The 18th Abduction Read online

  If she had gone off on her own, Joe really had no clue where to look for her.

  Chapter 89

  Finally home after my eighteen-hour day in the Tenderloin, I greeted Joe and Martha from the doorway. I unbuckled my gun belt, pulled off my jacket, and stepped out of my shoes, leaving it all in a heap, and made my way across the room to my husband.

  I was exhausted, frustrated, and starving, but still dying to tell Joe about Lopez and kick the case around with him. He was sitting on the sofa with his laptop open on the coffee table. I dropped onto the couch next to him, put my arms around him, and hugged him to pieces.

  “I’m guessing you had a bad day,” he said, hugging me back.

  I got right into it, telling him about Denny Lopez in snatches, knowing that Joe was an expert at making sense of random clues. Then he did the same with me.

  “Anna is missing,” he said. “She borrowed a car from the dealership, had an accident, and vanished.”

  When he’d given it all up, I saw that his case was like mine, clues everywhere, leading to nothing.

  “Keep your phone charged,” I said. “She could call saying she ran away from home and that she’s all right.”

  He nodded, but from the look on his face, I knew he was deeply worried. He didn’t buy my happy ending for Anna at all.

  “I did find something interesting,” he said, “about our pal Slobodan Petrović.”

  He turned the laptop so that I could see the photo on his computer screen, a slightly out-of-focus image of a group of about eight men wearing fatigues, loosely gathered in a wooded area. They looked like they were having an outing. But there was more to it than that—much more.

  A female wearing only a skirt pulled up around her thighs was lying in the middle ground, encircled by several of the men. And in the background, shaded by trees, were bodies of men and women in civilian clothing hanging from branches. There had to be a dozen of them. The vignette looked unreal, like an art installation, the product of a particularly gruesome imagination. But it wasn’t art. And it wasn’t imaginary.

  “Oh, my God,” I said several times.

  Then I scrutinized the picture, looking for “our pal” Petrović.

  Standing near the center of the frame was a large, wide-shouldered man with a shaved head, wearing fatigues, combat boots. There was something in his hand, small, possibly metallic, with points—like a throwing star.

  Joe said, “That’s him.”

  “Is it?” I wasn’t sure.

  “There’s a caption. I translated it. ‘Colonel Slobodan Petrović and men after taking the Bosnian town of Djoba. Petrović is proficient in the use of shuriken, throwing stars.’”

  I asked, “What’s the source of the photo?”

  “It appears to have been taken by one of the soldiers. It showed up in the trials against the Serbian Army high command. The caption was added during the trial, and it’s unattributed.

  “And I found this,” Joe said. “A Serbian soldier testified at Petrović’s trial. Here’s a quote: ‘Colonel Petrović and other army officers would watch the hangings. I heard but never saw this. There were rumors that they would sometimes hunt victims in the woods.’”

  Joe looked at me.

  “You called it, Joe. When Adele’s body was discovered, you said you thought it was the work of a gang. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to call Petrović the gang leader.”

  “I think so,” he said. “Get ready for the punch line. The witness said, ‘Colonel Petrović had a reputation for using a throwing star, and using it well.’”

  I threw myself back on the couch. Was this proof? Was this evidence against the man who had injured Carly Myers and Adele Saran with throwing stars and then hanged them? What was the value of testimony from an unnamed witness who may have flipped on Petrović in order to get leniency from the court? Even the report of hunting in the woods was unsubstantiated.

  Joe and I talked about this, concluding, naturally, that neither the SFPD nor the FBI could vet these foreign crimes attested to by unnamed witnesses. Furthermore, we still had no direct evidence that linked Petrović to throwing stars, or hanging anyone, in the USA.

  “It’s a mile short of probable cause,” I said.

  “Exactly what Steinmetz said. But here’s what I say. We’re a step closer to landing this son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 90

  The pain nagged and pulled at Anna until she was forced to wake up and open her eyes.

