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days ago Joe would have gotten on the next flight to DC and met with the kid. Today he told the director, “Marty, this is a bad time. I might be able to kick free in a week or so, but I’m on the brink of something here. I can’t get out of it. I’m sorry.”
    Petrović wasn’t a case or even a file folder. Joe had never misled the director before. Then again, he’d never before promised a survivor of ethnic cleansing that he would try to nail a killer, let alone one as monstrous as the Butcher of Djoba.
    Joe was 90 percent convinced that the man on Fell Street was Slobodan Petrović. But without independent verification, he couldn’t prove it, even to himself.
    Full stop.
    He pulled the phone toward him and called Hai Nguyen, a top FBI forensics tech at Quantico, then forwarded two photos to him. One, Petrović’s ICC mug shot; and the second, this morning’s partial of Petrović’s face.
    “I’ll take a look, Joe.”
    “Thanks, Hai. And—”
    “I know. Right now.”
    After getting a fresh cup of coffee, Joe resumed researching the man who was accused of slaughtering hundreds if not thousands of Bosnian civilians.
    File names filled his screen and Joe opened them all. Everydocument added nuance, color, and data to what he already knew: Where Petrović had been born, his brutal upbringing and punishing military service, hints of what had led him to become a mass murderer.
    Fact: After the end of the war Slobodan Petrović had been captured on the run, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and indicted in the International Criminal Court. Then the charges had been dropped. He’d been released and his criminal record closed.
    Supposition: Sometime later he’d come to America, where he’d bought or rented a house and a car in San Francisco.
    Joe zeroed in on that.
    He ran the poor-quality photo he’d taken of Petrović through the DMV database and wasn’t surprised that he didn’t get a hit. So he called Hai Nguyen again.
    “How’s it going, Hai?”
    “Your mail, Joe. Open it.”
    Nguyen’s reconstructed photo looked like the pictures of Petrović he’d retrieved from the military files. It was an astonishingly good likeness and quite usable.
    Joe hung up and entered the picture into the DMV database. A driver’s license appeared on his screen. It was the man he’d seen on Fell Street, but his name was not Slobodan Petrović.
    It was Antonije Branko.

CHAPTER 15
    Joe was focused, streaming along a tunnel of concentration, the zone where he felt most comfortable.
    Once he had a name with a photo, it didn’t take long to get into all that followed: tax rolls, parking tickets, and records of a house on Fell Street sold to Antonije Branko a year ago.
    Now Joe had something tangible.
    He enjoyed a few seconds of elation while analyzing this new information. Most likely before he’d left Bosnia, Petrović had changed his name to another Serbian name that gave him plausible deniability. If he was ever recognized here or there, he could say, “Petrović and I were from the same village. He might be a third cousin. Many of us
resemble
one another.”
    Joe’s illuminating thought was supplanted by one more urgent.
    He bent to his keyboard and quickly searched the SFPD database for
Antonije Branko.
He found him listed as a person of interest who had been seen affiliating with known criminals in “crime-prone locations”—bars, girly clubs, dodgy neighborhoods.
    Branko had parked in those neighborhoods in his pricey midnight-blue Jaguar. He had been brought in for questioning on two minor drug cases, for purchasing Molly without intent to distribute. Seasoned narcotics investigators had failed to lay a finger on him. No arrests. No indictments.
    It looked to Joe like Petrović used go-betweens and buffers in his work, and so far he hadn’t left any fingerprints. That he’d obscured his face with his phone and hand while walking down the front steps of his house now seemed calculated and