by Alex Archer
“There is a man waiting across the street. I believe he’s looking for you. It isn’t safe for you to leave,” he said. “Not yet.”
He took his hand off her arm as requested.
For a moment she considered marching over to the front door and going outside, just to see what would happen, but then her good sense asserted itself. She’d already had one confrontation tonight—she didn’t need another. Annja settled back into her chair and waited for her companion to make the next move.
She watched from the corner of her eye as he casually looked around the room, checking to see if anyone had noticed their interaction. Then he glanced at her and went back to staring at the bar top.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be harsh.”
Annja accepted his apology with the slightest of nods.
“My name is Novack. I didn’t come here to harm you. On the contrary, I came to warn you that you’ve chosen a dangerous path. If you persist in asking questions, you’re only going to draw attention.”
“Attention from whom?” Annja wanted to know.
“The wrong kind of people.”
Annja leaned closer, her emotions flaring. “A woman was murdered. If my questions bring those responsible out of hiding, then so be it.”
“They’ve already killed once. Who’s to say they won’t make you their next target?”
Annja smiled but there was no warmth in it. “They’re welcome to try,” she told him.
Novack—first name or last name?—glanced around and then reached inside his coat. Annja stiffened, expecting him to pull a weapon, and was relieved when it turned out to be a small manila envelope.
He slid it across the bar toward her hand.
“I was hoping you might say that. Meet me in the Church of the Holy Savior in Čachtice tomorrow evening at seven if you want to know more.”
Annja frowned. “I’m not going to meet you anywhere,” she said, even as she picked up the envelope and opened it. “Why would I meet with someone who won’t even tell me their full name?”
She glanced inside the envelope and her breath caught in her throat. Staring up at her was a color photograph of a naked woman lying dead on the ground somewhere. The front of the photo was stamped with the word Doklad in bright red.
That was a Slovak word she knew.
Evidence.
“What on earth...?” she began, looking up, only to find Novack halfway across the tavern headed for the exit.
She opened her mouth to shout after him, but then remembered how careful he’d been to avoid being seen speaking with her, and cursed under her breath instead. She jumped off her bar stool, threw some money on the bar to cover her bill—and then some, she thought—before hurrying to catch up.
By the time she reached the street, however, she was too late.
Novack was nowhere to be seen.
12
With Novack’s words of warning echoing in her head, Annja kept a sharp eye out as she made her way the last few blocks to her car. She didn’t see anyone following her, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there somewhere, watching her. When she reached her car she got in, locked the doors and drove straight to her hotel.
Inside her room, she pulled the photograph out of the envelope and sat down to have a closer look.
When she’d first seen the photo she’d thought it might show the woman she’d tried to rescue, but now she realized that wasn’t the case. This woman was not only blonde where the other was brunette, but she was also taller with a slimmer build. She was lying on her side, her eyes open and staring at the camera, and Annja could feel the accusation frozen forever in that gaze.
Find them. Find whoever did this and make them pay.
As with the woman Annja had found, there were no major wounds or other visible injuries to suggest a cause of death. Annja looked for the puncture wounds that had been described in Jane Doe’s autopsy report, but the woman’s position prevented her from seeing if they were present.
She didn’t want to jump to conclusions. She had no idea where or when this photo was taken. It might not be related to the other case at all. He might be using it to lure her in for some reason.
But the more she looked at the photo, the more she stared into the dead woman’s unseeing eyes, the more convinced she became that whoever killed this woman had also killed the other.
That made at least two. Were there more?
She didn’t know, but she intended to find out.
Grabbing her laptop, Annja fired it up and spent some time searching for new reports of murdered women in the Trenčín region of Slovakia. While she was able to pull up a few incidents, she didn’t find much beyond articles about the press conference from earlier that morning.
If she wanted to get to the bottom of this, it looked like she’d have to meet Novack at the appointed time and place after all.
Both excited and frustrated by the day’s events, Annja decided to call it a night. She took a quick shower to rid herself of the dust kicked up from the day’s canvassing efforts and climbed beneath the sheets, thoughts of the dead women dancing about in her mind as she drifted off to sleep.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING MORNING had its own share of surprises. While enjoying a coffee and croissant in the hotel dining room, Annja glanced at the TV and saw Detective Tamás stepping up to the podium for another press conference. English subtitles were running along the bottom of the screen, allowing her to read along.
Tamás looked somber in a dark suit and tie, but he seemed to give off an air of smug satisfaction as he addressed the small group of reporters.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. We have two pieces of news to share with you this morning.
“The first is that we’ve identified the victim as Marta Vass, a twenty-three-year-old student from Budapest who was here on a sightseeing expedition.”
Reporters began shouting questions, but Tamás held up his hands and waited for them to quiet down before continuing.
