The 18th Abduction Read online

  There was a road, with cars and what looked like houses close to the base of the hill.

  You can make it, Del. Focus on the road.

  She started down the slope, bracing against saplings when the grade was too steep. Soon she would run out in front of traffic and hold up her tied wrists, and when a car stopped, she’d tell the driver to call the police.

  Adele sucked air into her burning lungs as she ran. Blood poured down her arm from the throbbing wound and the star that was still in her shoulder, but she pressed on. She was in midstride when the shock came, the blow and sharp pain between her shoulder blades that knocked her to the ground.

  She thought she might have blacked out, but she was awake now, sledding on her belly over fallen leaves, toward the headlights on the road just below.

  The pain was nearly unbearable, but Adele stretched her bound hands in front of her. Her descent stabilized, and as she slid slowly downhill over the dry leaves, she told herself, I’m going to make it. I’m going to take my life back and make Tony and his goons pay for what they’ve done, so help me God.

  Chapter 74

  At 8:00 a.m. Conklin and I were in the break room with Jacobi, who was showing us the images Clapper had just sent him.

  They were hard to make out across the table, so I took Jacobi’s phone out of his hand and stared at the screen. I expanded the image.

  “Oh, no. Is this Adele?”

  Jacobi sighed and took back his phone. He said, “Claire’s on her way to San Jose. Here are the coordinates. Get going. I have to get to the parents before the press does it for me.”

  On any other day it would have been a soul-lifting and inspirational drive alongside Crystal Springs Reservoir and the rolling hills from SF to San Jose. But this morning I felt saturated with dread.

  Adele Saran had died an inconceivable death. As investigators, we would be starting over, learning what we could about the killer with the help of forensic science and our own problem-solving minds. That, combined with hope, luck, and prayer, might lead us to Susan Jones, or it might not. Based on how Adele’s body was posed, her murderer was probably the same psycho who’d killed Carly Myers.

  We commandeered a squad car, and Conklin took the wheel while I manned the phone and the radio, connecting with the rest of the team over the wail of our siren. We got clear of Highway 280 and Route 17, then took Camden Avenue to Hicks, a two-lane stretch of road that cut through the Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve, eighteen thousand acres of rugged wilderness.

  The scenery was impressive and couldn’t have been more different from the skeezy motel in the Tenderloin. Assuming the perp had killed both women, he had range. Or maybe he just liked the legendary spookiness of Hicks Road, described as Halloween any time of year. Travelers claimed to have heard banshees and seen red-eyed ghouls on Hicks. Others spoke of the blood albinos and other fanciful ghosts.

  But it was morning. No wraiths or banshees made themselves known. A turn in the road opened into a forested area just up ahead, and I picked out the crime scene.

  It wasn’t hard.

  Law enforcement vehicles flanked the road: CSI and coroner’s vans, local police cruisers, and a couple of ambulances. Crime scene tape cordoned off the road on both sides, enclosing the primary and secondary crime scenes, and an evidence tent had been set up just outside the perimeter.

  Conklin pulled off the road a few yards from the tent.

  I called dispatch, notifying them that we were on the scene. Conklin and I looked at each other across the front seat. Neither of us felt sunny-side up today. We’d failed Adele Saran and were heartsick about it.

  I said, “Okay, Rich. Ready or not, time to go.”

  He badged the uniform at the tape, and as soon as we had ducked under it, Clapper appeared. We shared both shock and banalities as he walked us to the big oak tree, ten yards in from the edge of the road.

  Hanging from the outspread branches was the body of a young woman, pretty, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a white sweatshirt with the words Pacific View Prep. She was barefoot and had been hanged by the neck with what looked like a length of white telephone-type wire.

  Clapper said, “We’ve got our pictures, and I have two teams going through the woods looking for God knows what. She’s been up there long enough. Agreed?”

  I nodded okay.

  Claire came up behind me and stood next to me as a van backed up to the tree. A couple of CSI techs climbed to the van’s roof and very carefully, reverently, cut the wire below the knot and brought the dead twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher down.

  Chapter 75

  Joe and I were watching the eleven o’clock news, lying close together on the sofa, with Martha breathing deeply on the floor beside us.

  I held the remote control.

  I wanted to keep talking to Joe, but first I had to see how the media was treating the death of Adele Saran.

