Sun Bay Confidential

[Serbovia]

Port District
Belozersk
Republic of Zapadnoslavia
United States of Greater Serbovia

Matija didn't understand why one would build a house and then not live in it. It seemed like such a waste, but he didn't really mind. The house had walls and a roof, so even this time of the year it was a warm place to be, at least with a blanket around. And it provided shelter from bad people. He didn't understand those either. There were those bad people in green and blue who wanted to take him back to Carentania, and there were those others who wanted to hurt him. The others had warned him of that. These Serbovians were weird folk.

It hadn't been like this in Carentania. What little he remembered of the country was good, though for some reason dad hadn't liked it very much. Dad and his friends that Matija had once seen at the house. One day they'd left, and dad had told Matija that they would never be able to return home, eventually finding their way into this strange country. Mother must have still been in Carentania, for she'd left for whatever reason months before Matija and dad had left the country. Matija and dad had lived in Belozersk until one day big men in green - policemen or soldiers, maybe his dad had done something wrong - had come for dad, and Matija had been left alone.

Or not really. But it had been the same as loneliness to him. His father had also left, but Matija didn't know where, so an older woman had told him that he needed to go to an 'orphanage'. But Matija hadn't understood, after all he wasn't an orphan. His dad must have still been in Serbovia somewhere, and his mother awaited in Carentania. The orphanage place hadn't been a very nice one, because the other kids had been mean to him, so he'd left. Matija had gone home, but a strange family was now living there, so he'd found a new one for himself. He could find food too. His dad had always said that only 'commies', whatever they were, picked stuff up from trash cans. Those commies must have been pretty stupid since his dad had talked about them all the time, but Matija didn't see anything wrong with eating out of a dumpster. Why pay at a store when you could get the same stuff for free in the back?

These Serbovians and their money things were indeed odd. Though tired and aching after the day, voices from the street prompted him to get up, and when upright he saw from the glassless window a car turn from the street towards the long pier ahead of him. It was a fine car, one of those big black ones the rich people usually drove. Matija saw that a boat, a yacht even, had shown up at the end of the pier. They must have been rich people, though it was very quirky to go to a cruise this time of the night.

He remembered seeing boats and cars like these on TV, and he remembered dad talking about how well off the Serbovians were. Maybe he could go and ask them for money or food.

Then he saw what happened next. One of the three men who emerged from the big car started to run to his direction, the two others turning after him. Then there were two bangs, and finally a third one. The men were shouting curses before they lifted the third one up and threw him over the pier's side.

Now, Matija didn't feel like going out to beg from them.

 

[Serbovia]

152 Buran
Homicide Investigation Unit
Greater Belozersk Judicial Police
Belozersk
Republic of Zapadnoslavia
United States of Greater Serbovia

"Greater Belozersk anti-drug task force for schoolkids, principal's office."

"The midterm detail getting on your nerves, Slava?"

A blush appeared in the face of Lieutenant Vyacheslav Kozin with that reply and the familiar voice of Senior Lieutenant Ivan Naryshkin, one of the deputies for the Naval Gendarmerie Port Captain in Belozersk. His curious way of replying to the phone, originally a Homicide in joke after everyone had gotten tired with being pulled off to the midterm holidays anti-drug detail, in the end wasn't that suited to external communication.

Lieutenant Kozin sighed. After all, in the absence of fresh homicide cases for the full unit complement the "extra" staff had been detailed to the annual drug enforcement operation of the midterm holidays against objections that Drugs and Vice could have well managed that by detailing patrolmen and people from other Judicial units. Everyone in Homicide considered their team the cream of the crop of Greater Belozersk, and a waste of professional talent that they'd have to go around netting gram-level weed busts from random university students.

"You could say that", Kozin replied, shrugging at his end of the phone line.

"Saw you on Karelingradskaja Gazeta too, what a celebrity we have here. You're taking this principal stuff fairly seriously, eh?"

Kozin snorted. Some higher-up had had the particularly clever idea of sending him to one of those press conferences they liked to hold to show what they'd netted during the drug detail, and he'd come up with some half-hearted crap to say for the fourth estate.

