18th Abduction (Women's Murder Club) (16 page)

Yuki said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you about this dead Serbian war criminal, right?”

I laughed, wondering whether I could tell Yuki that I knew exactly who she was talking about. “You could say that again.”

“Well, just hang on,” said Yuki. “He’s not dead.”

She grabbed her bag from the footwell and pulled out a page torn from a newspaper. It was an ad with the headline,
STEAK HOUSE OPENS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. MEET TONY BRANKO
.

There was a photo of the new owner, Antonije Branko, standing outside the door under the awning with
TONY’S PLACE FOR STEAK
spelled out in flashy gold script.

Yuki said, “One of my coworkers showed this to me. He had family in Bosnia during the war. He knows this Tony as Slobodan Petrović. I looked up the photos of Petrović when he was on trial at The Hague. The names don’t match, but
the photos do. Apparently, Petrović got out of Bosnia somehow and opened an upmarket steak house on California Street.”

I didn’t have the expected response.

“You’re nodding your head?” Yuki said. “That’s it? War criminal living in San Francisco and you nod your head?”

“I’m trying to take it in,” I said. “It’s a lot.”

She took my lack of astonishment as a rebuke.

“Are you
kidding
? I thought this would blow your mind. It did mine. But never mind. I’m clueing Parisi in in the morning, and then I’m going to take this to the FBI. They’ve got to know that a mass murderer is a local restaurateur, now open for business.”

“I hear you,” I said.

Joe would have to understand my sharing information with Yuki when I told him that she was already in the know.

“Okay,” she said, “I’m waiting.”

Yuki took back the water bottle and slugged half of it down.

I said, “I already knew. Joe’s working on this.”

She whipped her head around and gave me a startled look. Then she said, “Share a few more words, if you don’t mind.”

“The FBI has been duly notified and is aware of Petrović. A survivor from the massacre at Djoba came to Joe, and he’s looking into all of it—how and why Petrović’s case at the ICC got kicked, why he’s here, what it means.”

Yuki shook her head. “
Now
you tell me.”

Yuki was an assistant DA, a prosecutor. She was dogged, and yet if there was no case to dig into, she’d drop it. The FBI was on it. There was nothing for her to do.

I said, “Sorry for not volunteering this, Yuki, but its Joe’s case. I needed to know first what you knew before divulging what Joe told me in confidence. Okay?”

She nodded, disappointed but understanding.

I stuck my key into the ignition, and Yuki opened her door and started to get out. I was thinking fast. Was Yuki’s news of a mad-dog war criminal who enjoyed hanging his victims purely coincidental?

Now it was my turn to say, “Wait.”

Yuki got back into the car.

I said to her, “What you just said about Petrović. Follow me on this. Torture. Rape. Hanging. Does this ring a bell with you—or am I totally out of my mind?”

“You’re thinking Carly Myers?”

“Do you see it?”

“How do you connect them?” Yuki asked me. “She’s a schoolteacher. He owns a pricey steak house.”

“She was a schoolteacher who turned tricks on the side—in a motel. Petrović imprisoned women in a building that, under his occupation, was called the rape hotel. He enjoyed hanging people, didn’t he? Carly was found manually strangled, then hanged.”

“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.

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.

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.

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?”