From the Devil's Farm

by Leta Serafim

  “If she was guilty, she would have taken off, too.”

  “She defended them.”

  His friend groaned. “You yourself said she lacked the musculature to carry the boy up to Thanatos. You convinced me.”

  “Maybe they’re in it together. Maybe she’s working with them.”

  “Something’s wrong with you, Yiannis. You can’t let anything go. You just keep poking at it like a snake until it rears up and bites you. You’re allergic to happiness.”

  Furious, Patronas stayed outside on the deck of the police cruiser while Tembelos and the others went below. He resented the way his friend had dismissed his fears about Lydia Pappas, mocked him for his suspicions. Women were tricky; surely Giorgos, a married man, knew that. Vigilance was everything when it came to women.

  When the boat got underway, he gripped the railing and scanned the sea for the Zodiac. The wind was up, hitting him so hard in the face that he had to take a step backward. Water came spilling across the deck; and he had to fight to keep his balance on the slippery metal. He was soaked by the time the cruiser reached Antiparos.

  As the boat drew close to shore, he was dismayed to see Antiparos wasn’t one island, but many. A few had names, the captain informed him: Despotiko, Strogili, Tourlos, and Preza. A wealthy ship owner, Goulandris, owned one, but for the most part, they were uninhabited.

  Patronas debated searching them, but decided no one could survive on those rocks for long, not without food and water, and subsequently directed the captain to head into port instead. The village was similar to those on Sifnos, the majority of the whitewashed buildings occupying a low-rising hill above the harbor.

  Vast swaths of the Antiparos remained undeveloped, he noticed, a landscape of empty beaches and secluded, blue-green lagoons, reminiscent of the Chios of his childhood. The water sparkled in the sunlight, so clear he could see all the way to the bottom.

  Following a lengthy search, they found the Zodiac, a hole torn in its side, abandoned on the beach of Livadia on the western side of the island.

  Patronas waded ashore and made his way over to it. The beach was deserted and the Zodiac was listing to one side, half-submerged in the shallows. Seeing the gaping hole in the rubber, he was sure the kids had sunk it deliberately, seeking to obliterate every trace of their presence here.

  “What do we do with it?” he called to Tembelos.

  “Leave it,” his friend yelled back. “We’ll come back for it after we catch them.”

  Patronas had been keeping Stathis informed, so he called him now. “We found the Zodiac with a hole punched in its side. Afterward, we searched the island, but we didn’t find them. My guess is they used Antiparos as a stepping stone on their way to Paros. I don’t know how they’re getting there, but that’s how I would have played it if I were them. It’s the closest destination, less than a mile away. They’re athletes. If they had to, they could swim there.”

  “If they decide to hide out on Paros, it won’t be easy to find them,” Stathis said. “Five thousand people live in the port alone and that’s not counting the tourists. Cruise ships stop there on a regular basis, three, sometimes four a day, so there are those people, too. It’s a pretty loose place. Nobody knows or cares who you are or what you do. It’s a lot like Mykonos in that respect. Those kids want to disappear, they found a good place.”

  “We’re on our way there now in the cruiser. My guess is they’ll try and get to Athens at some point and from there on to the United States.”

  “I’ll call Venizelos Airport,” Stathis said, “tell the security people to keep an eye out. Check the passenger manifests for all outgoing flights to America.”

  Paros was as Stathis had said, a throbbing tourist mecca. A ten-story cruise ship had just docked in the port of Parikia, and the streets were packed with foreigners of every age and description. Turkey must have been on the boat’s itinerary, for Patronas saw a group of men in fezzes. Germans, from the look of them. A large quay jutted out over the water, and the cruiser drew alongside, anchoring there, the crew throwing out a length of rope and securing the vessel.

  In contrast to Sifnos, the buildings in the port were a hodgepodge of historic styles and elements—neoclassical mansions interspersed with the boxy, whitewashed houses of the Cyclades—the two traditions forming a nearly seamless tableau. One of the most famous sites in the Orthodox world, Panagia Ekatontapiliani, Our Lady of One Hundred Gates, was in Parikia, Nikolaidis told him. Built by Justinian the Great, it dated from the sixth century AD.

