The Ignorance of Blood (30 page)

‘That was a rape charge,’ said Falcón. ‘I remember Comisario Elvira mentioning it when I gave him my first report on Vasili Lukyanov's accident.’

‘So Sokolov
was
into sexually assaulting women on that occasion?’ said Ramírez.

‘I think he was more interested in
violence
against women,’ said Cortés. ‘I'll check the case history and get back to you.’

‘Well, that's progress on Marisa Moreno,’ said Parrado.
‘If
we can match the DNA and find the suspects.’

‘We've done some limited work on that,’ said Ramírez. ‘Before the incident in Las Tres Mil occurred, our two detectives, Serrano and Baena, were in Seville Este, trying to find out where one of these Russian groups are holed up.’

‘Why Seville Este?’

‘We believe that Vasili Lukyanov was defecting from Leonid Revnik to join a renegade gang run by Yuri Donstov. The GPS in Lukyanov's Range Rover had an address in Calle Garlopa in Seville Este.’

‘Any sightings of Yuri Donstov?’ asked Falcón. ‘Or any Russians?’

‘There are a lot of apartment blocks on Calle Garlopa and, so far, no Russians and no reports of having seen any.’

‘It was probably just a meeting point,’ said Cortés. ‘I can't see him putting an address into his GPS. They've been more careful since Operation Wasp.’

‘I have a source who tells me that Yuri Donstov could be in the Polígono San Pablo,’ said Falcón.

‘They don't advertise their whereabouts,’ said Díaz.

‘Let's move on to the two murders in Las Tres Mil,’ said Parrado. ‘Sub-Inspector Emilio Pérez is the investigating officer, I believe.’

‘I'm not in possession of a fully confirmed ballistics report yet,’ said Pérez, starting off in his characteristic fashion.

‘But you have what we need to know, Emilio, so tell us that,’ said Ramírez.

‘Oh, right, Inspector. The autopsy revealed that the two dead bodies were killed by nine-millimetre rounds, which we assume were fired from the same gun, but this has not been confirmed yet.’

Ramírez tried to speed him up with quick turns of his fingers.

‘The weapon found at the scene was a Beretta 84FS Cheetah. This is a .380-calibre weapon and only one round had been fired, which was found embedded in the living-room wall opposite the window. I have the plan here.’

‘Keep going, Emilio,’ said Ramírez.

‘It is believed that this round wounded the assailant holding the nine-millimetre weapon. Preliminary findings from the autopsy reveal that the trajectory of the bullets entering Miguel Estévez, the Cuban victim, meant that the gun was fired from the floor, which encourages us to believe that the shooter has been injured. The first bullet smashed Estévez's spinal column at the sixth vertebra, the second hit his fourth rib and penetrated his heart.’

‘Blood?’ said Ramírez.

‘Three blood samples were recovered from the apartment. One belongs to Miguel Estévez, the second to Julia Valdés, who was El Pulmón's girlfriend, and the third is unknown, but corresponds to the samples found on the floor and wall of the living room where the .380 round was found, the threshold of the door to the bedroom from where Julia Valdés was shot, the stairs up to the apartment block and the pavement outside. They're working on generating the DNA now. We have not had time to derive El Pulmón's DNA from hair and bristles found in his bathroom, but we believe that…’

‘He wouldn't shoot his own girlfriend,’ said Ramírez. ‘What about the Beretta?’

‘Ballistics say that it was fired lying flat on the table with
the screw within the trigger guard. There were other screws holding the barrel in place. They think it was covered by the magazine. The recoil had sent the gun back to the window.’

‘The knife?’

‘The hunting knife had Estévez's fingerprints on the handle. The knife which stabbed him was not found.’

‘Conclusion?’

‘The first shot from the Beretta injured the shooter. Estévez tried to stab El Pulmón, who in turn stabbed him and then turned the Cuban so that he was between El Pulmón and the injured man on the floor. The shooter hit Estévez twice. Powder burns on the shirt suggest that the second shot was fired as Estévez was pushed back on to the shooter. El Pulmón escaped. The shooter then killed Julia Valdés and left the apartment himself.’

