18th Abduction

by Patterson, James

  It was after 7:00 p.m. when Conklin and I escorted Dennis Lopez from the back of the cruiser into the Hall and gave him a brief elevator ride to Homicide.

  We had detained Lopez on reasonable suspicion, but that was short of probable cause, which would have allowed us to get an arrest warrant and toss his butt in jail.

  Reasonable suspicion meant that anything he said could be used against him, but after questioning him for a short time, like twenty minutes, we would have to charge him and read him his rights, or let him go.

  I hoped he’d break under pressure, confess to killing Carly, or give us something that would lead to the two missing schoolteachers. And that they’d still be alive.

  Interview 2 was available. Conklin pulled out a chair for Lopez, and I kept my hand on his shoulder until he sat down. Time was blowing past.

  Conklin removed the cuffs I’d slapped on Lopez in the basement, saying to him, “Okay? You should be more comfortable now. Can we get you something to drink? Soda?”

  But Lopez had had experience with the police before. He turned down our offer and answered “No,” “No,” and “I don’t know” to our questions. Ten minutes into our interview, he asked, “Am I under arrest?”

  “No,” I said. “We’ve brought you in for questioning. We’re detaining you on reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. That’s because when I ordered you to stop, you stepped on the gas. You can’t do that. Like I told you, you broke a law.”

  “Oh. But to be clear,” Lopez said, “can I leave?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “That’s the detaining part. But you’re correct that you’re not in custody.”

  “If you decide to hit the street,” Conklin told him, “we’re going to upgrade you to suspect. We’ll be taking a much harder look at you. We’ll work with the DA on getting probable cause, and that means search warrants and cops watching you until you screw up. Which I think we can count on.”

  “Actually, I want to help,” said Denny.

  I said, “Okay, good. Let’s get to it.”

  So I asked Denny for the third time, “When was the last time you saw Carly Myers?”

  “I don’t know her.”

  I almost lost it. He was screwing with us, and I had no power to turn him around.

  I leaned in, and speaking in a hard, cold voice, I said, “I swear, Denny, either you help us or you become the focus of my life until you’re in jail.”

  Lopez used a minute of our precious time to think things over. Then he said, “The last time I saw Carly was a couple of weeks ago. I guess. I don’t keep a calendar.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t see her last week? Let me give you a hint,” I said. “Carly and her two friends were seen leaving a bar called the Bridge on Monday night.”

  “I. Didn’t. See. Her. How am I supposed to prove that? I got a question for you. How many hookers get killed every year in this city? A dozen? Do you know? Do you want to grill me about them? Do you think I go around killing working girls? Are you out of your minds?”

  When he’d finished venting, Conklin said, “Let me help you out. You were seen on Tuesday night at the Big Four, where Carly was murdered. Your taco ride has been seen there frequently. The Big Four manager knows you were pimping for Carly. That’s what the DA is going to tell the judge. You were the dead woman’s pimp. You were seen at the crime scene around the time she was killed. We’re asking you about a woman you knew and did business with. Follow me?”

  Denny nodded and all of the air went out of his balloon.

  Conklin said, “Right now our forensics lab is going over the tacomobile, and the DA is getting a warrant for your DNA. A foreign hair was found on Carly’s body, and if the DNA on that hair matches yours, you’re our guy. You’re it.”

  “I didn’t kill Carly,” Lopez told my partner. “I’ve never had sex with her. I’ve never even touched her.”

  “Then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by telling us every single thing you know,” I said.

  Conklin asked, “How about it, Denny?”

  CHAPTER 59

  Denny thought over the win-win suggestion I’d made, while looking into my hard blue eyes—and he took it to heart.

  He said, “I met Carly at the Bridge one night about three months ago. I was sitting at the bar. Carly was a couple stools down, and I started talking to her. She was very cute. I moved over next to her. I bought her a drink. I asked her what kind of work she did and she told me. She said she didn’t make a lot of money and was trying to pay off her college loans.”

