Facade (6 page)

I
ris went home and collapsed at her kitchen table, her head in her hands. She felt sick.

If Luc was upset over the dinner she'd had with Xander, how would he feel tomorrow, seeing a photo in the newspaper of her furtive exit from Xander's house? It would look like she really had spent the night with him. She groaned and Sheba, startled, looked up from her favorite sleeping spot inside the kitchen fireplace.

Iris speed-dialed Ellie for advice, then pressed “end” before the call went through. It was time for Iris to sort out her own problems.

“I'll give Luc some space,” she said to Sheba, “then go by the restaurant later to grovel. I need to prepare him before that photo shows up tomorrow.”

The dog blinked up at Iris with liquid eyes.

“You're right, girl. First I'll behave like a responsible professor and check on my AWOL student.”

*                          *                       *

Iris ended up getting Jasna's address from the on-line student records. She navigated her Jeep through the streets of Cambridge, too accustomed to the pot-holes and patched pavement to give in to her natural urge to check for a flat tire. A few blocks from Fresh Pond Parkway she pulled up to a brick apartment building with peeling paint trim.

She was about to press the “Unit 3: Jasna Sidran” button above the mailboxes, when a harried young mother holding a mewling toddler bustled out through the inner door. Iris stuck her foot in the door before it closed. She figured Unit 3 to be on the second floor of a building this small. She couldn't help noticing a structural problem as she climbed a staircase which pitched downward from the outer wall.

The strong smell of curry filled the hallway. As Iris approached the door of Unit 3, she could hear someone's conversation in rapid French passing through into the hall.

“Where did you leave it?” said a voice that sounded like Jasna's. Iris hadn't thought of her as French.

Iris rapped on the door. The voice went silent but no one answered. She knocked louder. “Jasna, it's Iris. I wanted to make sure you're okay.”

After a moment, the door opened a crack. A sliver of Jasna's face appeared. The sockets under her eyes looked hollowed-out. Her skin was sallow.

“We've missed you in class these last few days,” Iris said. “I wanted to make sure you weren't sick.”

Jasna started coughing and backed away an inch or two. “I have the flu but I am getting better,” she said a bit stiffly.

“Do you need anything? Some soup or juice?” Iris could now see enough of her student to notice some lines of blood on Jasna's bare outer thigh, below the girl's huge, paint-splattered t-shirt.

“It looks like you're hurt. Do you need me to drive you to Harvard Health?”

“No. I'm fine.”

“But... ” Iris tried to nudge the door open further with her foot.

“I will be in class Monday. Thank you for coming. I need to sleep now.” Jasna pushed the door closed.

Iris trudged back to her car. Was the blood on her thighs from Jasna cutting herself? How could she get her troubled student to accept help?

She couldn't seem to do anything right today. She couldn't get Jasna to trust her, she had managed to hurt her lover's feelings, and now, to top it off, an embarassing photo of her would be in tomorrow's paper. She should've stayed in bed.

L
uc wouldn't return her calls to his condo, the café, or his cell. When Iris had broken down and called Ellie, her friend had assured her that Luc would relent. But when Iris told her about the kicker, that morning's visit to Xander, captured on film and set to be plastered in the
Globe
, even Ellie couldn't offer much optimism.

But at six that evening Ellie called back. “Iris, turn on the news. Channel 4. There's going to be an announcement about Xander's connection to the missing girl. It was on the banner that scrolls along the bottom of the TV.”

Iris ran to her living room and fumbled with the remote. An overly-loud Bernie and Phil furniture commercial, usually producing a reflex jab to the mute button, was just ending. Then Xander appeared on the screen in an elegantly tailored suit. He closed his front door, then tried to make his way past a dozen reporters shouting questions and thrusting microphones toward him. Iris thought she could spot Budge's emerging bald spot among the heads.

At the top of the porch stairs Xander stopped, in a seemingly impromptu move, and said “I would like to clear something up. There's been speculation about a connection between me and the missing girl, Lara Kurjak. I do not know Lara, but was told she might have tried to come to my office last week. I've been searching my memory to try to find a reason for her visit and the only possible link I can come up with might stem from my days of military service in the Dutch division of the UN Peacekeeping Troops. I was stationed in Bosnia in 1994 through 1995. I was romantically involved with a Bosnian woman during my time there and since the dates seem to align, I can only speculate that this girl might be a product of that romance. I returned to Bosnia after the war to re-unite with this woman but, by that time, she had left her village and I couldn't find her. I was never told that there might have been a child. I want to repeat that I don't know if this was what happened, but it's the only scenario I can think of that might explain her coming to see me.”

