by Lena Bourne
“So there is a chance she just left?” I ask, feeling a little like I’m spinning in fast circles.
But getting people to talk can be like that. They’ll never just tell you all they know right away. You have to gain their trust first. I’ve interviewed enough people by now to know that, and to also know that Marina is close to telling me everything.
She nods while peering at me through narrow eyes, as if she’s deciding whether to tell me something or not. In the end, she sighs and pours the rest of her coffee from the copper pot into her cup, stirs in a cube of sugar, and adds a little milk.
She sighs again and looks me straight in the eyes.
“I don’t want to be disloyal to my cousins, or add anything more to the rumors that have already plagued them for so long,” she says and pauses, clearly waiting for me to say something.
“I won’t print any of this,” I say hoping it’s what worries her the most.
She takes a sip of her coffee and looks at me again. “The thing is, right before her disappearance, Esma told me she wouldn’t mind just packing up and going away. She wouldn’t tell me why, but I later found out it was probably because she was stuck in a love triangle.”
“What kind of love triangle?” I ask.
“The worst kind,” Marina says. “Between two brothers.”
“Rado and Esma?” Renata says breathlessly. “I never knew that.”
“Why would you know? I only found out years after she disappeared,” Marina says, making it clear that she doesn’t know about Rado and Renata either. “Rado and Esma had a fling just before she disappeared. Apparently. According to Milo, at least. He told me a few days before he killed himself. I never asked Rado about it, didn’t want to add to his pain. Especially since I’m not entirely sure it was true.”
“Why?” Renata and I ask at almost the same time.
She looks startled. “Because Esma would’ve told me. She couldn’t keep secrets very well, that one, especially not explosive ones like that. Plus Anita didn’t know anything about it and she was with Rado at the time. Then again, she and Rado didn’t speak much after Esma left and that could’ve been the reason.”
She looks from me to Renata who looks very stricken by this news.
“Rado never mentioned dating Anita,” she says quietly.
“I don’t think they were actually in love,” Marina says. “Just, you know…”
She blushes slightly and picks up her cup and drinks the rest of her coffee, then grabs her two bags of shopping off the chair next to her. “That’s enough gossiping and remembering bad times. I should be getting home. Dinner isn’t going to cook itself.”
I have more questions, lots and lots more, but it’d be weird if I insisted she answer them now.
“Esma and Rado, who would’ve thought,” Renata says once Marina disappears behind the fountain. “And Anita and Rado for that matter. I never knew.”
“You think it’s true?” I ask.
She looks and me and grins. “It would explain some things, now wouldn’t it?”
I nod. “Like why he keeps her room so neat and sweet-smelling. Maybe he’s hoping she’ll come back one day.”
She shrugs and looks down at her hands, which she’s clutching together in her lap. “That would explain a lot too.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like why he’s so emotionally unavailable, for one thing,” she says and looks up at me. Her eyes are very watery and very sad, even though her tone is firm and her voice steady. “And why he doesn’t want anyone to know about us.”
I don’t know exactly how to reply to that so I just smile in sympathy.
She waves the waitress over.
“We should go help Fata with dinner,” she says.
I’m pretty sure she’s gearing up and pumping herself up to confront Rado about all this tonight. And I feel more than a little mean for hoping I’ll get to witness it.
But Esma’s disappearance is shrouded in layers of mystery, and one of the people with firsthand knowledge is Rado. I really hope he’ll open up.
15
Mark
The headquarters of the National Police Investigations Bureau, which also houses the sex crimes unit that Brina worked at before joining the task force is a modern, new building built of metal and blue glass. I drop Brina off in the parking lot just as my phone starts ringing.
Walter’s calling and I just know he’s hit some sort of snag in carrying out what I asked him to. Given that only about twenty minutes have passed since I give him his instructions, I hope it’s not too grave a snag.
“I’m thinking a raid on that apartment building should happen sooner rather than later,” I say to Brina instead of answering the call.
She chuckles coldly. “I’ll do what I can, but as I told you, my bosses weren’t very happy about me working on Anita’s case and they were even less happy about me connecting Leskovar to it.”
“Don’t you have a human trafficking division in there?” I ask. “They might be interested.”
This time she laughs out loud. “It shows that you’re used working cases with everything at your disposal. Here, I’m not even sure where and what to start filing to get something like that off the ground.”
Whatever notions she has about the ease of working cases as a US Military Special Investigator will have to be disabused some other time. I work as I’ve always worked, going off of what resources I need to tap to get the information I need, and not necessarily what’s readily available to me.
“First we need to secure those women and then we need to interview them all,” I say pointedly. “Do what you can, however you can, to make that happen. You’ll figure it out, I trust you. Just don’t take no for an answer, that’s half the battle won.”
She looks at me with wide eyes and a slightly open mouth like I’ve told her some big secret.
