Perfect Prey

by Laura Salters

  I’m convinced I must look mentally unstable, but one big perk of black skin is nobody can tell when you’re blushing. So I just face the screen, stare at the log-­in page and wait for him to bring me the code. The hotter-­than-­the-­sun cappuccino has too much foam and too little cocoa powder, but I can barely taste it anyway. The barista smiles at me, and there’s something strangely attractive about him and his hipster beard, eyebrow piercing and deep blue eyes.

  Did he hit on Erin while she worked? Is that why she stopped writing the email and never started again? Are the flirty undertones in his half-­smirk something more sinister?

  Jesus, Corbett. Get a grip.

  He’s harmless.

  As subtly as I can, I search the corners of the ceiling. No cameras. Damn. There’s no way of seeing what exactly Erin was up to on Friday, July 10, 2015 at 14:05:21. I hope the police can pull up some worthwhile footage from the street outside.

  Like most ­people in their twenties, I’m an expert at wasting time on the internet, so I kill the twenty minutes no problem. I try to check my Northern Heart emails, but find the account has been deleted—­fair enough—­and there’s nothing in my personal in-­box from the Daily Standard. Again, no surprise. I’m on the verge of typing Erin’s name into Google, delving into the dark world of the police-­orchestrated media campaign, but I know I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. I log on to Facebook instead.

  After scrolling through my feed for a few minutes—­succumbing to a few clickbait articles my friends have shared, liking a second cousin’s engagement announcement—­her name crops up regardless. Mary-­Kate Johnson, one of the salesgirls from Northern Heart, has used her as clickbait, or likebait, of her own.

  Miss you every day, Erin Baxter. Praying you’ll come home soon <3”

  I fight back the nausea. I don’t think Mary-­Kate ever acknowledged Erin’s existence, beyond the flesh-­searing jealousy she fired Erin’s way when she first joined the intern team. The status has eighty-­six likes and dozens of well-­wishing comments, all sending their love to Mary-­Kate in this difficult time. The wave of anger catches me off guard.

  Then I can’t resist any longer. I click onto Erin’s page.

  The gut-­wrenching feeling never comes. Maybe I’m numb to it after all that’s happened, but her quirky profile picture of her own shadow doesn’t evoke any stabbing grief. She rarely updated her status, so most of the posts on her feed are posts she’s been tagged in by others. There’s not much to get upset about in comparison to my real life memories of her.

  My coffee is still roughly the temperature of liquid magma, so I scroll down a little farther.

  Erin Baxter became friends with Robyn Ward and two others.

  Robyn Ward is a girl from Northern Heart, and I assume Barbara Baxter is an aged relative judging by her profile picture. But Kieran Riddle? I don’t recognize him.

  Something twists in my stomach. Are the police looking at the same profile right now? Questioning whether or not he’d been stalking Erin?

  His profile is private, and we only have one mutual friend. But a quick scroll through his friends list shows that most of them are women. Beautiful women. There are the obligatory family members—­I assume Brian and Helen Riddle are his parents—­but the rest resemble an amateur modeling portfolio: nightclub photography featuring fish pouts, hair extensions and false eyelashes. He’s listed as a University of Lincoln alum, but doesn’t have a current employer on his profile.

  I really have no idea what I’m looking for. He’s never posted on Erin’s wall, and I have no way of knowing if they’ve private messaged.

  In a bolt of inspiration, I remember one of the notes I made on the plane home, scrawled in the margin of a fiendish Sudoku puzzle, and never acted on. Find Borko Zoric on Facebook. Hands trembling, I open a new tab and type his name into the search bar.

  Bingo. Third result down. Borko Zoric, Univerzitet u Novom Sadu. Novi Sad University.

  But it’s not Borko I’m interested in. I click on his friends list, type “Andrijo” and watch as two profiles come up.

  The first has an F1 car as its profile picture and is in the Leskovac network—­a quick glance at a map of Serbia shows me that’s a city in the south, whereas Novi Sad is in the north of the country. I discount him. Mainly because the second profile, Andrijo Marković, is clearly him. I’d recognize those inky eyes anywhere.

