Evan had never been particularly good at throwing his weight around. He’d never had to be. He was a fair judge of people, though, if he asked the right questions. “Stavros won’t permit me to see them, right?” he floated for a starter.
“Mr. Stavros has nothing to do with it.” The response from the wiry, gray-haired police captain was without expression, but Evan thought he could read some resentment there. The man was probably about Stavros’ age but without the natural cushion from the years that wealth provided. He’d probably been pushed around by the Greek tycoon his whole life.
“Did you work on the case?” Evan asked.
The captain hesitated, glancing at the younger man who was the only other occupant of the office and who was doing a pretty good job of pretending to study his computer screen. Maybe money didn’t talk here as much as Evan would hope, but that could be a good thing. Maybe this man was sick of being bullied by Stavros.
“Yes. I worked on it. Terrible thing, a young girl like that.”
“Could you tell me a little bit more about the circumstances of the case?”
“Come on back to my office.”
The headquarters were deceptively roomy, the back office sporting a high ceiling fan and built-in bookshelves filled with volume after volume of leather records of some kind. “Have a seat,” the captain directed him and then pulled down one of the numbered volumes resting it on the desk and opening it to a certain page before he slid it across the desk Evan’s way.
It was a newspaper clipping, black and white, but yellowed with age. “Tragic Drowning,” the man translated the headline.
Evan glanced at the date, but could not otherwise read the article. Greek to him, as they say.
“It’s an account of the finding of Athena Stavros’ body. Anything you notice there?”
Evan glanced at it again. “Not really.”
“No picture of the girl. Usually a story about someone’s death would be accompanied by a picture of the deceased. But Stavros was bizarrely obsessed with not having his niece photographed. I’m told he made it a rule at the boarding school she attended as well, until he took her out of school completely, that is, and brought her here. And he watched her like a hawk when she was on the island. Might even say kept her a prisoner almost. Barely anyone saw her.”
Evan nodded.
“My brother was one of her guards. One of her later guards.”
Evan didn’t want to even guess at the significance of the “later” reference so he just asked. “What happened to the earlier ones?”
The man spit out a word in Greek. “Scum,” he clarified. “My brother said whoever had guarded the girl before had,” he hesitated, “hurt her.”
The blood came pounding to Evan’s head and he felt a rage that rivaled what Stavros had just demonstrated in his office. He wished he could slam something or pound it. But now was not the time to express outrage. Now was the time to gather facts.
And make decisions.
“Was your brother there the day she, er, died?”
“Yes. He said she just swam away and they couldn’t catch her.”
Evan said nothing.
“But she was a strong swimmer. By the time my brother and the other guard reported it—”
Something about the way he said that seemed to suggest a delay.
“She was nowhere to be found. And these currents…”
“Where was this?”
The captain jotted down a few lines of precise directions. “Here. You can go see the spot if you want.”
“They found a body?”
“Not until Stavros flew back to the estate and took over the search himself.” He pulled back the volume with the news clipping and flipped a page, shoving it back Evan’s way.
Evan looked at the open page, swallowing his immediate surge of disgust and despair. It was a photo of a corpse, black and white and unforgiving in all its merciless detail. Small but bloated, with seaweed draped around the limbs like some kind of perverted decoration, it was hard to even tell whether it was even a woman, though the corpse was naked on the sand.
“I’d never seen Athena Stavros. But my brother had.”
A long pause.
“A corpse doesn’t lose six inches of height. Athena was a tall girl and this poor soul…was not.”
“But the coroner ruled it Athena?”
The captain shrugged. “Of course.”
“Any other girls disappear around that time?”
The captain focused soulful brown eyes at the photo. “Of course.”
Evan stood up and shook the captain’s hand. “Thank you for your time.”
He was at the door before the man called to him, though he hadn’t told him his name. “Mr. Reynolds. Fredrico Stavros is a dangerous man.” He said something in Greek.