From the Devil's Farm

by Leta Serafim

  The men had inspected the Zodiac and seen the same white shape in the water Patronas had. Not wanting to disturb it, they left it in place, pending his arrival. They would take Svenson’s remains to Athens on the cruiser after Patronas finished processing the scene. All four were wearing protective gear—probably an unnecessary precaution, given how long Svenson had been in the water—but Patronas had insisted on it anyway.

  Garbed in his hazmat suit, Tembelos was a strange vision in the night, his voice deeply muffled by a mask. “What’s the term?” he asked Patronas, “death by misadventure?”

  “Not a chance,” Patronas said. “Svenson was murdered. Same killer, different means.”

  Undoing the front of his suit, Tembelos reached into the pocket of his shirt with a gloved hand and pulled out an envelope. “I found this in his apartment. There were several of them. I bagged the rest, but I wanted you to see it.”

  A woven red anklet, it was nearly identical to the one found on Sami Alnasseri.

  Behind his goggles, Patronas sensed his friend was watching him.

  “This mean Svenson did it?” Tembelos asked.

  “I don’t know, Giorgos. I just don’t know.”

  “It would fit. Someone, maybe a migrant, knew he was responsible, that he’d murdered the kid, and took care of it. Revenge is big in that part of that world.”

  It was nearly two a.m. when the doctor at the clinic arrived to sign off on Svenson’s death. Patronas had summoned him to the marina, telling him to get there as fast as he could, that there had been another death.

  The doctor knelt down next to Svenson. “Looks like he drowned,” he said after a long moment.

  “Are you sure?” Patronas asked. “Check him carefully.”

  Pulling on gloves, the doctor methodically inspected Svenson’s body, starting at the top of his skull and working his way down. “It looks like he has a contusion on his head, but there’s no telling where it came from. It might well have come from hitting the dock when he fell overboard.” He offered this in a hopeful voice.

  “So … not necessarily murder?”

  “This is beyond my level of expertise,” the doctor responded. “You need a coroner to look at him.”

  Together, Patronas and Tembelos raised Svenson up and placed him in a black body bag.

  Before zipping the bag closed, Patronas took a final look at the American’s lifeless form. Svenson was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt from a Grateful Dead concert, a skull split by a bolt of lightning. Ironic, Patronas thought grimly, given the way the American died.

  Svenson’s clothes were soaking wet and clinging to him, a tendril of seaweed caught in his hair. Patronas ran his gloved hands over Svenson’s head, seeking to establish the size and shape of the contusion the doctor had mentioned. And then, with a heavy heart, he closed the bag.

  “I’ll fill out the paperwork and get him ready to go to Athens,” Patronas told Tembelos. “After that, let’s call it a night. We can start again in the morning.”

  He was convinced the American had been knocked out, trussed up in the rope, and thrown into the water to drown. No one frequented this place. There would have been no witnesses. As with Thanatos, whoever had done this had chosen his killing ground well.

  Lydia Pappas was waiting for Patronas when he got back to the apartment, sitting outside on the terrace in a cotton nightgown. The spotlights around Leandros had been turned off, and the candle in the lantern on the table flickered unsteadily. On the second floor, all was quiet.

  So tired he could barely think, Patronas wondered how much to tell her. “Svenson’s dead,” he said, fumbling for the words. “Judging by his appearance, he fell off the boat and drowned. It probably happened not long after he called me, at least fifteen hours ago. He didn’t say anything to you, did he? Why he wanted to speak to me?”

  Lydia Pappas shook her head. “I didn’t see him today.”

  She got up and began walking back and forth. “I can’t believe it. Richard was always so careful on that boat. The way he wound the ropes …. He wouldn’t quit until he got it exactly right, one concentric circle after another. The kids and I used to tease him about it. I can’t believe he drowned … not someone like him. It’s impossible.” Her voice rose. “First the Syrian boy and now Richard. Who’s next? Me?”

  “Hush, Lydia,” Patronas said. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” Taking a deep breath, he said it again in a louder voice. “I love you.”

