Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

I didn’t want to release Denny, but we’d gone past reasonable suspicion already. We could charge him for pandering, but there was no point.

We’d done our best with our only suspect—and damn it, we’d come up empty.

Chapter 61

It was just after 8:00 p.m. when the lab tech picked up the soda can with Denny Lopez’s DNA on the rim to compare with the lone pubic hair Claire had retrieved from Carly Myers’s body. It was after 9:00 when I sent my report to Jacobi, and as I closed down and packed up for the night, I ran the Lopez interview through my mind again. Was he a small-time criminal guilty of pimping out willing females in exchange for a cut? Or was he far worse, a clever, psychopathic killer?

I was leaning toward the former, that Lopez was a common parasite who was supplementing his by-the-hour taco delivery job, when my desk phone rang.

Yuki’s name flashed on my caller ID.

What was keeping her in her office at this time of night? I picked up the receiver and Yuki didn’t wait for me to say hello.

“I just heard something,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“Hi, Yuki. What’s up?”

“I gotta talk to you. Your place or mine?”

Yuki’s office was one floor down, so either place was easy enough, but I had one foot out the door, and I asked her, “Can this wait? I’m on my way home.”

“How about we talk in your car?”

I phoned Joe and reached him as he was driving home.

“Have you eaten dinner?” I asked.

“I was thinking we could go out for Thai food.”

There was a restaurant we loved on Clement, located two blocks from our apartment. It was a good idea, but from the sound of Yuki’s voice, I calculated that I was going to be occupied for a while. Joe and I made a plan and a backup plan, and then I took to the fire stairs and headed down.

Yuki was waiting for me on the third-floor landing.

“What took you so long?” she said.

It had been thirty or forty seconds since I’d hung up the phone. I said, “Ha, ha. This had better be good.”

We continued down the stairs to the lobby, exited through the back door, walked along the breezeway past the ME’s office to Harriet Street and the parking lot under the overpass. I unlocked my trusty Explorer and we both got in. I reclined my seat, and Yuki did the same with hers.

“Start talking,” I said.

Yuki said, “Have you ever heard of a Bosnian war criminal named Slobodan Petrović?”

This question was a stunner.

I turned my head to look at my friend. Joe had told me about Petrović, but even though I trusted Yuki completely , I couldn’t just spill Joe’s beans.

Yuki had fixed me with her sharp brown eyes.

“Do you know who I mean?” she asked again.

“The Butcher of Djoba,” I said. “He was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the ICC, but as I recall, the case against him was kicked. It was said that after he was released, he drowned. How’d I do?”

“Impressive,” said Yuki. “Do you know about his particular crimes against humanity?”

“Fill me in,” I said.

I dug around in the console, found a couple of PowerBars, and gave one to Yuki. She took a bottle of water out of her bag and passed it to me.

We took half a minute to satisfy our snack and hydration needs, and then Yuki was back on Petrović.

She said, “As you may have heard, this mofo ordered the killing of a couple thousand civilians. The men were locked in burning barns, slaughtered with machine guns, or randomly executed. Babies were pulled from their mother’s arms and tossed alive into fires or bayoneted; the lucky ones had their throats cut. The women and girls were raped, impregnated, destroyed from the inside out…”

Yuki choked up, then after a moment went on with this horrible story of Serbian military atrocities. She told me that she’d seen film of Colonel Petrović taking a child of about six onto his knee.

“He kissed his forehead and said everything would be fine. Then he cut the boy’s throat.”

“That’s…beyond monstrous,” I managed to say. “Simply inconceivable.”

Yuki said, “There’s more. From witness reports, Petrović liked to choke women and girls while he raped them. He’d let up so they could breathe, then choke them some more. When they were dead, he hanged them. Actually, whether they were dead or alive is unclear.”

I was dying to know why Yuki wanted to tell me about Petrović so urgently.

And then, finally, she told me.

Chapter 62

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 what 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 a 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 in Parisi 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 it’s 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.”