"Indeed, we must educate the youth about the horrid dangers of recreational drugs and whatnot", Kozin replied in a sarcastic tone, "What a load of horse dung. On a more serious note, though, what does the Port Captaincy want with our illustrious elite this time?"

"Shore patrol came upon a floater this morning, over at the Oldtown Beaches. Looks like that your team has some actual work to do", Naryshkin replied, Lieutenant Kozin hearing a more serious tone in his voice.

"One of those drunken or stoned, drowned student kids again?"

"No, not quite", Naryshkin continued, momentarily pausing, "Male, between 20-30, no ID yet...likely cause of death is gunshot, twice to the back and once to the head."

"You don't say", Kozin said with genuine surprise. Looks like there's some actual work for them to do after all. "Alright, what's the exact location?"

"62 Karelin. Forensics are on their way too."

"Shit", Kozin cursed. Karelin was the main seaside boulevard of Belozersk, a ten-kilometer roadway of bars, hotels, souvenir stores and beaches, and 62 was right in the middle of the busiest Oldtown. That meant a lot of audience, not to mention the media attention. "Alright, we'll be on our way."

The moment after he'd set down the receiver, the familiar feeling of adrenaline rushing into his veins caught Lieutenant Vyacheslav Kozin as he holstered his 10mm Fedorov-Nikonov handgun that had been lying on his desk, before getting up and grabbing his jacket from the office chair. Then he turned to see Sergeants Katerina Kuzmina and Slavko Orlov grinning behind their desks, and it occurred to him that maybe he should have been more quiet in the first parts of his phone conversation.

"Off to hold drug education, are we?", Orlov asked and puffed out a cloud of smoke from his cigarette.

"Page Lukin and Komorowski, smartass", Kozin replied gruffly, heading for the doorway out of his Homicide team's offices, "We have a murder to take care of."

 

[Serbovia]

152 Buran
Greater Belozersk Judicial Police
Belozersk
Republic of Zapadnoslavia
United States of Greater Serbovia

Investigator Vladimir Novak yawned as he stepped out of his -85 VAZ 320 with a cup of coffee in hand and started to head for the doors leading from 152 Buran's underground parking lot to the building itself, walking past rows of parked large sedans - most of them evidently unmarked police vehicles - and the occasional personal vehicle someone had brought to work. The sounds of cars filing in and their doors opening upon reaching the designated parking seats told him that he wasn't the only one showing up for the morning shift late.

At the doors, the two contract security guards - armed as all police buildings were classified as medium-to-high risk targets by the Main Administration of Commercial Security - greeted him and let him go past the metal detectors without hassle, identifying him not only from Novak having arrived the same way nearly every working day for the past four years since he'd transferred out from Preventive Police but also from the gold-color metal badge that hung from his neck.

Novak didn't have to wait for the elevators to come down, since the doors of one slid open accompanied by a bling just as Novak had passed security, two men in suits and a blonde woman rushing past him in a frantic speed. If he recalled correctly, those were people from Homicide. Hell, he recalled the woman especially well from the Police Association's most recent anniversary party, especially given what had happened at the two-participant afterparty at Novak's house. Alas, the Investigator had found out only in the following morning that she was in fact in an existing relationship, and whenever the two had stumbled upon a same crime scene uncomfortable looks were still shared.

The story had circled around like a wildfire too, but then again, what else was new? In this job you saw things most people only saw from TV news or cop dramas, and as the saying went a hard job called for hard free time. Even by Serbovian standards, cops were usually heavy drinkers, especially Homicide ones. After all they were the ones working with corpses all day. Novak's own division was Gangs and Narcotics, and he'd seen some pretty harrowing stuff too, but certainly not to the same degree.

At the elevator, he pressed the button for the sixth floor, and soon found himself greeting another guard at the lobby, this one in the dark blue uniform of the Zapadnoslavian Police Force. Contract guards were allowed to do only the perimeter, and inner security and jails in Serbovian police stations were usually taken care of by guards employed by the police agency. After all, it was cheaper than getting a full-time police officer for the job.