“I’ll get it done,” she finally asserts and I do believe that she’ll give it her best shot. Maybe Simon can do something to speed up the process too. But I’ll figure that out later.
Walter is now calling me for the second time, and this time I answer, watching Brina walk away.
“All three of them went their separate ways,” Walter says. “I’m trailing the younger Derganec brother.”
“And Dino?” I ask.
“He’s being taken to that underground contact he talked about yesterday,” Walter says. “He told me to go do this by myself for now.”
I pull out of the parking lot and head for the nearest highway interchange, without an actual clear idea of where to go next.
“Go to the apartment building in Vrhnika. I’ll send you the address,” I say, following an instinct I’m not even sure about yet.
“And what do I do there?” he asks.
“Just sit in your car and make a note of everyone coming and going,” I say. “And call me if either of the Derganec brothers shows up there. Or the ex-wife. Or anyone actually.”
He agrees and I pull over at a bus stop to text him the address and decide where I should go next. The ex-wife or the daughter?
The daughter is more likely to talk to me, but she probably knows less about the scope of the operation her parents seem to be running. Still, she must know something.
I call her and she reluctantly agrees to meet me at the Carpe Diem NGO offices.
Since the rush hour traffic heading out of Ljubljana is still hours away I make the trip in less than thirty minutes.
She’s smoking a hand-rolled cigarette by the heavy wooden door that leads into the townhouse, which houses the Carpe Diem offices. Her long hair is pulled into a messy knot at the back of her head her face is so pale it has a bluish tint to it. Though that might just be the effect of the black clothes she’s wearing.
“Why do you want to talk to me again?” she asks as I exit the car and walk toward her.
The acidity of her tone wipes the smile I was greeting her with right off my face.
“We found your father�
�s book of names, Jana,” I tell her. “And we spoke to one of the women mentioned in it. I have a few more questions.”
She tosses the cigarette on the ground and stomps on it. “Well, I hope she told you what a kind-hearted man my father was and how much he helped her.”
She sounds like she’s in a great deal of pain. Her eyes are very red, and I can see traces of tears on her cheeks. Coming to talk to her might not have been the best idea I’ve ever had, and I don’t like the sharp reminder of my failing skills as an investigator. I’m not even sure if that’s to blame anymore though. I think maybe I’m just rusty. Maybe I just got too complacent, too used to being retired and I’ve drifted away from being able to feel a situation and react with good instincts. Apparently, at least according to my mentor, an investigator’s instincts never go away, they just get sharper, but I’m not sure I ever believed that. You can forget anything. But what I need to do is stop focusing on these pointless questions and just do my job.
“Actually, she kind of did tell me that, yes,” I say and smile at her. “Only she went home right after your father rescued her from a dangerous situation, and we’re having trouble locating any of the other women listed in your father’s book. I was hoping you could give us some names from your records here, maybe even an address or phone number. Shall we go inside?”
From the corner of my eye, I catch movement in the dark entryway of the house. Judging by the streak of white I saw, I’d say it was her friend Lina with the nearly white hair. She doesn’t come to the door, but I have a strong feeling that she’s standing right beside it, listening to us.
“My mother called me,” Jana says and somehow it sounds like a threat. “She said not to talk to anyone.”
“You could’ve told me that when I called you on the phone,” I say calmly. “I think you want to tell me something.”
She gasps, her eyes going very wide. “Like that my father was a dirty old man. That’s what you want to hear? Well, he wasn’t. He was a good man!”
She practically screeches the last sentence, which tells me I’m getting somewhere here. I’m just not sure I’ll get there.
“I know your father made it look like he was helping these women,” I say. “But is that what he was actually doing?”
She gasps in surprise again.
“I don’t have to listen to this crap,” she says. “He was a good man and he was trying to help them. I’m going now. Don’t try to follow me and don’t call me again. I have nothing more to say to you.”
She strides away from the building, hugging her body tight with her arms and looking down at the ground. I’m at a total loss as to what my next step should be. Do I chase her down the street? Leave and do like she asked?
Neither of those are good options. There are other ways to get the NGO records, just none as good as having Jana show them to me voluntarily.
I decided to cut my losses for now and head for the car when Lina pokes her head through the front door.
“I think you better come in here,” she says. “I want to tell you something.”
She steps back into the dark foyer and I follow her in. The entryway is just a covered outdoor space, opening up into a small courtyard up ahead and two doors leading into the house proper on either side. She leads me through the one of the left, and we enter a narrow hallway with high ceilings and large windows, which for some reason they decided to paint black.
She walks briskly into an office at the end of the hallway where the huge windows aren’t tinted and let in plenty of sunshine. It’s a large room, with a big l-shaped, dark wood computer desk in the center of it, with two laptops on it. Several teal-colored filing cabinets line the walls, and the room is big enough to hold a sitting area with two sofas, a coffee table, and a bookcase full of paperbacks and magazines.
