by Alex Archer
Turning her back on the filing cabinets, she moved to the desk. She sat in Petrova’s chair and began riffling through the folders on top. One of them caught her eye, and when she pulled it from the stack, nearly knocking over a cup of moldy coffee in the process, she saw that instead of a name this file had a number written on its tab. Curious, she opened it.
Inside she found a report on a twenty-eight-year-old male who had been discovered dead of a drug overdose. Or, at least, that was what she thought it said; she knew a few words in Czech, and Slovakian was quite similar. She looked for the section of the report where the individual’s name would be listed and found the spaces blank.
That was when it clicked.
The number was for those cases where the subject was unidentified.
She searched through the stack and quickly checked the handful of files that were identified by number only, glancing at the photograph stapled to the inside left of each folder. They were split roughly between men and women, but none of them were the woman she was looking for.
She sat back, flummoxed and irritated, wondering where Petrova had put the file. She tried to remember if he’d had anything in his hands; perhaps he’d taken the file with him.
No, his hands had been empty. She was certain of it.
Which meant it had to be here somewhere.
She leaned forward, deep in thought, and only realized the doors to the morgue had opened when they banged against the interior wall. With seconds to avoid being seen, if she hadn’t been already, Annja did the only thing she could think of.
She slipped underneath the desk.
A male voice called out in Slovakian. Annja only recognized one word—Petrova—but it wasn’t too hard to figure out what was being said given the tone and inflection. “Dr. Petrova, are you in there?” or something similar was her guess.
She’d left the door to the office partially closed. Now she heard it squeak as someone pushed it fully open and footfalls sounded close by.
“Petrova?”
Annja held her breath, praying that whoever was standing on the other side of the desk didn’t notice the damage to the doorjamb or find anything irregular about the fact that the lights had been left on in Petrova’s absence. Something thumped onto the desktop, making her jump slightly, but she didn’t give herself away.
Seconds passed and Annja didn’t hear anything more. Had Petrova’s visitor left the room?
She let her breath out slowly and waited a few more seconds before climbing quietly out from beneath the desk.
No one was in sight.
As she got to her feet, her gaze fell on the manila envelope in the center of Petrova’s desk. Picking it up, she opened it and slid out the file it contained.
The dead woman’s face stared back at her from a picture inside the file.
Annja pulled out her cell phone and quickly took pictures of each page. When she was finished, she returned the file to the envelope and put the envelope back on the desk.
Five minutes later she was exiting the hospital and heading for her hotel, wondering how she was going to get the pages translated.
* * *
TELLING HERSELF SHE didn’t really have a choice, Annja gritted her teeth and dialed the number. The phone rang twice and then a smooth male voice said, “Annja. What a pleasant surprise.”
“Hello, Garin.”
“Things must be quite amok for you to be calling me. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Like Annja, Garin was tied to the sword. He’d been there the day Joan of Arc was executed, a fact Annja had once found hard to accept. That any man should be allowed to live over five hundred years was a miracle; that this gift had been given to this man, rogue and scoundrel that he was, often had her shaking her head at the unfathomable nature of the universe.
She and Garin had always had a volatile relationship. He was good-looking, in an alpha-male kind of way, with black hair, dark eyes and a neatly trimmed goatee that gave him a slightly villainous air. He was not only extremely rich but extremely arrogant, as well. When she’d first met him, Garin had tried to take the sword from her by any means possible, believing its existence made him vulnerable, but recently they’d settled into a kind of uneasy truce. Thankfully he’d also stopped trying to kill his former master, Roux, the other “old man” in her life.
She didn’t trust Garin as far as she could throw him, but she had, from time to time, relied on his help when no other options were available. Like now.
Annja needed to have the file translated, and she couldn’t go to her usual sources. Doug would wonder what she was doing messing about with the investigation around the dead woman instead of working on the episode he was now funding. Her friend Bart in the Brooklyn police department would ask how she’d gotten her hands on an autopsy file that was only twenty-four hours old and what, exactly, she needed it for. She wasn’t ready to answer either question just yet.
She had even, momentarily, considered trying to track down Brigitta, but that seemed like more trouble that it was worth.
She’d phoned Roux first. His “gray areas” were less rigid than her own, and she knew he wouldn’t hesitate to help her, but his majordomo, Henshaw, had said that Roux was playing poker in Monte Carlo for the next few days, and Annja knew that nothing could drag him away from the table when the going was hot.
That left Annja with very little choice.
It was Garin or Brigitta.
She’d almost—almost!—gone with the girl.
But in the end she’d sensed that this was too important to spend all that time tracking her down. Something had pulled her into this mess and she was determined to get to the bottom of it.
She gritted her teeth and said, “I need your help, Garin.”
“Ah, such sweet music to my ears. I’m at your service. Give the word and I’ll have the chopper pick you up and whisk you away from all your troubles.”