  Damn. His privacy settings are so severe you’d think he was hiding a secret life as a Vegas drag queen. I can’t even click on his profile picture to make it bigger, let alone see his personal information or posts.

  Sipping the scalding coffee, I notice I only have two minutes left on the Wi-­Fi. It’s now or never.

  Gesturing to the barista, I reopen the Erin tab. I flash him what I hope is a charming, noncreepy grin, and he responds with an equally overenthusiastic smile and starts to walk over, tray in hand.

  Yeah, he’s definitely attractive. I never thought bearded white guys with metal through their face were my type, but hey. There’s something about the way his black apron hangs off his narrow hips, and the black T-­shirt is tight around his arms.

  “Hi.” I smile before he’s even reached me.

  Smooth. Way to play it cool.

  “Good morning, miss. Can I get you anything else? More Wi-­Fi?”

  I shake my head. He eyes the violet ombre at the bottom of my locks and something twinkles is his eye. “No, thank you. The coffee is great. I just wanted to ask a question . . . my friend, Erin, came in here recently. She mentioned a cute barista she wishes she’d asked out. Was it you? Do you recognize her?” I point to the screen, where I’ve maximized her profile picture.

  I’m genuinely amazed how smoothly the lie glides off my tongue. Maybe I should play the role of flirty cappuccino drinker more often. I’m much less of a bumbling idiot.

  He leans in and scrunches up his brow. “No, I don’t think so. She is very beautiful. Not as beautiful as you, however . . .”

  The stilted way he pronounces beautiful makes me almost sure he didn’t mean to compliment me like that. Me? More beautiful than Erin? Yeah. And I can also talk to animals, don’t you know?

  I assume he’s telling the truth about not recognizing her, although a small part of me wonders if he’s seen her missing posters and doesn’t want to get involved in this mess. I try to mask my disappointment. I had a whole list of questions I’d have asked if he’d seen her that day. Questions that would’ve made me look like a stalker, but I’m well past the point of caring.

  Wait . . . a stalker. Would her potential stalker also have come in here asking for information about her?

  I’m about to ask him whether anyone else has come looking for her when he points to the name on my other open tab.

  “Andrijo Marković? He works here, too—­maybe it was him she saw. Although he hasn’t showed up for weeks.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  August 3, Serbia

  I LEAVE POVEZIVANJE with a home address and a trembling fist.

  Andrijo was here. Erin was here. At the same time?

  An unsent email, a crackling intensity between them in the midst of a thunderstorm. A missing girl, an enigmatic stranger. A connection—­how deep?

  There’s a fizzing inside me, delicious satisfaction that my initial hunch had genuine weight, blended with the indescribable fear of what he could have done to my friend.

  I have to go to his house. Not ring the doorbell or look for trouble or anything crazy, but just to scope out the area. See if there’s any sign of life in his apartment—­the barista said he hadn’t turned up for work in weeks. Since Erin vanished? Was taken? Again, it can’t be a coincidence.

  It was Andrijo. He was there that night at JUMP. He must have been.

  This is the link I’ve been looking for. A link even the police missed.

  There’s
a certainty in my gut I haven’t felt since those very first interviews with Ilić, and it centers me like a sedative. Gives me renewed focus—­calm, steady, sure. Now the rhythm of my thumping heart is fast, yes, but even. I’m getting somewhere. For the first time, I have a real lead.

  I open my maps app, pull up his address. It’s a few minutes’ walk away. The rain has stopped now, and the sun is slicing through the gray clouds. Walking away from Povezivanje, away from the cute barista with the nice eyes and game-­changing information, I stride quickly but assuredly, and trust me, assured is not what I feel 99.9 percent of the time.

  As I round the corner at the street intersection, I look back up the cobbles, past the awnings and pavement tables and Serbian flags. And even though my eyesight isn’t the best, I swear I see a uniformed man enter the café I just left.

