Джеймс Паттерсон - The 18th Abduction

Only one thing made sense to Joe. Petrović had been the witness. He must have testified against higher-ranking officers who had, in fact, been tried for war crimes and convicted. If this was true, he’d made himself one hell of a deal.

After his release, Petrović might have changed his name and gone far away from the scenes of his crimes.

It looked to Joe like that’s what he’d done.

Chapter 14

Joe’s day wasn’t going as he had hoped.

His concentration had been derailed by the briefing from Craig Steinmetz, the San Francisco field office supervisor. The meeting was about three private school teachers who’d been missing for two days—Lindsay’s case, Joe knew. There was no clue as to their whereabouts, and the SFPD was asking for help.

Joe would have liked to jump on board, but other agents were willing and able, and he had made a promise to Anna.

When the meeting ended, he went back to his office and tried to get back to work. But there were more interruptions.

The director called from DC and got right to the point. A domestic terrorism plot Joe had uncovered months ago needed his attention. Now. The suspect was American born, connected through Syria to an actor high up in a terrorist chain of command. Phone messages had been deciphered. A truck had been rented. But nothing had pinned the tail on Greg Stassi, the American donkey.

Stassi was in custody but wasn’t forthcoming. Without direct evidence leading to him or a confession, he would be released in forty-eight hours.

The director said, “Molinari, you know Stassi. He might talk to you.”

Two days ago Joe would have gotten on the next flight to DC and met with the kid. Today he told the director, “Marty, this is a bad time. I might be able to kick free in a week or so, but I’m on the brink of something here. I can’t get out of it. I’m sorry.”

Petrović wasn’t a case or even a file folder. Joe had never misled the director before. Then again, he’d never before promised a survivor of ethnic cleansing that he would try to nail a killer, let alone one as monstrous as the Butcher of Djoba.

Joe was 90 percent convinced that the man on Fell Street was Slobodan Petrović. But without independent verification, he couldn’t prove it, even to himself.

Full stop.

He pulled the phone toward him and called Hai Nguyen, a top FBI forensics tech at Quantico, then forwarded two photos to him. One, Petrović’s ICC mug shot; and the second, this morning’s partial of Petrović’s face.

“I’ll take a look, Joe.”

“Thanks, Hai. And—”

“I know. Right now.”

After getting a fresh cup of coffee, Joe resumed researching the man who was accused of slaughtering hundreds if not thousands of Bosnian civilians.

File names filled his screen and Joe opened them all. Every document added nuance, color, and data to what he already knew: where Petrović had been born, his brutal upbringing and punishing military service, hints of what had led him to become a mass murderer.

Fact: after the end of the war Slobodan Petrović had been captured on the run, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and indicted in the International Criminal Court. Then, after his conviction, for some reason he’d been released and his criminal record closed.

Supposition: sometime later he’d come to America, where he’d bought or rented a house and a car in San Francisco.

Joe zeroed in on that.

He ran the poor-quality photo he’d taken of Petrović through the DMV database and wasn’t surprised that he didn’t get a hit. So he called Hai Nguyen again.

“How’s it going, Hai?”

“Your mail, Joe. Open it.”

Nguyen’s reconstructed photo looked like the pictures of Petrović he’d retrieved from the Interpol files. It was an astonishingly good likeness and quite usable.

Joe hung up and entered the picture into the DMV database. A driver’s license appeared on his screen. It was the man he’d seen on Fell Street, but his name was not Slobodan Petrović.

It was Antonije Branko.

Chapter 15

Joe was focused, streaming along a tunnel of concentration, the zone where he felt most comfortable.

Once he had a name with a photo it didn’t take long to get into all that followed: tax rolls, parking tickets, and records of a house on Fell Street sold to Antonije Branko a year ago.

Now Joe had something tangible.

He enjoyed a few seconds of elation while analyzing this new information. Most likely before he’d left Bosnia, Petrović had changed his name to another Serbian name that gave him plausible deniability. If he was ever recognized here or there, he could say, “Petrović and I were from the same village. He might be a third cousin. Many of us resemble one another.”

Joe’s illuminating thought was supplanted by one more urgent.

He bent to his keyboard and quickly searched the SFPD database for Antonije Branko. He found him listed as a person of interest who had been seen affiliating with known criminals in “crime-prone locations”—bars, girly clubs, dodgy neighborhoods.

Petrović had parked in those neighborhoods in his pricey midnight-blue Jaguar. He had been brought in for questioning on two minor drug cases, for purchasing Molly without intent to distribute. Seasoned narcotics investigators had failed to lay a finger on him. No arrests. No indictments.

It looked to Joe like Petrović used go-betweens and buffers in his work, and so far he hadn’t left any fingerprints. That he’d obscured his face with his phone and hand while walking down the front steps of his house now seemed calculated and deliberate.

But Joe couldn’t see any cause for the FBI to bring him in for questioning.

If Petrović had legally changed his name in Bosnia, gotten a passport and a visa as Branko, come to the USA and applied for a green card, and gotten a driver’s license as Branko—none of this was a crime.

But in Joe’s opinion, people didn’t change very much.

Petrović hadn’t left all those bodies in Djoba and come to the USA determined to live a new life as a choirboy. As Anna had asked, where was he getting his money?

The thing to do was to let the fish run. Watch him, track him, and if he was involved in illegal activities, reel him in. Beach him.

Joe leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his neck, and stared at the acoustic-tile ceiling.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Anna. Her story had gripped him, and he was worried for her. He wanted to put Slobodan Petrović away. If he attempted to make this case official without any reason to open a case on Branko, he’d be shut down.

But if he didn’t help Anna, she could get herself killed.

Chapter 16

Thanks to Cindy’s anonymous source, Conklin and I had a name and known hangout of a guy who may have dated Carly Myers.

Name: Tom Barry. Favorite lunch spot: a sports bar called Casey’s on Fillmore.

I’d never been to Casey’s before and took a good look from the doorway.

The room was narrow, dark, and clubby, with framed photos of sports stars on the walls. A long bar ran along the length of the place, and there were some tables and armchairs front and back. Three HD TVs were positioned at intervals, and all of them were locked in on a horse race running in Saratoga Springs.

The crowd was fervent—money was on the line.

Conklin and I looked at the men at the bar, and one of them fit the photo. White guy in his twenties, lanky, spiky hair, drinking his lunch. To be fair, he had a bowl of peanuts beside his beer.

We walked over and stood on either side of him, and from the look in his eyes, we were pissing him off by encroaching on his personal space. Sorry, bud. This is police business. We were ready to grab him if he tried to run.