“Totally not going to happen,” she told him sharply. “Can you be serious now?”
He laughed, and Annja found herself turning red at the sound. That son of a...
“What can I do for you, Ms. Creed?” he asked while working to stifle his laughter.
“Do you know someone who can read Slovakian?”
“For the right price, I can find someone who reads ancient Sumerian. Slovakian certainly won’t be a problem.”
Annja had hoped as much, but it was good to hear her hunch confirmed. “All right. I’m sending you an email with some documents I need to have translated.”
She had already sent the images from her phone to her laptop and had the email ready to go. All she had to do was hit Send.
Garin’s joviality disappeared as he turned his attention to business. “It’s coming through now.” A pause. “Okay, I’ve got it.”
“If you can have your people take a look...” Annja began, but didn’t get any further.
“This is an autopsy report.”
“How do you...?”
“Twenty-three years old. Good physical shape. Dark hair and eyes. Name unknown. What have you gotten yourself into, Annja?”
The way he asked the question made her certain it was rhetorical, but she answered nonetheless.
“I stopped to help an injured woman the other night and she died from her injuries. I want to know what happened. How did you get the information translated so fast?”
“Hmm, what’s this now? A toxicology report?”
What on earth?
Then, suddenly, she understood. Garin could read Slovakian.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“The toxicology report? Completely inconclusive.”
“Inconclusive for what?”
“Anything. The blood they drew was apparently contaminated with a foreign substance they couldn’t identify. There’s also a note that the sample available was of such a small size they couldn’t run the screening test more than once.”
Annja frowned. “Why didn’t they just request ano
ther sample?”
She could hear Garin tapping the keys on his computer. “Doesn’t say.”
“Okay, forget that,” she said, waving it off for the time being. “The main autopsy report should say the cause of death.”
“It does.”
Annja waited, but Garin didn’t say anything more.
“Well, what is it?” she asked.
“What do I get out of it?”
For a moment, Annja was taken aback. What does he get out of it?
Then she remembered she was dealing with Garin. She’d never met a more selfish individual. He didn’t do anything unless there was a percentage in it for him.
This included, apparently.
“Have you no shame, Garin? A woman was murdered.”
“Happens every day, dear Annja, more times than you can count. That’s irrelevant to me. You want to know what this report says. I want to know what I get if I give you that information.”
The problem was that Annja didn’t really have anything to trade. Garin was richer than most developing countries and could buy almost anything that caught his eye. If he couldn’t buy it, he could usually charm someone into providing it for him. He quite literally wanted for nothing when it came to material possessions. Yes, on occasion Annja had been able to entice him with a particularly interesting artifact or with information on a lost culture or an intriguing historical puzzle; but this time around she had nothing to trade.
“I’m asking you nicely, Garin.”
“And what? I’m just supposed to give you what you need because of that?”
She knew he was pushing her buttons, goading her into losing her temper, but she could feel her control slipping away despite the knowing.
“You know what? Never mind. I’ll figure it out myself!” She pulled the phone away from her ear and hit the end call button.
Sitting down in front of her laptop, she called up an online translation service and set the software to convert her English words to Slovak. Then she typed “cause of death” into the box on the left. In the box on the right, the words príčina úmrtia appeared.
“Ha!” she said, as if Garin could hear her back in Munich.
Annja then called up the photos she’d taken in the morgue office and searched them for the phrase. She found it on page four, and in the box next to it were the words strata krvi.
Another query into the online translator and she sat back, staring at the words blinking at her from her computer screen.
Blood loss.
There were several lines of notes directly beneath, no doubt giving more details, but try as she might she couldn’t get the translation to make any sense. The words weren’t all that clear in the photograph and without any real knowledge of the Slovak language all she was doing was guessing at what some of the words and letters might be. The translation software was kicking back nonsense as a result.
She sat there, tapping her fingers on the tabletop. Then, with a sigh, she turned and picked up her phone once more. She hit the redial button and waited for Garin to answer.
He picked up before it finished ringing the first time.
Of course.
“A weekend of skiing with me at my chalet in Switzerland,” he said.
“Lunch at the Mall of the Americas in Bloomington, Minnesota.”
She couldn’t think of a more innocuous place. It would drive Garin completely nuts.
He was far from finished with his bargaining, however.
“An overnight visit at my home here in Munich. Pajamas optional.”
Right.
“Dinner in Paris at Roux’s, with Henshaw as chaperone.”
Garin sputtered indignantly. “Roux’s? Henshaw? Are you mad, woman? I’ve already spent more years than I care to count under that senile old man’s thumb, and his manservant—” Garin said the word the way someone else might say the plague or hemorrhagic fever “—is even worse than he is.”
Annja had him and she knew it.
“Fine. Last offer, take it or leave it. Dinner in New York at a restaurant of my choosing.”
