Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,116

coming from Vladimir was usually a lazy, drawn-out thing, and in this case it was clipped, nervous.

There was a light click, and Ilya thought that that might be it, but the first voice came back, full of bravado, so loud and clear that Ilya dropped his hands from the headphones.

“This is Officer Dmitri Malikov, interviewing the suspect, Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov, at fifteen hundred hours, at the Berlozhniki Medical Clinic. Can you confirm your identity for the record?”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, and his voice was clearer now too. “It’s Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov.”

“And can you tell me how you knew Lana Vishnyeva?”

“We were friends. Friends since primary. And her best friend is my girlfriend.”

“Your girlfriend’s name for the record?”

“Aksinya Stepanova.”

“And where were you on the night of the twenty-third of January?”

There was a pause. “Which night is that?” Vladimir said.

A note of annoyance crept into Dmitri’s voice. “The night Lana was murdered.”

“Aksinya wasn’t with me,” Vladimir said.

“OK,” Dmitri said. “Who was with you? Lana?”

“Yes. Lana,” Vladimir said.

“And,” Dmitri said. The annoyance had ceded to encouragement.

“I killed her,” Vladimir said.

There it was. He’d said it. And just as Ilya was beginning to wonder if that was the message, if this was Vladimir’s way of saying that he’d done it, no matter what Ilya believed, Dmitri asked, “How?”

“With a knife,” Vladimir said. “I stabbed her.”

“You mean you cut her throat? It was Yulia Podtochina and Olga Nadiova that you stabbed.”

“Oh,” Vladimir said. “OK. I cut her throat.”

“Where did you get the knife?”

“A store,” Vladimir said.

“You don’t remember which one?” There was a pause, and then Dmitri said, “I need you to make a verbal answer.”

“No,” Vladimir said.

“And what did you do with it after you stabbed Lana?”

There was another pause. Dmitri cleared his throat. It was a tic of his, Ilya remembered, from that dinner at the Malikovs’ apartment.

“I threw it off the Bolshoi Bridge, into the river.”

“Walk me through the whole night,” Dmitri said. “When did you meet up with Lana?”

Vladimir began to talk again, but Ilya was picturing him up on the Bolshoi Bridge. It had been the thick of winter when Lana was murdered, and the river was frozen solid. Nothing could be thrown into it.

The whole confession was like that—Vladimir making missteps and Dmitri correcting those he caught. Vladimir got the location of Olga Nadiova’s murder wrong. He described a struggle with Lana, though the newspaper had reported no signs of a struggle after her autopsy. He guessed wildly at the number of times he’d stabbed Yulia Podtochina, and Dmitri said quietly, “Try again,” and then, “Again.”

By the end of the confession, Vladimir’s voice had gone hoarse and thick.

“Why did you do it?” Dmitri said.

“I don’t know,” Vladimir said.

“Because of the drugs?” Dmitri said.

“Because I felt like it,” Vladimir said. This had been a refrain of his for much of their adolescence. “Why did you break the window?” their mother would ask. Because I felt like it. “Why would you say that to her?” Because I felt like it. “Why did you steal the cigarettes?” Because I felt like it, and his mother would say, “How nice it must be to always act the way you feel.”

“OK,” Dmitri said. “Enough.”

There was a click, and Ilya waited a second for Michael and Stephanie to resume, but that was the end of Dmitri’s recording, not Vladimir’s.

“So the deal,” Vladimir said. “This confession and Ilya gets to go, and not just for a year. I want him to stay there. A permanent exchange.”

“Yes,” Dmitri said. “That’s the deal.”

“And the murders?” Vladimir said. “What if there are more murders?”

“I’ll make sure there are not,” Dmitri said. “Maybe prison will be good for you. At least you won’t lose any other limbs.”

“Can I have a minute—for a cigarette?” The recording was threaded through with static, but still Ilya could hear a new clarity, or force, in Vladimir’s voice here, as though this question were the only thing he’d said that mattered.

Dmitri didn’t seem to notice. He scoffed and said, “Take five if you like.”

His footsteps faded, and the muffled sound returned—the microphone against bedsheets. There were footsteps again, and then a woman’s voice said, “Hurry up,” and Ilya understood why the question had mattered. The tape clicked. For a moment there was silence, pure silence, the kind you’d hear in outer space, between worlds. Then Stephanie’s voice replied to something Michael had said, and Ilya could picture Vladimir, stuffing the tape player back into the pink plastic bag and handing it to the nurse, whose courage