  Walking to the police station to meet Stathis, Patronas scanned the faces of the people. He stared hard at the English speakers, seeking to spot the Americans, but saw no one resembling the three students. By his calculation, nearly eighteen hours had elapsed since the suspects left Sifnos. They now had a significant head start.

  Stathis was waiting for them at the police station. He started in on Patronas as soon as he entered, cursing and insulting him, as angry as Patronas had ever seen him. Calling him names—tis manas sou o kolos, your mother’s ass—and other idiomatic expressions of a less than affectionate nature.

  “How the hell could you let them get away? Sifnos is not that big. Surely you could have prevented this.” On and on, it went. As the proverb said, Stathis passed him through fourteen generations.

  But beneath Stathis’ usual self-serving bluster, Patronas sensed fear. His boss was afraid that the kids weren’t done and would cut a swath through Greece the way those boys in Columbine had their high school.

  Cut from the same cloth, Bowdoin, Nielsen, and Gilbert were equally dangerous. The killing of Sami Alnasseri was testament to that. His boss was right to be frightened.

  The coroner called in the middle of Stathis’ tirade to report he’d successfully matched the DNA Patronas had sent him—the saliva on the beer bottles and Nielsen’s hair follicles—to the DNA on the metal pole and lock from Thanatos.

  “All three of your suspects handled it. There is no question in my mind.”

  “What about the knife?”

  “I haven’t processed it yet or the glass from the fire. I just wanted to let you know that in my opinion, you’ve got it right this time. Bowdoin, Gilbert, and Nielsen killed that little boy. I don’t know why. That’s up to you to establish. But they were definitely present when the crime was committed and undoubtedly were the ones who strung him up and slit his throat.”

  Stathis had overheard the conversation and was already on his cellphone, speaking to his colleagues in Athens, instructing them to put out an all-points bulletin for the three. “Contact Interpol and flag every flight heading to the United States from Europe.”

  His boss did a little victory dance after he hung up, hopping around like Zorba on the beach in the movie. “We’ve got those bastards. We’ve got them.”

  Patronas wasn’t so sure. So far the kids had outsmarted them every step of the way. Like a fool, he’d been taken in by their boyish antics. Whoever their leader was, he was a brilliant strategist. The Zodiac had been a masterstroke, a nearly foolproof method of escape.

  ‘Professor Moriarty,’ the priest had taken to calling the ringleader, after Sherlock Holmes’ legendary adversary, and Patronas concurred.

  Let Stathis talk all he wanted. It wasn’t over yet.

  Jonathan Alcott called later in the day to report he had heard back from his colleagues in Boston. “Although Richard Svenson was a brilliant scholar, he was considered to be a bit of a rogue,” he told Patronas. “Well known in the academic circles for his unorthodox teaching methods. Supposedly, he often took things too far, dwelling on the more grisly aspects of ancient religions in his classroom, of which, if my source is to be believed, there were many. Once he even had his students stage an ancient religious rite—Phoenician, my source said it was—so that they might experience firsthand ‘the mindset of the pagans.’ Svenson’s words, not mine.”

  Another piece of the puzzle dropped into place. “What did this reenactment entail?” Patron
as asked.

  “The last time we spoke, you mentioned human sacrifice. Evidently, that was the key element. He instructed one of his students to act as a priest and pretend to slit another student’s throat, to mime collecting the victim’s blood in a basin. Pretty unsavory, if you ask me. It got him into terrible trouble, and as far as I know, he never did it again.” Alcott hesitated for a moment. “The administrators at the university called him out, saying there’d been numerous complaints from parents, but he insisted it was his prerogative as a professor, a matter of academic freedom. By the way, he was on extended leave when he got killed, but whether this was imposed on him by the university or entirely voluntary, I don’t know. My guess is they were trying to force him out.”

  Patronas was writing furiously. “Anything else?”