“And a nightcap at that charming little flat of yours in Brooklyn?”
“Dinner. That’s it,” she said.
“Fine.”
Garin’s tone was one of annoyance, but Annja had learned to detect the subtleties in his voice, and she thought he was secretly pleased.
She had to admit she was, too. A little. At least she’d get a first-class meal out of it.
“The woman died of blood loss.”
“I already know that! What do the notes beneath the cause of death say?”
Garin was silent for a few moments as he puzzled it out. “Whoever wrote this has the handwriting of a child,” he said at last.
And you’ve got the disposition of one, Annja thought.
“A few of the words are hard to make out, but for the most part the notes appear to deal with the excessive blood loss the victim had undergone prior to dying.”
“Excessive?”
“That’s what it says. Apparently he didn’t have to drain the fluid from the body before beginning the autopsy. He found two large puncture wounds in the thigh close to the femoral artery and surmises that the blood loss was a result of these injuries.”
Annja knew the human animal was tenacious, that it would fight for its life with tooth and nail if necessary, and that sometimes—not often, but sometimes—people could cling to this world by the narrowest of margins, refusing to give in to that creeping darkness that waited to swallow them whole. But to remain alive with only the barest amount of blood left in the body? That went beyond tenaciousness, verging instead on the miraculous.
So says the woman carrying the mystical sword of a long-dead saint, Annja thought with a wry shake of her head.
One thing was clear: this had been no accident.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“Yes. So where shall we dine? I’m thinking perhaps...”
“Thanks, Garin, you’ve been really helpful. I’ll call you about dinner. Bye for now.”
She hung up the phone before he could say anything more. Annja knew he wouldn’t call her back; his pride wouldn’t let him. She would have to deal with him sooner or later, but for now, later was just fine.
She stood there, pondering what she’d just learned. It seemed clear that the woman had been the victim of a vicious attack. Maybe the killer was trying to tie his activities to the legend of the Blood Countess to earn greater notoriety. All hell was going to break loose when the press learned that the victim had been drained of most of her blood. If Annja was going to find justice for this woman, she needed to stay ahead of all that.
The first priority was finding out just who the victim was. Hopefully the woman’s identity would lead to the killer.
The police hadn’t been able to identify the victim through fingerprints or dental records, so she must not have been in trouble with the law. Nor had she applied for work with any government agency or any major corporate firm. Given that Nové Mesto was one of the larger communities in the area, it seemed likely that the woman had not come from the city but from one of the smaller, rural towns nearby.
Like Čachtice.
Best to start there, Annja thought as she headed for her car.
10
Annja had learned that crimes were not usually solved by brilliant deductions or leaps of logic in the style of Sherlock Holmes but by the slow and steady accumulation of information. Like archaeologists at a dig site, sifting through layers of dirt to get to the artifacts buried by the passage of time, so, too, do detectives sift through the evidence to find out who committed the crime and why.
She knew the police were hoping someone would see the press conference, recognize the woman’s picture and call to tell them who she was. But that could take days, maybe even weeks, and Annja was convinced the killer would strike again, and soon. Better to act now than to wait for information to come in on its own timetable.
When Annja a
rrived in the village of Čachtice, she parked in the town square. Taking the photograph of the dead woman with her, she began knocking on doors, asking those who answered if they knew the woman in the picture.
She had spent some time with her English-Slovak phrasebook and memorized a few key phrases, such as “Do you speak English?” and “Have you seen this woman?” Combined with the words for “yes” and “no”—ano and nie, respectively—Annja had all the Slovakian she needed to make a little headway into the subject of the murdered woman should anyone be willing to talk with her.
Unfortunately, she soon discovered that they weren’t.
Time and time again Annja would knock on the door and be greeted pleasantly enough by the home owner, only to have that same individual shake their head and withdraw the moment she pulled out the victim’s photograph. Several times those of the older generation took one look at the picture and gave her the sign of the horns to ward off evil—a hand gesture formed by extending the index and little fingers while holding the ring and middle fingers down with the thumb—before slamming the door in her face.
Annja put their reactions down to their not wanting to talk about the dead with a stranger, but she had to admit to a certain amount of unease each time it happened. She knew it was crazy, but it still made her wonder just what these people knew that she didn’t. The hairs on the back of her neck would stand at attention every time they forked their fingers at her.
She wandered down street after street, knocking on every door she found but getting nowhere. It was long past dark by the time she decided to call it quits. Tired from being on her feet all day and frustrated at the lack of results, Annja headed back to her car. She glanced over her shoulder and thought she saw something duck out of sight behind one of the buildings about thirty yards away.
Probably just a dog, she thought, and kept walking.
But after a few more minutes an itch began to form between her shoulder blades. She’d had the feeling often enough to know what it meant. Someone was watching her.
She stopped, turned and scanned the road behind her.
