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“And we’ll divide up the list of victims’ relatives and ask about their relationship with the two psychiatrists,” I tell him.
He nods curtly, but visibly relaxes. What I am also going to do is ask Simon to get his file sent over. He needs to be looked into and I’m the one who has to do it.
No one else has anything to report, so we disband, Brina leaving right away, Dino following Rok to the back to get the license plate number and Sojer retreating to the small alcove kitchen where he makes a lot of unnecessary noise opening and closing the cabinets as he searches for the tea bags, which he eventually finds in one of the drawers.
“Can I speak with you two in my office,” Simon says and leads the way there without waiting for a reply.
It’s no surprise to me that he wants a word. His grimaces during Sojer’s and Eva’s reports already clearly told me he would.
He shuts the door firmly once we’re all inside, and motions for us to sit in the black leather sofa that takes up a good portion of his office. Eva opts for the chair by his desk instead and I stand beside her.
“You already know what I want to say, don’t you?” Simon says and chuckles nervously.
“That we should leave priests and doctors alone,” I say and he grimaces again.
“Until you have proof,” he says.
“All the proof we can gather is the things we get from talking to people,” Eva says. “Everything else is long gone or non-existent. Ida still hasn’t found anything in the evidence logs that would connect the crimes together.”
“She’s still working on it, though, so she might,” Simon interjects.
“I think the man in the video could easily be Father Ignatius in his long overcoat, don’t you?” Eva asks, fixing her wide-open, questioning eyes on me.
“Dino will get the sketch done,” I say instead of telling her that it could very well be anyone given the poor quality of the image. “Then we’ll know.”
“And until then, please don’t interrogate the priests,” Simon says. “The task force reopening this case is already on shaky ground. I’ve been getting a lot of calls from people who want us to shut it down, or at least conduct the review very quietly.”
“Why?” Eva says, looking genuinely puzzled as she looks from him to me and back again.
“Because most of the cases are solved,” I say. “And reopening them with the goal of proving someone else committed the murders… well, that carries with it a lot of negative impact on the people involved in the original cases.”
“Not to mention reparations for those who had been wrongly imprisoned for the crimes,” Simon adds. “And the need to audit the work of the detectives and prosecutors involved.”
He looks at Eva with a very apologetic look in his eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, a lot of people are on our side, including the state secretary at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. And no one is openly against it. But they’re all asking for discretion and caution. Especially since what we’re doing has already reached the press.”
He walks to the other side of his desk and brings over a stack of newspapers. They’re all still crisp and have that ink and new paper smell, which fills the room as he lays them side by side on the glass top of his desk.
“I’ve already had several requests for an interview, mainly with Eva, but also you, Mark,” Simon adds.
“And I probably have an inbox full of them too,” Eva muses. “I haven’t been checking my work emails.”
The story seems to have mostly been covered in the more yellow and smaller, local papers, but one of the two major newspapers-Delo-seems to have picked it up too, although clearly not as front page news.
But the entire front page of one of the most popular yellow papers, called Slovenian News, is taken up with images of the apartment block and riverbank where Ana was found, along with a smaller picture of the man we spoke to there, Ivan Vidmar. But my eyes zero in on the picture of Eva, taken from the back of one of her books, so everything else is more of less a blur. The headline reads: Famous Serial Killer Hunter Eva Lah on the Trail of Another Murderer.
The donut and coffee I just finished threaten to come back up again. Three times she almost got killed while hunting serial killers and getting too close. And every one of those times is playing back in vivid, visceral detail in my head right now. I wish I was sitting down. But I can’t get my legs to move to the nearest seat now.
Eva is reading the article, which seems to take up the first four pages of the newspaper, while nodding along appreciatively.
“This is good,” she says, taking my nausea up another notch. But the worst of my PTSD flashback has passed and so I leave her side to sit on the sofa. “What do the other papers say?”
She pulls the next one closer and leafs through it to the article, scanning it fast, before taking up the main one, Delo.
“The internet is probably full of this now too,” she says and finally looks at me, her eyes widening and concern filling them
“No, Mark, this is good,” she says firmly. “This will draw him out and make him easier to catch.”
And she’s the one he’ll come after. That’s what she’s not saying.
