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Annja turned to find the police officer pointing at her leg. Looking down, she was surprised to find a nasty scrape across her right calf leaking blood into the top of her boot. She hadn’t even been aware she’d cut herself, the adrenaline rush masking any pain she might have been feeling.
“Lovely,” she said as the pain finally hit. It wasn’t a serious injury, but it stung like a son of a gun. She glanced toward her SUV, then back at the police officer. He was a young guy, in his midtwenties or so.
“Don’t worry, miss. I’ll keep my eye on it while you get that taken care of,” he said, standing a bit straighter under her scrutiny.
She gave him a smile. “Thanks. I appreciate it,” she said, and then limped into the hospital after the others.
5 (#ulink_285130b0-4947-5d08-bce5-bf18e55288f4)
“Why don’t you tell me your side of the story?”
Annja was sitting in an interview room at the police station with a fair-haired detective named Alexej Tamás. He was in his midthirties, and might have been attractive if he didn’t have a permanent scowl plastered on his face. He’d found her at the hospital after she’d had the cut on her leg cleaned and bandaged, no doubt summoned by the officer outside. Tamás had asked her to accompany him to the station to give a statement, and she couldn’t think of a good reason not to.
Now she was starting to question that decision.
Annja had been in more police stations than she liked to admit, had given more statements than she cared to recall, but still bristled at the insinuation that she was telling a “story.” She might bend the truth occasionally, especially in situations that involved the sword, but this time around she was telling the whole story, and the detective’s pessimism annoyed her. Still, she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt for the time being. Getting upset would only make her appear suspicious, and Detective Tamás already seemed predisposed to find the worst in people.
Better to be as cooperative as possible, Annja decided.
Smiling, she said, “Of course, Detective. I’d be happy to.”
She told him about filming at Csejte Castle earlier that afternoon, being flagged down by the woman named Csilla and then climbing to help the other woman.
Tamás let her talk, making occasional notes on the legal pad in front of him, but didn’t interrupt. Annja tried to read what he was writing, having gotten pretty good at reading upside down over the past few years, but the detective was writing in his native language, which might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Then again, she probably could have translated the hieroglyphs.
Several long moments later she sat back and waited for Tamás’s response. When it came, it was on a tangent she wasn’t expecting.
“What were you filming at Csejte?”
She frowned. “I’m sorry?”
“I asked what you were filming at Csejte.”
“Oh, just some filler for a piece we’re doing on Elizabeth Báthory.”
What else would someone be filming at Csejte?
“We? There are more of you?”
“Ah, no. I’m here alone. I meant ‘we’ in the sense of the television series I work for.”
“Ah, I see. What television series would that be?”
“It’s called Chasing History’s Monsters. We look at historical figures and try to...”
He waved her explanation aside. “So you claim you didn’t know the other woman—” he checked his notes “—Csilla Polgár, until she flagged you down.”
This time Annja let her irritation show, but just a little. “Yes. I said that.”
“So you didn’t meet her here in town? She wasn’t helping you with your television shoot?”
Meet her? Helping me?
“No, of course not. I told you, I’m here on my own.”
“Is there someone who can vouch for what you’re doing here? A producer, perhaps?”
Annja spoke without thinking. “Of course my producer can vouch for me, but what is this about? Why are you...?”
“His name?”
Annja stared at the detective. What was going on here? Did they honestly think she had anything to do with what happened to that poor woman?
She couldn’t think of any other reason for the detective’s questions.
“Doug. Doug Morrell,” she told him flatly, showing her displeasure without actually saying anything.
Tamás was undeterred. He rose, stepped over to the door and opened it, speaking to someone in the hall outside. After a moment he came back to the table and took his seat. In his hand was Annja’s cell phone, which she’d been asked to leave with the desk clerk when she’d arrived at the station.
“Let’s call Mr. Doug, yes?”
She almost said, Look, I’m not calling anyone until you tell me what on earth is...
Annja smiled. “Of course.”
She picked up the phone, started to dial Doug’s office in New York and then stopped. It was close to 9:00 p.m. here in Nové Mesto. The six-hour time difference would make it 3:00 a.m. in New York. Even Doug wasn’t that much of a workaholic.
One thing was for certain. He wasn’t going to like being woken up at this hour.
Couldn’t be helped.
Tamás was staring at her, so she stopped thinking and got to doing. She dialed Doug’s cell phone and waited.
One ring. Two. Three.
“Do you have any idea what time it is, Annja?” Doug asked.
Annja couldn’t tell if he was irritated or just half-asleep. With Doug, they were often the same.
“I know it’s early, Doug, sorry about...”
Tamás stretched out his hand, waiting for her to give him the phone.
“Annja? What’s going on? Why are you calling me at...”
“Got someone who needs to speak with you,” she said, and then handed the phone to Tamás.
“Mr. Morrell? My name is Detective Tamás, Slovak Police. I wondered if you would be willing to answer a few questions about Ms. Creed?”
Annja sat there and fumed as Tamás asked Doug to confirm just about everything she’d told him, castigating herself the whole time for opening her mouth without thinking about the implications. She hadn’t told Doug about the episode she was shooting; she’d intended on surprising him with it when she got back. If he told Tamás he didn’t have any idea what she was doing in Hungary, that would set the detective’s alarm bells ringing and he might want to keep her here for a lot longer than she intended.
