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“There was something,” she says as she turns back. “About two, maybe three months ago, she came back from one of her nighttime walks totally spooked, saying she saw that black man from her nightmares by the river.”
“What did he look like?” I ask.
“I don’t know, she never described him,” she says. “All she ever said was that he was tall and big and wore all black, and that even his face was covered. He just stood there looking at her until she wasn’t sure if he was real or she was just imagining things. She was leaning more towards the latter. He didn’t follow her when she ran away, that’s why she began to think maybe he wasn’t real. I don’t know if that helps.”
“It does,” I assure her and she nods, then continues walking.
“Just more of the same,” Sojer says after we cross the street and head back to the office. “A troubled woman with a mental illness.”
“And a man in black stalking her,” I add.
“It’s one of the shrinks, I’m telling you,” he says.
He could be right or he could be totally wrong.
“We’ll have a more official talk with them tomorrow,” I say. “And with the people at the church as well.”
One week of intense investigation and all we have to show for it is a vague description of a man in black who could also be a woman, a letter that’s so over the top insane it can hardly be genuine, and a killer who’s escalating and who seems to be fixating on Eva.
I hate to think it, because thinking it makes it hard to breathe, but we could use that fixation to draw him out.
* * *
EVA
It’s barely past six AM and I’m alone in the office, going over the files Mark brought from the youth center last night. I didn’t bother to turn on the lights, since I kind of like the way the blue ones make everything look so dreamy, but that effect is gone now, since dawn has long since broken.
I’ve hit a total dead end trying to find out more about Hana’s past. As it turns out, we have acquaintances and even friends in common, but they all clammed up when I started asking questions about her, which is probably my fault, because I feel damn guilty about doing it, so I didn’t formulate them well enough. I was up until almost eleven making the calls though.
I got a lot of curt and some downright impolite answers in the vein of that they’re not going to talk about a colleague behind her back and that I shouldn’t be asking at all.
I did learn that the job of reporting solely crime stories really got to her, and she’d had to take extended leaves of absence from time to time to recover. That would account for the gaps in her reporting, which sometimes lasted for years.
We were only able to connect two of the victims to the youth center—Ana Kobe, who worked there and Tina Ceh whom the nun took a special interest in. But we only checked the records up to a year before the first murder. The nun gave Mark all the records dating back to the opening of the youth center in 1988, before Sister Tereza and Father Ignatius ran it. And there, third on the list of attendees, is Hana’s name. She was only eleven years old at the time and she’s scowling at me from the black-and-white picture they included with the short write-up of what she was like.
From a broken home. Father an abusive alcoholic, mother over-worked and absent most of the time. The girl read a lot and didn’t talk much. Had a talent for writing and would help put together the church newsletter every month. They worked hard at nurturing this talent in her, but she remained sullen and eventually stopped coming when she turned thirteen.
Hana had never told me any of this. In fact, come to think of it, she never told me much about herself at all in the summer we spent together. She would talk a lot about writing, about wanting to write for the crime section, and how fascinating finding the root causes of evil would be, but she never spoke much about herself. I knew she was an only child and that she always wanted to be a writer, but that’s about it. At the time, I didn’t find that odd, now it seems significant. But maybe that’s just because I want it to be.
I never talk much about my past or my family either, especially not to people I only just met or don’t know that well. And I was all for figuring out the psychology of evil even back then. So Hana and I had a lot to talk about even without telling each other about our lives, and it was the first time either of us were away from our families, so it’s not that surprising we didn’t talk about them. Right?
Both my phones—the work one and private one—as well as my laptop start chiming and buzzing with notifications and phone calls before I can follow that train of thought any further.
Something’s happened. Another body?
The first text I open answers that question. Thankfully, it’s a no.
I’m not even sure who the text is from and it just asks for my comment on today’s article in Delo followed by a link to download the PDF version of it.
The rest of the texts are much the same. As are the few emails I check before finally downloading the article.
It’s a scan of from the Saturday Edition of the paper, a two-page spread, by the looks of it, written by Hana and bearing the title:Expert Serial Killer Hunter or a Woman Desperate for Attention?
The subtitle reads:Is Eva Lah truly the expert she claims to be, or does she simply make the evidence of serial killers she uncovers fit the crimes? Or worse… does she create the evidence herself?
The article only gets worse in its accusations and defamation of my work from there. I’m on the paragraph where Hana expounds on the letter she got, not actually including it, but wondering very unapologetically whether I might have sent it to her myself, when the door of the office slides open and Mark says, in a very breathless and relieved voice, “Good, you’re still here.”
He’s standing just inside the door, dressed but not quite, the belt of his pants still undone, his shirt not quite buttoned up and his sweater hanging off his arm, the sleeve trailing on the floor. He didn’t comb his hair either.