  He shrugged. I drummed my fingers on the table. I wanted him to get to it. Faster.

  Lopez said, “I told her I’d be happy to help her work off the loan and I’d give her a pretty good deal, a fifty-fifty split after taking out for expenses. She laughed. Asked me what I meant. I told her and she told me I was crazy.

  “So about a month after I made that offer, she called me and said she wanted to do it.”

  Conklin said, “She agreed to be a prostitute?”

  Lopez said, “She had decided. I didn’t pressure her. Not at all. She said she wanted to try. I made a date for her. I drove her to the Big Four. I like that place because they don’t ask any questions.

  “I stayed in the parking lot while Carly was having her date. I had told her I would be lookout in case of trouble. She made a couple hundred bucks and told me to make another date for her.”

  “And you did?” Conklin asked.

  Lopez said, “Once or twice a month. That was all she would do. Hey. To be honest, Sergeant, I don’t know for sure that she even liked guys.”

  “Explain,” I said.

  “Just a feeling I had. Look. A lotta girls who turn tricks hate men, don’t you think?”

  “Go on with your story, Denny. There’s a line forming outside, people waiting for this room.”

  He looked up at the two-way mirror and waved.

  I slapped my hand down on the table and his attention came back to me.

  Lopez said, “I picked guys who weren’t too gross, and she seemed fine with it for a month or so. Then, a few weeks ago, she said she didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  I said, “Is that right?”

  I took out my phone, showed Denny the pictures of him coming down the stairs at the back of the motel.

  “You recognize this guy?”

  He looked at the picture, eyes moving over the small screen, pausing, clearing his throat, then saying, “That’s me.”

  “That was a week ago,” I told him.

  “I was there,” he said, “but not with Carly.”

  I was ready with my follow-up questions. I asked him if he knew Adele Saran and Susan Jones. I showed him the picture I had of all three of them together at a table at the Bridge.

  Lopez said he’d seen them there but never spoken to Adele or Susan.

  He added, “Those are the missing women I heard about?”

  “I think you know that.”

  He stood up from his seat and yelled in my face, “You’ve got the wrong man. You’ve got the wrong man! I didn’t hurt anyone. And now I’m getting out of here. Adios.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Conklin stood up and said to Lopez in his very reasonable and patient voice, “Hey, Denny, you’re free to leave, okay? But come on. We’re not trying to pin anything on you. We’re trying to save some lives here.”

  I left Denny to Conklin and went to get our person of interest a soft drink. By the time I had returned to the box, Lopez was chatting with Conklin as if they were old friends.

  That was a good thing and I hated to break the mood, but I was still half crazy worrying about two missing schoolteachers. I took my seat, pushed the can of soda over to Lopez.

  He popped the top, took a swig.

  I pulled out my phone again and said, “Denny, here’s the timeline. Carly checked into the Big Four on Tuesday night a week ago. On Thursday she was found dead in room 212. Murdered. This picture of you is time-stamped 11:2
3 p.m. Tuesday, the night we think she was killed. You were coming down from her room. What were you doing there? Make me understand.”

  Lopez heaved a sigh.

  “I didn’t go to her room,” he said. “Actually, I was waiting for Daisy, my new girl. Daisy was in room 314, the top floor. I was in the parking lot, and I saw some man in a sports jacket leave 212, the room Carly always booked. It’s on the corner. She liked that because the room is a little bigger. I figured she might be in there alone. It was a hunch, that’s all. I knocked on the door. She didn’t answer. I went back down to the car and waited for Daisy.”

  He looked at my face and said, “That’s the fucking truth. You want to talk to Daisy? Because I don’t have her number.”

  Lopez was getting worked up again.

  Conklin said, “Keep going, Denny. You waited for Daisy to be finished.”

  “Yes. Thank you. When Daisy was done, we did our financial transaction inside the car, and I drove her back to Mission and Eighteenth Street.”