Vladimir Novak slipped into the offices of Belozersk Gangs and Narcotics, immediately taking a left both to avoid the open cubicle area where his boss likely was hanging out and to get to his post at the Little Hajr Task Force's surveillance room. Maybe Lieutenant Reznik would think that he had been there all the time.

"You're late, Novak", Investigator Said Alhazred, who'd been pulling night with the surveillance gear, said, turning on his chair to face Novak.

"Yeah", Vladimir Novak replied, then realizing that his translator hadn't shown up either, "Well, so is Corporal Daoud, it seems. How the fuck am I going to listen in on a bunch of phone lines when I don't even have anyone to tell me what they're saying?"

"Dunno", Alhazred replied with a yawn.

Said Alhazred was the twenty-eight year old son of Hajri immigrants from the state capital in Magnitaya. Initially serving as a patrol officer, he'd quickly found himself in Belozersk Gangs and Narcotics when the brass had begun to get concerned over the state of what was commonly known as the Belozersk Little Hajr. The need of native speakers to deal with the immigrants was probably why the guy had made Investigator so quickly.

A resident of Belozersk for all his thirty-four year old life, Investigator Vladimir Novak remembered how the city had been. Foreigners usually thought of Belozersk as nothing but hotels, strip joints and cheap bars, but in truth it was a city of three hundred thousand people with all its good and bad sides. Back in his youth, the only foreigners had been the occasional expat, a few Denisovans and a bunch of Seorans, and he had very little bad to say about them. As far as he considered, things had gone downhill when someone in Karelingrad had had a streak of genius to start drawing in those damn sand blacks.

Little Hajr, officially known as Belozersk North, had been originally built in the 1960s to an area formerly made up of local industry and the Belozersk International Airport to cater to the needs of the arriving Seoran immigrants. The influx of Hajri immigrants a couple of decades later had driven most of the Seorans to the rest of the city, and Belozersk North had been a dark stain on Novak's city since then.

The original signs of the suburb's decay - the fact that a lot of people in there didn't even speak Serbovian and the formation of youth gangs - had gone unignored up until the biggest Little Hajr gang had last year become an affiliate of the Bloody Scimitars. The biggest Hajri street gang in the entire country, the Bloody Scimitars dealt in drugs, prostitution and stolen car chop-shops and had seen steady expansion in Hajri immigrant communities since their formation in 1998.

Belozersk had traditionally been the turf of the Magnitaya-based Zhukov Brigade, but that crew never mixed up their business with outsiders, and had pretty much kept the Hajris to their Little Hajr. Novak remembered an incident a couple of years back when a Hajri crew had tried to score in on the tourists with street robberies along Karelin and the other resort streets downtown. Unfortunately for them, one night they'd made the mistake of robbing a couple of tourists who'd just come out of one of the casinos known to be affiliated with Zhukov. The four Hajris responsible hadn't been heard of in weeks until the brother of one of them started receiving chopped off fingers and toes in mail.

That had pretty much kept the Hajris to Little Hajr, but now with the Bloody Scimitar gang pushing in there was worry that they'd get the muscle to start an actual gang war in the city. That worry had been enough to get the Gendarmes and Magnitaya to authorize the Little Hajr Task Force. Among the things the Task Force had done so far was wire-tapping every pay phone in Little Hajr, since the gangs often used those in fear of surveillance on their cell or home phones. The court warrant they had for that project exclipitly covered only stuff related to the local gangs, so non-relevant calls were usually deleted outright with the obvious exception of those related to other kinds of crime.

"So anything happen overnight?", Vladimir Novak asked Alhazred as he took off his jacket and threw it on a sofa in a corner of the room.

"Been a quiet night for the most part, got a couple of courier calls but nothing else", Alhazred said, having turned back to his computer to pull up a recording, "...with the exception of this. From the corner of Kazimov and the 18th at around two-fifty."

"Is it done?"

"That's Serbovian..", Novak said with a surprise.

"Yeah, but the mark tried a run for it, we took care of it but didn't have the time to go to the sea."
"Damn it. Were you seen?"
"No."
"Get rid of the guns."
"Okay."

"What the fuck was that about?", Novak asked. Serbovians didn't usually do business in Little Hajr.

"No idea", Alhazred replied, "But doesn't look like it's to do with the Scimitars."