“The second is that as of 8:45 a.m., we have charged Csilla Polgár with the crime of murder in the first degree.”
Pandemonium broke out as all the reporters began shouting questions. Annja sat there, staring at the television in shock.
On screen, Tamás waited for the clamor to die down and then said, “I can answer a few brief questions.”
A reporter in the front row raised his hand and Tamás indicated that he should go ahead.
“Can you tell us what happened, Detective?”
“Both Miss Vass and Miss Polgár are students in Budapest. We believe they were traveling together when an argument broke out and Miss Polgár killed her companion in a fit of rage with a vicious blow to the head. At that point she stripped the body and pushed it over the side of a ridge to try to hide it. Unfortunately for her, another individual came along at that moment and Polgár was forced to improvise, pretending to assist with recovering the dying woman in order to throw law enforcement off her tracks.
“The victim received medical treatment upon arrival at the hospital here in Nové Mesto, but the doctor’s efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.”
“Is there an official cause of death yet, Detective?” a reporter asked.
“Yes. According to the medical examiner, the victim was struck in the back of the head with a blunt object. This caused massive internal hemorrhaging, which eventually led to her demise.”
Annja shook her head in disbelief. She’d held that woman in her arms and hadn’t noticed any such injury. Nor had the autopsy report mentioned anything even remotely similar.
What was going on here?
“Can you tell us who the third party is?” a reporter shouted, while another asked, “How do you know this other individual isn’t involved, as well?”
&n
bsp; “I am not at liberty to reveal her identity at the moment. Her story checks out and we’re confident that she was being a Good Samaritan when she stopped to assist Miss Polgár and Miss Vass. If you want to speak to her, you’ll have to track her down yourselves.”
Gee, thanks, Detective, Annja thought. Now every journalist in Slovakia would be looking for her!
Hopefully, they would assume the so-called third party was a local and start there, giving her some time before she had to start dodging reporters. If not, she’d deal with it. Right now she needed to talk to Tamás. She knew Csilla was innocent, and now that Tamás had followed through with his half-witted theory, she felt an obligation to help the woman.
On screen, Tamás answered a few more questions and then ended the press conference, disappearing back into the police station. Annja thought about calling him, but every reporter in the country would be doing the same thing right about now, trying to get the inside scoop on the charges against the alleged killer. If she were Tamás, she’d have some of the rank and file taking the calls until things quieted down. She thought she could get through to him without too much trouble—she was, after all, a material witness in the investigation—but something told her she should do this in person. She wanted to see his face and gauge his reactions.
The question was how to get in a room with him without bringing the press down on her head. Going to the station didn’t seem like the smartest choice, as she had little doubt the media would be scrutinizing anyone who entered for the next several days. It wouldn’t be hard for an enterprising reporter to match her photograph with one of the publicity stills from the show and wind up wondering what the star of Chasing History’s Monsters was doing here. That would bring its own media frenzy and simply exacerbate the problem.
A meeting at her hotel—either in the restaurant or her room—was out of the question for the same reason. There were too many staff members milling about.
No, she needed somewhere that was easily accessible but a little more private.
After a few minutes of thought, she came up with the perfect place.
* * *
“DETECTIVE!”
Annja had been waiting in the underground garage beneath the police station for the past half hour. The entrance was guarded by a uniformed officer, but when an overzealous news team tried to park their truck too close to the barrier, the officer had dutifully walked over to direct them elsewhere and Annja had taken the opportunity to slip past.
She’d lingered in the shadows, avoiding anyone who entered the garage while she waited for Tamás. Annja had anticipated that he might try to slip out of the office while all the media hubbub was going on, and was finally gratified to see him step off the elevator and walk toward his car, an older-model black BMW parked not too far from where she was hiding.
Tamás turned at the sound of her voice and waited for her to catch up with him. He didn’t seem surprised to see her.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Creed?”
While waiting, Annja had decided that a full-frontal assault was the best chance she had of eliciting a reaction. She summoned up an air of aggravation and said, “You can tell me what the heck is going on, for starters.”
Tamás frowned. “I’m sorry?”
“I saw the press conference this morning.”
“And?”
“And there’s no way Csilla Polgár murdered that woman! You know it and I know it. I told you as much when you questioned me earlier.”
Tamás, however, didn’t take the bait. He remained calm and unflustered as he said, “I understand how disturbing it must be for you to know that the woman you were working side by side with is, in fact, a cold-blooded killer. I’m sure that is unsettling to say the least. But that doesn’t change the facts.”
“Facts?” Annja replied. “What facts? All you’ve got is a theory, and frankly, it sounds like a rather crazy one at that.”
