Pike didn’t say anything. There was no point. He had crossed paths with so many people who did and would do the most heinous atrocities that none of it left much of an impression anymore. Here was this woman, and she would have murdered a child. Here was someone named Jakovich, who had probably ordered her to do it, and Darko, the same. People willing to do this terrible thing.

Pike stretched his back where Yanni shot him. It hurt. He thought the impact had probably cracked a rib.

“Whose baby is it?”

“Is mine!”

“No, not yours.”

“I am saying the truth. What you think is happening here? Why are you acting like this?”

Stone prodded Yanni with the M4.

“Maybe because this asshole shot him.”

“That was a mistake. He got confused.”

Pike looked at Yanni.

“Was shooting me a mistake, Simo?”

Yanni’s eyes fluttered at the mention of his true name.

“I get confused. Who is this Simo?”

“A soldier for Milos Jakovich. From Vitez.”

“This is not me.”

“Ran your prints, Simo. We know.”

Rina’s voice grew.

“I don’t know why you are saying this things. I am the mother—” Pike drew the .357, put it to Yanni’s head, and pulled the trigger. The blast echoed off the surrounding hills like a sonic boom. Rina jerked sideways, and shrieked, but Yanni simply slumped.

Jon Stone said, “Ouch.”

Pike thumbed the hammer, but he did not have to ask Rina again. The words spewed from her like lava.

“No, no, no, no—is not mine, isn’t, but is Milos’s. That is why Darko take him. It is true.”

“You work for Jakovich?”

“Yes!”

“Jakovich is the father?”

“No, no! The grandfather! He is the boy’s grandfather!”

These people lied so much they might not even remember the truth.

“Where’s the boy’s father?”

“He is dead! In Serbia! The boy is here because he has no one else. Even the mother is dead.”

The newest story rattled out, but this time Pike believed her. Milos Jakovich’s actual and only son was a forty-two-year-old man who had been incarcerated in a Serbian prison. Petar had been conceived during a conjugal visit, only to have his mother die in childbirth. Two months later, the boy’s father, Stevan, was murdered in his cell by a Bosnian-Croat who was serving time for the mass murder of sixty-two Bosnian Muslims at the Luka detention camp. This left Petar Jakovich as the old man’s lone remaining male heir, so he had the boy shipped to the U.S.

Rina said, “When Milos find out what Michael going to do, he say we must hide the baby. He give Petar to me and Yanni, and I give him to Ana. Then Michael take, and Milos tell us to find the boy, and show them.”

Show them. Murder his own grandson to show them.

Stone spit in the sand.