The Abomination (29 page)

If there was a fourth time, it was because you thought they were lying.

“I spent eight years in the military,” he began. “Fought in the Gulf War, was just about to get out in 1990 when I had the chance of an assignment to UNPROFOR – that's the United Nations Protection Force. We were the first peacekeeping unit to go into Krajina. These days, of course, it's in Croatia, but back then it was part of what had been known as Yugoslavia.”

It was, he said, an extraordinary period. Despite having seen action in Iraq, nothing could have prepared him for the barbarity of Yugoslavia's civil war.

“People were bayoneting their neighbours, then torching their houses. The Serbs had set up concentration camps and were rounding up anyone they didn't like the look of. Both sides were preaching ethnic hatred from their pulpits. The men were torn between going off to join one of the liberation armies, or staying to protect their families. No one had any food, but everyone seemed to have weapons and explosives.”

The UN had designated a number of safe-haven enclaves in Krajina, he said, enforced by peacekeepers. “Problem was, we weren't allowed to open fire unless our own safety was threatened. The locals soon realised they could pretty much do whatever they wanted to each other, and there wasn't a whole lot we could do about it.”

One day his unit was tasked to evacuate civilians from an area that was coming under heavy bombardment. “And that's where I found Soraya – Melina's mom. She was hiding in a cellar, covered in dirt and dust, but I could see straight away how beautiful she was. She was a Bosniak – a Muslim Bosnian, the only grouping with no army to back them up. It was a miracle she'd survived so long, really. I told her she could come back to our base to clean up, but really I knew it was the only place she'd be safe. And things just started from there.”

“What sort of relationship did it become?” Kat asked. “Were you married?”

Bob Findlater looked rueful. “I was, at the time. But not to Soraya. I didn't even know we'd had a child together until after I'd gone back home. A neighbour who knew I cared for Soraya wrote me to say she'd had a baby girl. I wrote back, but I never heard anything.”

Eventually his marriage broke up. Childless, he then decided to try and track Soraya and Melina down.

“Turned out Soraya had died towards the end of the war, and Melina was brought up in an orphanage. Well, of course that just made me even more determined to find her. She'd be almost eighteen by now – not too late to go to college. I thought I could offer to pay for that.” He took a breath. “Then I found out she came to Italy to work as a nanny.”

Piola and Kat exchanged glances.

Findlater nodded. “I realised fairly quickly that if you try to enter this country illegally, you pass through the hands of some pretty unpleasant characters. It's my belief she was forced into prostitution instead.”

“So you're still looking for her?”

“Not personally – my Italian's patchy, as I said. No, I found some good people and paid them to do the job for me.”

“That would be Barbara Holton and Jelena Babić?”

“That's right. Barbara ran a small organisation that had been doing good work in Croatia, reuniting victims of the war with their families. I found her online, did some background checks. She seemed very competent. I knew she'd be able to do a better job than I had, and it tied in with her own work on the long-term consequences of war.

“She recruited a friend from Croatia to help – that was Jelena, of course. To begin with I tried to tag along, but I soon realised they were more effective on their own, so I went back to the US for the Christmas holidays and left them to it. It was only when I checked into their hotel yesterday that I heard the terrible news from the desk clerk.”

Kat thought hard. It all made sense, but the first rule was to look for whatever could be corroborated or verified and double-check it. With both Barbara and Jelena dead, that might be difficult. “How did you pay them?”

“In cash, initially. Two thousand dollars, plus a thousand for expenses, with another three thousand to come if they found her.”

Kat saw Piola make a note. There hadn't been any cash in the women's hotel room, but then again, the killer might have stolen it.

“Did she give you a receipt?”

“Yes. But I'm sorry to say I haven't kept it.”

“How did you contact Barbara when you needed to speak to her?” The numbers retrieved from the woman's European cell phone had mostly been of local shops and bars.

“By email, mainly.”

“Do you still have the emails?”

