Cross Current (30 page)

“Miss Sullivan, you are telling me that these killings are about child slavery, here in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Yes, Collazo, that is exactly what I’m saying. Okay, so the
restaveks
aren’t the only part of their cargo—they do make money from bringing in your standard, old-style, illegal immigrants, too. In fact, this girl, Margot,” I said, “told me that her brother paid eight hundred bucks to come here to the States in order to take her away from these people.” 

“These people. You mean the slavers.”

The tone of his voice told me what he thought about my theory.

“You’re telling me,” he continued, “that the police translator who is here somewhere right now taking witness statements is really a child slaver.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true, Collazo.”

“And this young Haitian girl was telling you all about this when most Haitians won’t say anything to an American.” 

“The only reason she was helping me out was because she wanted to bring this Malheur guy down. He killed her brother. She said he was going back to the Bahamas on the
Bimini Express
—a little freighter that usually sails out of Port Laudania. Please, check that out, even if you don’t believe me.” 

He didn’t say a word for almost a minute.

“Come,” Collazo said. He walked over to the body, now abandoned and covered and waiting for transport. I followed him, thinking he wanted to speak to me out of earshot of the crowd. He bent down and, with a flourish, pulled back the sheet. It was the last thing I expected him to do, and I didn’t have time to avert my eyes.

“What the ...” I turned aside and felt the bile rising in the back of my throat. A porous blackness began to creep in around the periphery of my vision. I put my hands on my knees and dropped my head, breathing deeply. I had seen her, and already I wished I could erase those few seconds from my memory. The left side of her head looked like someone had cut a deep groove from the top of her scalp all the way down to her eye, and dark blood mixed with grayish brains spilled out across the concrete and across her face. Her eyes and mouth were open, as though she were still screaming.

“They have determined that he does it with a very sharp machete. He must be an immensely strong man. The MO’s the same as the other four victims.”

“You could have just told me, Collazo. My God. I think I might be sick.” I was having trouble breathing, and my eyes filled with tears. “You bastard. I was just talking to her a couple of hours ago.”

“And that’s exactly why I showed her to you. Child slavery.” He cleared his throat and stepped in close, invading my space, making me feel sicker still. “I’m going to tell you a little secret about people.” He paused for effect, then said, “They lie.” He stopped and smiled, showing the wide gap between his front teeth. “All the time. People lie to us to try to get us to do things. Things they want us to do for them. Go home to your little tugboat, Miss Sullivan. Amateurs like you, you go out and try to play detective, and people wind up hurt or . . .” He gestured at the body. “I don’t want to be scraping your brains off the pavement next time.”

XXII

I thought about Collazo’s words all the way home, thought about what I’d seen beneath that tarp. How could someone do that to another human being? Even that scowl of hers, the anger she’d wrapped herself in, none of that had obscured the fact that she was a beautiful child. Could Margot have been lying to me? I didn’t think so. The hate for Malheur I had seen on that girl’s face was real. She had taken a risk by talking to me. And I had put her in terrible danger by talking to her. If only I hadn’t gone to speak to her, if only I had taken her with me, put her in the same house with Solange. If only the world weren’t a place where children were abused and killed. And then there was Juliette. I had seen it in her eyes, too. Someone was hurting her. On the one hand, I was terrified that my blundering around would result in someone else getting hurt or killed. Yet, on the other hand, no one else was doing anything to stop this
restavek
business. Whether or not Collazo and D’Ugard believed me, this was real.

When I came around the hedge on the side of the Larsens’ house, I saw Pit sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, charts and papers and books spread out on every surface of the table and wood benches.

He looked up. “Hey, I got something to show you. Come here.”

After scratching Abaco’s ears, I joined my brother in the shade of the live oak.

“What have you got?”

“I think I can see what might have happened that night. From what you told me earlier, and from looking at the charts, I’d say their base camp is probably out in the bush somewhere on Bimini.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. A girl I met who came on an earlier trip on the
Miss Agnes
” —and a girl who is now dead because she talked to me, I thought but didn’t say—“told me that Malheur, the captain, is heading back to Bimini on one of those interisland freighters.”

