Patrick Radden Keefe

He was just pretending to.

But I think that there was a kind of a learned behavior by the police over the course of two decades where when there was the whiff of something more exotic, something that might be difficult to charge and get a conviction on, the police had a tendency just to say, nothing to see here, folks.

And you see it again and again.

There's a story about a guy, again, Russian-linked, sort of linked to a Russian story, who dies of two dozen stab wounds from two different knives.

And the police said, straightforward suicide, open and shut.

So there's a kind of stubborn, I think a willful sense in which the cops kind of refuse to engage.

And that, to me, seems to be quite clearly what happened with Zach, is that there was this MI6 footage showing that Zach was alone on the balcony.

So it'd be one thing if you had footage of somebody pushing him.

Then you've got your murder case, and it's kind of there for you on a platter.

But when you know that he's alone on the balcony and he jumps, even if there's somebody in the apartment right behind him who's, as you say, a very dangerous man...

That's a more exotic case.

That's a tougher case to bring.

And I feel like they just weren't up to it.

Well, initially they really, I think they would say today, naively placed their trust in the authorities to do their job.

And they did this in part because the police said we will leave no stone unturned.

Gradually they realized that the cops were not going to do that.

And so part of what my book is about is these two parents who realize that, you know, when you call the cops, nobody's actually going to come and help you.

And so they're then in that vacuum forced to become detectives themselves.

Yeah, part of the fun of this story is that Varun Dusharma, Indian Dave, was this hardened gangster.

And as any hardened gangster does, he came into his police interviews and just said, no comment, no comment, no comment, no comment.