by Lena Bourne
One thing I do know is that my only chance is getting that gun away from him. But will I be able to shoot him if I do?
That question will have to answer itself.
He pulls me along toward the renovated part of the farmhouse. To the left of it, there is a high pile of dark wood, only two support beams that are still standing testifying to the fact that it was once a barn.
He’s holding the gun kind of loosely and as he yells for Rado again I take my chance, slamming my body against his, kicking in the general direction of his knees, as I try to loosen the grip on my arm enough to jab my elbow in his stomach.
He lets out a shriek of surprise, but he’s stronger and more muscular than I gave him credit for.
The next thing I’m aware of, he’s punching me. In the face, in the stomach, in the head, and chest. The violence seems to go on forever and ever. I’ve only ever been punched once before. In the stomach. Long ago. Compared to this, it was nothing.
This is brutal. He’s breathing hard, wheezing, his eyes bright with madness. I’m in so much pain, I don’t even feel it anymore.
I kick and scream and punch back, getting one or two in, but that only makes him angrier. Before I know it, I’m on the ground, shielding my face with my hands and he’s kicking me. I have no doubt that I’ve found Anita’s killer. And Esma’s too? I’m expecting Rado to come at any moment to help this crazy old bastard finish the job.
But it doesn’t happen before the world turns black before my eyes and doesn’t come back.
24
Mark
The speed limit on Slovenian highways is something like 130 kilometers per hour, but the good thing is there are never any patrols anywhere. In Croatia, I don’t even know the speed limit, but I’m sure I was breaking it as we sped along the highway there. There were no patrol cars there either, but more traffic, which made for slower going than I liked.
But we reached the Bosnian border in less than two hours anyway, then lost half an hour crossing it.
Dino’s been making calls to his Bosnian colleagues, talked to Brina a few times, and informed me of everything he learned, but otherwise kept the conversation to a minimum. Mostly because I ignored most of his attempts at talking.
I speed up again as soon as we clear the border.
“You might want to slow down now,” he says. “The roads here are bad and we don’t want to end up on the roof in the middle of a minefield.”
“I know what I’m doing,” I say and don’t take my foot off the gas. “I drove a Growler in Afghanistan.”
I sometimes wish I could get back to those days, or more like, that free feeling of knowing you could die at any moment and not caring at all. Just living in the moment, in every minute. But I was twenty years old back then. A lot has happened since.
“Is that one of those little fighter jeeps?” he asks and I nod.
“Cool. I never pegged you for an actual soldier, though you do move like one, come to think of it.”
He chuckles softly. “Did you see a lot of fighting?”
“Yeah,” I say. “More than I care to remember.”
All the worry and dread I didn’t feel in the middle of it came back later. And never left. If he’s trying to get me to talk to loosen me up, he picked the wrong topic.
He seems to realize it and doesn’t say anything else. We pass a sign, indicating that the town we’re heading for is only twelve kilometers away now. Ten minutes later, I’m finally forced to slow down because we reach it.
“Where do you want to go first?” he asks. “My friend from Sarajevo can’t come until seven PM. He’s meeting us at the police station.”
It’s just after two now.
“Renata’s house,” I say and he doesn’t argue, just inputs the address into the map on his phone.
“It was that one,” he says as I drive right past it. I reverse, hit the brakes hard, leave the car in the middle of the street and run to the door of a grey, drab, sorry-looking house with a gravel front yard overgrown with thick patches of weeds. I hear chickens clucking in the back yard and the neighbors’ children laughing behind the high, thick hedge separating this yard from the one next door.
Dino joins me by the door right after I ring the doorbell. No sound comes out of the house. So much for finding Eva safe and sound in the house, pissed at me for worrying about her unnecessarily again.
In the back of my mind, the fear that she’ll break up with me all over again for panicking and racing to her rescue like this has been loud all the way here. But the fear that I dropped the ball so badly on this case that something has now happened to her was louder, more urgent.
No one comes to the door and in the end, Dino reaches for the doorknob and the door opens.
“They still don’t lock their doors in small towns like this,” he says. “It’s refreshing, I guess.”
And lucky for us.
I stride into the house, calling Eva’s name, but get no reply. The living room is where she slept, I know because the top of her white pajamas with black dots is on the floor between the sofa and the window. But none of the rest of her things are here.
“Mark, come quick!” Dino calls from the direction of the kitchen then runs past the living room door and out of the house. I catch up to him outside, where he runs around the house to the backyard. He’s crouching by a pile of grey cloth, which I only recognize as the skirt of an old woman as I see her lying there. Blood is covering the back of her head and half her face.
Dino checks if she’s still breathing and looks up at me. “She’s alive. We need to get her to the hospital.”
I leave him to make the call, while I frantically check the rest of the yard and then the house. All the rooms are empty and the only sign that Eva was ever there is her pajama top on the living room floor and the scent of her peachy shampoo in the bathroom. I’d recognize it anywhere. And now I can’t get the image of her just after a shower, her long hair wet and glistening like white gold out of my head. It’s not a happy sight. She looks like she’s already gone in my mind. Like a memory that’ll never be a reality anymore. Sickening.
