“You didn’t think to call and let me know where you were?”
“I know. I know. I had a sudden idea to follow Petrović home from the restaurant.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“After lunch I went to Tony’s. I used a car from the lot so that he wouldn’t recognize me by my car. I waited for hours and he didn’t leave the restaurant. I stayed there all day. I peed in a bottle. I didn’t leave or move.”
Joe was fuming, but he nodded, then said, “Go on.”
“I saw the man with the evil smile. He left at 7:00 p.m. That’s why I didn’t come here. I saw him and had to decide what to do. If I followed him, maybe he would recognize me.”
“Oh, you think so?”
“You’re being sarcastic with me? Really, Joe?”
He waited her out as she stared at him with an angry, hurt look on her face. She continued to glare as she debriefed him.
“I decided to stay outside the restaurant. I watched customers come and go, come and go, and then I still waited, until all the lights went out. Petrović never left. So I drove past his house. I didn’t see the Jaguar. There was only one light on upstairs. I drove home and I circled the block.”
Anna went on.
“No one was watching me. Still, I parked two blocks away, and then I walked home and came in through the backyard. I am sure that I wasn’t seen.”
Joe said, “And did you drive by his house this morning, on your way here?”
“Yes. His car wasn’t there.”
“And you drove by the restaurant?”
“They don’t open until noon,” she said.
“So what are you doing, Anna? Are you studying law enforcement online? You think you should get an honorary FBI badge and a gun? Do you think you can sneak up behind Petrović at a traffic light, yell ‘Hands up,’ and bring him in? What the hell are you thinking?”
She stared at him and he didn’t flinch. It was unbelievable that this woman, so completely out of her depth, unarmed, untrained, had been tailing a notorious war criminal and now was trying to stare him down.
Her lack of fear was alarming. If she kept this up, he’d be called to identify her body lying in the street, his card in her handbag.
She said, “You don’t scare me, Joe. And you don’t tell me what to do. I survived this fat man when he was fucking me on the floor. I survived what he did to me.”
She pulled her hair away. In daylight the burn scar was like shiny cloth, bunched up and glued to her cheek from eyebrow to jawline.
Anna said, “I saw what he did to my friends and my sister, and I found my dead mother, naked, in a shallow grave. My beloved husband, same. My baby in a ditch. I got away. By night. By foot. By boat and train and more by foot. So do not tell me I can’t watch him. Don’t tell me that. Either help me. Or leave me alone.”
She got up from the chair and headed for the door.
Joe called after her.
“Anna. Come back. I have pictures for you to look at. Do you want to identify your soldier in the Escalade. Or do you not?”
CHAPTER 66
Anna stopped in the doorway and, without answering, walked back to the side chair and sat down.
Joe swiveled the computer screen so she could see the enlarged photo of the soldiers grouped around the monument at the center of Djoba’s main street. Beyond the monument, scattered bodies lined the road.
Anna looked at the photo, searched from the left side to the right. Her eyes stopped on the image of Petrović, then swung back to the other end of the row.
She reached out a shaking finger.
“That’s him. The man in the Escalade.”
Joe said, “You’re sure?”
Tears sprang from her eyes.
“I’m sure,” she said. “That’s him. I can still smell his stinking breath. He’s a twisted bastard. But I don’t know his name.”
Joe said, “Okay, Anna, okay. I’ll get an ID on him. Not today, but we have access to the identity papers of these troops. I’m sorry for what I said before. I’m scared for you, understand? Let me walk you to your car.”
“I can find it,” she said.
It was a struggle, but he didn’t say “Stay away from Petrović” as he walked with Anna to the elevator. His office was on the thirteenth floor, and it took long, uncomfortable moments for the elevator car to travel up from the ground floor. During that time Anna stared at the elevator doors and Joe stared at Anna’s profile.
He pictured the cruel episodes in her life as if they had happened to a relative or a dear friend, and it pained him. He was taking this case too personally, and that worried him. Still. He would tell Steinmetz he was assigning a 24/7 tail on Petrović.
The elevator ground upward and lurched to a stop. The doors slid open. Anna stepped in, turned around, and punched the button for the ground floor. She looked up at Joe as he told her he’d call her when he had new information. She thanked him and the doors closed.
Joe walked back to his office and took a good look again at his screen capture.
He paid most attention to the soldier Anna had identified as the man who had confronted her on Fell Street. As she had told him, the man was a regular soldier, not an officer, and he was in uniform—fatigues, the dark-colored beret, smooth-shaven. He had been adjusting his beret, and in this frame his face was blurred.
Joe cued up the thirty-second video of the men posing in front of the monument and cut screenshots every second. He reviewed his work and found the clearest image of the man Anna had pointed to in the second row.
He printed out the still shot for his file and drew a circle around the unidentified soldier.
And funny thing, the more he looked at this man, the more certain he became that the soldier in the photo was a younger version of the gray-haired man he’d seen with “Tony” in the steak house last week.
This man had been saying something to Petrović. Like, “Yes, I just heard. I’ll take care of her.” Something like that.
Joe had been shocked to see Petrović come out of the kitchen and had focused on him. He hadn’t been listening closely to Grayhair at that time. But in retrospect, the odd phrase had a terrible ring. It could have meant anything; that a payment was due to the hostess or the linen company—or something darker.
Petrović had said to Joe at the time, “Where’s your girlfriend? The one with the bike.”
When Petrović’s sidekick had said, “I’ll take care of her,” had he been referring to Anna?
Petrović had seen Anna on the bike. And he’d seen Anna with Joe when he’d taken Petrović’s photo coming down the steps of the yellow house. But did Petrović also know Anna from raping and burning her in Djoba?
Despite the genocidal rape and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, as far as Joe knew, Petrović hadn’t committed any crime in the USA. But maybe Escalade Man had, and if so, he might have a police record.
Hai Nguyen was likely out for lunch, but Joe attached the video and the clearest screen capture to an email, marking it URGENT.
He wrote, “Hai. Serbian soldier in the second row from the bottom, third in from the left. Djoba, Bosnia. I need his name.” He sent the email.
Joe went to the break room for coffee, thinking about that nameless soldier raping Anna. He knew her movements here in San Francisco and had the balls to try to intimidate her. He recognized her. How could he not? Maybe he had ID’d her to Petrović.