I felt sick to my stomach.
I was doing my job, as was Conklin and the homicide crew, and the volunteer cops, our first-class ME, and the crime lab. But even the manpower, the twenty-four-hour days, the interviews, and the deep research hadn’t produced a live suspect.
Yes, I felt defensive, but there were no acceptable excuses.
The Pacific View student body, the parents of the three women, and all of the city’s citizens had every right to demand answers.
Someone shouted my name.
I turned to see Claire coming toward me, only yards away on Harriet. She tossed her head in the direction of the demonstration and looked as distressed as I felt.
We put our arms around each other’s waists and crossed the street together. Cindy and Yuki waved to us from the entrance to MacBain’s, and we burst through the door together.
Syd MacBain said, “Take any table you like.”
No discussion needed, we went for our favorite table.
We ordered coffee and tea, and I swore Cindy in, as usual, officially notifying her that this meeting was off the record. She rolled her baby blues, shook her head, making her blond curls bounce, and said, “Gaaaaahhhhhh.”
Claire laughed, Yuki joined in with her rolling, merry giggle, and then we were all laughing, because you cannot hear Yuki’s laughter without falling apart.
I had to give it to Cindy. She broke the gloom into pieces.
Once the hot drinks arrived, Yuki took charge and briefed our group on Slobodan Petrović’s suppression of Djoba, Bosnia, two decades ago.
“He’s here now,” she said, “going under an alias, Antonije Branko.”
“Petrović is in San Francisco?” Cindy asked.
“Looks like it,” Yuki said. “A man presumed to be Petrović just opened a steak house on California.”
“Tony’s? The one that used to be Oscar’s?” asked Claire.
Yuki said, “That’s the one.”
Claire and Cindy were shocked. They listened avidly as Yuki described an aspect of Petrović’s modus operandi—his documented pattern of rape, torture, and murder. I’d spent a restless night talking it over with Joe, comparing Petrović’s MO to the strangulation and hanging of Carly Myers in a motel shower.
I wasn’t yet convinced that the dots, in fact, connected.
When Yuki turned the meeting over to me, I explained that Petrović was known to have kept women prisoners in a rape hotel, and that he had sadistic tendencies.
Cindy said, “Go on,” and I did.
I said, “Myers was found in a motel frequented by prostitutes. With nothing more than what we’ve said, I can’t help but wonder if this bizarre torture and hanging of Carly Myers was committed by Petrović. And if so, is he on a roll? Has he stashed Saran and Jones in other motels around town? Because we don’t know where they are. We don’t have a clue.”
I thought of those students chanting “Do your job” just down the block. Was Petrović a lead? Or was I just hoping for something to give us a handle on this kidnapping and murder?
Claire’s voice broke into my thoughts.
She said, “I just got this back from the lab last night. These are impressions of those unusual premortem cuts on Carly’s body.”
Cindy hadn’t heard about those cuts. She jumped in with questions.
“What kind of cuts? Can I see the pictures? Oh. Oh. Those don’t look fatal. Were they, Claire?”
Claire said, “No, they weren’t fatal. These wounds were probably inflicted to scare her and make her compliant. Sometime after that, she was asphyxiated, and then, when she was dead, she was hanged. Seems to me that the hanging was for effect. She was dressed in a men’s white shirt—probably just to hide the wounds, make a better-looking corpse.”
Claire and I have been close friends since we were both rookies, and I can read her pretty well.
From the look on her face, I was sure that Claire was about to drop some kind of news we hadn’t heard before.
CHAPTER 64
My phone buzzed, Richie texting me that Jacobi wanted to meet with us right away.
I texted back. Ten more minutes. Maybe fifteen.
Then I tuned back in to what Claire was saying. She had opened another folder of photo enlargements, saying, “These pictures are of the latex molds pulled from the slashes in Carly’s torso. See here: thin slabs of latex and a ridge where the latex material seeped into the wounds. The report suggests that the wounds may have been caused by throwing stars.”
“Are those the same as ninja stars?” Cindy asked.
Without waiting for an answer, Cindy began googling throwing stars on her phone.
“Here we go,” she said. “Actual name of throwing stars is shuriken. They’re of Japanese origin but used in other countries. ‘Historically, shuriken are made out of almost any metallic found objects’ … dah-dah-dah … ‘star-shaped, five-pointed, swastika-shaped,’ and so on.”
She swiped on her phone, read another page, and resumed her summary.
“The stars are not meant as a killing weapon—to your point, Claire. They’re used more to injure and distract and to supplement swords and other weapons … Uh, they’re usually five to eight inches in diameter, very thin, thrown with a smooth movement so that they slip effortlessly out of the hand. Okay, paraphrasing here, the victim often doesn’t see the star and thinks he’s been cut by an invisible sword.”
Claire said, “Yeah. That thin blade sounds right. One of the wounds was a slice on Carly’s forearm. Like defense against a glancing blade.”
Cindy showed us an image of throwing stars of all shapes tacked to a display board. Then she put down her phone and said, “Throwing stars are illegal in many countries and some states. They’re illegal in California.”
I remembered what Claire had said when I went to the morgue to see Carly Myers’s body: “If you find the weapon, you may find the killer.”
Forensics had homed in on the most probable weapon. But how were throwing stars a link to Slobodan Petrović?
The check arrived. Cash dropped on the table from four hands. We hugged and headed off to work.
I moved fast, edging through the demonstration and taking the front steps, wanting to get to that meeting with Conklin and Jacobi.
I had a lot to tell them about the genocidal war criminal living near the Panhandle. That he had a documented history of torture, rape, and mass murder.
And that, according to postwar witness reports, Petrović was a sadist: he made a point of hanging his victims, and it seemed like he just loved to do it.
CHAPTER 65
Security called up to Joe, saying that he had a visitor, Miss Anna Sotovina.
“Send her up,” Joe said.
Anna had stood him up for last evening’s six-thirty meeting, turned off her phone, and not returned his texts and calls. He’d been worried about her all night, and now he was pissed off.
When she knocked on the doorframe, he checked her out. She was dressed for her job and didn’t seem scared or injured. He asked her to come in and indicated a chair.
She started speaking as she crossed the room.
“I turned off my phone,” she said. “I didn’t want it to ring when I was waiting in my car.”