‘Good,’ said Ramírez. ‘Any witnesses?’

‘Just the one,’ said Pérez. ‘Carlos Puerta, one of El Pulmón's clients, who the Inspector Jefe mentioned earlier.’

‘Four gunshots go off in an apartment in the middle of the
barrio
and we have only one witness?’ said Juez Parrado.

‘It's Las Tres Mil,’ said Pérez, hopelessly. ‘The only person who was prepared to say anything was the tenant above El Pulmón, who told us he'd heard the gunshots at about one p.m. When it comes to seeing people running around with blood all over them, especially when drugs are involved, then everybody is suddenly deaf and blind in Las Tres Mil.’

‘So what did Carlos Puerta see?’

‘He saw two men pull up in a dark blue car. He didn't notice the model or the number plate. They went into the building. One fits the description of the Cuban, Miguel Estévez, and the other this person we now know is the Russian weightlifter, Nikita Sokolov,’ said Pérez. ‘He heard three shots. Puerta saw El Pulmón run out wearing a T-shirt covered in blood and heard a fourth gunshot. Then the weightlifter came out, got into the car and drove off.’

‘And Carlos Puerta didn't report the shooting?’ asked Parrado.

‘He's a junkie,’ said Pérez, by way of explanation.

‘What about El Pulmón?’ asked Falcón. ‘He being our most valuable witness of all.’

‘I spoke to Serrano and Baena before I came here and they've come up against the same brick wall,’ said Pérez. ‘El Pulmón was late with his product, so there would have been plenty of his clients out on the street. He'd also have been running
and
with Estévez's blood down his front. There must have been fifty people who saw him. Only Carlos Puerta has come forward.’

‘So why was Puerta prepared to talk?’ asked Parrado.

‘He said he was a friend of El Pulmón,’ said Falcón. ‘He was very upset about the girl, Julia Valdés, getting killed. There's more to his story than he's prepared to admit, but getting it out of him is a different matter.’

‘I'll go back to him later this evening or tomorrow with the Narcs,’ said Pérez.

‘So, Puerta is unreliable, which means we have to find El Pulmón,’ said Parrado.

‘If I was El Pulmón, I would go to ground as far away from my regular haunts as possible,’ said Ramírez.

‘We do know he owned a car,’ said Pérez, ‘but it's not in Las Tres Mil any more. Traffic are looking for it.’

‘In that case he could be out of Seville by now,’ said Ramírez.

‘He used to be a
novillero,’
said Falcón. ‘Find the name of his sponsor and see if he has any old friends in that community.’

‘He hasn't been in the bullfight game for years,’ said Pérez.

‘Work back, Emilio,’ said Falcón. ‘He's not going to go anywhere near his drug contacts. Family is equally unlikely. So it's old friends, and the ones from the bullfight game are the most likely to stick by him in his hour of need.’

‘Especially if they've got gypsy blood as well,’ said Ramírez.

‘I'd like the DNA from the blood samples belonging to the nine-millimetre shooter,’ said Cortés. ‘If, as I'm hoping, we've still got Sokolov's DNA on file and we can get a match, that would put him at the crime scene in Las Tres Mil and then the girl who saw him in Calle Bustos Tavera would put him at the Marisa Moreno scene, too.’

‘I'm not sure the witness we've got, who saw him and his two “comrades” in Calle Bustos Tavera, is reliable enough for court,’ said Ramírez.

‘Why not?’ asked Parrado.

‘Saturday night – she'd been using drugs.’

‘If we can put Sokolov there, it will at least inform us,’ said Cortés.

‘Both Marisa and El Pulmón had direct contact with Russians. We believe that Marisa had been coerced, through threats to her sister who was working for the Russians as a prostitute, to start a relationship with Esteban Calderón and fulfil certain tasks related to the 6th June bomb conspiracy,’ said Falcón.

‘And El Pulmón?’

