I held the remote control.
I wanted to talk to Joe, but first I had to see how the media was treating the death of Adele Saran.
The headline stories on all channels, mainstream and cable, focused on the tree where Adele Saran had been found hanging. There were close-ups of the knot, the tree, the coroner’s van leaving the scene, the men in white CSI coveralls bringing evidence to the tent for bagging and tagging. All of this activity was accompanied by the crackle and screech of car radios.
Press setups were dotted around the immediate area, outside the tape. Television reporters faced the camera and told their audience of the horror at the murder scene. A peppy young woman interviewed Paul Harwood, the hiker who had discovered the nightmare on Hicks Road early this morning and called the police.
Harwood told the reporter, “I didn’t believe what I was seeing, that I can tell you. I thought at first it was some kind of prank. A store dummy or something like that. But I had a bad feeling, so I pulled over to make sure. And there that poor girl was, strung up like that …”
I muted the sound as the video switched back to the studio anchor.
Joe said to me, “So, go on with what you were telling me.”
“Where was I?”
“With Claire.”
“Right. Rich and I followed Clapper and Claire back from the crime scene, and we all went straight to the morgue.
“Claire sidelined everything but our victim and got right to the external postmortem. Time of death, approximately nine o’clock last night. Joe, she was alive last night!”
Joe said, “Oh, God,” and then I told him what else I had learned from Claire.
“It’s not for the record yet, but for the moment Claire is saying Adele’s cause of death was the same as Carly’s.”
Joe said, “She was strangled first and then hanged. She had wounds from a throwing star?”
“Exactly,” I said. “And this time it wasn’t guesswork. The damned thing was still sticking out of her back. There was another deep wound in her right shoulder. Neither was fatal. She had bruises on her torso, inner thighs, around her neck below the ligature. Also, as with Carly, there was no discernible physical evidence on the body that would lead to the killer or killers. No skin cells or blood under her nails; in fact, her hands were tied tightly together.”
“What about the rope she was hanged with?”
“It was coated copper wire.”
“Telephone wire. You’re not going to get prints off that.”
I said, “Whoever hanged Adele Saran was a tidy son of a bitch. Wore gloves. Wore a condom. Clapper took blood, sexual assault kit, swabs, and clothes to the lab. Maybe the killer was sloppy and left saliva on her skin, or bled on her clothes.
“But I’m not feeling lucky.”
Joe hugged me, and I burrowed in under his arm and took some deep breaths.
“Anything else?”
He always listened to everything, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and I was glad to tell. Maybe Joe would notice something I had missed.
I said, “Okay, well, here’s something a little different. CSIs found three or four sets of human tracks through the woods, coming from Hicks Road, spreading out, then converging about a hundred yards in from the road.
“Adele hadn’t gotten very far. The blade to her back brought her down. Judging from the disturbance on the ground, she fought a little but never got up. She was probably strangled where she fell, and carried out to the hanging tree by the road. There was nowhere for her to run, Joe. There was mostly wilderness for miles around.”
Joe nodded, picturing the way it had gone down.
“So a hunt, you think,” he said. “And multiple perpetrators. Not personal and yet very sadistic. What’s that about? Some kind of gang—”
I had to interrupt him.
“Wait, Joe, what’s this?”
CHAPTER 76
The images exploding on the TV screen had grabbed my attention. I unmuted it.
It was live footage of demonstrators surging through Civic Center Plaza and pooling at the base of City Hall. There were close-up shots of grieving students and many angry people of all ages with hand-lettered signs demanding justice for Carly and Adele.
A couple of cruisers entered the frame with sirens bleating. When they stopped, cops opened the rear doors, and I recognized Adele Saran’s parents being led by a cop and an organizer to a podium. I started to boost the volume, but Joe took the clicker away from me and turned off the TV.
“That’s enough, Lindsay. You’re not going to get anything useful from watching more of this.”
He pulled me closer, kissed my forehead. I knew he wanted me to calm down for my own good, but my mind was on fire.
We had chores to do before bed and it was way late. Joe took Martha for a walk, and I went to clean up the kitchen.
I was thinking about what Joe had said about Adele’s death, and the suspicion of a gang—but tracking and killing her and posing her corpse in a tree was way too organized for street gangsters. The killer or killers had been careful and followed some kind of script, maybe a pattern of killings that proved the same perpetrators had killed both Carly and Adele.
As I loaded the dishwasher, I thought about the conversation I’d had with Joe last night, when we were safe in bed and I had no way of knowing that Adele Saran was running through the woods, about to be murdered.
I came back to the unplumbed coincidence of Slobodan Petrović, a terrorist military officer who was on the record for hundreds of rapes, tortures, and hangings—a man with a history of programmed military executions.
Joe had shared his frustration that he had nothing on Petrović, with two teams of agents working on it. They were watching Petrović’s car, house, and restaurant, and had attached a tracker to his Jaguar, but sometimes they lost him in traffic. Or while they were watching his parked car, Petrović left the restaurant by a back door.
Discretion was critical. Petrović had made Joe as FBI—Joe’s mistake—and if Petrović thought that the FBI was still surveilling him, they would never catch him in an illegal act. He’d take pains not to let that happen. They had no probable cause to get any kind of warrant.
But this emergency was about to expire without probable cause. The FBI had to catch him in an illegal screw-up if they were ever to kick him back to The Hague for his sentence to be reinstated.
“We follow him, Linds,” Joe had told me. “He drives around town. Goes shopping. Gets a haircut. Goes back to his restaurant. Goes home at night. We wait and watch and follow. He’s never as much as gone above the speed limit. I can’t get a warrant to wiretap his phones without probable cause, and I don’t have it. I can’t pull him over, invade his premises, or get a warrant to search anything. He refuses to screw up.”
I got into my pj’s and tried to let go of the hellish images in my mind. I was running through the woods with Adele as a pack of savages threw star-shaped blades at us. I couldn’t shake the feeling of how terrified that poor woman must have been.
As I got under the blankets, I was thinking that Joe and I were both good detectives. Okay, better than good. And neither of us was getting traction on our case.
I heard Joe come in through the front door with Martha. He filled her bowls, turned off the lights in the living room, then came into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes.