and that worried him. Still. He would tell Steinmetz he was assigning a 24/7 tail on Petrović.
The elevator ground upward and lurched to a stop. The doors slid open. Anna stepped in, turned around, and punched the button for the ground floor. She looked up at Joe as he told her he’d call her when he had new information. She thanked him and the doors closed.
Joe walked back to his office and took a good look again at his screen capture.
He paid most attention to the soldier Anna had identified as the man who had confronted her on Fell Street. As she had told him, the man was a regular soldier, not an officer, and he was in uniform—fatigues, the dark-colored beret, smooth-shaven. He had been adjusting his beret, and in this frame his face was blurred.
Joe cued up the thirty-second video of the men posing in front of the monument and cut screenshots every second. He reviewed his work and found the clearest image of the man Anna had pointed to in the second row.
He printed out the still shot for his file and drew a circle around the unidentified soldier.
And funny thing, the more he looked at this man, the more certain he became that the soldier in the photo was a younger version of the gray-haired man he’d seen with “Tony” in the steak house last week.
This man had been saying something to Petrović. Like, “Yes, I just heard. I’ll take care of her.” Something like that.
Joe had been shocked to see Petrović come out of the kitchen and had focused on him. He hadn’t been listening closely to Grayhair at that time. But in retrospect, the odd phrase had a terrible ring. It could have meant anything; that a payment was due to the hostess or the linen company—or something darker.
Petrović had said to Joe at the time, “Where’s your girlfriend? The one with the bike.”
When Petrović’s sidekick had said, “I’ll take care of her,” had he been referring to Anna?
Petrović had seen Anna on the bike. And he’d seen Anna with Joe when he’d taken Petrović’s photo coming down the steps of the yellow house. But did Petrović also know Anna from raping and burning her in Djoba?
Despite the genocidal rape and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, as far as Joe knew, Petrović hadn’t committed any crime in the USA. But maybe Escalade Man had, and if so, he might have a police record.
Hai Nguyen was likely out for lunch, but Joe attached the video and the clearest screen capture to an email, marking it URGENT.
He wrote, “Hai. Serbian soldier in the second row from the bottom, third in from the left. Djoba, Bosnia. I need his name.” He sent the email.
Joe went to the break room for coffee, thinking about that nameless soldier raping Anna. He knew her movements here in San Francisco and had the balls to try to intimidate her. He recognized her. How could he not? Maybe he had ID’d her to Petrović.
And there was Anna, a defiant, unarmed civilian stalking a killer who just might like to put her away for good.
CHAPTER 67
Adele assumed that it was morning because Marko had woken her by pulling her out of the bed by her hair.
“Please. You’re hurting me.”
She didn’t actually know what time it was, what day, how long she and Susan had been trapped in this gilded cage. No clocks, no outdoor light, no sense of the rhythms of the day and night. It was maddening, but it wasn’t the worst of their treatment.
Despite the promise of freedom for good behavior, they had been punished repeatedly. Punched. Raped. Criticized and threatened and locked in their rooms without time or sound or hope.
Now she and Susan were in the glossy, peach-colored dressing room, pearly as the interior of a conch shell and lit with the softest of makeup lights. They sat in vanity chairs facing the large, beveled mirror.
Susan was fair, strawberry blond, tall. Adele was dark-haired, wiry, athletic. They each had been given a wardrobe and a box of cosmetics suited to their hair color and complexion.
Today they were similarly dressed in silk dressing gowns over their matching baby doll pajamas. They’d been instructed to look beautiful. But they’d never been a fraction as terrified in their lives.
The dressing room was situated between their two bedrooms. Beyond the bedroom suite was a large sitting room, thickly carpeted, luxuriously appointed with down-stuffed upholstered furniture, a marble fireplace, and a grand piano.
There were