Penny Criminal Case. Alexander Cherenov

Starkov could not stand it, “as one character in Sholokhov’s “And Quiet Flows the Don” said: “If you swung, then hit!”

      Proceedings in the course of the novel: “I will hit you!” did not follow, but the prosecutor unexpectedly cut the road to the truth – and “went to confess”.

      “This case was given to us, dear Alex…”

      “What does it mean?!”

      No, Starkov was not stunned by surprise – such a reaction is inherent in the heroes of the novels – but the format of his face has clearly undergone even greater changes.

      “What the fuck, boss?!”

      “By territoriality, dear Alex,” the prosecutor moved his eyes further away.

      Starkov could not resist and grunted.

      “And what, boss, overnight there were changes in the administrative-territorial division of the districts?! Now this wasteland will add us mileage, doesn’t it?!”

      “I would have joked myself,” the prosecutor sinned against the truth: he could not joke from birth, “but…”

      “Zarathustra does not allow?” Starkov joked instead of the authorities grimly.

      Boss was clearly not acquainted with Zarathustra, which was proved by the unexpectedly interested look of his sad-dull eyes.

      “No, dear Alex, this one… as his…”

      “Zarathustra.”

      “…Yes… he had nothing to do with it.”

      The prosecutor boyishly sniffed.

      “It turned out, that the murder was committed on our side of the wasteland…”

      “And then he was ‘transferred as a Christmas present to the dearest patron’?”

      Starkov joked, but with every joke, it became less and less vigorous: comprehending the inevitable had a bad effect on nerves and facial muscles.

      “You guessed, dear Alex.”

      “And who so pleased us?” Starkov immediately showed a gloomy face: the jokes were over, despite all their traditionally inexhaustible stock.

      “Someone… someone… I can have a look right now…”

      The prosecutor dived his head into the pile of papers he had constructed and removed a thin folder with a red police cover from it.

      “Here: Rubin.”

      “Rubin?!”

      Starkov ran with his hand over his overgrown chin: he intended to shave in his office, with an old electric razor “Berdsk”.

      “And how did he find it out?”

      Instead of answering, the prosecutor handed Starkov a thin folder.

      “Take a look, dear Alex.”

      The case – this is only due to the exceptional thinness – consisted of the Starkov’s incident report, the decision to open a criminal case, the extremely laconic protocols of interrogations of the medical examiner Tarsky, an expert-criminalist Pavlovsky, lieutenant Ivanov and the senior authorized officer of the City Department of Internal Affairs captain Rubin. The scheme and photos from the scene were attached to the case. The last document in the case was the resolution on the transfer of the case on a territorial basis and the “highest” resolution of the city prosecutor of the “Let it be!” Format.

      “That’s not bad for one night and a piece of morning,” Starkov approved colleagues through teeth and gnashing of teeth. “Although you can immediately see, how the guys were in a hurry to get rid of the work… Hmm… Well, what did Captain Rubin confess here?”

      The interrogation protocol of Rubin, like the other “defendants”, fit on one sheet of the standard prosecutor’s office form of interrogation of a witness. It was felt that the readings were minimized and fixed with only one purpose: to “make happy” colleagues from the Central district in shock terms.

      Starkov quickly looked through the sheet. Rubin confessed that, while developing a version of the senior investigator Starkov about a pre-planned murder, he, waiting for the dawn, decided to examine the part of the wasteland, from which local policeman Ivanov brought the cat to the deceased girl. Preliminary Ivanov oriented him in place.

      “Did Ivanov orient him in place?!” Starkov grinned out loud. “What a progress! Yes, he himself must be oriented, and not only in that place, but also in the place in life! No other way, now he will be transferred to the detectives, and at the same time from fools to clever people – for their ingenuity!”

      Concisely “admiring” with lieutenant Ivanov, Starkov returned to the case file. Then Rubin said that within a radius of several meters from the location of the cat indicated by Ivanov, he noticed brown spots on the ground. They stretched in a broken chain towards the part of the wasteland, where the corpse of the girl was found. Soil samples with brown spots on them were taken by the investigator of the prosecutor’s office of the Kirov district to the forensic medical bureau for a forensic biological examination, and it turned out, that this was blood, which coincided in group with the victim’s blood.

      “Quickly!” Starkov shook his head. “And the blood is it, and the blood type is known… Too fast! It takes days to establish both ‘in peacetime’!”

      In conclusion, Rubin found on the October side of the wasteland bloody women’s panties with initials on the inside of “TK”. Being presented to the identification of the mother of the victim, they were identified as belonging to her daughter.

      “And where is the identification protocol?”

      Starkov quickly leafed through the sore business: there was no protocol. Probably, they just waved with panties in front of the face: the usual police disorder of the format “That’s not bad, but who really needs it – let it rework!” And “comrades from the Kirov district” were in such a hurry to “move the clamp from their neck to someone else’s”, that they did not even bother to draw up an inventory of documents, not to mention the identification protocol.

      Starkov closed the folder and placed it in front of him on the console to the table, behind which, hunched over and pressed his head into the shoulders, the prosecutor sat – not at all in the image and likeness of the high authorities.

      “Well, what do you say, dear Alex?” the prosecutor faltered in his voice.

      Starkov threw up his hands.

      “And what can you say? We will not go to refute these facts and beg for the ‘city’ to get the case turned back to the Kirov district… The deed is done… Well, in the sense that it is now with us, and we cannot get away from it… Although the Kirov ‘comrades’ could have merged these cases: because they have two almost similar corpses… And what the city prosecutor thought, hell knows…”

      Suddenly he shook his head, which had already acquired a mine of bewilderment.

      “It is not clear, why such maneuvers? Who needed to drag the corpse from one area to another? For what purpose? It would seem, is it not one hell, on which part of the same waste ground will a corpse be found?!.. So, not one… I am – in the sense of “one hell”… So, there was a goal. But I cannot understand what. If you wanted to throw a corpse to us, why drag it to the Kirov side? It’s unclear…

      “Well, here, dear Alex, reveal this crime!” the prosecutor suddenly “came to life” – even his face, of parchment color, slightly got rosy. “Take this case to investigate!”

      “Why me?!”

      Starkov was clearly not in a hurry to share the bosses’ enthusiasm.

      “This week, Meshkov