18th Abduction

by Patterson, James

“Keep going,” Yuki said.

  “I’m thinking out loud,” I said. “I admit I don’t know how Petrović would know Carly—or any of them. But it’s not impossible, right?”

  “No, this is all good,” Yuki said. “You could be onto something. Want to toss this around with Claire and Cindy?”

  “Another good idea,” I said. Sometimes we amazed ourselves.

  Yuki and I hugged good-bye, and I drove home thinking about Petrović, wondering if it was possible that he’d gotten his hands on the three schoolteachers from Pacific View Prep.

  I’d do anything to find out if and how.

  CHAPTER 63

  The next morning I left home early so I could meet the girls for breakfast at MacBain’s before work.

  When I hit Bryant and Langston, I heard shouting and saw that Bryant Street was cordoned off from Seventh to Harriet and mobbed by protesters.

  I made the required detour and a few turns before I could park under the overpass on Harriet Street, then I walked up the block to the intersection and saw the protesters. They were mostly high-school kids, hundreds of them. They wore maroon-and-gold Pacific View sweat shirts and were surging toward the Hall of Justice, carrying signs with the faces of Carly, Susan, and Adele, and chanting, “Do your job. Do your job.”

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  I was doing my job, as was Conklin and the homicide crew, and the volunteer cops, our first-class ME, and the crime lab. But even the manpower, the twenty-four-hour days, the interviews, and the deep research hadn’t produced a live suspect.

  Yes, I felt defensive, but there were no acceptable excuses.

  The Pacific View student body, the parents of the three women, and all of the city’s citizens had every right to demand answers.

  Someone shouted my name.

  I turned to see Claire coming toward me, only yards away on Harriet. She tossed her head in the direction of the demonstration and looked as distressed as I felt.

  We put our arms around each other’s waists and crossed the street together. Cindy and Yuki waved to us from the entrance to MacBain’s, and we burst through the door together.

  Syd MacBain said, “Take any table you like.”

  No discussion needed, we went for our favorite table.

  We ordered coffee and tea, and I swore Cindy in, as usual, officially notifying her that this meeting was off the record. She rolled her baby blues, shook her head, making her blond curls bounce, and said, “Gaaaaahhhhhh.”

  Claire laughed, Yuki joined in with her rolling, merry giggle, and then we were all laughing, because you cannot hear Yuki’s laughter without falling apart.

  I had to give it to Cindy. She broke the gloom into pieces.

  Once the hot drinks arrived, Yuki took charge and briefed our group on Slobodan Petrović’s suppression of Djoba, Bosnia, two decades ago.

  “He’s here now,” she said, “going under an alias, Antonije Branko.”

  “Petrović is in San Francisco?” Cindy asked.

  “Looks like it,” Yuki said. “A man presumed to be Petrović just opened a steak house on California.”

  “Tony’s? The one that used to be Oscar’s?” asked Claire.

  Yuki said, “That’s the one.”

  Claire and Cindy were shocked. They listened avidly as Yuki described an aspect of Petrović’s modus operandi—his documented pattern of rape, torture, and murder. I’d spent a restless night talking it over with Joe, comparing Petrović’s MO to the strangulation and hanging of Carly Myers in a motel shower.

  I wasn’t yet convinced that the dots, in fact, connected.

  When Yuki turned the meeting over to me, I explained that Petrović was known to have kept women prisoners in a rape hotel, and that he had sadistic tendencies.

  Cindy said, “Go on,” and I did.

  I said, “Myers was found in a motel frequented by prostitutes. With nothing more than what we’ve said, I can’t help but wonder if this bizarre torture and hanging of Carly Myers was committed by Petrović. And if so, is he on a roll? Has he stashed Saran and Jones in other motels around town? Because we don’t know where they are. We don’t have a clue.”

  I thought of those students chanting “Do your job” just down the block. Was Petrović a lead? Or was I just hoping for something to give us a handle on this kidnapping and murder?

  Claire’s voice broke into my thoughts.