  ANDRIJO’S BUILDING IS an apartment block, but a very nice one. It looks like each flat takes up an entire floor. The exterior is mint green with big bay windows and hanging baskets of flowers, delicate drainpipes and glossy black doors. To be honest, though, the flowers and doors are not what I’m looking at.

  I’m looking at the three police vans parked outside.

  They’re here for him?

  They’re here for him.

  A crushing crescendo of satisfaction builds inside me. I knew. I knew from the start. Coal-­black eyes and piercing intensity and unsettling conversations and nobody believed me, but now they are here for him.

  What does this mean? Are they following the same lead I am, or do they have more?

  A small throng of spectators has gathered, and one very junior officer is trying his damnedest to usher them away. A teenage girl in a school skirt takes pictures on a smartphone. I push through them, right up to Ilić. He’s talking urgently into a phone, and looks more than a little irritated to see me standing in front of him, sopping wet hair drying into frizzy afro, coffee still lingering on my breath, hope wafting off my skin like a rancid smell.

  He hangs up. Fixes a smile on his face, but not before I see his true feelings toward me. I’m too amped up to care. “Carina. What are you doing here?”

  “I saw the vans and followed them. I was on the next street,” I lie, not wanting him to know about my detective work in Povezivanje.

  “Right. We’re just following up on a lead. It’s nothing to do with Erin’s case,” he says flippantly, but the final clause leaves me cold.

  He’s lying to my face.

  It’s not sinister. I know that. But he’s said it before; he doesn’t want to get my hopes up, doesn’t want to have to explain himself, doesn’t want to deal with the grief-­stricken girl standing in front of him.

  He’s unaware that I know this apartment belongs to Andrijo.

  Behind him, another detective loads a black bag marked Evidence into the back on the van. From the shape, it looks like a laptop case. Andrijo’s? Am I making a leap? Another one?

  Some of my leaps haven’t been far off.

  I swallow hard. “Okay.”

  A tight smile. “Go back to your hotel room. Relax. Spend time with Karen; she needs you. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”

  I agree and walk away, knowing that back to the hotel is the last place I’m thinking of going right now.

  MY HEAD SWIMS.

  I’m in another internet café.

  Andrijo. He’s the crux of this case.

  How?

  Was it as sordidly simple as a rape-­turned-­murder?

  Or was there something more?

  How does it all tie together?

  His alibi. What was it? His boss said he’d been at work. It struck me as odd at the time—­Erin went missing on a Sunday. Could he have been working at Povezivanje?

  I had looked up the café’s opening hours before I flew back out to Belgrade. It’s closed on Sundays, hence I waited until today to check it out.

  “He hasn’t showed up for weeks.”

  So he must have another job.

  Where?

  A half-­formed thought floats to the surface of my mental cesspool.

  Bastixair has a distribution center a few hundred yards from Povezivanje—­and his apartment. Did he choose to live there because it’s the perfect location for commuting to both jobs?

  Hurriedly, I click through to the Bastixair homepage, then use the site’s own search function to look for any reference to Andrijo Marković.

  Nothing.

  I don’t let disappointment swallow me whole. I have nine minutes of Wi-­Fi left.

  A few more clicks take me to a list of Bastixair’s key shareholders. None of the names ring any bells—­they’re all very Serbian. I’m about to click off the page, explore a different avenue, when the name right at the top catches my eye: Kristijan Kasun.

  I frown. Why would I have heard of him? It’s somewhere in the back of my mind, just out of reach.

  His profile takes an eternity to load. When it does, I skim through pages and pages of information. Several phrases jump out at me: he’s a parliamentary candidate for the Serbian Progressive Party whose son has Aubin’s syndrome. His picture shows a balding white man in his forties, thin-­rimmed glasses balancing on a narrow, pointed nose.

  Pressing my eyes together, I try so hard to remember where I’ve heard his name that I nearly give myself an aneurism. Something appears, again half-­formed. Tim, talking about Andrijo’s alibi.

  “He was at work with his boss. He’s a respected figure in the area.”

  Respected like a parliamentary candidate?

  I swear Tim mentioned a name, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.