“Here’s the way I see it.” He pointed to the chart of the Straits of Florida, and we both stared while he gathered his thoughts. The coast of South Florida and the Keys ran down the left side. The Great Bahama Bank bordered by the Biminis, Gun Cay, Cat Cay, and, to the north, Great Isaac’s Light, were on the right side of the straits. Flowing north through the middle of all this was the Gulf Stream, pouring through this narrow slot at speeds of three knots or better. “So they house the people over here” —Pit pointed to Bimini—“until the weather is calm, and then they try to make a quick run across the Gulf Stream to dump their load and run back to the Bahamas. Their boats are primitive, and they don’t have fancy navigation gear because it’s only a forty- to fifty-mile run. They count on conditions being the same for each run. I suspect the night Solange was set loose out there the current wasn’t exactly cooperating.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sey, you found the kid right here” —he pointed to a penciled letter X on the chart—“on Wednesday morning around eleven a.m. The
Miss Agnes
had sunk going into Hillsboro about thirty hours earlier. In a two- to three-knot current that kid would have traveled sixty to ninety miles north by then.” 

“Right. That’s why I couldn’t make any sense out of it.”

“I think the
Miss Agnes
was originally headed for Miami Beach. Say they left Bimini early Monday morning planning to unload their cargo late Monday night. They assumed the current was hauling ass as usual, so they cranked an extra thirty degrees into their course to compensate. Only, due to a cross current and a slowing of the stream from the previous week’s norther, they ended up down off Elliot Key by mistake. I still can’t explain how Solange and that woman ended up in the boat. But if they got in the boat off Elliot, and the stream was running at less than two knots, which, by the way, I have verified to be the case with a windsurfing buddy of mine who works down at the Rosenstiel School—”

“Where?”

“You know, the oceanography place down at UM? They do satellite imaging of the oceans and, by looking at temperature and all that, they can determine how fast the current is running. Very cool stuff. Anyway, it was abnormally slow that night—that whole week, as a matter of fact.”

Trying to keep Pit on track sometimes took some nudging. “Okay, so they’re down off Elliot Key, and they dump those two into the dinghy. Then how did the
Miss Agnes
end up at Hillsboro sixty miles north?”

“Easy.” He reached under the chart and pulled out a wrinkled newspaper. He pointed to a story he had circled with a yellow highlighter. “This article is about the huge Art Deco festival they’ve been having on the beach. Been going on all week. There were concerts and lights and all kinds of stuff happening down on Miami Beach. Scared ’em off. They’ve been dredging Haulover Inlet, so the lights on the barges there probably made them pass on that entrance. They kept heading north, looking for a quieter place to land. Coming into Port Everglades was too dangerous with the Coast Guard station right there. Eight hours later they were coming into Hillsboro Inlet in the wee hours of the morning. That captain must have been desperate to get rid of his cargo by then.”

“So you’re saying the
Miss Agnes
motored up the coast in eight hours, but the dinghy drifted the same distance in just under two days.”

“That’s how it would have happened with the current running less than two knots, which my buddy says it was.” 

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Lots of things are beginning to make more sense.”

He cocked his head to one side and looked at me. “This kid, why are you putting yourself in danger for her? These guys have killed people, Sey.”

“I know it doesn’t make much sense to anybody else. And I don’t know how to explain it.” From down the yard, out on the river, the deep rumbling of a high-powered ocean speedboat’s idling engines was making the brass dividers jump and vibrate on the picnic table. My world was boats, engines, saltwater. I knew nothing about kids, how to do their hair, what kind of toys or clothes to buy them, and I was so afraid I’d end up like my own mother, unable to handle it. But for some reason something was different with Solange. “Pit, if I hadn’t found her, she probably would have died. Yeah, maybe someone else would have come along, but the thing is it wasn’t someone else. It was me. That makes us connected somehow. And if I just let them send her back to Haiti, there’s a good chance she’ll die there. I can’t just sit back and watch that happen. Do you know anything about what it’s like for a street kid in Haiti? Okay, I know I’m not going to change the world, but if I can just save this one kid...”