  It seemed wrong to be telling her this tonight, but Patronas wanted to get it said, to have her hear it from him. The stabbing had scared him. Who knew what lay ahead? Whether or not he’d get a second chance.

  “Oh, Yiannis, what’s going to happen?”

  A simple answer seemed beyond him. Age, fatigue? Patronas wasn’t sure. “I don’t know,” he said

  “You’ll catch him. I know you will.” Lydia Pappas sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “You’re like Diogenes with his lantern, searching the world for an honest man.” She smiled then. “Only it’s not honesty you’re seeking. It’s the reverse.”

  A poor joke, but Patronas laughed anyway. “That’s me as a cop. What about me as a man?”

  “I love you, Yiannis. Surely, you know that. You’re the only man in my entire life who has valued me the way I want to be valued, who recognizes my true worth.”

  They spent the night lying next to each other on the bed, their fingers touching. Framed by the window, the moon illuminated a square patch on the floor. Although faint, the light made Patronas uneasy. He felt exposed, the dark corners of the room full of some unseen threat.

  Lydia Pappas eventually slept, but he lay awake until morning. Something kept bothering him, something he should have done, but hadn’t.

  The next day was even worse. The coroner in Athens—a dour man everyone joked was as lifeless as the corpses he worked on, called Patronas and reported that the DNA on the knife from Thanatos did not match that of either Achilles or Costas Kourelas, nor was there any trace evidence suggesting the two had been anywhere near the vicinity when the boy was killed.

  “They’ve done jail time and seem pretty familiar with police procedure,” Patronas said. “Is it possible they wiped everything down?”

  “Highly unlikely. There was a lot of territory to cover—the pole and chain, the platform, not to mention all that paraphernalia scattered around. It would have been virtually impossible to clean it all. Neither man is the killer you seek, Yiannis. It’s as simple as that.”

  “And the fragments of glass from the fire?”

  “Ditto,” the coroner said. “There was nothing on the glass that would have linked them to the bombing.”

  So Achilles Kourelas had suffered in vain.

  Patronas felt like vomiting. “Did you tell Stathis what you found?”

  “What I didn’t find,” the coroner said, as ever, quick to correct him. “No. I decided to let you do the honors. I don’t envy you, telling him that your people made a mistake and shot an innocent man.” The coroner gave a dry laugh. “Your boss is not known for his compassion.” Still chuckling, he went on, “One thing of note: those bones you sent me were indeed very old—at least two thousand years or more. I’ve taken the liberty of sending them on to the archeological department at the University of Athens. Let’s see what they come up with. However, they have no relevance to the child’s death. Also, the lock that held the chain …. I looked it up, and it, too, is ancient, dates from the time of the Dorian invasion, roughly 1100 B.C. According to the sites I checked on the Internet, similar locks are still in use in Karpathos today. But I don’t believe yours came from there. No, given the pitting and erosion of the metal, I’d say it’s at least three thousand years old.”

  “Where would a person find a lock like that?”

  “Most probably in a museum. Or perhaps a private collection. Such artifacts are exceedingly rare. Oh, by the way, your drowning victim arrived here in the lab at dawn this morning and is prepped and
ready to go. He’s at the top of my to-do list.”

  Patronas winced at the man’s choice of words. The coroner always appalled him, his cavalier attitude as he spoke about the most repellant aspects of his job, the cheerful way he went about his work, whistling as he removed someone’s heart and tossed it on the scale. On occasion, he’d even given the dead nicknames, usually after the shadow puppets much beloved by children in Greece: ‘Karagiozis,’ if the corpse in the mortuary had a big nose, ‘Kollitiri,’ if it were of diminutive stature, and ‘Veligekas,’ if it resembled a Turk.

  Distraught already, Patronas didn’t want to get into the specifics of what the coroner planned to do to Svenson, the sawing open of the American’s head and the cutting of the y-shaped incision, the stitching back together afterwards, usually with black thread so thick it resembled twine.

