“It’s one of the cases Eva wanted files on,” he says. “The Tim Ban case. That was one of the first murders I investigated and I was working with Detective Kos on it. He wanted it closed fast, even though I had serious doubts that we had the right of it. But he overruled me because he outranked me.”
I remember Kos. We ran across him in my first case with the task force and he wanted that one closed fast too.
“You don’t think he was killed in a fight with another drug dealer?” I ask.
That other drug dealer did eight years for stabbing Tim, but had maintained his innocence throughout, according to the file Eva and I read before I came here.
“I don’t think Tim was a drug dealer in the first place,” Sojer says. “He’s my age and we grew up in roughly the same neighborhood. He used drugs and he was always a depressed guy since he lost both his parents in a car crash when he was in high school. It led him to a life of petty crime, but it was mostly just stealing. He never did serious time and was never picked up for dealing. So, him getting killed while purchasing a large amount of heroin never rang true to me.”
“The prosecution maintained that he was on the verge of becoming a full-fledged dealer. And the evidence was solid enough to convict the guy who was supposedly trying to sell him the stuff,” I say.
Sojer shrugs and drinks some more of the beer. “They’d argued earlier in the day, in front of witnesses. Threats were exchanged. So when he was found dead in the morning, the other dealer was our first stop. He had no alibi for the night, and traces of Marko’s blood were found on his clothes.”
“Yes, he claimed those were from the fight they’d had earlier,” I interject as he pauses to drink some more of his beer.
“I thought that was a plausible explanation,” Sojer says. “He didn’t deny arguing with Ban and he was the one who claimed Ban had ambitions to start dealing too. Kos took him at his word on that, but not on his claims of being innocent of the murder. And he wanted the case closed fast. He always does. It gives him more time to drink.”
He chuckles darkly and drinks his whisky in one swallow.
“It was the same way with the other two very similar stabbings next year, which we also investigated,” Sojer says. “I thought those two were connected at first, but as you probably know, two different guys did time for them.”
“Both claiming they were innocent,” I say as I nod.
“One a known rapist, the other the victim’s abusive, drug-addicted boyfriend,” Sojer says. “So not quite innocent. Everything looked legit that time, so I didn’t push. But I’ve spent all day thinking about those cases. Maybe my first instinct was right, and they were all connected. And maybe they’re even connected to the one last night.”
“It’s what Eva’s been saying,” I say and lean back. “And not just those, but about twelve others too.”
“I’d like to help you investigate this, if you’ll have me,” Sojer says in a grave tone.
I take a few moments to consider it. But it’s really a no-brainer. There are a lot of cases to re-open, I’m down one of my investigators because young Walter is taking an extended leave of absence in his native Austria, and I’ll be a father in a less than two months.
So I’m the one extending my hand to Sojer this time. “Yes, that works. Welcome aboard. We start bright and early tomorrow. Come to the task force office at eight.”
He grins, shakes my hand and assures me he’ll be there. Then he finishes off his pint in a couple of long swallows, stands up and walks to the bar counter where he settles our tab.
I lean back in my creaking chair, cradling my beer and watch him walk out of the pub. I can’t shake a nagging feeling that he has some sort of hidden agenda in wanting to work on this case with us. Though that could be because I’ve come to dislike him deeply and I don’t forgive easily.
But I’ll play the cards as they lay, because we do need all the help we can get.
* * *
EVA
The task force apartment is a two-bedroom place, but only one of the bedrooms is furnished. That’s where Mark is still sleeping now. The second bedroom has a huge window that overlooks the Ljubljana castle, a small inflatable bed against one wall, and nothing else. I’ve covered much of the remaining two walls with crime scene photos and reports from the cases I think are connected, doing so in chronological order.
And I’ve spent the last hour or so sitting on the kitchen chair I dragged in here and looking at photos of the victims. They’re lying where they were found, their faces illuminated by the camera flash, the expressions on them peaceful-yet-not, and somehow the same. In each case, death seems to have come for them in the exact moment where they let go of some sort of pain, and it was just starting to ease off their faces.
The victims are all roughly the same age, mid-twenties to early thirties. They all look very young. But that, and the eerily similar expressions on their faces in the crime scene photos is where the clear connections end.
Another connection could be that they all seem to have come from good families and had their lives more or less on track. Except the first victim, Tim Ban, who was orphaned. But he was raised by his aunt and uncle who, according to the files, were very involved in his life and were trying hard to help him get it back on track.
