that he didn’t get a hit. So he called Hai Nguyen again.
“How’s it going, Hai?”
“Your mail, Joe. Open it.”
Nguyen’s reconstructed photo looked like the pictures of Petrović he’d retrieved from the military files. It was an astonishingly good likeness and quite usable.
Joe hung up and entered the picture into the DMV database. A driver’s license appeared on his screen. It was the man he’d seen on Fell Street, but his name was not Slobodan Petrović.
It was Antonije Branko.
CHAPTER 15
Joe was focused, streaming along a tunnel of concentration, the zone where he felt most comfortable.
Once he had a name with a photo, it didn’t take long to get into all that followed: tax rolls, parking tickets, and records of a house on Fell Street sold to Antonije Branko a year ago.
Now Joe had something tangible.
He enjoyed a few seconds of elation while analyzing this new information. Most likely before he’d left Bosnia, Petrović had changed his name to another Serbian name that gave him plausible deniability. If he was ever recognized here or there, he could say, “Petrović and I were from the same village. He might be a third cousin. Many of us resemble one another.”
Joe’s illuminating thought was supplanted by one more urgent.
He bent to his keyboard and quickly searched the SFPD database for Antonije Branko. He found him listed as a person of interest who had been seen affiliating with known criminals in “crime-prone locations”—bars, girly clubs, dodgy neighborhoods.
Branko had parked in those neighborhoods in his pricey midnight-blue Jaguar. He had been brought in for questioning on two minor drug cases, for purchasing Molly without intent to distribute. Seasoned narcotics investigators had failed to lay a finger on him. No arrests. No indictments.
It looked to Joe like Petrović used go-betweens and buffers in his work, and so far he hadn’t left any fingerprints. That he’d obscured his face with his phone and hand while walking down the front steps of his house now seemed calculated and deliberate.
But Joe couldn’t see any cause for the FBI to bring him in for questioning.
If Petrović had legally changed his name in Bosnia, gotten a passport and a visa as Branko, come to the USA and applied for a green card, and gotten a driver’s license as Branko—none of this was a crime.
But in Joe’s opinion, people didn’t change very much.
Petrović hadn’t left all of those bodies in Djoba and come to the US determined to live a new life as a choirboy. As Anna had asked, where was he getting his money?
The thing to do was to let the fish run. Watch him, track him, and if he was involved in illegal activities, reel him in. Beach him.
Joe leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his neck, and stared at the acoustic-tile ceiling.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Anna. Her story had gripped him, and he was worried for her. He wanted to put Slobodan Petrović away. If he attempted to make this case official without any reason to open a case on Branko, he’d be shut down.
But if he didn’t help Anna, she could get herself killed.
CHAPTER 16
Thanks to Cindy’s anonymous source, Conklin and I had a name and known hangout of a guy who may have dated Carly Myers.
Name: Tom Barry. Favorite lunch spot: a sports bar called Casey’s on Fillmore.
I’d never been to Casey’s before and took a good look from the doorway.
The room was narrow, dark, and clubby, with framed photos of sports stars on the walls. A long bar ran along the length of the place, and there were some tables and armchairs front and back. Three HD TVs were positioned at intervals, and all of them were locked in on a horse race running in Saratoga Springs.
The crowd was fervent—money was on the line.
Conklin and I looked at the men at the bar, and one of them fit the photo. White guy in his twenties, lanky, spiky hair, drinking his lunch. To be fair, he had a bowl of peanuts beside his beer.
We walked over and stood on either side of him, and from the look in his eyes, we were pissing him off by encroaching on his personal space. Sorry, bud. This is police business. We were ready to grab him if he tried to run.
I flashed my badge, introduced my partner and myself, and asked if he was Tom Barry.
“Why do you ask?”
I pulled my phone and showed him the parking lot photo. I asked him if he was the man in