” Aparo said. “Oh, and get a load of this. The couple who live just below the Sokolovs in 5C? Seems their dog went loco that morning and bit the husband. Like, mangled him, got him in the forearm and wouldn’t let go. Right about the time Yankovich—”
    “Yakovlev,” Kubert corrected him.
    “—took his swan dive.”
    “Did they hear a fight?” I asked.
    “No,” he said. “Just a small thud, maybe the vase hitting the floor, then the screams from the street.”
    “So what are they doing with the dog?” Kubert asked.
    “Nothing. She’s back to normal. They’ve had her for years, never bit anyone before.”
    Kubert’s face took on that familiar, pensive expression, like he was about to reveal another great secret of the universe to us. “Dogs sense things, you know. They have these powers . . . what we know about how their minds work doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.”
    And before Kubert segued into another fascinating episode of