One of the videos had been shot from a balcony thirty feet up, showing soldiers mowing down fleeing civilians, shooting at random, the bodies jerking, falling, dust coming up on the street like a brown cloud. Women in head scarves held up their arms and cried out at the sight of the slaughter.
The still shots lacked sound, and for that Joe thanked God.
The last piece of footage felt like a jackpot.
It was a group shot of a hundred men gathered around a monument on the main street. The troops had formed rows, like a class photo, the tallest in the line at the back, others seated on the lower three tiers of steps around the monument.
At one end of the grouping, taking a strong stance, was Slobodan Petrović. He was red-faced, uniformed, in a gold-braided hat, and heavily armed. He waved at the camera, grinning and proud.
Joe was staring at Petrović when a thought struck him.
He pictured the gray-haired man in Tony’s Place, walking a half pace behind Petrović. He’d had a mustache, and he’d been speaking with Petrović in Serbian.
Could this be the same man who’d paid a call on Petrović at oh dark hundred last night? The same one Anna thought she recognized from the prison brothel?
Joe couldn’t help but remember in crisp detail when Petrović had called him out in the restaurant last week. He had mentioned Anna, referring to her as his “girlfriend.”
Maybe, as Anna suspected, the gray-haired man knew her, too.
Joe grabbed his phone and called Anna’s cell phone again. Still no answer. He got the number of San Francisco Tesla, where Anna worked as a bookkeeper, and called there. He asked the woman who answered the phone to put him through to Anna Sotovina.
The receptionist said that Anna wasn’t there. She thought that Anna had gone to lunch at one and hadn’t come back. The dealership was closing now for the night.
Joe said, “Was anyone concerned that she didn’t come back from lunch?”
The woman said, “Not really. If she finished her work, no one would care if she went home. It was a slow day. Is there anything I can do to help you? Shall I leave a message for Anna?”
Joe said, “No. Thanks anyway.”
Anna wouldn’t have stood Joe up without calling. Had she been abducted by Petrović or the man in the Escalade?
Joe folded his hands on his desk.
This was unusual for him. He didn’t know what to do.
CHAPTER 58
It was after 7:00 p.m. when Conklin and I escorted Dennis Lopez from the back of the cruiser into the Hall and gave him a brief elevator ride to Homicide.
We had detained Lopez on reasonable suspicion, but that was short of probable cause, which would have allowed us to get an arrest warrant and toss his butt in jail.
Reasonable suspicion meant that anything he said could be used against him, but after questioning him for a short time, like twenty minutes, we would have to charge him and read him his rights, or let him go.
I hoped he’d break under pressure, confess to killing Carly, or give us something that would lead to the two missing schoolteachers. And that they’d still be alive.
Interview 2 was available. Conklin pulled out a chair for Lopez, and I kept my hand on his shoulder until he sat down. Time was blowing past.
Conklin removed the cuffs I’d slapped on Lopez in the basement, saying to him, “Okay? You should be more comfortable now. Can we get you something to drink? Soda?”
But Lopez had had experience with the police before. He turned down our offer and answered “No,” “No,” and “I don’t know” to our questions. Ten minutes into our interview, he asked, “Am I under arrest?”
“No,” I said. “We’ve brought you in for questioning. We’re detaining you on reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. That’s because when I ordered you to stop, you stepped on the gas. You can’t do that. Like I told you, you broke a law.”
“Oh. But to be clear,” Lopez said, “can I leave?”
“Not yet,” I said. “That’s the detaining part. But you’re correct that you’re not in custody.”
“If you decide to hit the street,” Conklin told him, “we’re going to upgrade you to suspect. We’ll be taking a much harder look at you. We’ll work with the DA on getting probable cause, and that means search warrants and cops watching you until you screw up. Which I think we can count on.”
“Actually, I want to help,” said Denny.
I said, “Okay, good. Let’s get to it.”
So I asked Denny for the third time, “When was the last time you saw Carly Myers?”
“I don’t know her.”
I almost lost it. He was screwing with us, and I had no power to turn him around.
I leaned in, and speaking in a hard, cold voice, I said, “I swear, Denny, either you help us or you become the focus of my life until you’re in jail.”
Lopez used a minute of our precious time to think things over. Then he said, “The last time I saw Carly was a couple of weeks ago. I guess. I don’t keep a calendar.”
“You’re sure you didn’t see her last week? Let me give you a hint,” I said. “Carly and her two friends were seen leaving a bar called the Bridge on Monday night.”
“I. Didn’t. See. Her. How am I supposed to prove that? I got a question for you. How many hookers get killed every year in this city? A dozen? Do you know? Do you want to grill me about them? Do you think I go around killing working girls? Are you out of your minds?”
When he’d finished venting, Conklin said, “Let me help you out. You were seen on Tuesday night at the Big Four, where Carly was murdered. Your taco ride has been seen there frequently. The Big Four manager knows you were pimping for Carly. That’s what the DA is going to tell the judge. You were the dead woman’s pimp. You were seen at the crime scene around the time she was killed. We’re asking you about a woman you knew and did business with. Follow me?”
Denny nodded and all of the air went out of his balloon.
Conklin said, “Right now our forensics lab is going over the tacomobile, and the DA is getting a warrant for your DNA. A foreign hair was found on Carly’s body, and if the DNA on that hair matches yours, you’re our guy. You’re it.”
“I didn’t kill Carly,” Lopez told my partner. “I’ve never had sex with her. I’ve never even touched her.”
“Then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by telling us every single thing you know,” I said.
Conklin asked, “How about it, Denny?”
CHAPTER 59
Denny thought over the win-win suggestion I’d made, while looking into my hard blue eyes—and he took it to heart.
He said, “I met Carly at the Bridge one night about three months ago. I was sitting at the bar. Carly was a couple stools down, and I started talking to her. She was very cute. I moved over next to her. I bought her a drink. I asked her what kind of work she did and she told me. She said she didn’t make a lot of money and was trying to pay off her college loans.”
He shrugged. I drummed my fingers on the table. I wanted him to get to it. Faster.
Lopez said, “I told her I’d be happy to help her work off the loan and I’d give her a pretty good deal, a fifty-fifty split after taking out for expenses. She laughed. Asked me what I meant. I told her and she told me I was crazy.