One Minute Out

“A picture? Bring it out slowly.”

The hand comes out, there is a palm-sized photo in it, and I holster the gun. As Corbu offers it to me she eyes my Glock, now back on my hip. She asks, “What kind of thing were you doing at that farm?”

“The kind of thing you really don’t want to ask about.”

“You were trying to rescue the women?”

I shake my head. She looks me in the eyes and registers my intensity, and she doesn’t ask me for any more details.

As I take the picture from her, she says, “My sister, Roxana.” Corbu’s voice turns hopeful now. “Did you see her there? Anyone who looked like her? She doesn’t usually wear so much makeup, but this is the most recent photo I have. A cousin’s wedding in Timisoara in May.”

Before I even look I say, “The Serbian told your mother she was dead.”

I watch pain in her face reappear, clouding over her new excitement. “Yes. I guess I am just holding out a little hope that—”

“I get it.” Hope isn’t a strategy, as my mentor Maurice used to say, but it does go a long way in helping us deny the awful truth.

I look down at the image now. Two women stand at a party in flowing dresses, a flute of champagne in each one’s hand. At first I don’t recognize Talyssa on the left. She has longer dishwater-blond hair in the photo, and now her hair is dyed red and cut shoulder length. And she’s wearing makeup, while now her face is unadorned. She’s by no means unattractive, but she’s relatively plain, her features all but nondescript.

Kind of like me, I guess.

Plus, it takes me a moment to associate the dressed-up, confident, happy woman in the picture with the buttoned-up, terrified, exhausted woman seated in front of me.

But next to her in the photo I see another woman. She is stunning. Beyond stunning. She doesn’t even look real.

Talyssa says, “I know what you are thinking. We don’t look like sisters.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” I say, but in truth, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.

Roxana’s features are all soft, her eyes large, her lips full. Where Talyssa has blond hair, this woman is a brunette, and she is easily four inches taller than Talyssa.

“We have different fathers. And she’s six years younger than me.”

Looking over the photo, I feel sure I’ve never seen Roxana before in my life. I’d remember someone who looked like that, I’m certain.

But I keep staring in silence for a few seconds. I really don’t remember any of the faces I saw in the cellar. I only remember Liliana; she is Moldovan, and she looks nothing like the girl in this photo.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t see her . . . but it was dark, and there were a lot of girls in the—”

“Never mind. She’s dead. I know she’s dead. I keep telling myself not to think about finding her alive.” She pauses. “The only thing I can realistically hope to find are her killers. Maybe they will lead me to her body.” She looks at me with suddenly fierce eyes. “I’ll find you a place to take Vukovic. It will be far from the road, far from people, and covered.” With a cold smile she adds, “He can scream all he wants . . . and nobody will come to save him.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You’re starting to get the hang of this.”

TWELVE

   Captain Niko Vukovic ran the police force in Mostar, but that wasn’t where he made his money. He was paid by the Serbian mafia in Belgrade for a number of things, but his main income came from assisting with the flow of trafficked humans from the East, on their way to the West, the Middle East, and even Asia.

Vukovic didn’t know the scope of the operation in which he played a part. No, he was a big fish in a small pond, and his pond was Mostar. Here, as far as he was concerned, he was in command. Not that old general who’d run the way station until the night before last, but the police captain who had kept the pipeline open through the territory for the past several years.

After Babic’s obviously politically motivated assassination, Vukovic worried that those involved in the pipeline would hold him accountable, even though his job was not to provide physical security for the general but rather safe passage of the women on the roads to and from the way station, and police coordination if something went wrong. Still, the first thing he did when he heard about the attack on the farm was to assign himself four of his best officers to act as a security detail.

The four all took money from the Branjevo Partizans, the Belgrade mob, same as Vukovic. He figured they could be trusted to watch over him, both during his regular police work and when escorting him to a restaurant frequented by one of his Serbian mob contacts on the second floor of a small hotel on Stari Pazar Street.

The hotel was in the hilly Old Town at a cobblestoned intersection a block from the swiftly flowing Neretva River. It was luxurious by local standards, and the neat lobby was nearly empty. He walked up the stairs with his entourage to the restaurant and found it all but deserted, as well. It was late for lunch but early for dinner, his preferred meeting time with his contact.

He saw a heavyset silver-maned man alone in a back booth on his phone with a bottle of Serbian liquor in front of him.

Vukovic nodded. Always here by four. Just like clockwork.

The police chief entered with his four officers. He directed them to stay by the front door of the restaurant while he headed to the back.

“Zdravo, Filip.” Hello, Filip, Vukovic said as he sat down. “Haven’t heard from you. Time for a quick chat?”

The Serbian mobster gave him a half nod, then finished his call and poured Vukovic a drink.

They toasted without much emotion, then drank down their shots in silence.

Another round was poured and drunk, and then a third poured into the little glasses. But instead of picking it up and downing it, Vukovic said, “I’m sure your people in Belgrade have spoken to someone in the Consortium.”

Filip just nodded.

“What do they say?”

“What you’d expect. The Consortium is mad at us, mad at Babic, and mad at you.”

The police chief did expect this, but he also knew he had to push back against it. “You told them I didn’t have men providing security at the way station, didn’t you? That was not my role.”

“Yeah. I told them. Look, this will blow over, but they are moving the way station. It’s already closed.”

“Shit,” Vukovic said, but he wasn’t really surprised.

The man from Belgrade added, “The whores were taken to Dubrovnik. They are going to filter the next batch of product from Sarajevo to Banja Luka.”