Pit was shaking his head. “Okay, I get it, I get it. Why did I even need to ask? I should have known. Just tell me you’re not planning on talking to this captain dude.”

“Pit, I’m sure he knows where this kid’s father is. I mean, if he was just bringing her over as a
restavek
, she’d be dead by now. He’s had two chances to kill her, and he hasn’t done it. I know a Haitian woman who thinks it comes from some sort of magic. I’m not quite ready to go that far yet. But I do think there’s something special about this kid.”

“So you’re just going to find this Haitian captain and walk up to him and ask him where the kid’s dad is?”

“Not exactly. I’m still working on that part. I think if I can find some evidence that he is importing these kids as child slaves, and locate him, the police will take him into custody and maybe I’ll get the answers to my questions then. I hope to get some help from this Border Patrol guy I know.”

“Sey, sometimes I wish you were as concerned about yourself as you are about all these wounded birds you adopt.”

We both started collecting the charts and books and instruments that were spread out on the picnic table. When my arms were full, I headed into the cottage, dumped the stuff on my dining table, and went to the fridge for a cold beer.

“By the way, sis,” Pit said as he came through the door. “B.J. came by looking for you earlier. He told me a little bit about what was going on with you two. All joking aside, what’s up? B.J.’s a great guy, and last time we talked on the phone, it seemed like you thought so, too.”

I carried my beer bottle across to my bedroom door, then turned to face him. “Pit, I told you, I don’t want to talk about that. Besides, look how late it is. I’ve got to change, then get down to Hollywood and check on how things are going, say hello to Solange. Want to come along?”

“Can I bring my board?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “You haven’t changed.”

As soon as I parked in front of Rusty’s building, Pit pulled his sailboard out of the back of the Jeep and was ready to go. I noticed the Paris Kids bag back there and I picked it up. Might as well give it to her. She probably wouldn’t like it anyway.

I undid the clasp on the dive watch on my wrist and handed it to him. “Meet me back here at seven, okay?” He disappeared across A1A in the direction of the beach. The breeze was decent, a solid twelve to fifteen knots out of the south- southeast. Storm clouds lined the eastern horizon, but that wouldn’t matter to Pit. I figured I wouldn’t see any more of my brother until it grew too dark to see the waves, which, in June, wasn’t until after eight.

There was no sign of Rusty’s vehicle in the parking lot. Back at the cottage I’d found myself standing in front of my closet trying to decide what to wear, knowing that there was a chance he would be here. Then, of course, I had felt really stupid and had just thrown on some baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt. At the last minute, on my way out of my bedroom, I’d grabbed a Hawaiian print shirt and tied the shirttails around my waist so I could at least look a little feminine.

Jeannie opened the door with a curt nod, and when I stepped into the condo, I was hit smack in the center of my chest by an airborne miniature helicopter.

“Ouch, that hurt!” The slightly larger of Jeannie’s twins had collapsed in hysterics at my dismay, and his brother pounced on him and took away the ’copter launcher.

“Mom!” the older boy screamed, and punched his brother in the back as he fled into a bedroom.

“Welcome to the madhouse,” Jeannie said. She sat back down on a tiny chair in front of a computer and seemed to ignore the screaming and the sound of fists hitting flesh that was coming from the bedroom.

“Don’t you think you should do something?” I pointed to the bedroom door.

She didn’t even look up from the computer screen when she said, “They’ll work it out.”

And I felt it again, that I could never be a mother.

“Where’s Solange?”

Jeannie inclined her head toward the other bedroom. “She’s been asking about you all day.”

Solange didn’t hear me enter the room. She was sitting on the bed, playing with two stuffed animals, and while the bear was neatly tucked in with the covers up to his chin, it appeared that the monkey was getting a hell of a chewing out in Creole. I didn’t understand the words, but I sure knew that tone of voice.

“Hey, kiddo, how are you?”