  She said, “I just got this back from the lab last night. These are impressions of those unusual premortem cuts on Carly’s body.”

  Cindy hadn’t heard about those cuts. She jumped in with questions.

  “What kind of cuts? Can I see the pictures? Oh. Oh. Those don’t look fatal. Were they, Claire?”

  Claire said, “No, they weren’t fatal. These wounds were probably inflicted to scare her and make her compliant. Sometime after that, she was asphyxiated, and then, when she was dead, she was hanged. Seems to me that the hanging was for effect. She was dressed in a men’s white shirt—probably just to hide the wounds, make a better-looking corpse.”

  Claire and I have been close friends since we were both rookies, and I can read her pretty well.

  From the look on her face, I was sure that Claire was about to drop some kind of news we hadn’t heard before.

  CHAPTER 64

  My phone buzzed, Richie texting me that Jacobi wanted to meet with us right away.

  I texted back. Ten more minutes. Maybe fifteen.

  Then I tuned back in to what Claire was saying. She had opened another folder of photo enlargements, saying, “These pictures are of the latex molds pulled from the slashes in Carly’s torso. See here: thin slabs of latex and a ridge where the latex material seeped into the wounds. The report suggests that the wounds may have been caused by throwing stars.”

  “Are those the same as ninja stars?” Cindy asked.

  Without waiting for an answer, Cindy began googling throwing stars on her phone.

  “Here we go,” she said. “Actual name of throwing stars is shuriken. They’re of Japanese origin but used in other countries. ‘Historically, shuriken are made out of almost any metallic found objects’ … dah-dah-dah … ‘star-shaped, five-pointed, swastika-shaped,’ and so on.”

  She swiped on her phone, read another page, and resumed her summary.

  “The stars are not meant as a killing weapon—to your point, Claire. They’re used more to injure and distract and to supplement swords and other weapons … Uh, they’re usually five to eight inches in diameter, very thin, thrown with a smooth movement so that they slip effortlessly out of the hand. Okay, paraphrasing here, the victim often doesn’t see the star and thinks he’s been cut by an invisible sword.”

  Claire said, “Yeah. That thin blade sounds right. One of the wounds was a slice on Carly’s forearm. Like defense against a glancing blade.”

  Cindy showed us an image of throwing stars of all shapes tacked to a display board. Then she put down her phone and said, “Throwing stars are illegal in many countries and some states. They’re illegal in California.”

  I remembered what Claire had said when I went to the morgue to see Carly Myers’s body: “If you find the weapon, you may find the killer.”

  Forensics had homed in on the most probable weapon. But how were throwing stars a link to Slobodan Petrović?

  The check arrived. Cash dropped on the table from four hands. We hugged and headed off to work.

  I moved fast, edging through the demonstration and taking the front steps, wanting to get to that meeting with Conklin and Jacobi.

  I had a lot to tell them about the genocidal war criminal living near the Panhandle. That he had a documented history of torture, rape, and mass murder.

  And that, according to postwar witness reports, Petrović was a sadist: he made a point of hanging his victims, and it seemed like he just loved to do it.

  CHAPTER 65

  Security called up to Joe, saying that he had a visitor, Miss Anna Sotovina.

  “Send her up,”
Joe said.

  Anna had stood him up for last evening’s six-thirty meeting, turned off her phone, and not returned his texts and calls. He’d been worried about her all night, and now he was pissed off.

  When she knocked on the doorframe, he checked her out. She was dressed for her job and didn’t seem scared or injured. He asked her to come in and indicated a chair.

  She started speaking as she crossed the room.

  “I turned off my phone,” she said. “I didn’t want it to ring when I was waiting in my car.”

  “You didn’t think to call and let me know where you were?”

  “I know. I know. I had a sudden idea to follow Petrović home from the restaurant.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “After lunch I went to Tony’s. I used a car from the lot so that he wouldn’t recognize me by my car. I waited for hours and he didn’t leave the restaurant. I stayed there all day. I peed in a bottle. I didn’t leave or move.”

  Joe was fuming, but he nodded, then said, “Go on.”

  “I saw the man with the evil smile. He left at 7:00 p.m. That’s why I didn’t come here. I saw him and had to decide what to do. If I followed him, maybe he would recognize me.”

  “Oh, you think so?”

  “You’re being sarcastic with me? Really, Joe?”

  He waited her out as she stared at him with an angry, hurt look on her face. She continued to glare as she debriefed him.

  “I decided to stay outside the restaurant. I watched customers come and go, come and go, and then I still waited, until all the lights went out. Petrović never left. So I drove past his house. I didn’t see the Jaguar. There was only one light on upstairs. I drove home and I circled the block.”

  Anna went on.

  “No one was watching me. Still, I parked two blocks away, and then I walked home and came in through the backyard. I am sure that I wasn’t seen.”

  Joe said, “And did you drive by his house this morning, on your way here?”

  “Yes. His car wasn’t there.”

  “And you drove by the restaurant?”

  “They don’t open until noon,” she said.

  “So what are you doing, Anna? Are you studying law enforcement online? You think you should get an honorary FBI badge and a gun? Do you think you can sneak up behind Petrović at a traffic light, yell ‘Hands up,’ and bring him in? What the hell are you thinking?”

  She stared at him and he didn’t flinch. It was unbelievable that this woman, so completely out of her depth, unarmed, untrained, had been tailing a notorious war criminal and now was trying to stare him down.

  Her lack of fear was alarming. If she kept this up, he’d be called to identify her body lying in the street, his card in her handbag.

  She said, “You don’t scare me, Joe. And you don’t tell me what to do. I survived this fat man when he was fucking me on the floor. I survived what he did to me.”

  She pulled her hair away. In daylight the burn scar was like shiny cloth, bunched up and glued to her cheek from eyebrow to jawline.

  Anna said, “I saw what he did to my friends and my sister, and I found my dead mother, naked, in a shallow grave. My beloved husband, same. My baby in a ditch. I got away. By night. By foot. By boat and train and more by foot. So do not tell me I can’t watch him. Don’t tell me that. Either help me. Or leave me alone.”

  She got up from the chair and headed for the door.

  Joe called after her.

  “Anna. Come back. I have pictures for you to look at. Do you want to identify your soldier in the Escalade. Or do you not?”

  CHAPTER 66

  Anna stopped in the doorway and, without answering, walked back to the side chair and sat down.

  Joe swiveled the computer screen so she could see the enlarged photo of the soldiers grouped around the monument at the center of Djoba’s main street. Beyond the monument, scattered bodies lined the road.

  Anna looked at the photo, searched from the left side to the right. Her eyes stopped on the image of Petrović, then swung back to the other end of the row.

  She reached out a shaking finger.

  “That’s him. The man in the Escalade.”

  Joe said, “You’re sure?”

  Tears sprang from her eyes.

  “I’m sure,” she said. “That’s him. I can still smell his stinking breath. He’s a twisted bastard. But I don’t know his name.”

  Joe said, “Okay, Anna, okay. I’ll get an ID on him. Not today, but we have access to the identity papers of these troops. I’m sorry for what I said before. I’m scared for you, understand? Let me walk you to your car.”

  “I can find it,” she said.

  It was a struggle, but he didn’t say “Stay away from Petrović” as he walked with Anna to the elevator. His office was on the thirteenth floor, and it took long, uncomfortable moments for the elevator car to travel up from the ground floor. During that time Anna stared at the elevator doors and Joe stared at Anna’s profile.

  He pictured the cruel episodes in her life as if they had happened to a relative or a dear friend, and it pained him. He was taking this case too personally, and that worried him. Still. He would tell Steinmetz he was assigning a 24/7 tail on Petrović.

  The elevator ground upward and lurched to a stop. The doors slid open. Anna stepped in, turned around, and punched the button for the ground floor. She looked up at Joe as he told her he’d call her when he had new information. She thanked him and the doors closed.

