by Lena Bourne
They’re all parked around a fancy home, which is too large to be called a house. A mansion would be more apt. It’s a new structure with a pale peach color facade, burnt orange-colored accents, and more windows than I can easily count. As far as I can tell, it’s surrounded by acres and acres of soft-looking grass interspersed by gravel paths. The driveway that leads to the house is one such, and on either side of it, fields of green stretch to a slight rise on the left and dense forest on the right. What little sunlight is managing to seep through the cracks in the grey clouds is attaching itself to the house, making it glow rose gold. The whole scene just screams money. Not taste though, judging by the architecture and coloring of the house. Ever since I spent almost a year renovating my first home—the cottage in Sveto—I notice these things more than I ever did. But I’m not here to give an architectural critique.
Brina, one of the detectives on my task force team, is leaning against one of the three black sedans Simon recently purchased for our job cars. Her shoulder-length black hair is flapping in the wind, and the color makes her face look paler than chalk. The dark circles around her eyes almost match the color of her hair. She’s one of those detectives that can’t separate their own life from the job and finding justice. I should know since I’m the same. Which is why I haven’t mentioned it to her like a bunch of my bosses always made a point of doing with me. I know very well that there’s nothing she can do to change it. That’s just how we’re wired. It’s all or nothing when it comes to working cases. And neither of us is in a position to do anything right now.
She waves to me, and I park beside her.
“What is this place?” I ask after we exchange a hasty greeting.
“The home of Anton Leskovar, the former Minister of Commerce, former CEO of the country’s largest oil company, and the current mayor of this town,” she says. “He and his wife were found shot this morning. She’s dead, but he survived and was rushed to the hospital.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “A domestic killing? How did you connect this to Anita’s case?”
We’ve started walking towards the wide-open main door of the house and she stops abruptly and spins around to face me.
“A former colleague called me as soon as the report came in,” she says. “Leskovar was questioned in connection with Anita’s death eight years ago. He was never named a suspect, but…You think it’s a stretch?”
She read the expression on my face right. I came here expecting to see a dead young woman, but now I have serious doubts about this being a true break in Anita’s case.
“Your zeal for solving this case is commendable,” I tell her, wondering when the last time she got any real sleep was. Up close, she looks haggard. This case has a bad hold on her. “Let’s go in and see what we see.”
They haven’t cordoned off the area, but a uniformed police officer stops us about ten feet from the main door. He’s a young guy, maybe twenty-three years old at most, and he takes his sweet time examining my flashy new ID card with the huge gold Europol seal on it. All the while, he looks like he’s about to start crying because he doesn’t know what to do about me.
“He’s with me,” Brina says, showing her normal detective badge.
He breathes a visible sigh of relief and lets us pass.
“Good thing you still have that,” I tell her. “Mine isn’t doing a lot.”
She nods and quickens her pace towards the door.
“Not without these,” a woman yells after us. It’s Ida the crime scene tech whose work proved invaluable in tracking down the killer we had just caught. I have no doubt that the forensic investigation into that case that she’s heading will land him in jail for the rest of his life. Simon is still trying to get her to join the task force full time, but I don’t know how that’s going.
She’s wearing a full-body white PPE jumpsuit, complete with a hood cinched tight around her face. It rustles as she approaches, holding out latex gloves and blue shoe covers for us.
“Mark, Brina,” she says. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Is this part of a case you’re working on now?”
I take the items from her hand, and say, “We’ll see,” just as Brina says, “Yes, we think so.”
She looks from one to another. “Well, let me walk you through it.”
She takes the lead, then waits for us to don the protective gear before entering.
My entire cottage could easily fit into the foyer of the house. The flooring is checkered black and white marble, there’s a wide white marble staircase directly opposite the door and a round wooden table in the center of the space with a huge vase full of roses on it.
About three feet from the door, there’s a shallow pool of blood, its edges already congealed. A set of wheel tracks leads from it out the door and boot prints surround it, outlining an area roughly the size of a body. It’s almost like a chalk outline they used to draw around murder victims back in the day. Discarded latex gloves, tubes, and even a used syringe are littering the area, along with a sheet of paper so soaked in blood it’s impossible to read anything on it.
“This is from the paramedics trying to save the man?” I ask Ida, who rolls her eyes as she nods.
I’m sure the rolling of the eyes was an unconscious gesture on her part. Every single crime scene tech I have ever worked with is always annoyed with anyone who messes up the crime scenes they are working on. But I’m sure she hopes the guy will live.
“He was shot first in the living room, just through there,” Ida says and points at a set of wide-open double doors—light brown inlaid with brushed gold. “Then again in here. The second bullet knocked him down, but he still managed to crawl a ways before collapsing.”
This is evident from the blood trail too. I crouch down to examine it closer. On one side, the blood trail of the crawling man is clear and there are even two palm prints, but on the other side, it's interrupted by something he must have held in his hand.
