Hicks Road, spreading out, then converging about a hundred yards in from the road.
“Adele hadn’t gotten very far. The blade to her back brought her down. Judging from the disturbance on the ground, she fought a little but never got up. She was probably strangled where she fell, and carried out to the hanging tree by the road. There was nowhere for her to run, Joe. There was mostly wilderness for miles around.”
Joe nodded, picturing the way it had gone down.
“So a hunt, you think,” he said. “And multiple perpetrators. Not personal and yet very sadistic. What’s that about? Some kind of gang—”
I had to interrupt him.
“Wait, Joe, what’s this?”
CHAPTER 76
The images exploding on the TV screen had grabbed my attention. I unmuted it.
It was live footage of demonstrators surging through Civic Center Plaza and pooling at the base of City Hall. There were close-up shots of grieving students and many angry people of all ages with hand-lettered signs demanding justice for Carly and Adele.
A couple of cruisers entered the frame with sirens bleating. When they stopped, cops opened the rear doors, and I recognized Adele Saran’s parents being led by a cop and an organizer to a podium. I started to boost the volume, but Joe took the clicker away from me and turned off the TV.
“That’s enough, Lindsay. You’re not going to get anything useful from watching more of this.”
He pulled me closer, kissed my forehead. I knew he wanted me to calm down for my own good, but my mind was on fire.
We had chores to do before bed and it was way late. Joe took Martha for a walk, and I went to clean up the kitchen.
I was thinking about what Joe had said about Adele’s death, and the suspicion of a gang—but tracking and killing her and posing her corpse in a tree was way too organized for street gangsters. The killer or killers had been careful and followed some kind of script, maybe a pattern of killings that proved the same perpetrators had killed both Carly and Adele.
As I loaded the dishwasher, I thought about the conversation I’d had with Joe last night, when we were safe in bed and I had no way of knowing that Adele Saran was running through the woods, about to be murdered.
I came back to the unplumbed coincidence of Slobodan Petrović, a terrorist military officer who was on the record for hundreds of rapes, tortures, and hangings—a man with a history of programmed military executions.
Joe had shared his frustration that he had nothing on Petrović, with two teams of agents working on it. They were watching Petrović’s car, house, and restaurant, and had attached a tracker to his Jaguar, but sometimes they lost him in traffic. Or while they were watching his parked car, Petrović left the restaurant by a back door.
Discretion was critical. Petrović had made Joe as FBI—Joe’s mistake—and if Petrović thought that the FBI was still surveilling him, they would never catch him in an illegal act. He’d take pains not to let that happen. They had no probable cause to get any kind of warrant.
But this emergency was about to expire without probable cause. The FBI had to catch him in an illegal screw-up if they were ever to kick him back to The Hague for his sentence to be reinstated.
“We follow him, Linds,” Joe had told me. “He drives around town. Goes shopping. Gets a haircut. Goes back to his restaurant. Goes home at night. We wait and watch and follow. He’s never as much as gone above the speed limit. I can’t get a warrant to wiretap his phones without probable cause, and I don’t have it. I can’t pull him over, invade his premises, or get a warrant to search anything. He refuses to screw up.”
I got into my pj’s and tried to let go of the hellish images in my mind. I was running through the woods with Adele as a pack of savages threw star-shaped blades at us. I couldn’t shake the feeling of how terrified that poor woman must have been.
As I got under the blankets, I was thinking that Joe and I were both good detectives. Okay, better than good. And neither of us was getting traction on our case.
I heard Joe come in through the front door with Martha. He filled her bowls, turned off the lights in the living room, then came into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed to take