"Alright. I guess I'll take care of it then. Go home, and if you see that lazy asshat Daoud tell him that unless he's in here in ten minutes he's not getting any of that shared coffee in the break room."

Alhazred nodded with a smirk, and got out of the room. Damn immigrants, Vladimir Novak thought to himself, a lazy lot all of them.

 

[Serbovia]

62 Karelin
Belozersk
Republic of Zapadnoslavia
United States of Greater Serbovia

A dead body, Lieutenant Vyacheslav Kozin reminded himself as he studied from a distance the still-wet carcass, always had a story to tell. The relatively fit body of a young man lay on its stomach on the pavement at the point where the Gendarmes had pulled him out of water, with the two bullet wounds on the back and the one to the back of the head still visible. So was the exit wound on his cheek, Kozin noted as he watched the forensic investigators in their white overalls study the body close-by.

"Given the winds and water drift last night, he was probably killed way to the East", Senior Lieutenant Ivan Naryskin, standing next to him in his green Gendarmerie uniform, was musing, "Port District maybe, or even farther outside."

Kozin did not reply, instead lighting a cigarette and glancing to the direction of the street. Two of the four lanes of Karelin had been closed at this point to provide room for the Gendarmerie and Police cars that had showed up to the scene, and uniformed cops were busy keeping the people gathered to the sidewalk on the other side from crowding the remaining two lanes. It was as he feared. Most likely the entire crime scene would end up as the latest DuRör hit, given how many people out there in the crowd had their camera phones out. The team leader of the Homicide Investigation Unit had tried to quit smoking on more than six separate occasions, but it had never worked out. In spite of several years with the Unit, there was always something unsettling about these crime scenes.

Then again, they still didn't have a name for their victim. Maybe the publicity would help out in that regard.

Kozin watched as a couple of coroners started to lift the dead body up on a gurney, the forensics people having done their work. There wasn't much to go on except taking images anyway, for the crime scene itself was likely elsewhere. The sound of another car pulling up to the edge of the police cordon caught his attention, and Vyacheslav Kozin turned again to see Sergeant Ivan Komorowski and Sergeant Dimitri Lukin exit the big police sedan, waving their badges at a guarding uniformed officer to allow them through.

"What the hell took you so long?", Kozin asked as the two officers approached him, joining Kozin, Naryshkin Kuzmina and Orlov in the group of people idly watching as the body was wheeled on the gurney towards a black coroner's car awaiting at the edge of the crime scene.

"This", Sergeant Wladislaw Komorowski, an ethnic Lusatian, replied while handing Kozin a stapled bunch of A4 papers that were evidently prints from the police data system, and then shouting at the coroners, "Hold off for a moment there, will you?"

Kozin studied the set of papers handed to him, realizing that they were missing persons reports from the database. Indeed, one entered into the system on this very morning caught his eye, and he rushed to the gurney to pull off the covering from the body. Momentarily comparing the picture in the missing persons report to the body lying on the gurney, a flash of recognition struck Lieutenant Vyacheslav Kozin, in spite of the gunshot wound that had ravaged the victim's face. It was, in fact, the very same person.

Nikolai Varennikov, a 22-year old student of the Venediktgrad University of Medicine and Natural Sciences in town for his midterm holidays, reported missing today after last being seen two days ago exiting the nightclub of his hotel - Belaya Zvezda Belozersk. Now the victim had told a part of his story, but the question remained: how the hell did a twenty-year old student kid end up dead in the sea with three bullet holes on him?

"Our victim has a name", Kozin said to his teammembers, nodding at Komorowski, "Good work, Wlad."

The burly, brown-haired Lusatian acknowledged him with another nod.

"Right", Kozin said, drawing in from his cigarette and passing the papers to his team members to look at, "Komorowski and Lukin, head up to the Belaya Zvezda, search his room, interview anyone who knew him, the usual, Orlov, head up back to Buran and call this guy's university and the Venediktgrad Police to see if they have anything on him."

"Why me again?", Orlov replied with a cringe.

"Because you have that telemarketing phone voice", Kozin retorted dryly, "Assuming this guy's been dead for a day or so, there's a good chance that he was killed within city limits. Ivan, up for a little coastal ride with me and Kuzmina here?"

