Black Horizon (21 page)

Two more media vans pulled up, and Jack was on a roll. He hit all three—
wham, bam, wham
. He had people all over town distributing flyers and getting the word out. He had Bianca’s roommate working social media. He had the FBI on alert for a possible kidnapping. He felt real positive energy—for about forty-five minutes.

And then it started to fade.

He was still waiting on an update from the FBI. One by one, squad cars were leaving the trailer park, and Jack was close enough to hear the radio calls. Their redeployment was all about the oil spill; they weren’t going out to look for Bianca. It was the same with the media. Based on the conversations Jack had overheard on the grounds, most of the reporters were pretty annoyed about being pulled from the spill to cover a missing cocktail waitress. Neighbors watched the crime scene with some interest, but they, too, seemed distracted by the helicopters in the air and other trappings of the bigger story around them.

Jack ducked under the police tape and went to the lead detective, Sam Holiday.

“Excuse me,” said Jack, “but exactly what is being done to find Bianca Lopez?”

Holiday was tapping out an e-mail on his smartphone, never looking at Jack. “Everything possible.”

“Look, I know there’s an oil spill, and I understand you’re busy. But a young woman has gone missing.”

“We’re on it,” said Holiday.

“It honestly doesn’t look that way.”

Finally, Holiday looked up from his phone, peering out over the top of his reading glasses. “We’re on it,” he said coolly. “Now, if you would, sir: please step back. You’re on my crime scene.”

Jack didn’t move immediately, but finally he turned and walked slowly to a place just outside the perimeter. The detective was in charge, local enforcement was overwhelmed, and Jack didn’t have time to turn Sam Holiday into his best friend in law enforcement. This was a bad situation within a bad situation. Oil-containment buoys on the ocean, barricades along the shoreline, and a crime scene at the mobile-home park. Key West, Swyteck style, was concentric circles of disaster.

Jack’s iPhone vibrated with an incoming call. He checked the number, raised his eyes to the heavens, and said, “Thank you.” It was Andie.

“You must have ESP,” said Jack.

“No, CNN. They broke away from spill coverage to do two minutes on it. I’m so sorry, Jack.”

Jack gripped the phone, alarmed. “Do you mean ‘sorry’ as in Bianca’s no longer with us? Because the last I heard, she’d gone missing. Nothing more than that.”

“No, that’s the status I have, too. The CNN piece was all about the active search.”

“Not sure how
active
it is. If it’s not about the spill, law enforcement has it on the back burner down here. No one has seen or heard from Bianca in over eighteen hours, and we’re losing precious time.”

“That’s a problem.”

“Ya think?” he said, facetious.

“I’ll call the field office right now.”

“Agent Linton interviewed me at the airport when I got back from Cuba.”

“He’s a good point person. I’ll make sure he calls you.”

“You’re the best. Thanks. So when can I see you? We have a honeymoon to finish.”

“Soon, I hope.”

A follow-up for something more specific would have been normal, but nothing was normal about marriage and undercover work.

“I have an ultrasound at eight weeks. We’ll see the little heartbeat.”

“And his enormous penis.”

“That’s at sixteen weeks. And anyway, I’m feeling it’s a girl.”

“Can’t wait.”

“I’ll call you before then. But I’m following up with the field office right now, so Linton or someone else should get back to you about Bianca right away.”

“Thanks. Love you.”

“Me, too.”

Jack hung up, feeling better on a lot of levels.

“Hey, Swyteck!”

Detective Holiday was fast coming toward him. Jack wasn’t sure how to read the expression on the detective’s face, but there was plenty of urgency in his voice.

“They found your client,” he said.

Chapter 33

F
or the second time in as many days, Jack was in the emergency room. The good news was that “found your client” meant found
alive.
Bianca was in the hands of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Crimes Against Persons Unit, and a victim’s advocate pulled Jack aside the moment he arrived.

“She denies any sexual assault,” said the counselor, “and thankfully the physical examination backs her up on that. Only physical injury appears to be a cut lip. Just one stitch required.”