“Was he carrying a bag of some sort?” I ask. “A briefcase, maybe?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing like that was found. But well-spotted. I also concluded that he had something in his right hand while he was trying to get away. But I already spoke to the paramedics and they didn’t find anything lying next to him. Nor did we. Maybe his arm was just paralyzed on that side from one of the bullets.”
“Who found the body?” I ask her.
“One of the stable workers, as far as I know,” Ida says.
I straighten up. “And where’s the wife?”
“This way.” She leads the way to the living room, which is a cavernous room with a very high ceiling lined with tall windows. The two sofas and two armchairs inside are either replicas or actual antiques, upholstered in a cream-colored fabric covered with roses and gold leaf. The wife is slumped over on one of them, a large black-lined bullet hole in her right temple. Her blood has soaked into the sofa coloring half of it crimson.
She looks about my age, with long, dyed red hair, the dark brown roots beginning to show. She’s wearing a floor-length nightgown of a similar cut to the one I left Eva in. Except that in her case, she’s wearing a matching long-sleeved kimono over it. Both are silk, judging by the way they drape over the blood-soaked sofa.
She’s still clutching a revolver in her right hand. It has a white bone handle, the barrel has roses etched into it, and looks like something from the Wild West.
“This looks like a pretty straightforward murder-suicide to me,” I say making Brina grimace. Ida is nodding along though. “Maybe he was divorcing her. Or she found out he was cheating.”
“Who are you?” asks a dark-haired man with so much gel in his hair that it shines silver in the overhead lights.
“Mark Novak, Europol Violent Crimes Task Force.” This new title of mine is a mouthful and it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. “You?”
“Detective Nik Jenko,” he says in a slightly less sharp tone. “I was told to expect you. And to share all we find with you.”
&nb
sp; That doesn’t roll off his tongue easily either. He looks to be about thirty and so full of zeal the air is thick with it.
“This is my case,” he adds in a very obvious pissing contest display.
“We’re looking into a possible connection with a case we’re investigating,” Brina says. “Maybe you’ve heard of it. A stripper was found under the Dragon Bridge in Ljubljana about eight years ago. Badly beaten, no hands, face so smashed in it was unrecognizable. Anita Rajić.”
Nik turned almost as pale as Brina while she was speaking. He clears his throat nervously.
“Eight years ago was a bit before my time,” he says. “But this is an important man. And everything points to a murder-suicide, as Novak here said.”
“Was the husband also wearing his pajamas?” I ask, since I don’t want their conversation to go any further down the path it was heading. We don’t know if the cases are connected yet, nor do I feel like listening to instructions on how we must keep our investigation discrete.
Yes, the victim was an important man, but with all those elite positions under his belt, and this being Slovenia, I’m sure none of us thinks he came by all of them simply on the back of honest work and merit. Though maybe I’m being unfair.
“No, he was dressed in a suit,” Nik says. “Shirt and tie, but no jacket.”
“Do we have an approximate time of death?” I ask.
“Sometime between one and five AM. The ME couldn’t be more specific.”
“And the neighbors? They didn’t hear anything?” I ask.
Nik chuckles. “What neighbors? He owned at least half a hectare of land around this house. There’s a stable with four horses out back.”
He sounds very impressed by all this. Awed, almost.
“And did the gun belong to them?” I ask.
“Haven’t gotten that far yet,” he says. “I only just got here.”
Him getting this defensive this early into our possible collaboration doesn’t bode well. While I was still working for the military, I’d often had to work closely with local police officers. It never went smoothly. This is heading the same way fast. But I also don’t think it matters much in this case. I doubt there’s a connection to ours.
“Can we speak to the person who found them?” I ask and he shakes his head.
“He’s being treated for shock in the ambulance. Later, they told me.”
I tell him we’re going to look around some more, then lead the way back out of the house. Brina follows, her face tight and her mouth pursed as I stop in the driveway and face her.
“I want to look deeper into this,” she says. “If there’s no connection, I’ll back off.”
I look at her for a couple of seconds. I recognize that fire in her eyes, I used to see it in mine when I looked in the mirror. Before she joined the task force, she worked with trafficked women, and the Anita Rajić case sparked that career choice for her. This isn’t just a case for her. It’s her passion.
“Alright, we’ll look into it,” I say, because there really is nothing else to say.
“Good call,” Ida says behind my back. “Because despite how it looks, I don’t think this was a simple murder-suicide.”
Ida has a stellar track record of being right in her assumptions, but in this case, I can’t see how she can be.
“Why?” I ask.
“For one thing, there’s no gunpowder residue on the wife’s hand,” she says. “And with a revolver, there should be.”
“And what else?” I ask, since she successfully forestalled my argument that the absence of gunpowder residue on the skin is not always conclusive.
“And the lock on the back door is broken,” she says. “The damage looks fresh.”
