Rasputin's Shadow

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Book: Read Rasputin's Shadow for Free Online
Authors: Raymond Khoury
Tags: Fiction, General, Historical, Thrillers
trademark, faux-surprised “What?” look.
    Larisa didn’t flinch. “None that he’s bragged about,” she told him flatly. “Look, this only happened a couple of hours ago, and as you can imagine, everyone at the consulate is pretty shaken up about it. We’ll get some answers soon enough. Believe me, we want to know what happened here as much as you do.”
    I nodded and glanced at the framed picture again. Leo and Daphne Sokolov. Sweet and harmless-looking older couple, the kind of folks we’d all like to have as neighbors. Only there was obviously more to them than that. That much was clear. But I doubted there was any point in pressing Larisa on it. If she knew anything more about them, she wasn’t about to share.
    Still, for the record, I asked, “What about the Sokolovs? Anything else we should know about them? Any kids?” I hadn’t seen any telltale pictures of kids and grandkids.
    “Doesn’t look like it, but we’re not sure,” Giordano said.
    I asked Larisa, “Are they on your radar for any reason?”
    “No. But then again, I wouldn’t expect them to be. As you well know, there are hundreds of thousands of Russians in this city. We have no reason to keep tabs on them any more than you do. They only come to us if there’s some kind of problem.”
    “Which the Sokolovs never had—until this morning.”
    She shrugged and nodded in agreement. “So it seems.”
    “Would anyone want to harm them?” I asked.
    She looked at me curiously. “What are you thinking?”
    “Well, could be there was a confrontation and one of the Sokolovs ended up pushing Yakovlev through the window. But Yakovlev seemed like someone who was in pretty good shape and I’m finding it hard to imagine Leo or Daphne Sokolov getting the upper hand on him physically like that.”
    “Unless Leo—or Daphne, for that matter—unless one of them had a black belt we don’t know about,” Aparo threw in helpfully.
    “Sure, there’s always that possibility,” I granted him without too much sarcasm in my tone.
    “Or they could have drugged him,” he added.
    “Your coroner will look into things like that, won’t he?” Larisa asked.
    “Yes, we’ll get a full tox report on the victim. But maybe the Sokolovs weren’t behind this. Maybe they were in some kind of trouble and they turned to Yakovlev for help. Maybe they were friends and he showed up here at the wrong time and interrupted something and got shoved out the window for it.” He turned to the detectives. “Either way, Yakovlev shows up here, there’s some kind of a fight, he ends up taking a dive out the window, and the Sokolovs are gone. The key is to find the Sokolovs. That sound about right to everyone?”
    “Hey, you guys are the pros,” Adams said sourly. “We’re just here to do the legwork.”
    I let it slide and asked, “You got a BOLO out on them?”
    It sounded weird to say it. Not the word. The idea. To have an all points bulletin out for a couple of sixtysomethings who seemed like your quintessentially harmless citizens felt odd. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me like they might be in trouble. We needed to find them.
    Adams, meanwhile, had feigned a deeply concentrated look, like he was racking his brain about it, before his face lit up in a eureka moment. “Damn, why didn’t we think of that?” He turned to his partner and pointed in our direction. “Listen and learn, buddy. These feds, they’re just magic. Listen and learn.”
    He was obviously aching for me to give him an excuse to escalate things, and judging by the uncomfortable face his partner pulled, it wasn’t a first. But I didn’t feel like getting baited. Aparo was off to one side checking out the shelves and he turned too, but I shot him a look to make sure he kept his cool.
    “All right,” I said. “Until we find the Sokolovs, we’ve got a lot of questions that need answering. Let’s start at the beginning. How did Yakovlev get here? Did he drive, did

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