Chapter 1: Shattered Happiness
The blue glass elephant swayed in Elena Andreevna's trembling fingers, catching and refracting the dim light of the office. Detective Anna Sviridova found herself admiring how blue flickers danced across the walls—as if pieces of sky had penetrated this room saturated with grief and fear.
"Sofi brought it from summer camp last year," Elena Andreevna's voice, hoarse from tears, broke the silence. "She said, 'Mom, can you believe it? Just one more left. One more elephant—and we'll have happiness.' Someone had told her about the seven elephants…"
Anna glanced at her watch: 3:40 PM. Outside, a fine November drizzle was falling, turning the streets into mirrors reflecting the gray sky. Two weeks. It had been exactly two weeks since sixteen-year-old Sophia Velichko never made it to school.
"Tell me once more how that morning went," Anna tried to speak gently, though everything inside her tightened at the realization that this woman would be reliving the worst day of her life for the tenth time.
Elena Andreevna slowly placed the elephant on the table. Its trunk pointed toward the door, as if showing a path to salvation that could no longer exist.
"I saw her off as usual. Sofi wore her new jacket—white, with a hood. I even thought: maybe it's too light-colored for autumn? But she was so happy about that jacket… We hugged at the doorstep, and I wished her a good day. She smiled and said, 'I love you, Mom.' Just said it, for no reason…"
Elena Andreevna fell silent, smoothing out non-existent wrinkles on her skirt. Anna knew the hardest part was coming.
"At 7:38, I checked the app. We always tracked each other through a special mobile application; we had agreed to it after the threats began. Sofi wasn't where… she wasn't where she was supposed to be at all. I messaged her…"
"Through a messenger app?" Anna clarified, though she already knew the answer. She had read this detail in the reports dozens of times.
"Yes. I just asked, 'Where are you?' She replied, 'In class.' But I could see… I could see she was somewhere else. I called her homeroom teacher—Sofi wasn't at school. She never skipped classes, never! And then… I immediately knew that what we had feared all this time had happened."
Anna pulled a photograph from the folder: a gray Toyota Camry without license plates, captured by a surveillance camera at the intersection of Spring and School Streets. The timestamp on the image: 7:35.
"You mentioned that Viktor Mikhailovich sold his car a month ago?"