  I said to Lopez, “Can you describe the man you saw leaving Carly’s room? The man in the sports jacket.”

  “It was a nonevent. He was moving fast.”

  “Did you see his car?” I asked.

  “No. I was in the back lot, and I think what he did was walk around to the front. Sometimes I park in the front, too.”

  I said, “Could you describe him to a sketch artist?”

  “Doubtful. I could try. If I do that, will you kiss me good night and drive me home?”

  Conklin said, “First, the sketch artist. Then I’ll talk to our lieutenant, and if you’ve been cooperative—no kisses. But we’ll get you a ride home.”

  Denny spent a few minutes with our sketch artist, who showed us the resultant drawing of a rectangular face with regular features. It could be anyone.

  I didn’t want to release Denny, but we’d gone past reasonable suspicion already. We could charge him for pandering, but there was no point.

  We’d done our best with our only suspect—and damn it, we’d come up empty.

  CHAPTER 61

  It was just after 8:00 p.m. when the lab tech picked up the soda can with Denny Lopez’s DNA on the rim to compare with the lone pubic hair Claire had retrieved from Carly Myers’s body. It was after 9:00 when I sent my report to Jacobi, and as I closed down and packed up for the night, I ran the Lopez interview through my mind again. Was he a small-time criminal guilty of pimping out willing females in exchange for a cut? Or was he far worse, a clever, psychopathic killer?

  I was leaning toward the former, that Lopez was a common parasite who was supplementing his by-the-hour taco delivery job, when my desk phone rang.

  Yuki’s name flashed on my caller ID.

  What was keeping her in her office at this time of night? I picked up the receiver and Yuki didn’t wait for me to say hello.

  “I just heard something,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  “Hi, Yuki. What’s up?”

  “I gotta talk to you. Your place or mine?”

  Yuki’s office was one floor down, so either place was easy enough, but I had one foot out the door, and I asked her, “Can this wait? I’m on my way home.”

  “How about we talk in your car?”

  I phoned Joe and reached him as he was driving home.

  “Have you eaten dinner?” I asked.

  “I was thinking we could go out for Thai food.”

  There was a restaurant we loved on Clement, located two blocks from our apartment. It was a good idea, but from the sound of Yuki’s voice, I calculated that I was going to be occupied for a while. Joe and I made a plan and a backup plan, and then I took to the fire stairs and headed down.

  Yuki was waiting for me on the second-floor landing.

  “What took you so long?” she said.

  It had been thirty or forty seconds since I’d hung up the phone. I said, “Ha, ha. This had better be good.”

  We continued down the stairs to the lobby, exited through the back door, walked along the breezeway past the ME’s office to Harriet Street and the parking lot under the over-pass. I unlocked my trusty Explorer and we both got in. I reclined my seat, and Yuki did the same with hers.

  “Start talking,” I said.

  Yuki said, “Have you ever heard of a Bosnian war criminal named Slobodan Petrović?”

  This question was a stunner.

  I turned my head to look at my friend. Joe had told me about Petrović, but even though I trusted Yuki completely, I couldn’t just spill Joe’s beans.

  Yuki had fixed me with her sharp brown eyes.

  “Do you know who I mean?” she asked again.

  “The Butcher of Djoba,” I said. “He was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the ICC, but as I recall, the case against him was kicked. It was said that after he was released, he drowned. How’d I do?”

  “Impressive,” said Yuki. “Do you know about his particular crimes against humanity?”

  “Fill me in,” I said.

  I dug around in the console, found a couple of PowerBars, and gave one to Yuki. She took a bottle of water out of her bag and passed it to me.

  We took half a minute to satisfy our snack and hydration needs, and then Yuki was back on Petrović.

  She said, “As you may have heard, this mofo ordered the killing of a couple thousand civilians. The men were locked in burning barns, slaughtered with machine guns, or randomly executed. Babies were pulled from their mother’s arms and tossed alive into fires or bayoneted; the lucky ones had their throats cut. The women and girls were raped, impregnated, destroyed from the inside out …”

  Yuki choked up, then after a moment went on with this horrible story of Serbian military atrocities. She told me that she’d seen film of Colonel Petrović taking a child of about six onto his knee.