  She saw nothing but blackness and thought she was blind.

  Panic raised a fine sweat over her whole body, and for a long moment she forgot to breathe.

  What happened to me? Where am I?

  The pain was excruciating. It radiated from the back of her head and seemed to spread everywhere. Her heart bucked as the pieces came together.

  She was a prisoner again.

  A bar of light coming from under a door showed her that she was on a bed in a small room.

  How did I get here?

  A feeling of flying came into her mind, then images of driving the Tesla, all speed and freedom. She’d parked outside Petrović’s house. And a void opened in her memory. Something had happened.

  Anna’s head was killing her.

  She must have taken a blow and lost consciousness. She didn’t remember any of that, but she tried to recall it, clawing at the fog wrapped around her memory. And then she was dragged into the present by the ragged sound of breathing beside her.

  She looked around the small room for a way out. There were no windows, just one door and the thin bar of light.

  It was enough to see that her clothes had been thrown around the floor. His clothes were in a pile by the side of the bed.

  Her stomach was empty but she heaved, clamped her hand over her mouth. She told herself to just lie still and breathe and think. In time she looked at the man in the bed and assessed him. How strong was he, how drunk, how much of a threat.

  He wasn’t big, but from what she could see, he was muscular, like the soldiers in the rape hotel in Djoba. Anna had survived the hotel because she’d focused on the future, when she would be free, and what she would do one day to her attackers.

  To Petrović.

  She sat up slowly, and the man shifted beside her, clacked his teeth, stopped breathing, threw his arm across her, and came awake.

  He looked at her.

  “What?” he said.

  “Bathroom,” she said.

  He pointed at the door, rolled over so that he was facing the wall, and resumed his sleep.

  Anna dressed in the dark. She could not find her purse, her phone, but the door was unlocked. She stepped out into a hallway, holding her shoes. A night-light was on in the bathroom to her right, and she went in, closed the door. There was no lock.

  She flipped the switch by the door and the ceiling light came on. Heart pounding, ready to spring up if the door opened, Anna used the toilet, then went to the sink.

  There was a note taped to the mirror.

  It was written in Bosnian in large, black block letters:

  “ANNA. STARA PRAVILA JOŠ UVIJEK PRIMJENJUJU. ZNAŠ.”

  It meant “The old rules still apply. You know.”

  It was signed “SP.”

  Chapter 91

  “Anna. The old rules still apply. You know. SP.”

  She knew Petrović’s rules well.

  Obey. If you don’t, we will happily kill you.

  SP. Slobodan Petrović had made the rules.

  Images flickered, faces of women she’d known from school and the market and from neighboring homes: Dalila and her mother, Amela; her best friend, Uma; and Zuhra, her husband’s younger sister. The girls who had defied the soldiers or had curled into balls and given up—they were killed.

  The ones who learned fast, did as they were told, they didn’t even talk to the other women about what they’d endured. What good was it to complain? They had to live another day and hope for an opportunity to get away.

  B
y being smart, she and Dalila and a few others had survived and gotten out at the end of the war. But this was America. There was no war here. And yet here she was in a rape hotel.

  Anna washed her face with hot water, and kept washing as she remembered the hotel in Djoba. One indelible memory looped in her mind. The men berating Uma before they shot her to death. Uma hadn’t cried or even put up a hand. She had wanted to die.

  Anna’s own hands shook as she dried off with the towel.

  Then she peeled the note from the mirror and looked into her own eyes. She had gotten older since she’d last seen her face.

  Her eyelids drooped, and the corners of her mouth sagged from fear and pain. She moved her hair back. The scar was livid, and there was blood behind her ear.

  She released the sheaf of hair, and for a moment her younger self was reflected in the glass. Her radiant smile as she dressed for her wedding, patted powder on her unblemished skin.

  Tears jumped into her eyes, and she ran the hot water again and cried into the stream, scrubbing hard, trying to wash all of this away, at the same time listening for the boot kicking in the door and the beating.