She sits down at the desk behind one of the laptops and indicates I should take a seat next to her.
“I went through our records after you interviewed Jana yesterday,” she says and she actually looks scared. That’s the only way to describe it. “And I can’t reach any of the women who left their contacts. They’re not at the jobs we secured for them, or living in the apartments we found for them. Something’s not right.”
Tell me about it. Whatever Leskovar promised these women, they didn’t get it. Did Anita die because she found that out and threatened to go to the police?
“Can you give me a list of the women that came through this charity?” I ask. “Maybe I’ll be able to track them down.”
She looks at me with wide, scared eyes and then nods. “We mostly have digital files.”
She reaches into a drawer and rummages around inside it to find a USB stick, which she plugs into the laptop. “I’ll just give you everything.”
“Thanks,” I say while she starts dumping files from the hard drive onto the USB stick.
“Do you think I was part of something illegal?” she asks while the files are loading. “I never knew, I swear I didn’t. I started working here to help trafficked and abused women. Do you think I somehow helped in trafficking them instead?”
I wish I had a good answer for her. Actually I wish I could tell her she’s wrong, if I’m being perfectly honest. She’s young and innocent and telling her that, yes, I suspect she might have been, will destroy that. So I cop out and just shrug in answer to her question.
“Tell me about the process the women who came here for help went through,” I say instead.
“It was pretty straightforward,” she says. “We’d take down their details, they were issued a little spending cash and then driven to a halfway house where they were given a bed to sleep in and some fresh clothes,” she says.
“Where is this halfway house?” I ask. “The one where the massage salon is here in Vrhnika?”
She looks startled. “Yes.”
“And what happened then?” I ask. “Did you run checks on them? Get them new papers?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. All our job entailed was making sure they were safe and had some money. From there, they were free to do as they wished.”
“What about getting them jobs? Helping them find a better life?” I ask. “Who handled that part of the promises made to them?”
“The promises made by Jana’s father you mean?” she asks and I nod.
“I didn’t know a lot about that side of things,” she says. “I know he referred a lot of the women here and I know, through Jana, that he and his friends used their contacts to help them, but I was never directly involved in any of that.”
“And you didn’t find any of that suspicious?” I ask, maybe a little too sharply.
“A little, maybe,” she admits quietly. “But Jana was a part of it and she’s the most honest and kind person I know. I didn’t want to rock the boat too much. A lot of the women who came here, most actually, had nothing. No money, no papers, nowhere to go, and no home to return to. I know that the official way of getting papers for these women would’ve taken months if not years. If it could be done at all. So I turned a blind eye and didn’t ask too many questions.”
“Did you do any follow-up on the women you processed through here?” I ask.
She nods. “Yes. I arranged language lessons for some of them, and sometimes they’d come in asking for directions to somewhere. None of them ever complained about the halfway house or Leskovar of anything like that.”
“But outside of that, you never actually followed up with any of them?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Not until yesterday. I even went by the halfway house, but none of them would speak to me. Even though I met all of them.”
She ejects the USB stick and hands it to me. “I hope you have more luck in finding these women. I’ll keep looking too.”
The door at the end of the hallway slams against the wall and the sound of several sets of shoes comes from outside the office. A few moments later, a tall skinny man in a dark blue suit and dark red tie appears in the doorway. I recognize him as the other
Derganec brother because he looks enough like the man I visited this morning.
“Kindly step outside,” he says harshly.
“Why?” Lina asks. “What are you doing here?”
Four heavily muscled men, all with crew cuts and wearing identical black windbreakers follow him inside.
“We’re closing this office and taking all the files,” Ivan Derganec says.
The fact that he hasn’t asked me who I am yet tells me he already knows. And the fact that he hardly acknowledged my presence tells me he couldn’t care less.
I stand up and show him my badge anyway, and proceed to introduce myself.
“On what authority are you here?” I ask.
He grins, but it looks like a snarl. “On the authority of Mrs. Kolar, the founder of this NGO. She believes illegal activities have been carried out through this office and wishes to put a stop to them.”
Lina gasps. “What illegal activities?”
She looks even more scared than before as she looks at me. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Go home, Miss,” Ivan says. “You will be contacted by investigators in due time.”
The four bouncers have already each chosen a filing cabinet to empty and are hastily stuffing files and folders into black plastic bags.
“Where are you taking all the files?” I ask and get another mocking smirk from Ivan.
“I’m afraid I can’t disclose that,” he says. “I suggest you vacate these premises too.”
“I can’t let you destroy this evidence,” I say.
This time he chuckles. “You have no power to stop me.”
Lina is shaking beside me. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Come on, let’s go. I’ll take you home.”
One of the four men has finished emptying his filing cabinet and has moved to the desk, where he unceremoniously shoulders past me and, grabs the laptop Lina and I just vacated and shoves it into the garbage bag too.