A Blind Eye: Book 1 in the Adam Kaminski Mystery Series (3 page)

E
yes still closed
, Adam reached for the bedside lamp. His arm hit the wall. Hard.

He opened his eyes but lay still, confused for a moment, not recognizing the bed or the room. As his mind cleared the swamp of sleep, it all came flooding back — the flight, the train ride, their first afternoon of meetings followed by a formal dinner.

A pale orange light crept around the edges of the thin curtains that hung over the window. A stronger light would have come right through them, but the sun was still warming up, not yet ready for its big entrance.

Adam reached for his watch on the night table, carefully this time so as not to hit the wall again. Six thirty. In the morning. He groaned and rolled over in the bed, pulling the warm goose down duvet up over his naked shoulders, covering the eagle tattoo. Shouldn’t he be jet-lagged? Sleeping until ten or so?

But Adam had always been an early riser. The first rays of the sun were all the alarm clock he usually needed. Plus the group was meeting for breakfast at eight to start another busy day of tours and meetings. With a final groan, he rolled out of bed and into a hot shower.

Clean and bundled up against the chilly October day that awaited him, dressed in his standard uniform of khaki pants and button-down shirt, Adam needed one more thing before this day could really begin. A good cup of coffee. With an hour to kill before breakfast, Adam stepped out into the newborn day.

Philadelphia Boulevard twisted and turned as it followed the path of the river. Adam turned right, walking briskly toward the ruins of the Teutonic castle. The frozen air burned his nose and he felt his chest constrict against the cold, but he tucked his hands deeper into his pockets, his head lower into his collar, and kept walking.

A light mist was gradually burning away from the surface of the river to his right as he walked, and he could see its last tendrils creeping up over the banks then fading into nothingness. A few stores stood opposite the river and women in smocks and babushkas worked in the doorways of these, sweeping up and preparing for the day ahead.

The aroma of fresh baked bread carried across the boulevard. Adam turned to see a shopkeeper busy laying out baskets of tomatoes, fresh bread, dill, and the ubiquitous root vegetables any household could store safely through the winter.

An orange-gold light lit the walls of the ruins as he stepped into a small cafe looking out over the castle. The owner stood behind the bar, sweeping out a back room. He nodded as Adam took a seat at the counter that ran along a window, facing the water. From here, he could see the morning sun glinting off the river as the mist finally cleared, the castle ruins standing tall and golden in the early light.

He ordered an espresso and when it arrived he sat for a few minutes simply enjoying the bitter aroma before he swallowed it and signaled for another. A Warsaw Weekly lay farther along the counter, and Adam reached over to grab it just as a blast of cold air blew in with another customer to the cafe.

Published on Saturdays, the Warsaw Weekly was an English-language newspaper for the large expatriate and English-speaking community in Warsaw. And in the rest of Poland, too, apparently. It was a few days old already, but Adam browsed through it, reading about gallery openings, theatrical productions, and general gossip that would be of interest to anglophones in Warsaw.

The story came toward the end, a short piece tucked away at the bottom of a page. Up to that point, he had simply been skimming, mostly reading headlines and only glancing over the articles. This one caught his full attention.

The subject matter was grim. A young woman had drowned, killed herself, by jumping from the
Most Łazienkowski
, the Łazienkowski Bridge that crossed the Wisła River at the end of
Aleje Armii Ludowej,
a main avenue that crossed the heart of Warsaw. A student at Warsaw University, she had just started interning on the staff of a member of the Polish legislature, the
Sejm
.

It wasn’t the subject matter alone that caught Adam’s attention. It was the name of the young woman. Basia Kaminski. She smiled up at him from a photo attached to the article, a beautiful young woman bundled against the Polish winter in a heavy coat and high laced boots. Her hair was dark but something about her smile, the joy in her eyes, brought Julia to mind.

Kaminski must be a common name in Poland, Adam told himself. Purely a coincidence. It nevertheless sent a chill down his spine, and he focused his attention on the story the article had to tell.