‘I don't think there's a connection between him and the 6th June conspiracy,’ said Falcón. ‘This was just business. But it looks as if Nikita Sokolov, the weightlifter, was involved in clearing up the loose end of Marisa Moreno, and he's now made a mistake in failing to kill El Pulmón. If we can find El Pulmón, we can use him to locate Nikita Sokolov, and if we can charge Sokolov with the two killings in Las Tres Mil, that will give us some leverage in the case of Marisa Moreno.’

‘Matching DNA from the paper suits to unknowns on a database is going to take longer than seeing if we have a DNA sample for Sokolov and matching the samples from El Pulmón's apartment,’ said Parrado. ‘So let's do that first.’

‘We've still got the problem of finding either of them,’ said Ramírez.

‘Nikita Sokolov will be very keen to find El Pulmón. He's
the only credible witness we might get who'd be willing to place him in his apartment as the shooter,’ said Falcón. ‘I'll talk to my brother, Paco, as well. After his own accident in the ring he's always tried to help injured
toreros.’

The meeting broke up while Parrado was called out for an urgent consultation on another case. Everybody turned on their mobiles, went to the windows to make calls.

Falcón called his bull-breeding brother, worked through the excuses for not having gone out to the farm for months.

‘Paco, a question for you on your specialist subject,’ said Falcón, hurrying things along. ‘Do you remember a
novillero
called El Pulmón?’

‘Roque Barba, you mean. El Pulmón was the name they gave him
after
his accident,’ said Paco. ‘I remember it. Got a horn in the chest. When they moved him back to Seville after his initial surgery, I went to see him. I told him if he needed any help to call me. That was three years ago. I saw him a few times in the months after he first came out of hospital. I tried to persuade him to come up to the farm to work. Then we lost touch.’

‘A lot has happened since then, Paco, and not much of it good,’ said Falcón. ‘He became a heroin dealer in Las Tres Mil.’

‘A dealer? Shit, that's bad.’

‘The thing is, we need to find him.’

‘This sounds like trouble.’

‘He
is
in a lot of trouble, but not from us,’ said Falcón. ‘He's gone into hiding after a Russian gangster tried to kill him.’

‘I've just seen something on Canal Sur about a shooting in Las Tres Mil. Two people dead,’ said Paco.

‘That was the incident. And now we need to find him before the Russian gangster does.’

‘Well, he's not here, if that's what you're asking.’

‘I want you to use your contacts to find out if he still has any friends from his
novillero
days. Somewhere he could hole
up and get watered and fed,’ said Falcón. ‘That's all I want you to do. I don't want you to talk to him, Paco. That's important. I just want some ideas about where he might be, and we'll do the rest.’

‘He didn't kill either of those people in his apartment, did he?’

‘No,’ said Falcón. ‘The gangster did that.’

‘What's the worst that can happen to him?’

‘That the gangster finds him first.’

‘And from your side?’

‘We want to protect him because we want him to testify against the gangster. The worst charge against him will be possession of an illegal firearm.’

‘I'll see what I can do.’

Falcón went back to the table. The others finished their calls. Parrado came back into the room. The meeting resumed.

‘Anything else we should talk about now?’ asked Parrado.

‘I've just heard that the hair and semen deposit from the paper suits does not match any of the Russian DNA we have on our CICO database,’ said Díaz.

‘That was quicker than you thought,’ said Parrado.

‘The database is smaller than I thought,’ said Díaz.

‘I spoke to the Sex Crimes squad in Málaga and Nikita Sokolov was definitely Vasili Lukyanov's partner in the assault on that local girl. He beat her up and held her down, but insisted he did not have sex with her,’ said Cortés. ‘The good news is that they do have a sample of Nikita Sokolov's DNA.’

‘Felipe in Forensics has confirmed that he'll have the DNA from the blood samples of the unknown in El Pulmón's apartment generated by eleven p.m. tonight,’ said Pérez.

‘Good. Get that together with Cortés,’ said Parrado. ‘Now we know the direction we're heading in, let's find Nikita Sokolov and El Pulmón before they find each other.’