“Show us,” I say.
The back door she’s talking about is actually located at the side of the house. A field of grass stretches away from it, leading to a crest of a hill lined with still mostly leafless trees. Birches, it looks like.
The edge of the stable detective Nik was talking about is visible from the door, and I both smell and hear the horses. Their neighing is high-pitched, as though they sense something has happened to their owners. Horses are just as sensitive as dogs, some even more so, though these might just be reacting to all the people, noise and lights. A team of forensic techs in identical white jumpsuits to the one Ida is wearing are examining something in the stable.
One is dusting the frame of the back door for prints. Most of the outward side of it is already black from it, and the sheer number of prints the dust already uncovered tells me they’ll have their work cut out for them trying to match them up. The lock doesn’t look broken though. I say as much to Ida, who motions me to look closer.
“It was picked,” she says, pointing at it. “See those gashes along the keyhole? And if you look even closer, you can tell the mechanism inside is bent out of shape. Not the most professional lock-picking job, but it worked.”
I look closer and see she’s right.
“I’d think a house this posh would have better locks on the doors,” I say, straightening up.
Ida waves her hands through the air to encompass our surroundings. “This is a safe area. I’m betting they probably kept this door unlocked most of the time. It leads to a service area and storage space of sorts. The stable workers and gardeners used it to wash up and change, I’d say.”
“And what are those footprints?” Brina asks, pointing into the house where yellow evidence cones mark two sets of black muddy prints leading into the house.
“Suspicious,” Ida says. “I saw them in the foyer too. At least I think they’re the same. But I’ll have to examine them more closely to know for sure.”
“These footprints could belong to the person who found the victims,” I say earning sharp looks from both Ida and Brina.
“How long until you have some preliminary reports?” Brina asks and Ida flashes her a hard look.
“I’m not going to rush anything,” she says. “You know I’m efficient and that sometimes takes time. You will be among the first to get my report, how about that?”
I nod and thank her before Brina can say anything.
“We’ll leave you to it then,” I say and motion for Brina to follow me.
She does, but keeps looking back over her shoulder.
“I want to stay on this case, Mark,” she says once we reach the front yard again. She’s only recently started calling me by my first name and she’s still stiff when she does it.
“We will,” I say.
She was ready to fight me on it, but now that determination is visibly melting from her face and it’s quite a sight.
“Do you think there’s a connection to our case? What changed your mind?” she asks.
I’m willing to admit, to myself at least, that my skepticism that this is anything more than a domestic argument gone too far could stem from my reluctance to get sucked into a new case right now. I’d much prefer to go back to the cottage and spend the rest of today with Eva. Maybe she even managed to finish her article while I was here.
“If this wasn’t a murder-suicide, then whoever shot them, went to a lot of trouble to make it look like it was,” I say. “And not very successfully. But then again, Anita’s murder and the disposal of her body wasn’t successfully carried out either.”
The main thing that always bothered me about that was where she was found. In Ljubljana city center, under one of the more famous bridges and right next to the largest marketplace. Why go to all that trouble of trying to crudely disguise her identity, only to leave the body where it will easily be found?
I have no answer to that. And neither does anyone else on the task force.
It could be we’re dealing with culprits who aren’t actually the mob and are just using the same tactics. Or trying to, at least.
“You stay here and see if you can find out anything more. Try to speak to the stable worker who found them,” I say. “I’ll go speak to the surviving victim if I can.”
She thanks me with such feeling that it makes me uncomfortable. I may understand how she feels about solving the Anita case, but now I’m getting afraid she’ll unravel unless we find a connection to it in this one. I probably should say something to her about that, but I’ll be damned if I know what. Bottom line, I’m not the guy for that job.
I’ve been working on my life/work balance problem for the past couple of months. Successfully, I thought, but I’m not so sure anymore. Half an hour at a crime scene and I’m already itching to unravel this mystery. A leopard doesn’t change his spots after all. And the best way to help Brina is to help her solve the case that’s haunted her for years.
I expected more push back to being allowed to see the victim at the hospital, but the two uniformed officers guarding the entrance to the ICU ward seemed perfectly content that I’m supposed to be there. They barely glanced at my badge and asked no questions before letting me in.
The extremely helpful, but rather frazzled-looking ward nurse fetched the attending doctor right away when I asked.
The doctor herself took almost forty-five minutes to come to meet me.
She’s about sixty, with her graying blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail at the back of her head and what looks like permanently pursed and very thin lips.
“What do you need to know?” she asks brusquely as she strides toward me along the wide, blue linoleum floored hallway. Everything in this wing of the hospital looks brand new, and I’ve had ample time to examine it while I waited.
“Is the victim awake?” I ask, trying not to sound too annoyed at being kept waiting. That never goes over well. “Can I speak to him?”
She keeps walking right past me to the door of the ICU room. “I’ll check, stay here.”