Other than that, even the manner in which they were killed varies slightly. Not all of them were killed swiftly and efficiently with a single stab through the heart. Some, like Tim, lived long enough to walk to where they were eventually found. By the river in each and every case. But not in the same area. Not even remotely.
The victims had been found all along the banks of the Ljubljanica River from one end of the city to the other, with no discernible pattern to it. At least none that I can see. And the crime scenes aren’t even remote, out of the way places. Just like last night’s crime scene, a lot of the others were also in heavily frequented areas. This killer is not afraid of being seen. Why?
And why hasn’t he been seen yet?
There’s no hope of getting CCTV from the older cases, but Brina has managed to get us the traffic cam feed from the area where Ana Kobe was killed. Hopefully that’ll show us something. Maybe even the man in the fisherman’s coat. If he’s not afraid of being caught while committing the crime, then he’s probably not afraid of being noticed while planning it or looking on as the police investigate. A lot of killers enjoy doing that.
When I told Mark earlier that it’s possible to blend in by being conspicuous, it sounded far-fetched even to me, but it makes more sense in light of this. My subconscious must have been picking up on something my logical brain hadn’t seen yet. It often happens that way from me—I notice patterns and connect the dots before I realize it.
But I am fully aware that I might be grasping at very thin straws here.
“Did you get any sleep at all?” Mark asks with a mixture of annoyance, concern and just plain sleepiness. He yawns loudly before I can answer.
He’s standing in the doorway, squinting at the mess of photos and papers all around me and on the wall.
“I got the standard four or five hours I always get,” I tell him and brace against the wall to help me stand up. “I feel fine, I promise.”
Of course he leaps to help me, and of course I’m grateful, but I’d prefer to be able to stand up from sitting in a chair on my own too. I keep holding onto his arm even after I’m standing though, because my legs are filled with pins and needles and are not very supportive right now.
Mark is looking over the arrangement of photos on the wall, and the expression on his face tells me nothing about what he’s thinking.
“They all look like they’re about to start smiling, don’t they?” he asks after a while.
“Right? I see it too,” I say excitedly, because I’d begun to think he was seeing nothing at all in the way I laid out the photos. “Maybe he tells them something, which made them feel at ease right before he stabbed them.”
“Or maybe it means that they all knew the killer and he stabbed them right as they recognized him,” he says and yes, his explanation makes more sense. And is more actionable.
“We’ll have to interview all the victims’ families again, see if there’s a common thread in the places they frequented or the people they hung out with,” I say breathlessly.
He groans. “We’ll start by going over the transcripts of their interviews, then move on to interviewing the investigating officers. Sojer can help with that, I’m sure.”
“I wish you’d show more enthusiasm for this case,” I mumble.
“Eva, enthusiasm is more your thing,” he says very patiently. “I just get sucked in and get this unstoppable urge to drop everything else until I catch the killer. But it all leads to the same thing.”
I lean my head against his shoulder and hold on tighter to his arm.
“We’ll interview the families, but first, we need to have a good reason to drag everything back up for them,” he adds. “Don’t forget that they believe justice was served. Most of these cases were solved.”
“Not all of them, so I guess we can start with those,” I say and release his arm. “We’ll have to start with the victims, because there doesn’t seem to be any connection in the places where the bodies were found.”
I point at the foldout map of Ljubljana I also glued to the wall and which I marked each crime scene with a black dot.
“The river is your connection,” he says. “It’s where the killer and victims came together. We just have to find out why and how.”
He checks his watch and groans again. “We better get ready and go down to the office. We don’t want to be late for Sojer’s first day.”
He sounds bitter more than anything else. I don’t think he thought it through before agreeing to allow Sojer to work with us.
“Are you sure you trust him enough?” I ask and he shrugs.
“We have all this to work through,” he says and makes a sweeping gesture that encompasses the whole room. “And he’s worked a few of these cases, so he has firsthand knowledge of them. I’m willing to give him a chance.”
“OK, then I’ll do my best too,” I say in a clipped voice, which makes him laugh and pull me close again, kissing the top of my head.
“What would I do without you to watch my back?” he asks and he’s greatly exaggerating how things work between us, but it’s still a very nice thing to hear.
“Always,” I whisper and lean against him.
Our baby is awake now too, moving inside me, and making me wish all we had to do today was decide on how to lay out the furniture in the nursery.
But that’s not where we are now.
We have to find this killer, because I’m convinced that if we don’t, no one else ever will. And we have to do it before our daughter is born.