  “He kissed his forehead and said everything would be fine. Then he cut the boy’s throat.”

  “That’s … beyond monstrous,” I managed to say. “Simply inconceivable.”

  Yuki said, “There’s more. From witness reports, Petrović liked to choke women and girls while he raped them. He’d let up so they could breathe, then choke them some more. When they were dead, he hanged them. Actually, whether they were dead or alive is unclear.”

  I was dying to know why Yuki wanted to tell me about Petrović so urgently.

  And then, finally, she told me.

  CHAPTER 62

  Yuki said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you about this dead Serbian war criminal, right?”

  I laughed, wondering whether I could tell Yuki that I knew exactly who she was talking about. “You could say that again.”

  “Well, just hang on,” said Yuki. “He’s not dead.”

  She grabbed her bag from the footwell and pulled out a page torn from a newspaper. It was an ad with the headline, STEAK HOUSE OPENS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. MEET TONY BRANKO.

  There was a photo of the new owner, Antonije Branko, standing outside the door under the awning with TONY’S PLACE FOR STEAK spelled out in flashy gold script.

  Yuki said, “One of my coworkers showed this to me. He had family in Bosnia during the war. He knows this Tony as Slobodan Petrović. I looked up the photos of Petrović when he was on trial at The Hague. The names don’t match, but the photos do. Apparently, Petrović got out of Bosnia somehow and opened an upmarket steak house on California Street.”

  I didn’t have the expected response.

  “You’re nodding your head?” Yuki said. “That’s it? War criminal living in San Francisco and you nod your head?”

  “I’m trying to take it in,” I said. “It’s a lot.”

  She took my lack of astonishment as a rebuke.

  “Are you kidding? I thought this would blow your mind. It did mine. But never mind. I’m clueing Parisi in in the morning, and then I’m going to take this to the FBI. They’ve got to know that a mass murderer is a local restaurateur, now open for business.”
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  “I hear you,” I said.

  Joe would have to understand my sharing information with Yuki when I told him that she was already in the know.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’m waiting.”

  Yuki took back the water bottle and slugged half of it down.

  I said, “I already knew. Joe’s working on this.”

  She whipped her head around and gave me a startled look. Then she said, “Share a few more words, if you don’t mind.”

  “The FBI has been duly notified and is aware of Petrović. A survivor from the massacre at Djoba came to Joe, and he’s looking into all of it—how and why Petrović’s case at the ICC got kicked, why he’s here, what it means.”

  Yuki shook her head. “Now you tell me.”

  Yuki was an assistant DA, a prosecutor. She was dogged, and yet if there was no case to dig into, she’d drop it. The FBI was on it. There was nothing for her to do.

  I said, “Sorry for not volunteering this, Yuki, but its Joe’s case. I needed to know first what you knew before divulging what Joe told me in confidence. Okay?”

  She nodded, disappointed but understanding.

  I stuck my key into the ignition, and Yuki opened her door and started to get out. I was thinking fast. Was Yuki’s news of a mad-dog war criminal who enjoyed hanging his victims purely coincidental?

  Now it was my turn to say, “Wait.”

  Yuki got back into the car.

  I said to her, “What you just said about Petrović. Follow me on this. Torture. Rape. Hanging. Does this ring a bell with you—or am I totally out of my mind?”

  “You’re thinking Carly Myers?”

  “Do you see it?”

  “How do you connect them?” Yuki asked me. “She’s a schoolteacher. He owns a pricey steak house.”

  “She was a schoolteacher who turned tricks on the side—in a motel. Petrović imprisoned women in a building that, under his occupation, was called the rape hotel. He enjoyed hanging people, didn’t he? Carly was found manually strangled, then hanged.”