At this point Xander's dazzling blue eyes had turned misty and he looked off into space. The reporters seemed spellbound. Xander had taken on the air of a romantic hero, perhaps the lead from “Miss Saigon.”

Xander snapped out of his trance and continued. “I would like the focus to be on finding Lara. That's all that matters now.” Then he bustled down the steps and disappeared into a waiting taxi. The frenzied pack of reporters shouted unanswered questions at the departing vehicle.

A
fter Xander's media “confession,” Lara mania went into high gear throughout the Commonwealth. The idea of the lost girl being on the verge of finding her photogenic birth father seemed irresistible.

Iris was relieved to find no humiliating photo of herself in the Sunday paper. Not even a little one buried in the Metro section. Instead, the insufferable Budge had featured on the front page a noble-looking photo of Xander next to one of the troll-like Ivano Kurjak. The headline read
Who is Lara's Real Father?

Budge had interviewed Mr. Kurjak directly after the Saturday “bombshell,” and the man had been apoplectic in his denials about any part Xander might have played in Lara's parentage after an affair with his wife. “The disrespect this man shows me!” he was quoted as shouting. “How dare he?”

Ever the conscientious reporter, Budge had done follow-up interviews with “persons on the street” reacting to Xander's speculations.

“Lara looks a lot more like that cute architect than the other guy. The cops need to find her so they can, you know, be a family,” said Tiffany from Quincy.

“I think it's tragic. Poor kid gets nabbed from her own apartment. I hate that,” said Ritchie from South Boston. “Oh, yeah. The Harvard guy. He needs to man up—get out there and find his kid.”

“I pray for Lara. I'm sure the police are doing their best to bring her home to whichever man turns out to be her father. Poor thing doesn't have a mother,” said Mrs. Edward Stritch from Scituate.

That last was the most noncommittal of the reactions that Budge offered up.

Iris took a bowl of oatmeal out of the microwave and put it in the freezer to cool.

“Sheba, Xander bumped us off the front page. Bless the man!”

Sheba, from her resting place inside the kitchen fireplace, raised her head at mention of her name, then sensing a rhetorical comment with no pathway to treats, lowered it again.

The memory of the photo Budge was holding over her head brought a pang of guilt as Iris remembered how hurt Luc had looked. Even though she'd confessed to Luc that she'd spoken with Xander the previous morning, he still didn't need to see a photo of her sneaking out from under the guy's fence looking guilty-as-sin of something. She checked her watch. Nine in the morning was too early to wake him after his typical frantic Saturday night of cooking at the café. This was the only morning he had to sleep in, a Sunday with no trip to the food market, no suppliers to call.

Then again, maybe this was the perfect time to catch him with his guard down. She changed into black jeans and a sweater, then snapped Sheba's leash onto her pink leather collar with biker's studs.

As soon as Iris opened the door to Luc's condo, Sheba raced toward the bedroom. Only then did Iris pause. Was it such a great idea to barge in on Luc the morning after they'd had a disagreement? What if he had company? It wasn't as if they had ever discussed any ground rules for this relationship. After a month or so of spending nights together, Luc had simply given her a key. She had done the same.

Iris crept toward the door without hearing any voice, much less two. She peered in to see Sheba sitting on Luc's empty bed. The dog looked at her and let out a mournful howl.

Iris remembered, several Saturdays before, when she had swung by the restaurant at closing time to find two foxy, thirtyish women avidly chatting up Luc.

She slid under Luc's duvet and curled her body around his cold pillow.

D
etective Russo's stomach roiled in protest at his third cup of scorched police station coffee. It was Sunday morning and he tossed the front section of the
Globe
into the trash can. He ran his hand from the base of his short, powerful neck up over his shaved head and back again, which did nothing to relax him. The brass wanted Paul Malone to handle this Lara Kurjak case instead of Missing Persons. Since Malone was his lieutenant as well as his partner, the case was his as well. Russo hated these missing kids cases. He stared at the framed photograph on his desk of his red-headed son, ten-year-old Charlie Junior, in a little league uniform. If he had his way, knowing what he did about the pervs out there, he'd never let Charlie leave the house.

