“This is a mistake,” she managed, unable to take her eyes off the detective already removing her phone from her purse for evidence. Vasily looked at her with heavy contempt and answered for the investigator.
“You always thought you were smarter than everyone else, Claudia. This time you got sloppy. While Daria was helping the farmer, I checked whether any of our department vehicles had been logged in that area.
Your people assumed nobody would notice them out in the middle of nowhere, but the GPS tracker on the security vehicle proved otherwise. The SUV was parked at the farmer’s house for about half an hour—right when he was attacked.”
As the detainees were led out one by one, the veteran continued explaining what had happened at the farmer’s house. “They knocked the old man unconscious and dumped him in the cellar, then covered the hatch with a heavy rug.
The plan was to make it look like an accident. If we hadn’t pulled him out in time, he would have died down there from dehydration and his injuries. In a place that remote, nobody would have noticed for days. He’d been living alone for years.”
Claudia was the last to be taken away. She turned back once, and in her eyes I saw fear and fury. The empire she had built on lies had finally collapsed. Grandpa let out a long breath and looked at me.
His eyes were wet. Slowly he reached out his hand, and I took it, understanding that now we truly were together. The shadows of the past would not get to us again.
A month later, after the media noise around the Sukhogorov family tragedy had died down, Grandpa and I returned to the hospital to see the old farmer. Gerasim sat staring at a fixed point in space. When he finally spoke, it was as if he were talking to the empty air in front of him.
He didn’t look at us. It was as though he still saw that field. “That day I was counting up the harvest, making notes in a little pad,” Gerasim began, his fingers twitching.
“Then I heard that roar. Fire fell out of the sky into the ravine. I ran there out of breath, and it was a nightmare—smoke, burning metal, and there she was, crawling, just a young woman, beautiful and barely alive…”