“Some – the ones that are stored on my laptop.”

“What about the letter from the neighbour saying you had a daughter? Do you have that?”

“Sure, back home.”

“And your UNPROFOR documentation?”

“Likewise.”

Piola said, “We found a lock of hair in the hotel room Jelena and Barbara were sharing. Do you know anything about that?”

For the first time Bob Findlater looked puzzled. “I guess they must have taken hair from one of Melina's relatives,” he said slowly. “To match the DNA, in case there was any doubt when they found her.”

“They didn't tell you?”

Findlater shook his head. “As I said, I left that side of things to Barbara. Maybe that was naive of me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Before I left, I saw how fearless the two of them were – questioning prostitutes and pimps, getting physically threatened but never taking no for an answer. I assume that's why they were killed.”

Neither Kat nor Piola responded.

“Well?” he said. “That
is
the most likely explanation, isn't it?”

“It's one possibility,” Kat said at last. “At the moment we're not ruling anything out.”

“Have you considered,” Piola said carefully, “that the child may not be yours? The UN peacekeeping mission was, as I recall, ultimately unsuccessful. The war escalated, and many of the Bosniaks were driven out of Krajina. Life for civilians was . . . difficult. Particularly for the women.”

“You mean Soraya might have been raped?” Findlater shook his head. “From what I know of the timings, that doesn't seem possible. But even if it turns out that Melina isn't my natural daughter, she's definitely Soraya's. If I wasn't there to protect Soraya, and the worst
did
happen, Melina's doubly my responsibility.”

“Melina's fortunate that you're wealthy enough to take on a dependent,” Kat said. “What do you do, incidentally?”

“After I left the army, I went to work for a private contractor. We provide security and training packages to multi-national companies, that kind of thing. I do all right.”

They ran over the interview one more time. Bob Findlater was completely consistent in his answers.

“We'll need you to stay in Venice for a week or so,” Kat said at last. “We may have some more questions.”

“No problem. It'll give me a chance to keep looking for Melina.”

“I'm not sure that's a good idea.”

“Don't worry. I can take care of myself.”

“I thought the same,” Piola said. “The one who got me had a gun.”

Findlater stared at Piola, only now connecting the colonel's ravaged face with his own situation. “Jeez. These guys mean business, huh?”

“It appears so. You must assure us that you won't continue looking for your daughter. It may not be safe.”

Findlater nodded reluctantly. “I guess.”

“The fact is,” Kat added, “we don't even have any reason to believe she's still in Venice. If events happened as you suggest, the traffickers would almost certainly have moved her on after they'd killed Barbara and Jelena.”

The American sighed. “That's what I figured. It's just hard to give up, you know?”

“We'll take a DNA sample from you, just in case. That way if we do find her, we'll be able to link her to you immediately.” Kat took a disposable swab kit out of the drawer and pulled on the gloves. “I'm sure you're familiar with these. We just need to rub this bud round the inside of your mouth.”

Findlater hesitated. “Will it really help? As you said, she may not even be my biological daughter.”

“It'll speed things up if she is, though.”

He leant forward so that Kat could rub the swab around the inside of his mouth. As she did so, her face only inches from his, she became aware that his blue eyes were locked intently on hers. Disturbed, she forced herself to concentrate on what she was doing.

As she put the bud into the paper sleeve and sealed it, he gave her the ghost of a smile.
He fancies me
, she thought.

“Thanks,” she said, peeling off the gloves and extending her hand formally to shake his. “We'll be in touch, Mr Findlater.”

“Amazing,” Piola said when the American had gone.

“Extraordinary,” she agreed.

“After all this time, we finally have answers to almost every question we've been asking ourselves. It all fits. The photograph, the hair. . .”

“What about the approach Barbara Holton made to the Americans at Caserma Ederle?” she objected.

Piola shrugged. “As he said, finding Melina tied in with Barbara's own work.”

