Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

“Do you understand? I saw him here, two hours ago. Slobodan Petrović. ”

“Yes. I know who he is. You can talk to me. I understand what you’re saying, where you come from.”

Anna blew her nose, unknotted her scarf, and began telling Joe about a hot summer day in the village of Djoba.

“I was washing my baby in the kitchen sink when soldiers entered the village by the main road,” she said, staring through the windshield into the horrors from her past.

“They came on foot. Then the tanks and officers in jeeps.

“My little boy, Bakir, started to cry. My husband came into the room and said, ‘Stay here.’ And then he ran outside. Zerin wasn’t yet thirty,” Anna said. “So strong and vital. That was the last time I saw him alive.”

Joe murmured, “I’m so sorry. So very sorry, Anna.”

She was looking out into the darkened streets, projecting her terrible story onto this blank screen. She spoke of how her town had been declared a safe zone by the United Nations and how hundreds of refugees had fled there. How they had grouped together in the sweltering heat without enough food or water. And how most of those stranded in that so-called safe zone had been women, children, and the elderly.

Anna told him how the Serb soldiers had mingled among the refugees and executed the men at random, not stopping there but hunting down the ones who had hidden in the outlying fields and farmhouses. She described how the Serb soldiers had burned down the houses and barns and then turned their attention to the women and children left trapped in the town.

“I hid with Bakir in my house,” Anna told him, her voice hollow with shock, “but they found me. They took my child away, my beautiful boy. Then they held me down and…you can imagine what they did. Four of them. Laughing. Trying to hurt me as much as possible. Anyway, I passed out. The next morning they were gone. I found my baby boy on the side of the road with his throat slit.”

Anna groaned and then sobbed uncontrollably into her hands as she relived the unspeakable death of her child.

Joe pulled the car over to the curb and put his hand on Anna’s shoulder. She shook him off and leaned against the window, crying in ragged sobs until she was cried out.

Then she turned to him and said, “The most unbelievable thing is when something so unimaginable happens, a thing that kills you inside, you keep breathing and your heart beats and you still live. Time still goes on.”

Joe had to fight his own feelings, and they were many. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted to kill someone—Petrović. He wanted to cry.

Anna said, “It has been so long since I’ve told anyone, Joe. I’m sorry that you had to be the one. But seeing Petrović today, healthy, prosperous. I thought he was dead. I thought he was long dead.”

“What can I do to help you?”

Anna and Joe sat in the parked car and talked for a while, Anna describing fantasies of killing him, detailing conversations she’d had with other women in Djoba. Hushed conversations in which they never said what had been done to them. They hadn’t had to.

Finally exhausted, she said, “Please drive me home now, Joe. I need to be alone.” He started the engine.

Ten minutes later Joe parked near the house where Anna was renting a studio apartment. He told her that he would bring the bike to get it fixed, not a problem, and carried her backpack upstairs. He gave her his contact numbers and said to call him when she wanted to speak again.

She thanked him, went inside, and closed the door behind her.

Anna’s pain had permeated Joe’s car.

He could still see the violent imagery she had drawn of old people hanging off the sides of trucks, the slaughter of children, the refugees who’d hanged themselves rather than suffer at the hands of Slobodan Petrović.

These images accompanied him all the way home.

Chapter 8

I’d gone for a short run with Martha and was now home in our apartment on Lake Street.

The evening news was on the TV and the soup just beginning to simmer when Martha broke for the doorway, barking and shimmying, to greet Joe.

He bent to pet our good doggy, but his expression told me that he’d had a very bad day.

I said, “Hon. What’s wrong?”

“Did you eat?” he asked me.

“No. Did you?”

He shook his head.

“I’m heating up some split pea. I can give the chicken legs another few spins in the microwave.”

“Would you? I need to get out of my clothes.”

While I “cooked,” Jacobi called, and we updated each other on our lack of progress on the schoolteacher case.

“We’ve got zippo,” Jacobi said to me. “I hate this.”

We commiserated and talked over plans for the next day, and I had just hung up as Joe came into the spacious kitchen/living room. His hair was wet and he was wearing his robe.

He asked about my day, but I said, “You go first.”

Between bites he told me about meeting Anna Sotovina, a Bosnian war survivor, a couple of hours before. Her chilling story had gotten to him. It was getting to me.

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“Terribly broken. Her face is scarred. Her whole life is scarred. She survived the worst—torture, rape, the murders of her husband and child—and came here after the war. She has a good job and a rental apartment on Fulton. She had started over, Linds. And then she sees Slobodan Petrović coming out of a house a few blocks from her place.”

“It was really Petrović? Is she sure?”

“She has no doubt.”

I didn’t need to tell Joe about eyewitness sightings—how the mind fills in memory gaps with convincing detail, so that every time a memory is pulled up for review, it is slightly overwritten in the present. We’d both had firsthand experience with witnesses making positive IDs on criminals who, at the time of the crime, were in maximum security at the Q.

“I considered that,” Joe said.

He carried his half-full plate to the sink, refilled his wineglass and mine.

“Petrović,” I said. “I remember what he looked like. A husky, red-faced hog of a man.”

“That’s him,” Joe said. “He was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and went to trial and was convicted. It was a scandal at the time, but he was released.

“Then—he disappeared. A body was found in a river, I think, bloated and decomposing, and identified as Petrović. But identified by whom? Friends in high places? If Anna is right, he got out of town and ended up here.”

“What’s your gut tell you?”

Joe and I had been married for only a few months back then, but Martha loved him. She trotted over to him and rested her chin on his knee. Joe stroked her, drank his wine, and took long, thoughtful pauses that I did not interrupt.

Then he said, “I believe her, Lindsay. Enough to look into this. I don’t know yet how or if I can help her, but I’ll start digging into it tomorrow.”

In Joe’s place, I’d have done the same.

Chapter 9

Joe was driving to work the next morning, thinking about Anna Sotovina, when she called.

“Can we meet?” she asked. “I have a couple of things to show you.”

Twenty minutes later Joe pulled up to the three-story house on Fulton Street where Anna lived. He was about to go ring the doorbell when she got out of a red Kia parked across the street. She was dressed for work, wearing a blue skirt suit and lipstick. Her hair was combed so that it fell in a way that covered the burn scar on her cheek.

She waited for traffic to pass, then crossed, opened the passenger-side door, and got inside, saying, “I have to apologize for last night. All that crying.”

“Don’t apologize. You have good reason to cry.”