“Your friend Bogatyrev should have come to us instead. It didn’t take us very long to match his tapes with our files. His missing son was killed accidentally almost three years ago. We never had an identification on the body.”

There was a few seconds of silence while I thought about that. “So the poor bastard didn’t have to meet me last night, and he didn’t have to end up with that red, ragged hole in his shirt.”

“Funny how life works out, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Remind me to laugh twice next time,” I said. “Tell me what you know about him.”

“Who? Bogatyrev or his son?”

“I don’t care, either or both. All I know is some little man wanted me to do a job. He wanted me to find his son for him. I wake up this morning, and both he and the kid are dead.”

“He should have come to us,” said Okking.

“They have a history, where he came from, of not going to the police. Voluntarily, that is.”

Okking chewed that over, deciding whether he liked it or not. He let it ride. “So there goes your income,” he said, pretending sympathy. “Bogatyrev was some kind of political middleman for King Vyacheslav of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. Bogatyrev’s son was an embarrassment to the Byelorussian legation. All the petty Russias are working overtime to establish their credibility, and the Bogatyrev boy was getting into one scandal after another. His father should have left him at home, then they’d both still be alive.”

“Maybe. How’d the boy die?”

Okking paused, probably calling up the file on his screen to be certain. “All it says is that he was killed in a traffic accident. Made an illegal turn, was broadsided by a truck, the other driver wasn’t charged. The kid had no identification, the vehicle he was driving was stolen. His body was kept in the morgue for a year, but no one claimed it. After that … ”