  What kind of God would allow her to be taken again?

  She thought about Joe’s many stern warnings and the height of her arrogance.

  She’d maneuvered around him, followed Petrović, refused to wait for the men with guns to do their job.

  She had brought this down on herself.

  Anna was so agonized by her own behavior that she couldn’t stand to look at herself anymore. She opened the medicine cabinet and found a bottle of drugstore painkillers. She spilled tablets into her shaking hand, swallowed down the maximum dose, and put more pills in her pocket.

  She turned off the light and quietly opened the bathroom door. There was another door at the end of the short hallway and also an opening, an entrance to another room.

  Anna tiptoed on bare feet to that entranceway, and even though she didn’t know what she was walking into, she stepped over the threshold.

  Chapter 92

  Anna was only looking for an exit, but stepping into the living room, she was taken by the size of it, the high ceilings, light coming from a large, muted TV near a fireplace.

  A news show was on, an international channel, with the times in major cities displayed in the lower corner of the screen. Anna watched until it read San Francisco, 3:15.

  She couldn’t be sure, but as best as she could remember, she’d lost herself on Friday night.

  She’d been in the Tesla outside Petrović’s house, prepared to follow him to whatever mysterious places he went when he wasn’t at home or at the restaurant. The rear-end collision had entirely shocked her, throwing her into the steering wheel and out of the seat. She’d been furious when she’d gotten out of her smashed loaner, and then stunned to see the Serbian soldier in the blue Escalade.

  Anna remembered him clearly now from the hotel in Djoba. He had beaten her with a chair leg and then…she didn’t want to think about it.

  He was probably here now.

  Anna felt suddenly light-headed and her knees buckled. She grabbed at the wall, slipped down to the floor, and stayed there until she felt she could stand.

  Where was he? Was he watching her now?

  She had to leave this place. She had to get out.

  Anna looked around the dimly lit room, past the clumps of furniture, to the shuttered windows, back to the sofa, where she noticed the dark shape of a person sitting there with arms around tucked-up knees.

  God, no. Was it him?

  No. It was a woman.

  Another prisoner.

  Anna spoke in a whisper. “Hello?”

  The woman on the couch beckoned her to come over.

  “I’m Susan,” she said. “Talking together is against the rules, so we have to speak softly and fast.”

  Chapter 93

  Anna sat down beside Susan, and for the next three hours they barely moved, their bodies touching from shoulder to hip to thigh. They spoke like sisters.

  Susan said, “This is important, Anna. We have to play it cool.”

  Anna said, “I know. Buy time.”

  Susan told her about the routine, the names of the men who watched, cooked, used her, and Anna asked about Petrović—did he live here and how often did he come to this place?

  “Petrović? I don’t know that name. Tony is the boss. Antonije Branko.”

  “That’s him. Tony. It’s a fake name. Susan, he’s a war criminal. I know him from Bosnia. Do you know if he was with me last night?”

  Susan said, “No, it was my turn. He went to your room, but you were out cold. He said he likes it better when the girl has a little fight. You got Junior. He doesn’t care if you’re already dead.”

  Tears rolled down Anna’s face, but she talked through them. She told Susan that she had known Tony as Colonel Slobodan Petrović and that he had decimated her town in Bosnia.

  Susan grabbed her hand as Anna spoke of her losses and the months she had lived at the rape hotel. “Like this, only with shootings and bombs. I’ve seen a man who works with Petrović at the steak house. He has a short gray beard. He…”Anna stopped to get control of her tears. Then, “He knows me from Djoba.”

  “Marko,” Susan said. “He’s a sadist. Well. They all are.”

  Susan told Anna about the night two weeks ago when Tony and Marko had abducted her and her friends, how Carly had gone crazy and Tony had killed her.

  “An ‘object lesson,’ Tony called it. Oh, it got through to us, all right,” Susan said. “Then Tony said he was letting one of us go on an outing. He flipped a coin and Adele won. I wanted desperately to go, but I couldn’t be mad at Adele.