  “As we’d anticipated,” the coroner went on, “the child died of catastrophic blood loss. It was over in a matter of seconds. As soon as the killer nicked the boy’s jugular, he was gone. The results of the toxicology screens should be available later this week. I wish I could get it to you sooner, but unfortunately, such tests simply cannot be hurried. Once I have them in hand, I should be able to tell you if the boy was drugged beforehand. Let’s hope and pray that he was.”

  Patronas and his men were sitting in a vast room in back of the municipality building, dealing with the fallout from the American’s death. Needing more space, they’d moved out of the murder room and taken up residence here. Judging by the layout—the cafeteria-like counter and groupings of tables and chairs—it had once served as the hotel dining room.

  They had been on the phone all morning, alerting the American Embassy as well as his employers in Greece and the United States to Svenson’s death. Patronas had personally given the professor’s family the news, a long, involved process as Svenson had an ex-wife, three children in various parts of the world, and last, a live-in girlfriend in Boston—Brazilian, from the sound of her. He’d also contacted the dead man’s colleagues at the university, his department head, and the dean. It had been a lengthy ordeal, a series of heart-wrenching calls, the people he spoke to shrieking and crying when he told them what had happened. One man hadn’t bothered to hang up, just put the phone down and disappeared. Given that it was an overseas call and it took over an hour to get the situation rectified, this caused Patronas a great deal of distress. “Anybody there?” he kept shouting. “Please, please, hang up the phone!”

  As these conversations had to be conducted entirely in English, he had consulted the Divry’s Greek-English dictionary beforehand and written out phonetically what he wanted each of his men to say, coaching them on the proper way to pronounce ‘condolences’ and ‘sympathy.’

  Evangelos Demos, as to be expected, couldn’t get his mouth around the words and ended up saying, ‘Sorry, sorry, Svenson dead,’ which didn’t ingratiate him or the Greek police department with the Americans.

  The officials at the summer study wanted to know where they could locate a grief counselor to console Svenson’s students, saying it would be a great loss for them; the professor had been well-liked. Patronas had done his best, but psychiatrists who dealt with post-traumatic stress were few and far between in Greece, so no luck. Not knowing what else to do, he’d sent Papa Michalis to minister to them.

  Papa Michalis called in later to report that Svenson had been one of the most popular faculty members, and by and large, his students were inconsolable. “It’s hard. I don’t know what to tell them.”

  “You hear anything suspicious? Any clue as to who might have done it?”

  “No, nothing. Mostly, they just cry.”

  So far, Patronas had been able to keep the news of the murder away from the press, but given Svenson’s reputation and foreign nationality, it was only a matter of time before reporters got wind of it. He could just see the headline: ‘A Serial Murderer on Sifnos.’ It would destroy the island.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Achilles Kourelas, shot in that ill-conceived bust, one he himself was responsible for. If what the coroner said was true, Kourelas was innocent of all wrongdoing. So what if he’d been a thug and assaulted him? He shouldn’t have been injured the way he had—shot like a rabid dog in front of his father.

  Deeply depressed, Patronas again recalled Napoleon. Not the Napoleon who’d returned in defeat from Russia, but the one on Elba.

  Thinking he might as well get it over with, Patronas took a deep breath and called Stathis. “Sir, we might have a problem.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Also the dragon, earth-borne in craftiness, is coming behind thee.

  —The Delphic Oracle

  “What do you really know about Lydia Pappas?” Tembelos asked Patronas. And I don’t mean in the biblical sense, which you no doubt are eager to share. I’m talking about her character. Could she possibly be involved in this?”

  “In Svenson’s murder?”

  Tembelos nodded. “Stranger things have happened. Look at that Michael Douglas movie, the one with Sharon Stone. He was a cop investigating a murder and fell in love with the chief suspect, a woman who got her kicks from sticking ice picks in people.”

  “Lydia Pappas is innocent. I’d stake my life on it.”

  His friend snorted. “Let’s hope you don’t have to.”

  They were eating lunch in a taverna in Apollonia. The first call from a reporter had come in before they left to eat, and within minutes, it had been followed by a deluge—phones throughout the municipality building ringing off the hook. Patronas had left Evangelos Demos behind to deal with them, thinking that it took his associate so long to gather his thoughts, let alone articulate them, the reporters would eventually hang up in frustration.

