by Lena Bourne
He chuckles. “Yes, I’ve heard that before. But when you’re blocked from solving the first five cases you’re assigned as a detective, because all your main suspects are too well-connected, you can’t help but lose hope a little.”
I never let something like that stop me. Not at any age or stage of my career. It could be he’s telling the truth, or it could be he’s just not a very good detective. I guess I’ll find out, which it is soon enough. But not right now, because we’re at our destination.
Vrhnika is one of those towns that’s been around forever, just like most towns in Slovenia. This is my first time visiting it and I wish I was here just to explore. For the last couple of weeks, Eva and I have been visiting old towns like this all across the country. She’s been away for most of her life and hasn’t seen most of them, and I only just moved here about a year and a half ago. My grandparents immigrated to the US in the 1950s and both my mom and I were born there, but as soon as I visited the tiny village in Sveto where my family is originally from, I knew I wanted to live there forever.
The town hall is located in a long, two-story house in the old town center. The facade has recently been redone and shines bright white in the glaring sun. The sidewalk in front of the building, not wide to begin with, is congested with reporters, their cameras, sound techs, and what looks like random townsfolk, some of whom are giving interviews.
The police station is inside a similar townhouse a few buildings down, and there also, the sidewalk is packed with camera crews setting up and curious people.
“Where are we going to park?” Walter asks.
I share his concern. The streets are medieval-style narrow, to begin with, and the many cars and trucks from TV stations are not making things any better. As soon as I spot a space wide enough for my SUV I just drive into it onto the sidewalk and turn on the blinkers.
“This will have to do for now,” I tell Walter and grin. He grins back but his eyes look worried. I’m double parked, cutting off at least two TV station vans, but I doubt they’re going anywhere before three PM, which is when the police press conference is scheduled for.
It takes some careful walking not to trip over wires or run into people to reach the entrance to the town hall. An EU flag is flapping in the breeze above the door, as is a second flag, which is almost the same shade of blue as the first, only that this one shows a picture of the legendary Argo ship sailed by Jason and the Argonauts when they went to find the Golden Fleece. Legend has it, that on the way back with their prize, they sailed via the Ljubljanica River through Vrhnika trying to get to the sea, but failed and had to carry their boat. Or something along those lines. But the Argo is on the town’s Coat of Arms, proving me right in assuming that a town has stood here since forever.
A police officer is stationed at the main door and he spends about a minute looking at our badges before waving us through. The security guard— a tall, thin man of about sixty is standing in the foyer just inside the heavy, iron inlaid wooden door. Walters gasps in alarm as the man blocks his way towards the wide, grey marble stairs leading up.
“Are you here about the mayor?” he asks and he looks about as startled as Walter.
I briefly introduce myself and Walter and flash my badge again. Even in the gloom of the foyer, the gold badge glows. It really is too gaudy.
“We’d like to speak to his secretary,” I tell him.
“First floor, second door on the right,” he says and stands aside. “Was it murder?”
“I can’t share that information,” I say as I pass him.
“The mayor was a good man,” he says. “He didn’t deserve this.”
I stop and turn around. Walter is already halfway up the stairs and doesn’t notice.
“Did you see the mayor leave the office yesterday?” I ask.
He nods and straightens up. He’s at least half a head taller than me when he does that.
“He left when I finished my shift, at five PM,” he says. “We exchanged a few words like we do every day. He said he was on his way to play a couple of rounds of golf before meeting his daughter for dinner. He needed the exercise to mentally prepare, for it, he said.”
“He didn’t have a good relationship with his daughter?” I ask.
I didn’t even know he had a daughter, but it’s best to get this man’s information now and fit it in with everything later. He looks eager to talk. I can’t tell if it’s because he knows something or is just shocked because his boss has been murdered.
“She was one of those activist types, always protesting something,” he says. “You know, young and full of zeal and strong convictions. But he loved her very much. His exasperation with her was more for show.”
“Do you know what she was protesting against? And did it tie in with her father’s work?”
The man chuckles. “As far as I know, it was something different every couple of months. And it always tied in with the work her father was doing for the town.”
“Do you remember anything specifically?”
The man looks up, his eyes almost swallowed up by his bushy dark eyebrows lined with white. His demeanor tells me he considered the mayor almost a friend and definitely much more than just the man he worked for. I wonder if it was mutual. That tacky oversized house the mayor lived in didn’t exactly give me the impression that he considered himself equal with the everyman, or that he was a people’s type of mayor. But I could be wrong. Equality in this country is a notion that stems from its socialist past when the workers were protected and not looked down upon as a rule.
“Let me see, last month it was the clearing of a section of forest at the edge of town,” he says. “Her father sold the land to an Austrian firm who will be building a furniture factory here. Almost two hundred jobs, but Jana and her group were set against it. I’m sorry, I mean Ms. Leskovar. She and ten others chained themselves to the trees that were to come down. Very dramatic and over the top, in other words. But they reached some sort of agreement in the end. The trees came down and the construction of the factory has already begun. That’s all I know.”