  The headline stories on all channels, mainstream and cable, focused on the tree where Adele Saran had been found hanging. There were close-ups of the knot, the tree, the coroner’s van leaving the scene, the men in white CSI coveralls bringing evidence to the tent for bagging and tagging. All of this activity was accompanied by the crackle and screech of car radios.

  Press setups were dotted around the immediate area, outside the tape. Television reporters faced the camera and told their audience of the horror at the murder scene. A peppy young woman interviewed Paul Harwood, the hiker who had discovered the nightmare on Hicks Road while driving to his favorite trail early this morning and called the police.

  Harwood told the reporter, “I didn’t believe what I was seeing, that I can tell you. I thought at first it was some kind of prank. A store dummy or something like that. But I had a bad feeling, so I pulled over to make sure. And there that poor girl was, strung up like that.…”

  I muted the sound as the video switched back to the studio anchor.

  Joe said to me, “So, go on with what you were telling me.”

  “Where was I?”

  “With Claire.”

  “Right. Rich and I followed Clapper and Claire back from the crime scene, and we all went straight to the morgue.

  “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.

  The Butcher of Djoba got into his car and started her up.

  Joe switched on the Toyota as well. He was prepared to follow Petrović to his restaurant, as he’d done every morning this week, but the Jaguar had a new flight path.

  Petrović drove west on Fell, took a left turn on Masonic, crossing the Panhandle, and took another left on Oak, heading back the way he had come.

  Where was Petrović going?

  Joe was three cars back as the Jag took the left on Oak, a wide residential street that ran parallel to Fell. Joe followed the Jag through the awkward turn but now had to hang back so as not to be seen. And then, damn it, he caught a red light while the Jag sailed through the intersection.

  Joe checked the empty one-way cross street and ran the light. Once he was clear, he called his guys at the steak house to let them know that it looked like Petrović was heading into the Civic Center area.

  His team was also tracking the Jaguar on their monitors, and while one car stayed in place on California, the other tore out of a side street and headed toward the straightaway of Van Ness.

  The little Toyota SUV with the hot-rod engine was the most unremarkable-looking car on the road—if you didn’t know that it was loaded with a hundred thousand dollars of government electronics.

  Right now the GPS was pinging the satellite and laying out the Jaguar’s route on the monitor. As Joe followed Petrović’s car through the crowded Civic Center area, passing Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House on the left, and City Hall on the right, he was concerned that Petrović was going off script.

  Why? And what was his destination?

  Chapter 78

  Joe drove through Polk Gulch with a backup team behind him, both cars tailing the Jag, when Petrović took a right on Union where it crossed Van Ness.

  Was Petrović trying to lose them? Or was this a ruse, a deliberate joke on them, taking them out of the way and then doubling back to his restaurant?

  Or was this something else entirely?

  Instead of looping back, Petrović stayed on Union, c
limbing uphill to the high-priced neighborhood of Russian Hill.

  Joe exchanged words with his teams, instructing his follow car to speed up and pass him. If Petrović had picked up the Toyota in the rearview, he would now think that he’d lost his tail.

  A church was up ahead on the left, and something was happening there. A half dozen limos interspersed with media trucks were parked out front. Reporters sat on high canvas director’s chairs, facing their cameras, makeup people touching up their hair. Traffic cops held up their hands to slow and detour traffic.

  Just then the huge church doors swung open, and the newlyweds burst through with their wedding guests. The church emptied behind the new couple coming down the steps, waving, ducking rice, the bride pausing to turn around and toss the bouquet over her shoulder to a squealing crowd.

  Joe recognized the couple, a Silicon Valley billionaire and a Hollywood movie star. He got a good look because the wedding party had produced a one-lane logjam that had slowed the flow of traffic to just under a crawl.

  He was now at a dead stop. His backup team, just ahead of him, was also locked into the parking-lot variety of standstill.

  Cursing to himself, Joe checked the GPS.

  Petrović was zipping along Lombard within the speed limit, but at the same time was far, far away.

  Joe sent the backup team to Tony’s Place and checked in with the team on Fell Street who were now waiting for another team to relieve them.

  Once free of traffic, Joe took the next turn that would take him back to his office. He continued to watch the Jaguar’s contrail on his desktop computer, the little blip that was Petrović motoring back to the steak house.