hadn’t known.
At the same time, there had been no ransom notes or calls to any of the women’s parents, and the hounds hadn’t picked up a scent of any of the three women beyond the Bridge’s parking lot.
If this was an abduction, how had it happened? By force? Willingly? And if willingly, what had the kidnapper used to bait the hook?
My shoes were off and lined up under the coatrack.
Martha was wriggling in front of my knees and telling me she’d missed me. I grabbed her up and kissed her and snuggled her. After telling my sweet doggy girl how much I loved her, I went into the living room to find Joe.
CHAPTER 27
I found my Joe reclined in his big chair, papers stacked around him, his laptop open on his thighs, and deep in sleep.
It was after ten o’clock and I wanted to sleep, too, but I wanted to talk to Joe more. Maybe my own special agent would see a flaw in my reasoning or a door I hadn’t opened.
I called his name, walked over, and kissed his head, and he started awake.
“Joe, honey,” I said. “I really need to talk to you.”
He righted his chair into a sitting position and said, “I really need to talk to you, too. In fact, I may need to talk to you more.”
“You first,” I said to my man. “But I have a confession. I stink.”
“Do not.”
“Do.”
By the time I’d showered, gotten into pj’s, and made ham and mayo sandwiches with tea for two, Joe was back with Martha from their nighttime walk around the block.
I brought our dinner over to the coffee table, and Joe and I relaxed into the inviting embrace of the long leather sofa. I urged Joe to start talking. And he did.
“It’s about Anna,” he said. “Anna is the woman I met sitting on Golden Gate Avenue.”
“I know who you mean.”
“Well, here’s the thing. I didn’t open a case file on her that night. She looked like she’d been through hell, and I was right. In fact, I didn’t know a fraction of it. So I said ‘screw protocol’ and gave her a lift home.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, Joe. You can walk the protocol back, right?”
Joe picked up his sandwich, looked at it as though he’d never seen such a thing before, and put it back down on the plate.
“I should have done it before I started investigating Slobodan Petrović. I didn’t know if Anna’s story was for real or if she was having flashbacks to the nightmare of nightmares. If I’d opened a file, she would have had to meet with a duty officer and she would have been questioned. Extensively. What if he didn’t believe her? There was a good chance of that. And Bosnia isn’t exactly on our patch.
“I didn’t think it through.”
I remembered Joe’s face when he told me Anna’s story on the night he’d met her. He’d been this close to breaking down when he told me about the scorched-earth destruction of her town. The savage murders of her husband and child.
“You did the humane thing, hon. Subjecting Anna to an FBI grilling without first vetting her story could have been worse for her, and you, too.”
“That’s what I told myself. But what I’m doing now, having people in other offices do research, digging into government files on behalf of my concern for this woman … I’m acting like I’m a PI, not a federal agent. It’s inexcusable. Let me be more precise: I could get beached.”
Joe Molinari was a straight arrow. Solid. Honest. Some would say a hero. He’d taken a hell of a chance for a stranger. A woman. I tried not to let that bother me.
I asked, “What can you do to fix this?”
“Now that I’ve gone this far, I want to bring this to the supervisor as a real thing. If Petrović is living on Fell Street legally, I want to know how that happened. Why is he here? Is he in a witness protection program? Is he being managed? What’s his deal? If Anna is wrong and this is a Petrović look-alike, I’ll talk her down and save her the grief of being interrogated by the FBI. And I’ll fess up.”
“That shouldn’t take too long,” I said.
He shrugged. “I have to work this myself, not get anyone else involved. Anyway, your turn. Tell me.”
He didn’t have to convince me. I was dying to tell him about my day.
CHAPTER 28
Joe and I changed positions on the