 

[Serbovia]

11 Magnitaya
Hotel Belaya Zvezda
Belozersk
Republic of Zapadnoslavia
United States of Greater Serbovia

"Again?", the hotel clerk replied with a puzzled look aimed at Sergeants Wladislaw Komorowski and Dimitri Lukin, the two Homicide detectives leaning against the heavy mahogany table behind which sat the reception clerks of the White Star.

"What do you mean again?", Komorowski replied looking equally puzzled, and a glance in the direction of his partner told the Lusatian detective that Lukin was equally confused as well.

"Oh, a couple of your guys went in just a few minutes ago, they were also asking for Room 308, I think they were from Property Crimes or something.

"Really?", Sergeant Komorowski said, his initial confusion now turning into suspicion, "Can you describe them?"

"One guy was 190cm or so, the other one slightly shorter, maybe 180-185, looked like they were from Hajr originally."

Komorowski paused for a minute. Out of 1400 or so sworn-in officers of the Belozersk Police, about two hundred were part of the Investigation Bureau in its various units, and he was pretty sure that there were no persons of Hajri extraction in Property Crimes. The only ones that had even made it to Investigation were in Gangs and Narcotics or as roaming translators.

"You thinking what I'm thinking?", Lukin asked Komorowski.

"Yeah", he replied even as he pulled out his cell phone, "There are no Hajris in Property Crimes."

Murphy's Law again. Interviewing the victim's roommates, a couple of other students who had also made the missing person report, would have been a fairly routine task. Unfortunately, Ivan Komorowski could count 1+1, and knew to expect trouble whenever Hajris were involved.

As Komorowski was tapping the non-public number to the Belozersk emergency center, he saw Lukin first glancing to a surveillance camera on top of the reception desk and then turning back to the clerk, "Does that camera record?"

The clerk gave an uncertain nod.

"Can you show those two Hajris to us?"

The clerk waved past them, and Komorowski glanced to see a suit-wearing security guard approaching, opening a meter-tall gate to the other side of the counter and then sitting down on an empty chair next to the clerk.

"What do you want to see?", the guard asked, accessing a terminal which Komorowski correctly guessed provided an access to hotel surveillance.

"Those Hajri guys ten minutes ago."

"Alright, why don't you two come over here too?"

Komorowski and Lukin followed suit and entered the other side of the reception desk. Alas, as the guard pulled up recordings from the lobby cameras, his worst expectations turned out to be the truth.

"I know one of those guys", Sergeant Lukin exclaimed, "Back when I was in Assault and Robbery, I put him away for robbing a kiosk for five years, heard that he's rolling with the Bloody Scimitars nowadays. The smaller guy."

"Shit", Komorowski cursed, "So a convicted felon and a suspected gang member and his buddy go to the hotel room of a murder victim..."

Without stopping to think, Sergeant Wiladislaw Komorowski pressed the dial button on his cell phone. A female dispatcher replied on the other end.

"This is Sergeant Wladislaw Komorowski with the Belozersk Homicide Investigation Unit, I.D Boris-Hedon two-five-zero, requesting immediate uniformed back-up at the Eleven Magnitaya to take in gang-affiliated, possibly armed persons of interest at a possible crime scene."

* * *

Five minutes later, in an imported Eiffellandian-made sedan parked across the street from hotel Belaya Zvezda, Mohammad watched two black-and-white police patrol cars pull up to the hotel with their blue-and-red alarm lights flashing, and their blue-uniformed occupants quickly exit their vehicles carrying pump-action shotguns and rushing to the hotel through its main doors.

He let off a Hajri curse and reached for his pre-paid.

 

[Serbovia]

152 Buran
Homicide Investigation Unit
Greater Belozersk Judicial Police
Belozersk
Republic of Zapadnoslavia
United States of Greater Serbovia

Lieutenant Vyacheslav Kozin sighed and gazed at the Hajri man seated to the other end of the metal table, welded down to the interrogation room's floor.