  I look at the Wikipedia page for Kasun, as well as his official website and the news tab on Google. Nothing is jogging my memory, nothing is clicking into place. Six minutes left on the Wi-­Fi.

  For lack of anything better to research, I click on the images tab, crossing my fingers that by some miracle Andrijo and Kasun have been photographed together. That’d be perfectly neat, but far too easy. The first few pages bring up nothing interesting—­lots of pictures of him making public speeches and running campaigns and visiting schools.

  One does make me pause, though. A photo of him cutting a ribbon outside what looks like a clinic of some sort. I enlarge. A news story; yes, a clinic opening for sexual assault victims.

  Sexual assault. Erin. Baby. Rape? Stalker?

  Again, the leaps I’m taking are gargantuan, could take me from Jupiter to Neptune, but my hunch about Andrijo had something to it. Why can’t this?

  Five minutes left. I open the news article. The clinic, called Feminaid, is in Zrenjanin, the next city over from Novi Sad, and was opened nearly a decade ago to help sexual assault victims—­both physically and psychologically. I see the word abortion and nausea churns in my gut. Erin’s missing pregnancy test.

  There’s an image gallery at the bottom, and I scroll aimlessly through.

  Aimless, that is, until I see him.

  Not Andrijo Marković.

  Tim Halsey.

  THIS PICTURE WAS taken ten years ago. Tim Halsey was connected to Kristijan Kasun ten years ago.

  Is this important?

  Tim has never claimed not to know Kasun. It’s never really come up in conversation—­I had no idea who Kasun was until a few minutes ago. He might mean nothing in the grand scheme of this warped mystery. He’s a parliamentary candidate, a shareholder in a pharmaceutical company and frequently attends local openings to show face and cut ribbons. That’s all.

  But this picture links Bastixair to Kasun, and Kasun to Tim, and Tim to Erin. And somewhere in the middle, Andrijo slots into place.

  Brodie Breckenridge. She went missing eight years ago. Was she a sexual assault victim? Did she visit Feminaid?

  I shake the thought away. She disappeared in Croatia, and
this clinic is in Zrenjanin, northern Serbia.

  Still, my stomach twists at the idea of Erin, pregnant and scared, going to a clinic like that in secret. But when could she? Up until she went missing, we were only ever separated for an hour or so at a time on this trip. Definitely not enough to travel to Zrenjanin, have an appointment and then get back to Novi Sad without anyone realizing she’d left.

  Unless . . . while we slept? No. The opening hours, according to the clinic’s website, are pretty standard.

  Unless . . . she planned to go to the clinic at some point on the trip?

  Two minutes left. I take some screenshots of the article, the clinic, the image of Kasun and Tim, of a map directing me to the Feminaid in Zrenjanin, and send them to myself. Now I have them on my phone once the Wi-­Fi runs out.

  I remember the police vans outside Andrijo’s apartment block, the evidence bag, Ilić urging me to leave, lying about what they were doing. I try in vain to slot Povezivanje and Bastixair into the same picture. It’s the game I never win. Abusive father and stalker? Bruise and Andrijo? Kasun and baby?

  Pinning them down is impossible and I start to see why detectives in movies have those corkboards with pins representing different parts of the case, red string tying together the bits that are linked somehow.

  One minute to go. I take a punt. Google Andrijo Marković again.

  It was a long shot, and one that’s not rewarded. There’s just the usual Twitter account (an egg profile picture and no tweets), LinkedIn profile (which I can’t see because I don’t have my own) and another guy by the same name who’s a respected lawyer in the south.

  Zero minutes. I log out, thank the barista and send a message to Karen.

  I won’t be meeting her for lunch. I’m getting a bus to Zrenjanin.

  Chapter Nineteen

  August 3, Serbia

  THE CLINIC LOOKS exactly the same as it did in the picture from ten years ago, with the exception of the fresh paint job outside—­it’s now duck-­egg blue rather than peppermint green. A modern building, but there are only a few windows and you can’t really tell what’s inside from the street. A good thing, I guess. Its clients probably want to maintain confidentiality.