The 18th Abduction Read online

  He’d known that he’d caught Petrović at an angle, but what he saw on his monitor was a slimmer wedge of the man’s face than he remembered.

  Petrović’s longish hair fell over his eyes, and worse, his hand and cell phone covered most of his cheek and ear. Petrović had been looking down, watching his step, causing folds of his neck to gather under his chin, further distorting his profile.

  Joe was exasperated. He’d missed an opportunity, but still, if he’d stepped in to take a better shot, Petrović would have seen him do it.

  No good would have come of that.

  Joe focused on what he had.

  The shapes of Petrović’s head and nose were distinctive.

  He opened FACE, the agency’s facial recognition software, and imported the image of the “husky, red-faced hog.” The program could identify a partial image with 85 percent accuracy. If Petrović’s mug was in federal databases or those of sixteen states, FACE could nail him.

  Joe stared at the screen as the program did its work, but when the run concluded, only three marginal matches had been retrieved. None were positive. None were Petrović.

  Joe went back to Interpol’s Criminal Information System, a global criminal database, and after typing in Petrović’s name, he found several photographs like the one in the ragged newspaper clipping Anna had carried with her.

  Documents and hundreds of pages about Petrović’s military history and arrest downloaded, as well as transcripts of translated police interviews. The transcripts were heavily redacted. Why? A fast look through them told Joe that Petrović had denied every charge—the killings, the rapes, the torture—claiming that he was just a soldier.

  He’d been misidentified. They had the wrong guy.

  Joe had heard this same heinous crap from guilty criminals over the long history of his career. And without evidence, denials could work, even for red-faced, red-handed killers.

  In Petrović’s case, there were mountains of bodies. And there were survivors like Anna who surely would have testified. How had the Butcher of Djoba been released from prison?

  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.

  I flashed my badge, introduced my partner and myself, and asked if he was Tom Barry.

  “Why do you ask?”

  I pulled my phone and showed him the parking lot photo. I asked him if he was the man in the picture.

  “Looks like me. Yeah. That’s my leather jacket.”

  “Who’s that with you?”

  “Uh. Carly?”

  “You were with her a few nights ago,” I said.

  “Nope. I saw her last week, Tuesday. That’s when we went out. What’s going on?”

  Conklin sidestepped the question, asking Barry if he knew where we could find Carly.

  “Me? No. We’re not that close. If we’re drinking in the same bar, we sometimes go out for a bite and a roll.”

  “She’s missing,” Conklin said. “She hasn’t been seen in a few days.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Barry said, drawing back, showing alarm.

  The horses on the screen overhead were clearing the back turn and pounding into the stretch. The crowd in the bar broke out in yelling and rooting.

  Barry glanced up at the screen, yelled, “Oh, come ooon, Fast Talker, come oooon.” Then he remembered we were standing beside him, and turned back to us in disgust.

  “I don’t know anything about Carly. You’re wasting my time.”

  I said, “We believe you, Mr. Barry. But if you care about Carly at all, we need your help.”

  “Christ. I don’t even have her phone number.”

  Conklin said in that nice, nonthreatening way he has, “Sometimes people know more than they think. We’d appreciate you coming with us to the station, Mr. Barry. You might be able to shine a light on this situation.”

  “Look, I have to be at work at two, okay? I manage the car wash over on Third.”

  “You’ll be back in plenty of time,” I lied.

  Barry slapped a ten down on the bar, and I noticed his knuckles were scraped up. He’d swung at someone or something recently and connected. While he struggled into his leather jacket, Conklin snaked a hand around him, picked up the beer glass by the rim. While I further distracted Barry by putting the photo of him back in his face, asking, “This is the parking lot at the Bridge, right?,” Conklin got a plastic bag from the bartender.

  “I guess so,” Barry muttered.

  With his prints on a bagged glass under Conklin’s Windbreaker, we escorted him out onto the street and into the back of our car. As Conklin drove, I checked out Thomas Barry on the MDC built into the console.

  Barry had a minor-league record: an arrest for drunk and disorderly one night at Casey’s a couple of years back, a fender bender last year, and a DUI. His juvenile record was sealed.

  I had an image in mind of Carly Myers and Barry, and he didn’t look, smell, or feel like a match for her. What did she see in him?

  My interest was piqued. So much so that I was cautiously optimistic that Tom Barry held a key to the whereabouts of the missing schoolteachers.

  Chapter 17

  The Hall of Justice was a large, rectangular granite building on Bryant Street, home to the criminal court, the DA’s office, a jail, and the Southern Station of the SFPD, which included the homicide squad, where Conklin and I worked in the bullpen on the fourth floor.

