Truth & Lies: A Queen City Justice Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

the sixty-five-degree breeze coming off the water in spite of the serious nature of her visit.  She flicked a glance at her watch and wished, not for the first time, that she were here on vacation, rather than to interview the families of the women who were still missing.
    The evening before, Dana had met with Stana Novak’s family. They hadn’t heard from their daughter since the day she left for the States.  They were able to give Dana some personal effects for a possible DNA match, but they didn’t have much more information to offer.
    Elena Kovać’s sister, Eva Marušić, had cried when Dana spoke to her on the phone.  She’d recommended the café as a good place to meet, as it had been Elena’s favorite.
    Dana spotted Eva from across the café. She looked a great deal like Elena’s passport photo, clipped to the file folder in front of Dana. Eva wore a messenger bag across her chest and a searching look on her face. Dana waved from her seat, and Eva hurried across the open seating area.
    “Hello. It is good to meet you,” she said in accented English.
    Before they could do much more than greet one another, a server stopped at the table, coffee pot in hand. He filled Dana’s cup, then turned to Eva. She nodded, he filled her cup and then, apparently sensing their need to get to business, faded away.
    “Have you heard anything?” Eva asked in Croatian.
    “Not since I spoke to you yesterday. But my team is doing everything they can.” Dana switched to Croatian, and Eva’s face showed her relief. She pulled out a notepad. “Can you tell me how Elena decided to come to the States?”
    “Our mother had a stroke right after Elena graduated from high school. Elena cared for her from that time until my mother passed last year, and suddenly Elena’s entire purpose for being was gone. The boy she’d dated through school—literally the boy next door—had given up on waiting for her and married someone else. When she found out they were going to have a baby, she just couldn’t stand the idea of watching their family bloom next door. She was looking for an ‘anywhere but here’ option.
    “I work for a matchmaking service and set her up. Elena wasn’t sure about her groom when she met him, but she decided that marrying him would be a better choice than watching Stephan raise a family that could have been hers. Then, a couple of months after she went to the States, she told me that it didn’t work out with her groom. It sounds like he was a disaster. And she thought she was going to have to come back home. But then she met someone else, and it seemed like it was going really well. She told me his name, but I stupidly never wrote it down. His first name was a common English name. Robert or James or… God, I wish I could remember. I remember thinking that his last name was European, but non-English, but I don’t know if it was French or Spanish or Italian, or something else.” She sighed her regret. “They were going to get married. And then she just… disappeared . I had no way to get in contact with her and I haven’t heard from her in months, which really isn’t like her.”
    “There are a number of women who went to the US as mail-order brides and have gone missing and we’re following up on all of them. So I understand it better, can you explain to me how the mail-order bride thing works?”
    “Most of my clients live near here and want to be matched locally—a typical matchmaking service.  However, for women who want to emigrate, I work with a couple of different services that work as intermediaries between us and other countries’ services—mostly the United States.” Eva pulled an iPad from her messenger bag.  “My company is part of the network of two services.” She pulled the first up on her iPad, and Dana noted the URL before Eva opened a new tab and clicked to the second service. “Elena actually used a third service called Prava Ljubav. But they raised their prices for us