There was a long silence as both of them thought through the interview, looking for inconsistencies.

“It can be hard, sometimes,” Piola said slowly, “when the correct answer finally presents itself, to acknowledge that it
is
the correct answer. Psychologically, I mean. When there have been so many false positives, it's easy to treat a breakthrough as just another one.”

She nodded.

“On the other hand,” he added, “we have to be sceptical. It's our job.”

She looked at him. “You don't believe him either, do you?”

“Something's not right,” Piola said. He got to his feet, unable to sit still any longer. “I don't know what it is. But somewhere in all that Disney-movie crap about his long-lost daughter and how he just wants to change her life, there's a nasty little lie. I'm sure of it.”

“It's the lack of phone records that bothers me. If Barbara was working for him, why isn't there some kind of evidence trail? The only thing that definitely links them is that we know some of the prostitutes reported an American man asking questions about a Croatian girl.”

“We should show his picture to some of them. His passport photo will do – we can get that off the immigration guys at the Guardia di Finanza. And while we're at it, let's check he really left and entered the country when he said he did.”

She nodded. “I'll take care of it.”

“Did you notice,” he said thoughtfully, “that he was a little strange about having his DNA taken?”

She blushed.

“Oh,” Piola said. “I see.” He rubbed his jaw. “Although I don't, actually. I mean, certainly, a beautiful woman swabbing the inside of your mouth isn't something that happens every day. But it started before that, when you first told him you'd need DNA. He seemed . . . angry, somehow.”

“Why might that be?”

“I don't know. But there have been cases where a killer involves himself in a murder investigation, apparently just as a witness to help the police, only for his DNA to trip him up.”

“We don't have DNA from the crime scene, though.”

“No,” Piola agreed. “But he may not know that.” He sighed. “You know, Avvocato Marcello is going to love this. Every last loose end tied neatly into a bow. It'll all be handed over to Interpol and the organised crime team before the ink's dry on our reports.”

“OK,” she said. “Let's hypothesise for a minute. Say Findlater
isn't
telling the whole truth. Where does that take us?”

“It means. . .” Piola said. He took a breath. “It means this is even bigger than we thought. It means that whatever or whoever we're on the trail of, they're the kind of people who can whistle up a plausible ex-military American with solutions to all our questions any time they want to.”

“More than that,” she said. “It means they know what the questions
are
. They know where we've got to with the investigation.”

“Marcello?”

“Who else?”

There was another long silence.

“So,” he said at last. “Just suppose we were foolhardy enough to continue investigating in the face of possible corruption from our own side, Mafia death threats and American ex-soldiers bearing lies. What would we do next?”

She said, “We'd take the fight to them. We'd tell Marcello we don't believe a word of it. Then we'd go back to Findlater and tell him the same. Hell, maybe we even arrest him for the murders. We'd rattle their cages, and wait for them to panic.”

HOLLY INTERCEPTED GILROY
on his next visit to the Education Centre, following him into his classroom. Shutting the door, she explained what she'd learnt.

“This is remarkable, Holly,” he said when she'd finished. “Well done.”

She flushed with pleasure.

“There's an old Venetian saying,” he added. “‘A fish stinks first from the head.' And this stinks plenty. I think you may have just found those responsible for putting together Dragan Korovik's military strategy.”

“Not just his military strategy, either.” She handed him the abstract. “Read this.”

Pulling his glasses out of his shirt pocket, Gilroy read the title aloud. “
From ‘God on Our Side' to Genocide: Libidinal Frenzy as a Precursor to Mass Psychosis
. Sounds pretty dry.”

“It gets less so, believe me.”

He put it on the arm of the chair and read.

Abstract

A number of psychological studies have explored the circumstances in which individuals can be induced to harm others. In
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
(1974), Professor Stanley Milgram describes persuading volunteers to give electric shocks to strangers, merely by using verbal prompts such as “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, a process that has come to be known as “moral authorisation”.