“Crazy as it may be, it is what happened. Perhaps you’ve heard the expression truth is stranger than fiction. This is clearly one of those occasions. If you hadn’t come along, I have little doubt that Miss Polgár would have left the scene far behind.”
“But that’s the thing, Detective. If she hadn’t flagged me down, I probably wouldn’t have even seen her standing there. All she had to do was back up a couple of steps and I would have driven right past. Why would she expose herself that way?”
Tamás shrugged. “I couldn’t possibly tell you. Criminals do stupid things all the time.”
Annja decided to try a different tack. “You keep calling her a criminal, but I’m at a loss to understand how you arrived at that conclusion. What evidence do you have tying her to the crime?”
“You mean besides that fact that she was there at the crime scene?”
“That’s not enough and you know it. If it were, you would have arrested me, as well.”
If his expression was any indication, he was starting to get annoyed with her, but his reply, when it came, was civil enough.
“If you remember, I came close to doing that very thing. Lucky for you we have witnesses putting the other two women together at Csejte Castle earlier that afternoon. I have little doubt that we’ll locate Miss Vass’s belongings in the very near future, and when we do, we will find Miss Polgár’s fingerprints all over them.”
“But what about the—” she almost said autopsy report but realized her mistake at the last moment and switched to “—cause of death?”
“What about it?”
“You said Vass was killed by a blow to the back of the head, but I held that woman in my arms. There was no sign of an injury like that.”
Not to mention the fact that the autopsy report said the cause of death was massive blood loss.
Tamás looked at her closely, and for a moment Annja thought she’d gone too far. But then he seemed to shake off whatever suspicions her comment had prompted and smiled at her.
“I admire your passion, I truly do. But in this case I think it is misplaced. You didn’t see any sign of the injury because, as far as I understand, the damage was primarily internal. The victim’s thick hair seems to have cushioned the blow to some extent, preventing the skull from being crushed outright, but it did nothing to assuage the cerebral hemorrhaging that followed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to attend.”
He nodded, then opened the door to his vehicle and slipped inside. Annja watched as he started the engine and backed out of the parking space. Instead of driving off, however, he rolled down his window.
“Go home, Ms. Creed. There’s nothing more you can do, and it will be months before the case goes to trial. When we need you, I’m sure the embassy will be in touch.”
With that, he drove out of the garage, leaving her alone in the shadows with her thoughts.
13
Annja was more frustrated than ever. She knew Tamás was lying about the cause of death, and that made her wonder if he was lying about the relationship between Vass and Polgár, as well. It was certainly a convenient solution—claiming that the two women not only knew each other but had been traveling together and had gotten into an argument that had turned deadly. That explanation no doubt appealed to the detective’s need to tie up all the loose ends. The question was, what was the truth?
Annja wasn’t sure.
Tamás had claimed that witnesses had seen the two women together near the ruins of Csejte Castle. Talking to them might help her decide if Tamás was acting in good faith or if he really was at the heart of what was starting to look like a conspiracy to cover up more than just one murder.
She was suspicious, to say the least. She’d been at the castle all afternoon and hadn’t seen either of the two women, but she had to admit that didn’t necessarily mean they hadn’t been there. Annja had been pretty absorbed in her work at the time and might
simply have missed them.
But if Vass and Polgár had been there, and Tamás had found someone who’d seen them, then Annja should be able to find them, as well. What she needed to do was think like the detective.
So where to begin?
Yesterday she’d spent time knocking on doors in the village, but perhaps that had been the wrong approach. The locals had lived in the shadow of Csejte Castle for so long that very few probably visited the ruins. Those who did were likely involved in a business that catered to the tourists. According to Tamás, Vass and Polgár were on a sightseeing trip, so perhaps the best starting point would be with those who regularly interacted with such visitors. Annja could start with the locals who set up carts along the road leading to the castle and then move into town to check with the hotel staff and restaurant owners. If the women had been there—and in her mind it was a big if—someone must have seen them.
Novack’s warning about stirring up the wrong kind of people came to mind, but she brushed it aside. She’d gotten pretty good at causing trouble for the wrong kind of people, and there was no way last night’s threat would deter her from what she knew was right. She’d just pay more attention to her surroundings and make certain she wasn’t caught out alone after dark.
Satisfied that she had a plan of action, Annja crossed the underground lot and started up the ramp to the gate beyond. The detective must have said something to the guard on his way out because the man did little more than glare at her as she passed by and headed down the street to her car.
She sat in the driver’s seat for a moment, taking stock of it all. It was clear now that her instincts had been right—there was something fishy going on. From the lies about the cause of death to the rush to point the finger at Csilla Polgár, never mind the photograph of what seemed to be another victim, there were way too many loose ends. It was as if everyone around her was operating under the directions of some hidden third party; she could almost see the pattern... Almost, but not quite.