The chapel was drowning in white flowers. At the walls—funeral wreaths. On the floor—wilted roses and lilies scattered about. And like a mirage against the wall—an onyx pedestal made of black polished wood.
On it there was a skeleton in a wedding-white dress, adorned with gold—tens of chainlets, rings, bracelets, watches on bony hands… A skull with empty eye sockets… A scythe in a hand stripped of flesh. In the first moment, seeing this strange figure, police captain Ekaterina Petrovskaya thought: it’s some kind of trick, a performance… But then wild alarm squeezed her heart. Her head spun from the stuffiness, from the smell of dead flowers, from the hot wax.
To keep from falling, she clutched the hand of investigator Strashilin. Where had this seemingly simple murder case of the pensioner Ilya Ufimtsev led them?
So what exactly happened in the house of old Ufimtsev—a former party official—who read the Bible in the slope of his years and talked with the nuns of the nearby monastery?