As he read, he turned his trained eye to the details included in the article, though not a lot of information was available. Perhaps there simply weren’t that many details to tell. Adam wasn’t even really sure why this story made it into the English-language newspaper, unless the editors thought their readers might have seen the sad event. Or seen the aftermath.

The young woman had jumped in the early hours of the morning, before there was any traffic on the bridge. No witnesses had come forward. Her body had been found in the river by a local man walking his dog along the banks. More exactly, her body had been found by the dog.

Adam read the few details the paper had to offer, then placed the paper down next to him and leaned back in his seat. He shuddered at the thought of dying by falling from a height. It made his healthy respect for heights seem reasonable. Cautious, even.

He shouldn’t be reading this, shouldn’t be focusing on this. He was here to strengthen the relationship between Philadelphia and Poland, helping the department’s budget in the process. Not to solve crimes. Crimes that weren’t even really crimes, as the police had determined it had been a suicide.

The door opened again, and another blast of cold air rushed across him. He breathed in deeply and caught the reedy scent of the river over the strong aroma of coffee that pervaded the cafe. Looking out at the water making its turbulent way to the Baltic Sea, the same river that ran through Warsaw, Adam thought about the young woman, Basia Kaminski, and what she had been through.

He could picture it. The dog walker braving a chill morning, much like this one, to walk his dog down by the water. The river would have been shedding its mist, just as it had for Adam today. The body would have floated near the banks, perhaps getting caught in the long grasses that lined the water. The dog, sniffing for small animals or ducks or the scent of another dog had caught a whiff of something unexpected. Something recognizable but unusual.

He would have barked and his owner would have come running. Calling to it to stop barking first, perhaps, but then coming to see what was creating such excitement in his animal.

The man would have seen her at that point. Facedown in the water, most likely. Corpses usually were, in Adam’s experience. The dead man’s float. Her shoulder-length brown hair would be fanned out around her head, stretching off into the water, waving with the rhythm of the tide.

She had been wearing a winter coat, the article stated, which made sense. It was a cold time of year, and even someone contemplating suicide would instinctively have bundled up against the freezing temperatures of the night. Someone contemplating jumping into the even more frigid water that ran below the bridge.

It wasn’t a tall bridge. Someone could jump off it and survive, the journalist had been good enough to explain.

If the goal was death, that was easily accomplished by jumping toward the moving tide in the middle of the river. If the impact of hitting the water didn’t kill you, it, along with the pain of the bitter cold, would likely render you unconscious. Long enough, at least, for the tide to slam your body into the rocks that cropped up just downstream from the bridge. If she hadn’t been dead yet, she would most likely have drowned at that point.

The graceful image in Adam’s mind changed, against his will, her corpse battered and bruised by the time she reached the shore. Her hair tangled around her neck and armpits. Her warm winter clothes torn and pulled from her body.

Adam shivered.

Something about the image still wasn’t right, though. He paid for his coffee and headed back out into the cold, back up the river to the hotel to start his real work for the day.

A detail from the article was niggling at the back of his mind and wouldn’t let go. Was it the peaceful image he had conjured of the dead woman, one he knew couldn’t be accurate?

No, that wasn’t it. He looked out over the water as he moved his Italian leather loafers carefully along the still icy bricks of the pavement. In a few hours these bricks would be dried by the sun and the winter wind, but for now they were still slippery from the frozen morning mist.

Her feet — that was it. When she had been found, Basia had no shoes. The police assumed they had come loose in the water, the article had explained.

Adam frowned. One shoe could be lost, perhaps. But two? And winter boots at that?

It struck him as odd. As unlikely. And in a murder investigation, you had to focus on those things that were unlikely or odd to find your first clue. To start down the path that would lead, hopefully, to the truth. To a killer.

His face grew warm as his anger mounted at the thought of another young life wasted. At the idea that someone might have killed a young woman just starting out. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, his standard practice when trying to get his anger under control. This time, it worked.

He blew on his hands and tucked them safely back into his pockets. This wasn’t a murder investigation, he reminded himself, this was a suicide. A suicide in Warsaw that had nothing to do with him. Her name was simply a coincidence.

