“Do you think it wasn’t natural?” she asked. “The heart attack?”
Gromov was quiet for a moment.
“I think it needs to be checked. There are ways to trigger a cardiac event. Certain drugs. Enough stress. If Sokolov found out about the recordings, he could have sent someone to scare the old man. That alone might have done it.”
Vera felt sick.
“My God. I brought trouble to his door.”
“Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known.”
“But the documents? What if Dmitry found them?”
“The old man said he hid them well. They may still be there. The question is where.”
They sat there until dawn, talking through options. Gromov suggested searching Vitaly Ignatyevich’s apartment. Vera refused—that would be illegal. And if they got caught, everything would collapse.
“We wait,” she said. “If he survives, we talk again. If he doesn’t…”
She couldn’t finish.
For three days Vitaly Ignatyevich hovered between life and death. Vera called the hospital every few hours, pretending to be a distant relative. On the fourth day she got good news: he had been moved to a regular room. She drove there immediately. The old man lay in bed pale and shrunken, wires and tubes everywhere. But his eyes were open and clear.
“Vera!” he rasped when she came in. “You came…”
“Don’t talk. Save your strength.”
“No.” He gave a weak shake of his head. “Have to. Tell you. While I still can.”
Vera leaned closer.
“They came,” Vitaly Ignatyevich whispered. “Two men. Evening, after you left. They knew you’d been there. Demanded the documents.”
“Did you give them anything?”
“No.” A faint smile touched his lips. “Told them there was nothing. That it was nonsense. They didn’t believe me. Threatened me. Then…” He closed his eyes. “Then my chest started twisting up. Next thing I knew, I was here.”
“Vitaly Ignatyevich, are the documents still safe?”
“Safe.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Garage. Number seventeen. Sunrise storage lot. Under the workbench, toolbox. False bottom.”
Vera memorized every word.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” He turned his face toward the wall. “I’m guilty too. I helped him. All these years. I knew he wasn’t an honest man. But I kept quiet. I was afraid.”
“You’re not guilty. He used you.”
“Still…” His voice was growing weaker. “Take the papers. Make him answer for it. That’s all I can do now.”
Vera took his hand—dry, cold, almost weightless.
“I promise.”
She left the hospital with her heart hammering. She called Gromov and gave him the address.
“Sunrise storage lot,” he repeated. “I know where that is. I’m on my way.”
“I’m coming too.”
“No. You go home. If you’re being watched, you can’t be seen near that garage. I can handle it.”
Vera wanted to argue, but she knew he was right. They couldn’t risk anything now, not when they were this close.
She spent the night awake, staring at the ceiling of her shabby room. Her phone lay beside her, charged and on. She waited for it to ring. It did at six in the morning.
“Found it,” Gromov said, sounding tired but satisfied. “Everything was there. Contracts, meeting notes, bank records. And the recordings—eighteen of them, on old cassette tapes. We’ll have to digitize them, but that’s manageable.”
Vera closed her eyes.
“What’s on them?”
“I only listened to the beginning so far. But it’s enough. Sokolov personally instructs the old man on what to tell the notary. Mentions Judge Kravtsov. Talks about how to move your house into a shell company.”
Tears ran down Vera’s face—the first tears of relief she had cried in a long time.
“So we can win.”
“We can,” Gromov said. “Now we can.”
The next two weeks passed in a frenzy of work. Gromov digitized the tapes and organized the documents. Anton Sergeyevich worked through the legal side, consulting colleagues. Vera kept driving her taxi—she still needed money. And sitting still was impossible.
The recordings were even better than they had hoped. Eighteen conversations over four years—a running record of the crime. Dmitry’s voice. Polyakov’s voice. Voices of other men they still needed to identify. They discussed schemes, named amounts, mentioned names.
“There’s enough here for several criminal cases,” Anton Sergeyevich said at one of their meetings. “Fraud, document falsification, bribery of public officials. Sokolov is looking at serious time.”
“And Judge Kravtsov?”