Charlene Simmons worked out of Marathon, serving victims of violent crimes from Key West to Key Largo. She’d seen it all—rape, abuse, stalking, domestic violence, sex trafficking, adults, adolescents, children, straight, gay, male, female. Two decades of experience didn’t make it routine. Jack could see the compassion in her eyes.

“That’s good news.”

“Yes,” she said. “But the fear and threat of sexual assault can be almost as traumatizing as the real thing.”

“I understand.”

“Bianca asked to see you alone. But you need to be very sensitive. Be a good listener. Don’t ask questions that might bring on shame or embarrassment, but don’t shut her down if she needs to open up. I’ll be right outside the door if you need me.”

“Okay, got it.”

Jack took a deep breath. He wasn’t without experience in talking to victims, but this was going to be a tough one. Guilt was kicking in. The FBI had convinced him that, even under the new travel rules for Cuban nationals, the violence against him in Havana was unlikely to follow him back to the states. But his instincts were rarely wrong.

Should have hired a bodyguard.

Jack opened the door and went inside. Bianca was seated on the edge of an examination table, shoulders slumped. The room was noticeably colder than the hallway, and Bianca was wrapped in a hospital blanket. Jack closed the door quietly and walked toward the table. There was a chair in the room, but he stood facing her, waiting for her to look up. She didn’t.

“Hi,” she said softly.

“Hi.”

Her gaze was still cast toward the floor. She looked exhausted. “Thanks for coming,” she said.

“No problem. Can I get you anything? Water? Soda?”

“No.”

The fluorescent light hummed overhead. Through the door, the usual noises of the ER were audible but muffled. The examination room was otherwise silent.

“They numbed my lip,” she said. “Do I talk funny?”

It seemed like such a kid thing to say.
She’s so young.
And yet she’d seen so much.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

She raised her eyes for an instant, then looked away. “Do you want to know what happened?”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

Her hand began to shake. Jack sensed she was about to cry. He reached toward her, but she withdrew.

“He called me a whore,” she said, her voice shaking. “When he cut me, he said, ‘Taste the blood of a Cuban whore.’ ”

“I’m sorry,” said Jack. He hesitated to ask what happened next, but he was mindful of the counselor’s advice not to shut her down if she felt the need to talk.

“I don’t remember much after that,” she said. “He injected me with something.”

It was sounding like Jack’s kidnapping, but again he just let her keep talking.

“When I woke up, it was daylight. I was in the passenger seat of my car. I have no idea how I got there. I wasn’t even sure where I was at first.”

“How’d you get to the ER?”

“I couldn’t find the car keys, so I walked. The car was parked in the Winn-Dixie lot, which is,
quizás
, two blocks from the hospital. I got here about an hour ago, I’d say.”

“The hospital is one of the first places I checked when we knew you were missing. You must have walked into the ER right after I called.”

“Sorry. They asked if I had any family they should notify, and I said no. I should have asked them to call you.”

“It’s okay. You saw the doctor, the counselor. That’s more important. Let me ask you this, though. Do you have any idea why he left you where he did? Anything special about that place?”

“No. The cops told me I was lucky. They don’t think the guy was stealing my car and just taking me for a ride. He took me with something very specific in his mind, but for some reason, he chickened out. Maybe he saw the police roadblocks for the oil spill and decided it was too risky, so he pulled into the parking lot and left me. Thank God he didn’t . . .”

She didn’t need to finish the thought for Jack. “Thank God,” he said.

Bianca pointed toward a plastic bag on the counter. “Look in there.”

Jack opened the bag. It held her wallet, her shoes, and other personal effects. And some papers. It took Jack only a moment to recognize them as the letters Josefina had given him.

“He gave those to me,” said Bianca.

Jack felt chills. Of course he had suspected a direct link between his kidnapping and Bianca’s disappearance. But he wasn’t sure it had been the very same attacker—until now.

“Have you shown these to the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he said I should give them to you. Only you.”

“Okay. Then you absolutely did the right thing, Bianca. But we need to let the FBI know about it. If this guy is trying to get back to Cuba, we may have a shot at catching him.”

“Whatever you say.”

Jack reached for his phone. “Thanks to my wife, I have a direct contact at the FBI now. Agent Linton, and he’s completely dedicated to your case. I’m going to call him right now. There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll handle it.”

