18th Abduction (Women's Murder Club) Read Online Free Page A

very sorry, Anna.”
    She was looking out into the darkened streets, projecting her terrible story onto this blank screen. She spoke of howher town had been declared a safe zone by the United Nations and how hundreds of refugees had fled there. How they had grouped together in the sweltering heat without enough food or water. And how most of those stranded in that so-called safe zone had been women, children, and the elderly.
    Anna told him how the Serb soldiers had mingled among the refugees and executed the men at random, not stopping there but hunting down the ones who had hidden in the outlying fields and farmhouses. She described how the Serb soldiers had burned down the houses and barns and then turned their attention to the women and children left trapped in the town.
    “I hid with Bakir in my house,” Anna told him, her voice hollow with shock, “but they found me. They took my child away, my beautiful boy. Then they held me down and … you can imagine what they did. Four of them. Laughing. Trying to hurt me as much as possible. Anyway, I passed out. The next morning they were gone. I found my baby boy on the side of the road with his throat slit.”
    Anna groaned and then sobbed uncontrollably into her hands as she relived the unspeakable death of her child.
    Joe pulled the car over to the curb and put his hand on Anna’s shoulder. She shook him off and leaned against the window, crying in ragged sobs until she was cried out.
    Then she turned to him and said, “The most unbelievable thing is when something so unimaginable happens, a thing that kills you inside, you keep breathing and your heart beats and you still live. Time still goes on.”
    Joe had to fight his own feelings, and they were many. Hewanted to comfort her. He wanted to kill someone—Petrović. He wanted to cry.
    Anna said, “It has been so long since I’ve told anyone, Joe. I’m sorry that you had to be the one. But seeing Petrović today, healthy,
prosperous.
I thought he was dead. I thought he was long dead.”
    “What can I do to help you?”
    Anna and Joe sat in the parked car and talked for a while, Anna describing fantasies of killing him, detailing conversations she’d had with other women in Djoba. Hushed conversations in which they never said what had been done to them. They hadn’t had to.
    Finally exhausted, she said, “Please drive me home now, Joe. I need to be alone.” He started the engine.
    Ten minutes later Joe parked near the house where Anna was renting a studio apartment. He told her that he would bring the bike to get it fixed, not a problem, and carried her backpack upstairs. He gave her his contact numbers and said to call him when she wanted to speak again.
    She thanked him, went inside, and closed the door behind her.
    Anna’s pain had permeated Joe’s car.
    He could still see the violent imagery she had drawn of old people hanging off the sides of trucks, the slaughter of children, the refugees who’d hanged themselves rather than suffer at the hands of Slobodan Petrović.
    These images accompanied him all the way home.

CHAPTER 8
    I’d gone for a short run with Martha and was now home in our apartment on Lake Street.
    The evening news was on the TV and the soup just beginning to simmer when Martha broke for the doorway, barking and shimmying, to greet Joe.
    He bent to pet our good doggy, but his expression told me that he’d had a very bad day.
    I said, “Hon. What’s wrong?”
    “Did you eat?” he asked me.
    “No. Did you?”
    He shook his head.
    “I’m heating up some split pea. I can give the chicken legs another few spins in the microwave.”
    “Would you? I need to get out of my clothes.”
    While I “cooked,” Jacobi called, and we updated each other on our lack of progress on the schoolteacher case.
    “We’ve got zippo,” Jacobi said to me. “I hate this.”
    We commiserated and talked over plans for the next day,and I had just hung up as Joe came into the spacious kitchen/living room.