  Joe walked back to his office and took a good look again at his screen capture.

  He paid most attention to the soldier Anna had identified as the man who had confronted her on Fell Street. As she had told him, the man was a regular soldier, not an officer, and he was in uniform—fatigues, the dark-colored beret, smooth-shaven. He had been adjusting his beret, and in this frame his face was blurred.

  Joe cued up the thirty-second video of the men posing in front of the monument and cut screenshots every second. He reviewed his work and found the clearest image of the man Anna had pointed to in the second row.

  He printed out the still shot for his file and drew a circle around the unidentified soldier.

  And funny thing, the more he looked at this man, the more certain he became that the soldier in the photo was a younger version of the gray-haired man he’d seen with “Tony” in the steak house last week.

  This man had been saying something to Petrović. Like, “Yes, I just heard. I’ll take care of her.” Something like that.

  Joe had been shocked to see Petrović come out of the kitchen and had focused on him. He hadn’t been listening closely to Grayhair at that time. But in retrospect, the odd phrase had a terrible ring. It could have meant anything; that a payment was due to the hostess or the linen company—or something darker.

  Petrović had said to Joe at the time, “Where’s your girlfriend? The one with the bike.”

  When Petrović’s sidekick had said, “I’ll take care of her,” had he been referring to Anna?

  Petrović had seen Anna on the bike. And he’d seen Anna with Joe when he’d taken Petrović’s photo coming down the steps of the yellow house. But did Petrović also know Anna from raping and burning her in Djoba?

  Despite the genocidal rape and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, as far as Joe knew, Petrović hadn’t committed any crime in the USA. But maybe Escalade Man had, and if so, he might have a police record.

  Hai Nguyen was likely out for lunch, but Joe attached the video and the clearest screen capture to an email, marking it URGENT.

  He wrote, “Hai. Serbian soldier in the second row from the bottom, third in from the left. Djoba, Bosnia. I need his name.” He sent the email.

  Joe went to the break room for coffee, thinking about that nameless soldier raping Anna. He knew her movements here in San Francisco and had the balls to try to intimidate her. He recognized her. How could he not? Maybe he had ID’d her to Petrović.

  And there was Anna, a defiant, unarmed c
ivilian stalking a killer who just might like to put her away for good.

  CHAPTER 67

  Adele assumed that it was morning because Marko had woken her by pulling her out of the bed by her hair.

  “Please. You’re hurting me.”

  She didn’t actually know what time it was, what day, how long she and Susan had been trapped in this gilded cage. No clocks, no outdoor light, no sense of the rhythms of the day and night. It was maddening, but it wasn’t the worst of their treatment.

  Despite the promise of freedom for good behavior, they had been punished repeatedly. Punched. Raped. Criticized and threatened and locked in their rooms without time or sound or hope.

  Now she and Susan were in the glossy, peach-colored dressing room, pearly as the interior of a conch shell and lit with the softest of makeup lights. They sat in vanity chairs facing the large, beveled mirror.

  Susan was fair, strawberry blond, tall. Adele was dark-haired, wiry, athletic. They each had been given a wardrobe and a box of cosmetics suited to their hair color and complexion.

  Today they were similarly dressed in silk dressing gowns over their matching baby doll pajamas. They’d been instructed to look beautiful. But they’d never been a fraction as terrified in their lives.

  The dressing room was situated between their two bedrooms. Beyond the bedroom suite was a large sitting room, thickly carpeted, luxuriously appointed with down-stuffed upholstered furniture, a marble fireplace, and a grand piano.

  There were high ceilings and tall windows that were heavily draped. The room’s soft lighting came from torchiere lamps and the sconces on the walls between the bookshelves. The ceilings were decorated with ornate moldings and a chandelier hanging from a gilded plaster medallion.

  Adele would never forget the glittering crystal and the fancy plasterwork on the ceiling. She’d stared at it as the men had taken turns on her.

  Susan was brushing her hair. She asked, “Adele? Are you all right?”