Thankfully Doug had covered for her before. He must have answered the detective’s questions to the man’s satisfaction, because after several minutes Tamás handed the phone back to her.
“All I can say is that you’d better have a good explanation for being wherever the hell you are when I thought you were in Budapest.”
There was no mistaking his tone; this time he was ticked.
“I do, Doug. And I guarantee you’re going to like it. Let me finish up here and I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Harrumph.”
That was it—a grunt and then a dial tone. Sometimes Doug could be the worst kind of prima donna. Then again, she tended to be less than pleasant when woken up at 3:00 a.m.
She hung up the phone and slipped it back in her pocket, staring at Tamás the whole time, all but daring him to challenge her. She’d had enough of being treated like a criminal. Now she intended to get some answers.
“Satisfied?” she asked.
Tamás shrugged. “Just doing my job.”
“I would think you’d be interviewing the victim, not harassing the Good Samaritan who saved her life.”
The detective eyed her a moment and then sighed. “Trust me, if I could interview the injured woman, I would. Unfortunately, she passed away fifteen minutes ago, leaving you and Miss Polgár the last two people on earth to see her alive.”
Annja didn’t know what to say. She’d thought the woman was out of the woods when they’d gotten her to the hospital and turned her over to the medical staff.
Such a tragedy.
She wondered how Tamás had gotten word of the woman’s death, as he’d been in here with her for the past half hour and hadn’t taken any calls, but then she remembered his conversation with the guard outside the door when he’d retrieved her cell phone.
No wonder he’d wanted to verify her story. Annja and the woman who’d flagged her down were his only leads in what had suddenly become a murder investigation.
Annja looked up to find Tamás watching her, though this time with less hostility. She decided to risk a question.
“Have you been able to identify her?”
Tamás shook his head. “No, not yet. No one here recognizes her and there are no missing-persons reports that match her description, which probably means she isn’t a local. We’re searching for more information and processing her fingerprints now, but our access to the larger police databases is somewhat limited, so it will take a few days.”
Her curiosity getting the better of her, she risked another. “Do they have a cause of death?”
The detective shrugged. “We won’t have an official cause of death until the autopsy this afternoon, but I don’t think we’ll find anything surprising. She was thrown down a cliff and left to die in the cold.”
Annja frowned. “But what about the blood loss?” she asked, almost to herself.
Tamás’s softer expression suddenly sharpened. “Blood loss? What are you talking about?”
“Her skin was so pale, with a gray undertone to it,” Annja told him. “I took that to mean she’d lost a lot of blood.”
The detective relaxed. “Just a result of being exposed to the elements, I’m told. We’ll know more after the autopsy.”
The explanation didn’t make sense to Annja—she’d seen the effects of exposure before and was convinced this was something else entirely—but she wasn’t willing to raise Tamás’s ire by continuing to pursue the issue. When he moved the conversation to another line of questioning, she let him do so without protest.
“What do you know about Miss Polgár?”
“No more than I’ve already told you,” Annja said.
“To be clear, you’ve never spoken to her nor met her prior to tonight when she flagged you down to rescue the victim. Is that right?”
“Correct.”
“What makes you think she had nothing to do with the victim’s injuries?”
The question made Annja hesitate. “I’m sorry?”
“You said earlier you thought Miss Polgár had spotted the victim’s upraised hand while hiking down the road and flagged down the first passing vehicle for assistance, which happened to be you.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“So what made you believe Miss Polgár was traveling alone, instead of with the victim? Couldn’t she have easily pushed the other woman over the edge?”
Annja distinctly remembered wondering if the two women had been traveling together, but she didn’t mention that to the detective. There didn’t seem to be much point, given that the injured woman was found nude. If it had been an accident, the woman would have been dressed in her hiking clothes. Annja said as much to Tamás.
“Not if Polgár knocked her unconscious and then stripped her before pushing her over the edge,” the detective replied. “Polgár had several sets of clothing in her backpack, including another pair of hiking boots in a different size than those she was wearing.”
Annja thought about it for a moment and then shook her head. “I didn’t get that sense, Detective, sorry. She appeared genuinely concerned for the injured woman and was extremely helpful during the rescue.”
“What better way to throw the authorities off her trail than to assist in the rescue of the woman she attacked and left for dead, no?”
The cynicism inherent in that line of thought made Annja happy she didn’t have the detective’s job. Still, she just couldn’t see that young woman as the culprit.
“Thank you for your patience. We appreciate your help with this investigation. Will you be staying in Nové Mesto much longer?”
“I have at least another day of shooting at Csejte Castle, and then some archival research at the state museum in Bratislava, so I’ll be here for a few days yet.”
Tamás nodded. “Please be sure to leave your contact information with the desk sergeant so I can get in touch if any more questions arise.”
“Of course, Detective. I’m happy to help in any way I can.”
“I appreciate that, Ms. Creed. Good day.”
A uniformed officer escorted her down the hall, past another interview room where Polgár was being questioned by two plainclothes detectives. At the front desk a sergeant took down her cell phone number, the name and room number of her hotel, and asked her to keep them informed of when she intended to leave the country. Annja agreed to do so and five minutes later was standing on the steps of the police station, suddenly exhausted from her ordeal.
It had been a long day and night. It was time to get some sleep.
That, however, was easier said than done, as her rental car had been confiscated by the police as part of the murder investigation.
The rental car company was going to love this, she thought as she flagged down a cab for a ride back to her hotel.
