Page 82 of Night of Shadows
Not the kidnapping. Not the photograph. Not the recovery. I think of last night. The bath. The way Nora hummed a tuneless song while Maeve washed her hair. The fierce ritual of being a parent at the end of the worst day of her short life.
Nora got a bath last night at home.
Anya is in an oncology unit at Dana-Farber right now getting an experimental drug pumped into her arm because the drug is the only thing keeping her in monthly increments above the line.
Anya will not get a thousand more baths.
She’ll get, if Andreev is lucky and the experimental program works, several hundred. Not a thousand. Anya is six, and the math is the math.
I understand, in this moment, the architecture of what Marcus Andreev did.
I do not absolve him. I place him.
I sit back down.
My hand comes off the holster.
? ? ?
Andreev has not lifted his head.
He’s waiting. He is, by every measure, a man who has been waiting since 12:30 AM to find out which version of this morning he’s going to get.
"Marcus."
He looks up.
"Mikhail Sokolov. Tell me what you know."
"He’s a businessman in Brookline. Import-export. Office on Beacon Street. The office is small and clean. I checked him out. I checked him out twice. He passed every check."
"He’s not clean."
"I know."
"He works for someone."
"I do not know who."
"Marcus."
"I do not know. I am telling you the truth. He never told me. I never asked. I didn’t want to know."
I believe him.
"Anya goes to her treatment today," I say. "You do not go with her. Your wife takes her."
"Yes."
"You will be in federal custody by 2 PM. The arrest is going to be clean. You are going to confess. You are going to give the federal prosecutors everything you have given me. You are going to name Foley. You are going to name Sokolov. You are going to spend the next several years in federal prison."
"Yes."
"The Konstantinos family will not touch you."
Andreev looks up.
His face does what it has been doing since I sat down, only this is the version I didn’t expect to see; the version of a man who has decided he’s going to die today and has just been told he’s not.