I run back downstairs where a couple of neighbors have already gathered around the injured old woman, presumably Fata, the owner of the house. They’re chatting loudly in shocked voices and cursing a lot.
“I’m going to the police station,” I say to Dino over the chatter, causing it to stop abruptly.
“The ambulance is on its way,” Dino tells me as a woman about two heads shorter than me elbows through the crowd.
“We’re not waiting for no ambulance, we have to take her to the hospital right now,” she says. “An ambulance could take hours.”
I don’t have time for this. I have no time for anything. The loud lady takes over the management of what to do with the injured woman and Dino comes to my side.
“First we have to recreate Eva’s movements today,” I tell him. “She was going to see the police chief this morning. Maybe he knows more.”
“I already called them to come investigate this,” Dino says.
“But my way is faster,” I say and stride over to the car. The last thing I’m going to do is sit around waiting for people to come to me.
Dino catches up to me and grabs my arm. “Mark, slow down. He’s on his way.”
He’s looking me straight in the eyes and seems very concerned for me. There’s no reason to be. I’ll find her. If it’s the last thing I do. And if I don’t find her alive, it very well might be.
Luckily the wait for the chief isn’t long. Dino barely stopped talking when the sound of a siren that reminds me of some old 1970s police movie comes from the base of the hill this house is on.
“They sure hurried,” Dino says, meaning the cops, sounding surprised. “Hopefully Eva is with them, huh?”
I nod, not able to react to those hopeful words with anything more.
The cop car looks like something from the last century too, as it rolls up the hill, making a lot of noise,
but not going fast at all.
Yet eventually it parks in front of mine and a portly man with a giant mustache gets out the passenger side. Three more officers get out of the car after him, all in identical blue-grey uniforms.
“Do you know where Eva Lah is?” I ask before any of them can say anything.
The chief looks confused for a moment and then nods. “No. She came to me this morning, but this was hours ago. Before eight o’clock.”
“Did she say where she was going?” I ask.
“Where is Fata?” the chief asks. “We came to see what happened here.”
“What happened here was an assault on an elderly woman,” Dino says in their native tongue, which I don’t understand as well as I want to right now. “It is connected to the case we are investigating.”
“The journalist that works for Europol wanted me to go with her to Rado Kopanja’s farm outside of town,” the chief says harshly. “I told her there was no reason I should. According to my investigation, he was cleared of any wrongdoing in Esma Rajić’s case. She also wanted me to start looking for Fata’s granddaughter and I told her I would when Fata came to see me about it.”
He’s speaking harshly in a clipped angry tone and a part of me just wants to punch him in the face over it. But that won’t solve anything.
“Then she had an argument with Tarik Rajić in the square,” one of the younger officers says.
“About what?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I didn’t hear all of it. Something about his house and how he should let the police dig up the basement. Oh, and electricity was mentioned for some reason. I didn’t catch that part.”
Dino looks at me, seemingly as puzzled as I am.
“They went their separate ways after that,” the officer adds.
“And now we are going to do our job,” the chief says and starts walking towards the crowd at the back of the house.
“Eva was staying here and her things are gone,” I say. “Make sure you secure the house.”
“Maybe she left,” he says, looking at me over his shoulder. He’s followed by the other three officers and Dino grabs my arm, quite unnecessarily. I may want to lunge at the arrogant old asshole, but I’m not going to do it.
“Where’s the Kopanja farm?” I call after him and one of the younger officers gives me the directions to it.
“What’s next?” Dino asks.
“Her plan for this morning was to go see Rado with the chief. She was also going to speak to Tarik, but if the officer is to be believed, that meeting didn’t happen,” I say. Sometimes it helps calm my mind to speak the things I know out loud. Not that anything other than finding Eva will calm me right now.
“If he wanted Fata to report her granddaughter missing, I’d say Eva came here to get her,” I continue. “She either never made it or was at the house when the old woman was hit over the head.”
“Looking at that wound, I doubt it happened this morning,” Dino says. “The blood is too fresh.”
“We find Tarik and Rado and we’ll find Eva,” I say. “So you go after Tarik, and I’ll go to the farm.”
“Divide and conquer, you think?” Dino says. “You might need backup at the farm. The people around here, most of them still have basements full of guns left over from the war. And the way I see it, Rado is probably our guy.”
“I can handle myself,” I tell him. “You stay here and talk to some of these neighbors. See if one of them heard or saw anything. Then try to find Tarik and search the Rajić house.”
“I’m on it, Boss,” he says and strides back to the crowd right away.
I go to the car and dial Rok’s number. He’s proven himself a whizz at finding info for the task force in the past, so I hope tracing Eva’s phone won’t be too hard a job for him.
“I told all of you that I’d like to install trackers on your phones, but so far only Dino has taken the time to let me do it,” he says, talking fast and stuttering on every third word.