He’s a talker and I wish I knew what to ask to get as much information out of him as possible. But it’s too early in the case to know which questions to ask.
“Do you know if the mayor was having any problems with anyone else?” I ask. “Someone who would be able to do more damage than his daughter’s environmentalist group?”
His eyes widen and he has trouble drawing in a breath. “So he really wasn’t murdered by his wife like everyone’s saying?”
Vrhnika is a small town. Of course, everyone already knows what happened up at the big house.
“That seems unlikely to you?” I ask.
“She carried herself like royalty around here, his new wife did,” he says. “She was from Maribor, but she acted like she was from the Austrian Imperial Court at the very least. So why would she kill him? It makes no sense, because with him gone, she wouldn’t be the first lady around here anymore, now would she?”
He’s got a point, at least if his original assessment of her is correct. It also sounds like she could be the one solely responsible for the house and its decor.
“Were you and the mayor the last to leave the office yesterday afternoon?” I ask, purposefully changing the direction of the conversation to keep it focused on the facts and not village gossip.
Walter has finally noticed I lagged behind and is standing in the middle of the staircase, looking at me like he doesn’t understand what I’m doing. That could just be his face though.
“I locked up after us, yes,” he says. “But he has his own keys. His secretary would know if he came back. She’s very sharp. Knows everything.”
“Do you have CCTV cameras set up here?” I ask.
He nods. “Of course.”
I wave Walter over. “Would you mind if my colleague downloaded everything from yesterday? It would help our investigation very much.”
The security guard looks at me sharply and I
’m sure he’s about to ask for a court order or some such, but then he just nods. “It’s this way.”
Walter clears his throat instead of following the security guard who is already striding away.
“The secretary is upstairs in quite a state,” he says. “She’s cleaning the mayor’s office and I don’t think she should be. She wouldn’t talk to me.”
I could ask him a bunch of questions to make him explain it better since he’s clearly not stellar at giving concise reports. But it’s better I just go see for myself for the same reason.
“I’d like to speak to you again,” I say to the security guard who has now stopped and is looking at us. “What’s your name?”
“Ciril Hostar,” he says.
I nod, tell Walter to get the CCTV footage then head up the stairs, taking two at a time.
Sure enough, the sound of a vacuum cleaner is coming from the office to the right of the staircase. I’m already clutching my phone as I enter.
This is one of those old-style double offices, with an outer office for the secretary and an inner, even bigger one for the boss. It’s in this second one where I find the secretary—a middle-aged, short woman, with a colorful scarf around her neck, dark grey hair sticking out of a bun at the back of her head, and very swollen and very red eyes. She’s using a very loud vacuum cleaner to clean the area under the large windows behind the mayor’s gleaming oak desk.
I have to wave my arms through the air to get her attention because she can’t hear me calling her over the noise. Even after I have her attention, it takes her longer still to understand I want her to stop cleaning.
“Why are you vacuuming?” I ask once she finally stops.
“The poor dear forgot to close the window last night, and all the plants got knocked off the windowsill,” she says. “I have to clean up the mess.”
And then she bursts into tears and buries her face in her hands, the arm of the vacuum cleaner she was holding crashing to the ground.
A section of floor under the window is littered with soil, leaves, and bits of broken pottery, and the rest of the office looks none too neat either. The desk is covered by a whole mess of papers, about half of it covered by a large, dry coffee stain originating from an overturned porcelain cup at the edge of the desk, and the black leather office chair is facing the window, not the desk.
I have a whole lot of questions for the secretary. But first things first. I take a few quick photos of the mess and then call Slava, telling her we may very well have a second crime scene and that she should get here right away.
It’s possible the wind blowing in through the open window caused all this mess as the secretary assumes. But it’s even more likely that the attack that ended in Leskovar and his wife dying started here.
The secretary is still sobbing as I lead her out of the room and to her desk in the outer office. She’s in no fit state for my questions yet. And I don’t think telling her she might have destroyed vital evidence with her cleaning will help in that regard right now.
Eva
Where I had the hardest time getting started on the article before, when Mark was still here all the time, I had a different problem this morning after he left. It got even worse once he called to tell me the task force took on a new case. Just the sound of his voice and mostly his slightly detached, faraway-sounding tone, reminded me of all the times I’d lose him to a case while we were still together the first time.
The sun was high in the sky, bringing out all the lovely fresh greens, yellows, pinks, purples, and whites of the spring-awakened trees, bushes, and fields by the time I was finally able to still my mind enough to begin writing.
The sun has set now and I’m finally done. With the first article at least. The rest of the series that I promised them will have to wait. I already informed both the editor and my publisher of that.
Mark and I might not have seen eye to eye the whole time, but I enjoyed working with him on the case we just wrapped up. I want to be a part of the investigative team on this one as well.
Maybe I was overstepping my role with the task force a bit, but I called Simon to ask what the case was. I’ve been following it all day in the news, but the police seem to think that it’s an open and shut murder-suicide—that the wife shot the husband and then herself—so I have no idea what the connection Mark has found to an eight-year-old illegal stripper murder.