  “What thoughts?” Tembelos said cheerfully when Patronas told him this.

  Tembelos continued to joke around, trying to cheer him up, but Patronas held up a hand, signaling him to stop.

  “I can’t get the image of Achilles Kourelas out of my mind,” he said, “the way he clawed the earth with his fingers and lay there, bleeding. I knew we had no proof, but I proceeded anyway. It’s on me this time, Giorgos. That shooting is on me.”

  Affected by the coroner’s report, they were both drinking ouzo, throwing it down, shot after shot. Getting drunk wouldn’t help matters, but at this point, Patronas didn’t care.

  “He’ll be all right,” Tembelos said. “As my mother used to say, ‘The bad dog dies hard.’ And Kourelas is a very bad dog.”

  “Still ….”

  Fronting the street, the view from their table didn’t amount to much, but the bifteki they’d ordered had proven surprisingly tasty, flavored delicately with mint and nicely charred. Hungry as he was, Patronas could barely swallow and he pushed his plate away.

  A group of women were inspecting a rack of clothing on display across the street, and he watched them for a moment, trying to guess their nationality. A fanciful establishment, the store featured shorts made of peek-a-boo lace and hats with huge, floppy brims, as well as other items that gave tourists a bad name. English or German, had to be.

  “So back to Lydia Pappas …” Tembelos started to say.

  “I told you, she’s innocent.”

  “Yiannis, we’re running out of suspects.”

  “For God’s sake, Giorgos. First of all, she’s a small woman and as such, lacks the physical strength, the musculature needed to hoist a ten-year-old boy over her shoulder and carry him up to Thanatos, let alone string him up and hang him over the pit. The murder of Svenson would have been even more difficult. Neither crime was easy to execute. It would have taken someone with,” his voice trailed off, “panagia mou.”

  Tembelos stopped chewing. “What?”

  “Did we fingerprint those kids or swab them for DNA?”

  “Nope. I’m pretty sure we only did Svenson that day.”

  They sat for a moment in silence, looking at each other.

  “Shit,” Tembelos said. “It was t
hem, wasn’t it?”

  Patronas nodded. It had been in front of him the whole time. He just hadn’t seen it.

  The means, the opportunity …. All he needed now was the motive.

  When Patronas returned to the municipality building, he found an isolated spot and called Charlie Bowdoin on his cell phone. What he was planning was highly unorthodox and bordered on entrapment. He didn’t want to be overheard.

  “Hey, Charlie,” he said, working to keep his voice level. “It’s Chief Officer Patronas. I know you must have heard the news about Professor Svenson by now, and I just wanted to tell you how very sorry I am. It must have been a terrible shock, and I was wondering how you’re doing.”

  In a hollow voice, Bowdoin said he was all right. Then he asked for specifics as to how Richard Svenson had died.

  “We believe it was an accident,” Patronas said, “that he somehow got tangled up the ropes, tripped and fell overboard.”

  “Awful,” Bowdoin whispered. “I can’t believe it. To die like that … Professor Svenson. You didn’t know him. He loved the sea.”

  He and the other two boys had just returned from class. They’d been reassigned to another adviser, he told Patronas, and planned to finish out the term. “We figured we got this far, we might as well complete the course. It won’t be the same, though, without him.”

  Patronas took a deep breath. “You three were a great help to us during the search and I wanted to thank you.”

  To show his gratitude, he offered to take them out to dinner that night, and Bowdoin readily assented. They arranged to meet at Flora’s at eight thirty; then Patronas hung up the phone.

  Sitting back in his chair, he closed his eyes. “Epityhia!” Success!.

  The three students were already sitting at the table when Patronas arrived. Clearly arguing about something, they’d stopped when they saw him. They had all dressed with care and were far more subdued than he’d ever seen them, their hair slicked down and wet from recent showers. They stood up to greet him, Bowdoin insisting he take the chair at the head of the table.