Bianca seemed to have heard him, but she was staring blankly at the wall, her response distant. “He also told me to give you a message.”

Jack stopped, not yet dialing. “A message?”

“He said the price is ten million. Whatever that means.”

Jack knew exactly what it meant: ten million dollars was the price to be paid by the U.S. government for the names of the Scarborough 8 saboteurs.

“Did he say anything else?”

“That I should drop my case.”

Jack didn’t immediately follow the logic, but he could sort it out later. First thing was to get the FBI swarming on all available routes back to Cuba. He dialed Agent Linton and gave him the news. Linton had news for him, too.

“Interesting thing about the blood on the mirror,” said Linton.

“What?”

“Sometimes the perpetrator’s blood can be mixed in with the victim’s. You just never know. So I ran a sample through CODIS and some other data banks. You know what CODIS is, right?”

The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is an FBI-funded computer system that stores DNA in searchable profiles for identification purposes. It was how Jack got Theo released from death row. “Yeah, I’m familiar with it.”

“Anyway, I got nothing out of CODIS. But I got a hit in the weirdest place.”

“Where?”

“The World Anti-Doping Agency. They hold about eighty thousand samples from Olympic hopefuls all over the world. We came up with a hundred-percent match to a female athlete. A boxer in Cuba. Her name is Josefina Fuentes. Ever heard of her?”

Jack went cold. For a moment, he couldn’t even speak.

“Jack, you know her?”

Jack’s mind was awhirl. Rafael’s letters. The cut to Bianca’s lip. Josefina’s blood on the bathroom mirror—no doubt collected by Bianca’s attacker in some unspeakable manner and brought over from Cuba in a vial.

Taste the blood of a Cuban whore.

“Yes,” Jack said in disbelief. “I do know her.”

Chapter 34

J
ack needed space. Literally.

The oil mess, the attack on Bianca, his father a ticking time bomb of stress—it was a ball of confusion, but one thing was clear: Jack wasn’t leaving Key West anytime soon. A colleague in Miami linked him up with a Key West lawyer who had extra office space. Jack and Theo walked to Whitehead Street to check it out.

“We should go back to Cuba,” said Theo.

“Bad idea,” said Jack.

They were down the street from the courthouse, a few blocks from the cleanup on the southern shore. The Green Parrot bar was bustling with a lunch crowd, and Theo continued to plead his case as they walked through the sidewalk seating area.

“If Josefina isn’t dead, she’s obviously been hurt by this sick son of a bitch. I want to find out what happened.”

“We need to stay right here with Bianca.”

“But we dragged Josefina into this, Jack.”

“The oil consortium dragged her into it. They put Rafael’s letters in evidence.”

“Then I’ll go to Cuba, and you can stay here and fight the consortium. You
are
going to keep fighting, right? Don’t let that bastard push you around and make Bianca drop her case.”

They stopped at the curb, then continued through the crosswalk. “I actually don’t think he meant drop the case.”

“The message said ‘Drop it.’ ”

“But if you think this through, he’s not saying that he’s on the oil consortium’s side and that he’s helping them win the lawsuit. Truth is, he probably couldn’t give a shit about the lawsuit one way or the other. The only thing he wants is for the U.S. government to pay him for naming the men who brought down the Scarborough 8. So the last thing he wants is for me to make sabotage the centerpiece of Bianca’s case, trying to expose in a high-profile trial the very information that he thinks will put money in his pocket. He needs to keep the sabotage dialogue between himself and the U.S. government.”

“Ten million dollars sounds pretty ridiculous to me.”

“He’s already demonstrated that he’s a credible source. I’m not saying he’ll get ten million, but if he knows who’s behind an environmental disaster that outdoes Deepwater Horizon, he could be negotiating for real money.”

“Not if he killed Josefina.”

They stopped at a white picket fence, where a weathered wooden sign on the gate read
LAW OFFICE OF ALEJANDRO CORTINAS
.

“Let’s talk about this later,” said Jack. “I can’t keep practicing law out of a hotel room. Let me nail down some kind of arrangement with Cortinas, and we’ll go from there.”