Is he just using it as an excuse to get out of the house more?
That thought, or worry more like, has no basis in reality. It’s just an old fear of mine, borne of my pretty pessimistic nature which always insists that when things are going good, they will turn very bad soon.
As soon as I finished the article and emailed it, I started looking up all I could on the murdered stripper, Anita Rajić. The poor girl had a tragic life. Her mother died of untreated pneumonia when she was twelve, eight years later, her older sister disappeared and was never seen again, and one of her two brothers died in a construction site accident in Ljubljana a couple of days before she was murdered. And at one point during all that, her father had drunk himself to death. Anita and her family deserve justice. Not least because the person who not only killed her, but killed her brutally, is still walking free.
Anita’s only close relative is an older brother names Tarik who had lived in Austria for years before all this occurred. Maybe that’s the reason the timeline that led Anita to Ljubljana where she was killed is so sketchy. There simply was no one left alive who could be asked.
She was originally from a small town in Bosnia not far from the one my Berlin friend Selima was from. The same Selima who supplied me with all the information I needed for my article on the darker side of legalized prostitution in Berlin and who hated me after it was published. The same Selima who…
No, I don’t want to go down that road. It was bad enough walking it the first time, and for the next three years while I lived and breathed serial killers.
Being here, in this quaint little cottage, surrounded by beautiful nature and friendly, laid-back people, has made me see what Mark saw all along. What he kept warning me about. Namely, the darkness that settled over my mind from all the digging into and psychologically analyzing the depraved and twisted minds of serial killers. I kept telling him it wouldn’t rub off on me, but it has.
You can’t get close enough to the true reasons why those killers did what they did to write the kind of books I’ve been writing—true psychological profiles, Inside the mind of a killer type of things—without it rubbing off and leaving traces behind. It’s why I’ve been stymied in dark, pessimistic thoughts all day. And it’s why I’ve had such a hard time getting to work on this series of articles. Subconsciously, I didn’t want to revisit that darkness. And now I consciously know this was the reason. It all dawned on me today in bursts of insight I couldn’t push back.
The other thing working with the task force on their first case showed me was that I enjoyed that part of the process more. The stopping of these deranged individuals, catching them before they can ruin more lives, before they can bring their darkness to more doorsteps and into more homes.
What I’ve done, the books I’ve written, and all the articles before then, has always been for the victims. To part the curtain on the psychology behind the most twisted murders and make it easier for future ones to be caught.
But actually putting all that to work on stopping one, that’s so much more satisfying, and a much bigger contribution to the work I’ve been trying to do.
We haven’t properly discussed my future involvement with the task force yet, but I think it’s time we did. Just as soon as Mark gets back tonight.
Simon already sent me all they have on the Anita Rajić case. He also went on at length on how they think it’s mafia-related. But I’m not so sure. I think the same darkness that shrouded her family followed her too. And in the end, it caught her and swallowed her up. I’m not entirely sure it was the organized crime-type of darkness.
I
think her death might have been written long before she died. And I think the key could lie in the disappearance of her sister.
Mark
The secretary eventually calmed down enough so I could ask her a few questions. She confirmed what the security guard told me about Leskovar meeting his daughter yesterday evening and that he had no other appointments planned for after that. She also said it was sometimes his habit to come to the office late to work, but not to hold business meetings. He conducted those during business hours only. And she’d know because he wasn’t one to clear away coffee cups or whiskey tumblers, as she put it.
Once I started asking the more sensitive questions regarding his relationship with his wife and whether he had a mistress, she completely fell again. Apparently, her boss was a very friendly and kind-hearted man, and well worth the benefit of the doubt in all cases where his integrity and good nature might be in question. She pretty much screeched that at me. As far as I was concerned she was either telling the truth, or was trying to shield her boss. No way to tell at this point. But in a small town like Vrhnika, I’m sure everything will come out sooner rather than later. We just have to start asking the right questions.
Slava arrived about twenty minutes after I called her with Ida in tow. This proved a blessing since the secretary had every intention of throwing us out until Ida showed her the official paperwork and her ID, and explained that finding out what really happened to Leskovar would require a thorough investigation. I left them there to do their thing.
I’m at the task force office now, waiting for Slava and Ida to come and present their findings. The sky outside the tinted windows is in fact dark now, and I should leave soon if I’m going to keep my promise of Eva and I having dinner together.
Rok is in his lab, still looking for all the background info and people connected to Leskovar. Brina is in her office, furiously writing something in a notebook. Through the clear glass walls of her office, I can see her head bobbing up and down as she does. Simon already left and Dino grew tired of looking over Rok’s shoulder and informed me that he was going to reach out to his contacts and informants regarding Leskovar’s possible organized crime ties. I said that was a good idea because it is, and I probably should have thought of it first. Simon would have objected, I’m sure, since it’s very close to presuming those connections existed without any concrete evidence that they do. As far as pain in the ass bosses go, Simon is far from the worst. His primary goal is finding justice, and that’s a very good quality in a bureaucrat. I sent Walter to speak to the daughter.