The media pressure was already starting to ramp up after that jerk Harvard professor had fanned the flames on TV the night before. Maybe this would give him the opportunity to show Malone how much he'd learned at those expensive Criminal Justice workshops he'd been going to. He could do more of the heavy lifting on the case before Malone went into his predictable uber-stressed mode, with all the weight loss, haunted looks, and wickedly short tempers that that went with it.

Russo heard an attention-seeking cough and glanced up at the ponytailed rookie, Samantha Carter, standing at the entrance to his cluttered workspace.

“There's a call on the helpline you might want to hear.”

“Someone saw her?” he asked as he followed Carter to her cubicle in the open office section of the homicide division. He couldn't help thinking for the hundredth time since they'd moved to East Cambridge from the grand but seedy old HQ in Central Square that the new headquarters looked like a friggin' insurance office.

“No, it's about the father. He sounds like a real piece of work,” she said.

“Caller?”

“Wouldn't identify herself but said the father knows her husband.”

“Do we have a track on where she called from?”

“No, she hung up too soon.”

Russo plonked himself down into a visitor chair that creaked slightly. Carter punched buttons as she listened to the left earphone of her headset.

“Here it is.” She put the sound on speaker.

“Lara's father, Ivano Kurjak, told my husband he'd sold Lara to a man in Bosnia. He said he was going to send her there to marry this man after her school was finished in June.”

Samantha's voice came on. “Ma'am, can you tell me your name and how your husband knows Mr. Kurjak?”

The raspy voice continued. “She probably tried to run away. He might have found her and smuggled her out of the country. That's what you should check on.”

“Tell me your name please.”

The line went dead.

“Could you trace it?” Russo asked.

“No, she must have been timing it. Why do the cop shows give away all our secrets? She rang off just before the address registered.”

“Damn.” Russo stood. “Still, good work, Carter. See if you can clean up the recording. Maybe there's some background noise we can use.”

On his way back to his desk, the detective stopped at Malone's glass-enclosed office to update his superior. As Malone looked up from his bulky desktop computer and spotted Russo lingering in the doorway, he said, “How's it going tracking down our professor's war-time paramour?”

Russo eased into the office and relaxed into the chair across from Malone. “It's been really hard to track down any records from that time. Bosnia was the Wild West when DeWitt was out there.”

“Were you able to dig up anything about his activities there?” Malone asked.

“He was in this division, the Dutchbat, that was assigned to protect the Muslims in Srebrenica. Thing is, they obviously failed because the Serbs ended up massacring eight thousand Muslim men and boys and raping most of the Muslim women.”

“The Dutch soldiers just stood by and let that happen?”

“According to what I've read, these guys had their hands tied,” Russo explained. “The UN would only let them use force in self-defense and the NATO planes that were supposed to do the actual fighting never showed up.”

“Sounds like a scene from Hell. And we're supposed to believe that in the middle of all this DeWitt was playing Romeo with some Muslim woman?”

Russo shrugged. “I wouldn't know, but I guess these things happen during wartime. I did manage to come up with the name of someone from his division. The guy lives in London now. I left him a voice message several hours ago but he hasn't called me back yet, no surprise given the time difference.”

“Good—keep ahead of that. And see if you can find out where the assistant Nils something was on that Wednesday night. Maybe he's the one Lara was really coming to see at the GSD.”

Russo was about to rise from his chair when he remembered what he'd come here to tell Malone. “Almost forgot—Carter got an anonymous tip saying the father had promised the girl for an arranged marriage in Bosnia this summer. Can you believe it? The kid is twelve—she should be playing with dolls or maybe watching
Gossip Girl.”

Malone shook his head in disgust. “Get Foster to check the airlines for female minors traveling to that area in the last few days. Probably need to check flights to Paris and Frankfurt, too... who knows where else.”

“Will do. But doesn't this give more weight to our idea that she's a runaway?”

“We're already following up on how she might have left the area. But, seems like time to bring dear old dad in for questioning.”