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

His hair was wet and he was wearing his robe.
    He asked about my day, but I said, “You go first.”
    Between bites he told me about meeting Anna Sotovina, a Bosnian war survivor, a couple of hours before. Her chilling story had gotten to him. It was getting to
me.
    “What’s she like?” I asked.
    “Terribly broken. Her face is scarred. Her whole life is scarred. She survived the worst—torture, rape, the murders of her husband and child—and came here after the war. She has a good job and a rental apartment on Fulton. She had started over, Linds. And then she sees Slobodan Petrović coming out of a house a few blocks from her place.”
    “It was really Petrović? Is she sure?”
    “She has no doubt.”
    I didn’t need to tell Joe about eyewitness sightings—how the mind fills in memory gaps with convincing detail, so that every time a memory is pulled up for review, it is slightly overwritten in the present. We’d both had firsthand experience with witnesses making positive IDs on criminals who, at the time of the crime, were in maximum security at the Q.
    “I considered that,” Joe said.
    He carried his half-full plate to the sink, refilled his wineglass and mine.
    “Petrović,” I said. “I remember what he looked like. A husky, red-faced hog of a man.”
    “That’s him,” Joe said. “He was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and went to trial but wasn’t convicted. It was a scandal at the time, but he was released.
    “Then—he disappeared. A body was found in a river, I think, bloated and decomposing, and identified as Petrović. But identified by whom? Friends in high places? If Anna is right, he got out of town and ended up here.”
    “What’s your gut tell you?”
    Joe and I had been married for only a few months back then, but Martha loved him. She trotted over to him and rested her chin on his knee. Joe stroked her, drank his wine, and took long, thoughtful pauses that I did not interrupt.
    Then he said, “I believe her, Lindsay. Enough to look into this. I don’t know yet how or if I can help her, but I’ll start digging into it tomorrow.”
    In Joe’s place, I’d have done the same.

CHAPTER 9
    Joe was driving to work the next morning, thinking about Anna Sotovina, when she called.
    “Can we meet?” she asked. “I have a couple of things to show you.”
    Twenty minutes later Joe pulled up to the three-story house on Fulton Street where Anna lived. He was about to ring the doorbell when she got out of a red Kia parked across the street. She was dressed for work, wearing a blue skirt suit and lipstick. Her hair was combed so that it fell in a way that covered the burn scar on her cheek.
    She waited for traffic to pass, then crossed, opened the passenger-side door, and got inside, saying, “I have to apologize for last night. All that crying.”
    “Don’t apologize. You have good reason to cry.”
    She said, “I was in shock to see Petrović.”
    “Of course.”
    “I told you. I chased him on my bike. Crazy.”
    “I’m glad you didn’t catch him,” Joe said.
    She nodded. “I didn’t even think it was crazy. I couldn’t help myself. I saw him. And if I caught him—what did I think I would do? Call him names? But it was
him.
The Butcher of Djoba.”
    Joe said, “You were very brave, Anna. Crazy but brave.”
    She nodded.
    “You wanted to show me something.”
    “Yes.”
    She opened her handbag, pulled out a plastic folder, 8½″ × 11″. Inside was a newspaper article that had been folded into thirds. She opened the yellowed and worn page with shaking hands and showed it to Joe.
    The article was written in Bosnian. Anna tapped the photo at top center, just under the headline.
    “That’s him going into the ICC in handcuffs. See them? He was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, but the charges were dismissed. I don’t know why. Thousands were killed. I saw the bodies. But he was simply
released.
”
    She took out her billfold and