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He looks at her with desperation in his eyes. “But I want this to be over. I’m innocent. Lap is innocent.”
“They don’t think so,” she says to him and he nods slowly.
“Lap’s mother killed herself on November 1st, 1996,” Sojer says. “Is that what triggered him? Because the first murder occurred exactly a year later, at almost the exact time that he found her with her wrists slashed in the bathtub.”
“I can’t talk about that,” he says. “I won’t.”
“It would be better for you to answer our questions,” I prod. “Tell us what you know and we will make the process from here on in as painless for you as possible. No big media frenzy. No big trial.”
He fixes his eyes on me with a very sad look. “I can’t tell you anything because we are innocent of this. And you can’t promise me what you just tried to. We’re public figures. Once it gets out that you’ve arrested us for this, our careers will be over. We did so much good, and yet it will all be crushed now. Picked apart and destroyed.”
He turns to his lawyer. “Can you stop this? I don’t have anything else to say.”
She looks at me with glee in her eyes. “You heard my client. I am terminating this interview.”
Sojer sucks on his teeth and makes a lot of noise putting the photos back into his folder.
“All this damn waiting for nothing,” I say once we’re back in the hallway, and I didn’t actually mean to utter the thought aloud.
“Maybe we’ll have more luck with Lap,” he says and walks to the next door over.
“Sojer, Mark,” Ida calls to us from down the hall. “I just found out something that I think you should know.”
Sojer strides towards her and leads us into an empty interrogation room before asking her what she found in an impatient, harried voice. She looks at each of us, then nods like she’s decided something and clears her throat.
“What we found today is huge, and the knife is definitely the murder weapon,” she says. “I found blood from both Tara Merc and Ana Kobe on it. And that smaller glove is identical to the one we found in the alley they are a pair. But there was female DNA and blood on that glove. On all the gloves.”
“Yes, probably the victims’ blood,” Sojer says impatiently.
“No, sorry, I’m a little tired,” Ida says. “What I meant was, there is only female DNA on them. And some of it doesn’t match the victims.”
I take a step back and narrow my eyes at her. “But you said you might have trouble getting DNA evidence from the first glove. Could that be the reason for this find?”
She shrugs. “It’s possible and I’ll do more tests, but I just thought you should know this before you start interviewing the suspects.”
“All right, thanks,” Sojer says. “But all this lack of hard evidence means now is that we have to work even harder to get a confession.”
I have serious doubts that we’ll get that today. It would’ve been much easier had Ida come to tell us she found the doctors’ DNA instead of this, which I’m not even sure what to make of.
But at least we’re almost at the end of this case. And that counts for a lot as far as I’m concerned.
* * *
EVA
The narrow streets around the apartment buildings where Hana’s parents live are a veritable maze full of one-way streets, which are more often than not almost completely blocked by parked cars. Add to that the dead-end jammed up parking lots, and we’ve had to back out twice and almost got stuck while trying to navigate around the parked cars three times. And we still haven’t even gotten close to the address we’re looking for.
“Should we just park and walk?” I ask.
“Park where?” Dino says. “Every centimeter of available space here is taken. We’ll have to try this street from the other side. I can’t get through here.”
He steps on the gas and reverses out at speed, which is a clear indication that he’s losing his patience for this task we’re on. But we got this far and I’m not ready to give up yet.
We reach the main street and he uses too much force to shift into first, making the gears grind like something broke. He curses and steps on the gas just as a blur of green and gold I could see from the corner of my eye materializes into a woman running in front of our car. The brakes screech deafeningly as the car comes to a stop. But she went down and is not getting up.
“Did I hit her?” Dino asks in a panicked voice. “I don’t think I hit her.”
I didn’t feel the impact either.