Yet someone, somewhere, was mourning her, Adam thought as he jogged up the stairs to the hotel lobby, trying but failing to get the image of the dead girl out of his mind. Her death had left a void in someone’s life, and that pain would take a long time to heal.

T
he door swung wide
. Łukasz looked in through the open doorway. The apartment was empty. Hollow. It was just one step away, but to step inside her home was somehow to accept the emptiness. Admit the loss. He stayed where he was, looking in.

He could see straight through the apartment to the window looking out over the
Praga Południe
district of Warsaw. The view showed more of the same, gray apartment buildings that lined the streets in this part of the city. Tall, square, thick, undistinguished.

A kitchenette ran along part of the wall to the right. To the left, a small table pushed against the other wall left just enough room for a person to pass through. A low bookcase had been placed strategically at the far end of the kitchen to create a break between the eating and living spaces. At the other side of the long, narrow room, a sofa, chairs and coffee table created a cozy seating area. Łukasz knew that the sofa pulled out into a bed.

A small apartment, perhaps, but enough for one young woman living alone. Her ability to cover her costs of living was a point of pride for Łukasz. His daughter had always been independent. He had raised her that way — to work hard and to aim high.

He lifted his chin and smiled as the pride surged through him once more, then his face crumpled and his head dropped as he was swamped by the grief that now dominated everything, all the time. There was no escaping it.

He stepped into the room.

Basia had been dead for almost a week now but the scent of her in the apartment was so strong Łukasz felt as if she were standing next to him. He closed his eyes and inhaled. His hand reached out, but there was no one there. He stood, imagining, for a few minutes more.

It would almost have been better had these memories been taken from him as well. He could have stayed in that alley, in the dark and the cold, without remembering the loss or the pain.

Parts of his mind were still blocked to him, black holes where no memory floated, no ideas emerged. Had there been something else? Someone else? Someone he wanted to remember — or someone he wanted to forget?

Shaking his head in frustration, he opened his eyes.

Someone had attacked him, beaten him and left him for dead. It must have been the same people who killed Basia and it could only have been because he’d found something. Something that brought him too close to the truth to be safe. But what? Hours spent searching the one box of files left from his research had produced nothing definitive, just ideas. Wisps of ideas, really.

Four steps took him through the kitchen into the living room. A plant drooped on a shelf near the window, its leaves withered and dry, but Łukasz turned his attention to the shelf below it. Books filled that shelf and another like it farther along the wall. Books on structures of government, economic policy, analyses of voting practices and European Union policies.

He ran his eye over the spines of the books neatly shelved, then turned to the few still lying on the coffee table. A report from the World Bank, Jacek Kuron’s book about student involvement in the Solidarity movement, a pile of old newspapers.

Basia had loved Polish politics, had lived for it. When she received the offer from Minister Novosad to join his staff in the Polish legislature she had almost cried with joy. And Łukasz had rejoiced with her. She had taken him out to eat. Nowhere fancy, it was true, but it was her turn to treat him, she had explained, now she was a working woman. After all her father had done for her.

Łukasz picked up the World Bank report and flipped through it. Charts and summaries comparing governments of various Central and Eastern European states. Comparing the structures of government and levels of corruption. Łukasz was familiar with the book by Kuron, every journalist was. His firsthand account of what it had been like as a student at Warsaw University, recognizing the Poland that could be and fighting to make it a reality. This is what Basia had been reading when she was killed.

There was no sign that anyone else had been in her apartment. No books knocked off a shelf, no wrinkles in the rug that covered the floor, no furniture out of place. Not like his apartment when he’d returned from the hospital.

Yet someone had killed her. Łukasz knew that. Basia was too alive, too full of hope for the future to have killed herself. Whoever had done this had covered his tracks well, but there was a clue somewhere, he just needed to find it.

He would keep digging and he would keep pushing the police to reopen the investigation. He didn’t care if that meant he had to set up a tent in front of the police station. He would spend every day there if he had to. He wouldn’t give up.