“Can you do it?” I ask, maybe a little too harshly, as I maneuver my car around the police cruiser.
“I’ll try my best,” he says and I guess that’s all I can ask for.
He promises to call me as soon as he has something. And I will myself to focus only on the road and the drive. First things first. Take the investigation step by step. Don’t let emotional crap cloud your judgment or dictate your next step. Keep a cool head. All words of wisdom from my old mentor. None of them something I ever easily do.
The Kopanja farm is a scrap yard sort of dump. Only one part of the low, one-story house is still standing and it appears to have been built by someone with only the basic construction knowledge and virtually no actual taste. The other part is completely run down, with a collapsed roof and rot so bad I can smell it from halfway down the long driveway. I parked my car across the drive to prevent anyone from running away from the farm as I approach on foot.
The smell of rusted metal and rotten wood grows stronger with each step I take, and it doesn’t mix well with the scent of fresh mortar and cement.
The new house is shut up tight and there are no cars in the driveway, only an old tractor that would probably just collapse if you so much as touched it.
I walk straight up to the house and bang on the door, then try to open it right after. It’s locked. No one answers my knocks or my yells.
I kick down the door without thinking too hard about whether I should or not. If Eva is here, I will find her and nothing will stop me.
Rado’s new home is a simple affair, with a small kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom all on one level. The interior smells stuffy the way places start to smell after they’ve been unoccupied for a while. Since this house wasn’t built so long ago, the predominant smell is still of fresh paint and mortar. Here too, it doesn’t mix well with the stench of decay coming from the old part of the house.
Everything’s neat, the furnishings spartan, but nothing seems clean. And all the rooms are empty. My hope of finding Eva here is waning with every step I take.
I exit the house and run to the old part of the farmhouse. It has no glass in the window and no door, and the very air around it stinks of decay and rot. The room right inside the open door is covered with shattered roof shingles. Two of the roof beams have cracked and will soon break under the collapsing weight of the roof. Most of the walls leading up into rooms at the back of the house are still standing though some have large holes in them as though someone tried to knock them down with a hammer, but gave up halfway. I can’t come up with a logical explanation why he chose to build an extension to the house without first knocking down this part. Nor do I try very hard.
Dust is thick on the floor and the broken shingles crunch under my feet as I enter. I’ll do no one any good, least of all Eva, if one of those shingles falls on my head. But she might be in here, unconscious and I’m not leaving any part of this farm unsearched.
But she’s not in any of the rooms of the broken down part of the house.
I try the barn next, but it really is just a collapsed pile of wood, despite the two support pillars still standing.
Eva isn’t here.
Which doesn’t mean she wasn’t.
I go back to the driveway which is gravel and dust. Tire tracks are visible, but they could be from this morning or last week.
Would she even come here without a police escort?
The more I think about it, the more I doubt it. She was spooked by Rado and considered him a prime suspect for Esma’s disappearance. She wouldn’t come here alone.
And then I see something that makes my heart stop.
Blood on the gravel in the middle of the front yard. Blood spatter, little blood pools. Strands of silver-blonde hair floating in it. No, not floating. Stuck to it because the blood is already dry. Now that I’ve seen the first, I see more. The whole area around me shows evidence of a struggle. Eva’s life and death struggle. I can’t breathe. I’m not sure if my heart is even beating. But if ever there was a ti
me for me to keep a clear head, it’s now.
It’s not as hard for me to focus under stress as everyone, including myself, always thinks.
I call Dino first, telling him what I found and asking him to make those detectives coming in tonight hurry.
My next call is to Simon, asking him to do the paperwork and make the calls necessary for us to investigate this case here. And then to send Slava, Brina, and Walter. He doesn’t ask unnecessary questions, just says, “Find her,” in a low, shocked voice.
I tell him I will. Because there is no other choice.
Eva
I open my eyes and see nothing. Just darkness. Feel just pain. In my face, in my stomach, my chest, and my back. I’m in a box of some sort. A coffin? It’s too small for me, I’m contorted inside, my knees bend against my stomach.
My heart racing in fright only makes the pain I feel everywhere worse. There’s a whooshing in my ears, so loud it drowns out even the thumping of my heart.
But slowly, as consciousness wins over all the pain and confusion and panic, I realize the whooshing isn’t in my head. It’s all around me.
I’m in the trunk of a car and we’re moving.
And a tiny bit of light is coming in through the cracks between the back seats. Maybe if I kick at them they’ll open.
But I can’t turn to face the light. A large, hard box—suitcase I think—is blocking me from reaching it. Another suitcase is preventing me from straightening my legs.
The lights? What is it about the lights?
I can’t think clearly. Every time I try to focus my mind, my head starts throbbing worse. I scream in pain as I try to move, hitting my head on the low ceiling of the trunk accompanied by a sharp pain shooting through my left arm, which won’t support any weight.
Kick out the lights and wave through. A passing car will see and call the police.
That’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re locked in a trunk. I saw it in a movie once. Or a documentary.