Rich called Cindy and told her to get out to the airport and track down the next outbound flight to Sarajevo. A moment later Joe got an email from the lab.
Joe showed me his phone. Clapper had written that Vladic’s Escalade had paint clinging to the broken headlight socket that matched the Tesla Anna had been driving the day she was abducted.
I said to Joe, “If Vladic is indicted for kidnapping, he’ll be deported, right? I swear, if he confesses to killing Denny Lopez, I’ll throw him a farewell party with champagne and a live DJ.”
Joe pulled me close and we grinned at each other. He said, “Not getting ahead of ourselves, are we, Blondie?”
“I can wish, can’t I?”
Meanwhile, in real time, a dozen toasts were made with Tony’s wine: to Claire, to the cops who’d located the Jag and the Escalade, and to the fire and rescue workers who’d saved Anna and Susan. Glasses were raised to Joe and Diano, Conklin and me, for leading the charge and bringing it all home.
No one was left out.
Steinmetz clinked his glass with a spoon and announced that working with the SFPD had been an honor and a pleasure. Jacobi returned the favor.
Conklin’s phone rang, and after he kissed it, he told us the good news.
“Cindy watched Petrović board the plane under guard. She says she kept her eyes on it until it broke the sound barrier.”
Cindy was indomitable.
And after Rich made the announcement, the shouting commenced.
Petrović was gone.
From all that we knew about his recent past and his wartime history, it was a dead cert that Petrović’s sentence would be reinstated and that he’d spend the rest of his life in a cement box of a cell inside a maximum-security prison.
We whooped and yelled and hugged people sitting next to us, even those we hadn’t known before tonight. I texted Yuki and Claire, and they both arrived at Tony’s in time for coffee and chocolate pie.
It was a wonderful, unforgettable finale to our hard and dangerous work.
We’d done it. Case closed.
We couldn’t have known it then, but five years later, when we seldom thought about him at all, Slobodan Petrović would appeal his sentence at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
He’d worked a deal once before.
It would be unbearable, unjust, if he did it again.
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 115
Joe and I stood with Anna outside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the building’s granite walls shielding us from the slashing rain.
Three years before, Anna had moved to Spokane to get away from the searing memories of her time in San Francisco. Although we’d been in touch, we hadn’t seen her since.
Anna looked older now and more vulnerable. She was wearing a hooded raincoat, but the hood couldn’t hide the tears in her eyes. When we hugged, I felt her shivering.
I was afraid for her. Soon she would be testifying to the tribunal, telling them about Petrović’s crimes against her and her family in Djoba. She couldn’t tell them about San Francisco, but I knew full well how much she’d suffered when Petrović brutalized her yet again.
I couldn’t imagine how she’d gathered the courage to confront Petrović now.
Joe gripped her shoulders and said, “We’re with you, Anna.”
“I know. I’m glad.”
The doors to the courthouse slid open, and the crowd of reporters and survivors and onlookers rushed through the entrance into the main hall like a pack of wet dogs.
Ushers directed us, sending witnesses to the main courtroom, and spectators and the press to the gallery, an elevated viewing room separated from the courtroom by a wall of bulletproof glass. When we entered the observation room, I saw rows of theater-style seats rising toward the rear of the room, giving a high-bleachers view down on the court proceedings.
Joe and I sat in the fifth tier, where we had a full view of the courtroom. It was the size of a college lecture hall, high ceilinged and austere. The judges’ wood-paneled benches were centered on the wall opposite the glass barrier. Similar paneled benches, one for the defense, the other for the prosecution, were at right angles to the judges’ benches.
As we watched, Anna and her attorneys entered the main chamber. Anna had shed her coat. She was wearing a subtle plaid suit with a white blouse, and her chestnut hair was cut to shoulder length again. There was no sign of the tears or the tremors I’d seen just a few minutes before. As I watched, she pulled her hair back behind her ears, plainly showing the burn scar on her face.
I clapped on my headphones and listened to the court officer’s speech regarding the proceedings and the rules of decorum. He spoke in English, but his speech was translated into any of six official languages at the touch of a switch.
He called the court to order, and we were asked to rise.
A hundred people in the gallery and another fifty in the courtroom got to their feet as the judges arrived through a side door. Nine men and women, wearing dark-blue robes with royal-blue trim and stiff white jabots at their throats, took their seats at the benches.
The principal judge, Alain Bouchard, took the elevated seat at the center of the back row. He had black skin and white hair and looked to be in his late fifties. I’d read about him: he was a criminal court judge in his home country of Belgium, with a background in criminal defense.
Bouchard exchanged a few whispered words with his colleagues, then spoke to the bailiff, saying, “Please bring in the prisoner.”
CHAPTER 116
I thought I was prepared to see him, but when the side door opened and Slobodan Petrović was escorted by guards into the courtroom, I felt sick.
Tunnel vision, light-headedness, dropping-through-the-floor sick.
Joe gripped my arm. “You okay?”
“Uh-huh. I’m fine.”
I wasn’t fine. I was enraged.
When I looked at Petrović, I saw his gun pointed at my face. I had other images in my mind, ones I’d absorbed from hearing Susan’s tearful rendering of rapes and beatings. I thought about meeting Anna that first time when she was semiconscious in the ICU. And I would never, ever forget the mutilated bodies of Carly Myers and Adele Saran.
Petrović had done all of that and much more. And he hadn’t paid for any of it.
I’d relied on the ICC to return Petrović to his cement-block sarcophagus. My mind had rested on that image of him, a cockroach in a block of concrete.
Seeing him on his feet, well dressed, put a new picture in my head. I saw the clever, undefeated military officer who might have found another loophole. By the end of the day, he might get released for time served.
Petrović smiled at the judges as he passed the benches, before taking his place in the dock.
Joe took my hand, and together we stared at the master killer who had once been our focused obsession. Petrović looked much as he had when we’d seen him last. Yes, his hair was grayer, and he’d lost weight. But he still looked like Tony Branko in a good blue suit, a white shirt with a tie.
There was a buzz in the gallery, exclamations in many languages, muffled sobs, and his name, a sound like clearing one’s throat. Petrović.
I’d researched the trials of Serbian war criminals before coming to The Hague. I knew that over the last four months this court had heard appeals from seven previously convicted former top-level officers of the wartime Serbian Army, all of whom had been betrayed by Petrović.