  “Two more things. He got into trouble for diving off Cyprus in a restricted area. Also some artifacts he was responsible for disappeared.” Alcott paused and Patronas heard him shuffling papers. “Phoenician relics, a lock of some kind. The person I spoke to said it was priceless, there being only two or three like it in the entire world. Its loss caused a big uproar at the time.”

  There we have it, Patronas said to himself.

  Besides thievery, he wondered what else Svenson had taught his students, if ritual murder had once again been part of the curriculum.

  From what Patronas had seen on the Internet, people around the world continued to practice human sacrifice. One man on the Indian subcontinent confessed to killing his neighbor, certain the Hindu goddess, Kali, would welcome the sacrifice and reward him with the necessary funds to buy a car. Another had wanted to win the lottery. And then there was that awful group in London who’d killed and dismembered a boy and thrown his remains in the Thames River because a witch doctor from their native land claimed the child was possessed by demons.

  If God, the one his mother had believed in—not Kali and her friends—decided in His infinite wisdom to put an end to the human race, Patronas, for one, would vote for it. Sifnos had convinced him. Leave the grasshoppers and the zebras, the meadowlarks and the snakes, but get rid of man.

  Seeking the three fugitives, Patronas and his associates worked their way across Paros over the next forty-eight hours. Tembelos, responsible for the airport, checked every flight that left the island while Patronas, Evangelos Demos, and Petros Nikolaidis spoke to the charter boat captains and ticket agents, the staffs of the hotels and the restaurants.

  During the day, they inspected the sunbathers at the beach and at night haunted the clubs the port was famous for and the bars young foreigners were known to frequent. They ate on the run, souvlakia and tyropitas mostly, a slice of pizza on occasion. They labored around the clock and hadn’t showered or shaved since arriving on the island.

  The fevered pace was taking its toll. Patronas, for one, was so weary he could barely put one foot in front of the other.

  After they completed the search in Parikia, they moved on to Naoussa, another large tourist center, and from there to villages up and down the coast. It being late summer, there was an enormous number of ferries. Working with the Coast Guard, they inspected every one of them prior to departure. They even spoke to the crews of the cruise ships, ordering them to be on the look-out for stowaways.

  The coroner continued to call with updates, additional evidence of the Americans’ complicity in the crime. The toxicology screen had come back, and there was evidence the child had ingested Rohypnol.

  “What’s Rohypnol?” Patronas asked.

  “It’s potent date rape drug. Give it to someone and you can do just about anything you want with them; they won’t remember it. It’s easily available on college campuses throughout the United States, but in Greece it would be nearly impossible to obtain, as the drug is virtually nonexistent here. The students must have brought it with them.”

  “So, the Rohypnol alone would indicate American involvement,” Patronas said.

  “Indeed. As far as I know, its use is only prevalent in the United States, and even there only among the young people, those roughly the same age as your suspects.”

  The coroner went on to say that according to the trace evidence on the fragments of glass, Michael Nielsen, as Patronas suspected, was the one who’d thrown the Molotov cocktail into the migrant camp. However, there was little to link the students to the murder of Richard Svenson. His body had been in the water too long and all trace evidence had been washed away.

  The coroner had also heard back from the archeologists at the university. The baby’s skeleton dated from the time of the Phoenicians, perhaps even a little before. After Patronas hung up, he called Jonathan Alcott and told him to organize his dig; the bones were old.

  “I’ll get on it today,” Alcott said. “I know some experts in the area and I’ll call them. They’ll be ecstatic.”

  Proof of the kids’ guilt in the death of Sami Alnasseri continued to accumulate. The priest called and said a staff member at the summer study told him Michael Nielsen had been in trouble in high school.

  “It raised questions about his suitability for the program, but in the end they decided to take him. Allegedly he stalked a girl in his class, following her home from school and peering in the windows of her house. A couple of times he wore a mask of some malevolent movie character named, of all things, ‘Freddie,’ which terrified her. What jumped out at me was that her dog disappeared around the same time.”

  The priest was excited. Patronas could hear it in his voice.

  “I don’t know if you are aware of this, Yiannis, but if he did indeed kill her dog, that indicates he was already a very dangerous individual. Such activity at an early age is considered one of the three identifying characteristics of serial killers. As children, they wet the bed, torture animals, and set fires. It appears that with Michael Nielsen, we have two out of three.”

  “So he’s a psychopath?”

  “I prefer ‘evil.’ I loathe psychiatric terms.”

  A technician in the coroner’s office called to report that the lab was finished with Svenson’s body and that Patronas needed to inform the American’s family.

  It was a very sad conversation, Svenson’s son sobbing and wanting to know how much coffins cost in Greece, whether or not his father’s body was fit to travel. He and Patronas spoke in code; neither uttered the words ‘embalmed’ or ‘decayed.’

  As far as Patronas knew, no one had come forward to claim Sami Alnasseri’s body. The child’s remains still rested in a drawer at the morgue. He intended to fly to Athens after the case was over and arrange a proper burial for the boy. He’d even looked up Muslim funeral rites in preparation—how Syrians laid their dead to rest. He and Sami’s aunt would go to the cemetery and do whatever was necessary. He’d pay for everything out of his own pocket and place the child’s treasures next to him in the coffin.

  He’d had so little, Sami—not just worldly goods, but so little time.

  Patronas had called the victim’s aunt at her hospital room in Athens a couple of times to check in. She’d had her surgery and was doing about as well as could be expected, she said. “A woman comes every morning and makes me walk. It is very hard and hurts much.”

  “Did the graft take?”

  “Yes. The doctor, he is pleased. He brought people to see and everybody, they are smiling.”

  Thinking he might need to make further arrangements for her, Patronas asked where she planned to go after she was discharged from the hospital.

  “I don’t know. Maybe to Germany to be with my brother,” she said. “I am a leaf in the wind.”

  “We’re closing in on Sami’s killers.” Patronas struggled to pronounce the words correctly in Arabic. “Soon we will arrest them and it will be over.”

  Her voice caught. “It will never be over, not for me. It will hurt my heart always.”

  As it will mine, Patronas thought, but didn’t say.

  Patronas had tried repeatedly to get in touch with Lydia Pappas. Not for a lengt
hy talk—there was no time for that—just to check in. He’d called from Antiparos and from Paros multiple times. After ringing for a few minutes, her phone always went straight to voicemail.

  He tried again now from the hotel room. As before, the phone rang and rang, but she didn’t pick up. Worried, he called the owner of Leandros and asked him to check her apartment.

  A few minutes later, the man called back. “She’s sitting out on the terrace by herself. I told her you were trying to reach her and to call you.”

  Lydia was as friendly as ever when they finally connected. “Oh, Yiannis, I’m so glad you called. How’s it going?”

  “Case is still in limbo.” Still suspicious of her, he was unwilling to say more.

  Her phone had been giving her trouble, she said. It didn’t always ring when it should and she didn’t know what was wrong with it. “Probably need a new one.” Her classes were winding down and she’d been writing up the final evaluations of her students.

  Slowly, they moved on to more serious topics.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” Lydia said. “The way you screamed in your sleep after that man knifed you. I don’t know how things work here, but in the States when a cop gets injured on the job, they have to talk to somebody. You might want to consider it. According to psychiatrists, physical or emotional trauma can affect a person for a long, long time. They call it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.’ ”

  Swell, Patronas thought, she wants me to see a shrink.

  “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night either,” she confessed. “I start thinking about the fire in the camp and it’s like I’m reliving it—the smell of the smoke, the sound the branch made when it fell on me. I just can’t get away from it. It’s even worse with the child. What was his name, Sami? I’ll be doing something and suddenly I remember him and find myself in tears.”

  “You can’t just walk away from these things, Lydia. They affect you. All your life long, they affect you. Call it what you will, post-traumatic stress or battle fatigue, but you’re not the same person you were before and you never will be. Maybe talking to a shrink can help you deal with it, but it never really goes away.”