Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

“Claire sidelined everything but our victim and got right to the external postmortem. Time of death, approximately nine o’clock last night. Joe, she was alive last night!”

Joe said, “Oh, God,” and then I told him what else I had learned from Claire.

“It’s not for the record yet, but for the moment Claire is saying Adele’s cause of death was the same as Carly’s.”

Joe said, “She was strangled first and then hanged. She had wounds from a throwing star?”

“Exactly,” I said. “And this time it wasn’t guesswork. The damned thing was still sticking out of her back. There was another deep wound in her right shoulder. Neither was fatal. She had bruises on her torso, inner thighs, around her neck below the ligature. Also, as with Carly, there was no discernible physical evidence on the body that would lead to the killer or killers. No skin cells or blood under her nails; in fact, her hands were tied tightly together.”

“What about the rope she was hanged with?”

“It was coated copper wire.”

“Telephone wire. You’re not going to get prints off that.”

I said, “Whoever hanged Adele Saran was a tidy son of a bitch. Wore gloves. Wore a condom. Clapper took blood, sexual assault kit, swabs, and clothes to the lab. Maybe the killer was sloppy and left saliva on her skin, or bled on her clothes.

“But I’m not feeling lucky.”

Joe hugged me, and I burrowed in under his arm and took some deep breaths.

“Anything else?”

He always listened to everything, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and I was glad to tell. Maybe Joe would notice something I had missed.

I said, “Okay, well, here’s something a little different. CSIs found three or four sets of human tracks through the woods, coming from Hicks Road, spreading out, then converging about a hundred yards in from the road.

“Adele hadn’t gotten very far. The blade to her back brought her down. Judging from the disturbance on the ground, she fought a little but never got up. She was probably strangled where she fell, and carried out to the hanging tree by the road. There was nowhere for her to run, Joe. There was mostly wilderness for miles around.”

Joe nodded, picturing the way it had gone down.

“So a hunt, you think,” he said. “And multiple perpetrators. Not personal and yet very sadistic. What’s that about? Some kind of gang—”

I had to interrupt him.

“Wait, Joe, what’s this?”

Chapter 76

The images exploding on the TV screen had grabbed my attention. I unmuted it.

It was live footage of demonstrators surging through Civic Center Plaza and pooling at the base of City Hall. There were close-up shots of grieving students and many angry people of all ages with hand-lettered signs demanding justice for Carly and Adele.

A couple of cruisers entered the frame with sirens bleating. When they stopped, cops opened the rear doors, and I recognized Adele Saran’s parents being led by a cop and an organizer to a podium. I started to boost the volume, but Joe took the clicker away from me and turned off the TV.

“That’s enough, Lindsay. You’re not going to get anything useful from watching more of this.”

He pulled me closer, kissed my forehead. I knew he wanted me to calm down for my own good, but my mind was on fire.

We had chores to do before bed and it was way late. Joe took Martha for a walk, and I went to clean up the kitchen.

I was thinking about what Joe had said about Adele’s death, and the suspicion of a gang—but tracking and killing her and posing her corpse in a tree was way too organized for street gangsters. The killer or killers had been careful and followed some kind of script, maybe a pattern of killings that proved the same perpetrators had killed both Carly and Adele.

As I loaded the dishwasher, I thought about the conversation I’d had with Joe last night, when we were safe at home and I had no way of knowing that Adele Saran was running through the woods, about to be murdered.

I came back to the unplumbed coincidence of Slobodan Petrović, a terrorist military officer who was on the record for hundreds of rapes, tortures, and hangings—a man with a history of programmed military executions.

Joe had shared his frustration that he had nothing on Petrović, with two teams of agents working on it. They were watching Petrović’s car, house, and restaurant, and had attached a tracker to his Jaguar, but sometimes they lost him in traffic. Or while they were watching his parked car, Petrović left the restaurant by a back door.

Discretion was critical. Petrović had made Joe as FBI—Joe’s mistake—and if Petrović thought that the FBI was still surveilling him, they would never catch him in an illegal act. He’d take pains not to let that happen. They had no probable cause to get any kind of warrant.

But this emergency was about to expire without probable cause. The FBI had to catch him in an illegal screw-up if they were ever to kick him back to The Hague for his sentence to be reinstated.

“We follow him, Linds,” Joe had told me. “He drives around town. Goes shopping. Gets a haircut. Goes back to his restaurant. Goes home at night. We wait and watch and follow. He’s never as much as gone above the speed limit. I can’t get a warrant to wiretap his phones without probable cause, and I don’t have it. I can’t pull him over, invade his premises, or get a warrant to search anything. He refuses to screw up.”

I got into my pj’s and tried to let go of the hellish images in my mind. I was running through the woods with Adele as a pack of savages threw star-shaped blades at us. I couldn’t shake the feeling of how terrified that poor woman must have been.

As I got under the blankets, I was thinking that Joe and I were both good detectives. Okay, better than good. And neither of us was getting traction on our case.

I heard Joe come in through the front door with Martha. He filled her bowls, turned off the lights in the living room, then came into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes.

He said, “Clapper’s the best. If there’s trace on the body or evidence in the woods, he’ll find it. And this media hurricane is going to pay off, Lindsay. Someone, a witness to the abduction or the murders, is going to remember something and come forward with a bona fide lead.”

If only. If there was a hot tip out there, it had to come in before we found Susan Jones.

Chapter 77

Joe had requisitioned a repurposed black Toyota RAV4 with a powerful engine and high-tech bells and whistles throughout.

The GPS tracking device on the underside of Petrović’s car was transmitting to a monitor attached to the Toyota’s dash. The blue Jaguar was still parked across the street from Petrović’s yellow Victorian house.

It was a weekday morning, and Tony’s Place for Steak wasn’t yet open, but Joe had a team on California Street watching the front and another team on Jones with a view of the adjacent condo and garage. Petrović couldn’t leave either place without being seen and followed. Period.

Joe had eyes on the target’s house when the front door opened and Petrović stepped out. He locked the door behind him, then came down the front steps to the street. Joe lifted his binoculars to his eyes and watched as the hog puffed on his cigar—always managing to obscure a clear view of his face—and headed toward his car with a nice jaunty step.

Life for Slobodan Petrović was very good.

The blue Jaguar was parked within fifty yards of where Joe sat in the Toyota. He observed Petrović unlock his eighty-thousand-dollar showboat and surreptitiously look up and down the block, checking out the traffic, parked cars, neighboring homes. He seemed satisfied that there was nothing untoward around him—no danger, no tail, just another beautiful morning in the City by the Bay.