  “Tony brought her new clothes and then, presto, drove her away. They let her leave.”

  Anna asked, “Do you mean Adele Saran?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m sorry, Susan. Be glad you didn’t go.”

  Anna told Susan what she’d seen on the news, that Adele had been killed and hanged from a tree. Susan clapped her hands over her mouth and cried. Anna put her arms around her new friend, and they clung to each other, grieving without making a sound.

  When she could speak again, Susan said, “I don’t know why I believed Tony. I thought if I was sweet to him…I was so stupid.”

  “You had hope,” Anna said. “They hadn’t destroyed it.”

  Anna wondered if it was safe to have hope now.

  In the dark, while the men slept, Susan and Anna discussed what they had to do to escape. Nothing was off-limits—violence, tricks, charm.

  Together they checked the front door, as Susan had done before. Maybe this time the bastards had forgotten to lock it. No such luck. The shuttered windows were also locked. Their search in the foyer for cell phones in jacket pockets turned up nothing. Knives were locked in drawers.

  At seven in the morning Susan and Anna went to their bedrooms and got into bed with their captors.

  Chapter 94

  At just before noon, Conklin and I paid a call on Taqueria del Lobo to let Mr. Martinez know that the lab had impounded his vehicle again.

  Conklin opened the door and we walked into a shit-storm in progress.

  Martinez was yelling at Lucinda Drucker in the front room, which was packed with customers.

  “I told you, Lucy. I warned you. And now you gave my car to that asshole boyfriend of yours and the damned thing is still missing and now you’re fired. I’m calling the police—oh. Hola, Officers. Here they are.”

  I handed him the warrant and told him the bad news.

  “Mr. Martinez, your vehicle was found at the scene of a crime.”

  “Another one? Son of a bitch. You see what I’m saying, Lucy? You are such a dummy.”

  Lucinda Drucker was crying now. “Mr. Martinez, please, I need my job.”

  Conklin interrupted the shouting and crying to say, “Ah, Ms. Drucker, I have to speak with you for a moment. Outside.”

 
He led the sobbing woman out of the restaurant, and I took Martinez behind the counter to the kitchen doorway. As I gave the same news to Martinez that Conklin was delivering to Lucy, I was watching the late Denny Lopez’s girlfriend through the plate glass.

  I saw Conklin talking to her, saw her jerk away from him, a look of horror on her face. She threw up her hands, like, Get away from me. My partner reached out to her, and she pushed him off and backed away. Then she turned and lunged off the sidewalk, directly into the stream of traffic.

  I shouted, “Noooooo!” from where I stood behind the counter. She couldn’t hear me, but Conklin was also shouting and moving fast. But Lucy was faster. I ran through the doorway and out onto the sidewalk just as the event unfolded.

  Horns blared. Someone screamed, “Watch out!”

  Its brakes squealing, a northbound car hit the young woman in stride, flinging her high and onto the hood of a car parked across the street. The sound of the impact was horrifying. But it wasn’t over. Cars were out of control and crashing, piling up.

  I ran out to our cruiser, got my hands on the radio, and shouted the address to dispatch.

  “I need paramedics now at my location. And send backup.”

  By then Conklin had reached Lucy, and as I tried to cross the street to join him, I heard him saying her name, comforting her. I was relieved when I saw her try to sit up.

  But the chaos continued. The driver of the car that hit Lucy was frantic, and her children were screaming.

  The bus arrived and paramedics climbed out. Cruisers rolled up and blocked off the street. I filled in the patrol officers on the multi-car collision, then retrieved Lucy’s handbag from Martinez and handed it to one of the paramedics.

  Conklin and I were standing together in front of the taqueria when Lucy’s stretcher was loaded into the ambulance.

  “You know what she told me?” said Conklin.

  “No idea.”

  “‘I know Denny. He was a good man and he took care of me. Living without him isn’t worth it.’”