"You were found with a forged police badge and an unlicensed nine-millimeter pistol, and you have a previous record of violent crime which makes it especially illegal for you to carry a firearm, and where were you found?", he replied and raised his voice, "With a known gang associate in the hotel room of a fresh murder victim faking a interrogation into that murder victim's two associates! Why?"

"Only lawyer I want", the Hajri, a small but fit bald and goateed man who Investigator Komorowski had pointed out as one Yusef bin Hakim al-Khoraish, replied in broken and accented Serbovian.

"I guess he's stuck in traffic, I heard that the bus service is striking again."

"He has car!", al-Khoraish shouted, Lieutenant Kozin covering his surprise at the man's visible agitation.

"Bought with gang money, I presume", Kozin said back dryly, "The Bloody Scimitars pay him much?"

"What gang? I don't need speaking to you unless I get me lawyer."

Vyacheslav Kozin sighed again. Actually, contrary to what people these days got from foreign TV shows, Serbovian law only meant that if a lawyer was attempting to visit an arrestee in police custody, the lawyer could not be denied access to him, and the arrestee couldn't be denied the right to contact his lawyer to notify of his arrest. Nothing forbid the interrogation of an arrestee before his lawyer was at the scene, but unfortunately due to domestic and foreign proliferation of the police procedural as a genre people these days had caught on to their "need" of a lawyer. Back when Kozin had started as an Investigator fifteen years ago, it had been way simpler.

Maybe it was best to let the guy sit on it on a while. Without saying anything, the Homicide Lieutenant left the small interrogation room, closing the steel door behind him as he entered a far more brightly lit corridor to the side of the large room that housed the cubicle offices of his team. Lukin and Komorowski were waiting right outside, along with another Investigator whom he did not immediately recognize.

"Anything?", Komorowski asked. Lieutenant Kozin shook his head in response.

"Investigator Novak with Gangs and Narcotics", the newcomer, a thirty-ish black-hair with the accent of a Zapadnoslavian coastal native with the build of a former dockworker introduced himself. "Our floor heard that you're investigating a fresh case."

Kozin replied with a tired nod. "An university kid pulled off the water, shot in the chest and the head, we've got two Bloody Scimitars members in custody but so far we can only pin them on impersonating an officer, forgery and gun charges..."

He noted to himself that while all of the above could warrant sentences of up to 5-7 years, gang murders were considered Union offenses, making a guilty person eligible for execution. Zapadnoslavia had abolished the death penalty in 1997, but Karelingrad hadn't. Too bad they had fairly little to go on at the moment. The arrest of the two Hajris had prompted Kozin's return back to 152 Buran, with Kuzmina and Naryshkin continuing their not so successful scouring of the Belozersk coastline for a possible crime scene.

"Oh yeah", Novak cut in, "I had this to show."

A piece of paper the man had been holding in his hands turned out to be the transcript of payphone surveillance on the corner of Kazimov and the 18th streets, in Little Hajr if Kozin recalled correctly. And an interesting one indeed, as he went through the few laconic lines that some Gangs and Narcotics surveillance operator had copied to a transcript classified as "non-pertinent criminal". Kozin knew that the pertinent criminal ones were those related to an active case, while "non-pertinent criminal" ones were kept in store but classified separately. Entirely non-pertinent ones were deleted due to privacy concerns.

"Little Hajr, huh?", Kozin said as he passed the paper to Komorowski and Lukin, "But...Serbovians? You're getting any cameras in those parts?"

"You kidding me, sir?", Novak replied with a grunt, "The gang kids break up most of the regular ones, and upstairs only authorized funding for covert cameras in hotspots, that part of Little Hajr ain't one."

"So much for priority Directorate-backed gang enforcement", Lukin cut in.

"Yeah", Vladimir Novak said, "I guess they don't care as long as they end up having drive-bys on a regular basis in Karelingrad and elsewhere in those parts, or some rich tourist gets killed..."

"Which might be what's in fact happened", Lieutenant Kozin said, though he was very, very unsure about making such a statement. There were certainly superficialities that matched here, but so far the only suspects were Hajri ones, and unless the Bloody Scimitars were recruiting Serbovian muscle or working with some local crew this didn't add up. "Or then we have two fresh cases on our hands. In any case, it's worth looking into."