  Despite its storied past and understated charm, the HOJ was rat infested, prone to flurries of asbestos and sewage leaks, and seismically unstable.

  We’d been working here for so long that Conklin and I hardly noticed that the Hall was hazardous to our health. Whenever we talked about it, we agreed that we would miss the old wreck when it was eventually demolished.

  But at that moment, with a possible suspect in tow, we were only thinking about the missing schoolteachers.

  Conklin, Tom Barry, and I were seated at a metal table inside a small interrogation room down the hall from our squad room. Lieutenant Warren Jacobi, our old friend and commanding officer, was behind the glass.

  I took the lead in the interview and began by asking Barry to help us out. He responded by pushing my buttons, first denying knowing anything about Carly yet once more, then becoming argumentative and belligerent. He had quite an act. And the truth was, we had nothing on him.

  He could walk out anytime.

  Conklin took a turn.

  “Mr. Barry, cut it out. This is very damned serious. We’re trying to save lives here, and you’re acting like you’ve got something to hide. If you’re innocent, act like it, okay?

  “You went out with Carly, spent time with her, so give us something to go on. Where would she be if she went somewhere on her own after work and after dark?”

  “I. Do. Not. Know. Look, I wasn’t attached to her. At all. We talked baseball, football, and especially soccer. We screwed. Once in my place. Once in hers. I didn’t buy her a Valentine. I didn’t introduce her to my mother. The relationship was casual. What don’t you get?”

  After an hour of this combative back-and-forth, I thought I’d wrung everything out of Thomas Barry that he had to give; not only his work schedule but also the name of a woman who could vouch for him the night Carly, Susan, and Adele went missing. He gave us names of two other women he’d rolled with on the two nights after that. Thomas Barry was a player. We would send his prints to the lab, my thought being that maybe his prints would be found on Carly Myers’s car.

  It was quarter to two in the afternoon.

  Barry said, “Can I go now? I don’t want to get fired.”

  I said, “I’ll have an officer give you a lift.”

  “Okay. Finally.”

  He stood to put on his jacket and gave me a peculiar look, which I read as a sign he was about to do us a favor.

  “Sergeant, I had nothing to do with Carly being missing. Or any of them. If I were you, I’d be looking into Carly. My take is that she’s no angel. She has a dark side. That much I can tell you.”

  There was a knock on the door and Jacobi came in, looking stricken.

  He said, “Mr. Barry, I’ve got you a ride. Thanks for your help. Boxer, Conklin, I need to see you right away.”

  I handed Barry off to Officer Mahoney and headed back
to Jacobi’s glass-walled office at the back of the squad room.

  He and Conklin were waiting for me.

  I pulled out a chair, saying, “Waste of time. We don’t have enough cause to get a warrant—”

  Jacobi cut me off.

  “We’ve got a body. Might be Carly Myers. Big Four Motel, room 212. Call me when you get there.”

  Chapter 18

  Richie lost the coin flip, so I drove.

  We reached Ellis Street in record time, then closed in on the Big Four, slowing only for the aimless druggies wandering down and across Larkin.

  I pulled into the parking spot at the front of the seedy, rent-by-the-hour, no-tell motel, switched off the engine, and took a breath. We weren’t alone. A dozen homeless, impoverished, drug-dependent residents of the Tenderloin were camped out on the macadam between the parked cars.

  They were about to lose their campground.

  The parking lot was a secondary crime scene and would have to be vacated and taped off from the street.

  Conklin and I got out of the car. My mind was racing with questions, none of which would be answered until we got into room 212.

  Question one: Was the dead woman Carly Myers?

  Questions two and three: If the DB was Carly, what had killed her? And why here?

  A handful of the motel’s guests stood under the awning outside the manager’s office, complaining loudly that they needed to get into their goddamn rooms.

  The manager said just as loudly, “Cops said when they’re done, they’re done. Nothing I can do.”

  I interrupted the dispute to get the manager’s name, Jake Tuohy, and to tell him to stick around. We’d be back.

  Room 212 was at the rear of the motel. My partner and I rounded the corner of the three-story stucco building and saw a small fleet of first responders: two cruisers, an ambulance, and two CSI vans, all empty.

  We badged the uniform at the foot of the stairs, ducked under the crime scene tape, and headed up to the second floor, where Nardone, another uniformed officer, was waiting for us. At that time, Officer Robert Nardone was a beat cop with ambition and promise. He told us that he was the first officer on the scene.