Lost Girls (13 page)

“Go ahead, Mr. Dantzler.”

“Something came up this morning, something no less urgent but far safer than sending you to Haiti. The question is whether you are interested in getting involved. A body was found in the Jamaican channel and there will be a window of opportunity to examine it before it officially becomes a murder. A window in which you could get in and out of the morgue unnoticed.”

“Tell me,” Sherry said.

“An inspector from the Jamaica Constabulary Force was fishing off the coast of Jamaica this morning when he saw a body fall from a small plane. He managed to reach it within minutes and discovered a young white woman dead in the sea. The plane turned south and disappeared. There was a tattoo on the dead woman’s face under one eye. A black top hat on a purple skull.”

“Baron Samedi,” Sherry whispered in awe.

“Yes,” Dantzler said. “Call it what you will, coincidence or providence, but this police inspector happened to attend an international law enforcement conference in 2007 where I was speaking on the subject of human trafficking. He knew the story I shared with you about the Bulgarian informant and the tattooed women supposedly being trafficked to South America.”

Sherry sat back in her chair; the recorder on the answering machine snapped off as it ran out of memory. She ignored it. “So he called you to ask what to do and you could not tell him what happened in Haiti a week ago because World Freedom was the source of your information.”

Dantzler made a sound of acknowledgment. “Yes,” Dantzler said. “At least for the time being, Miss Moore. You must understand that Interpol, like all intelligence agencies around the world, relies heavily on their confidential sources of information. The relationship between Interpol and Madame Esme is a very old and delicate one. More is at stake than meets the eye.”

“I can appreciate that,” Sherry said. “But you have shared it with me.”

“Which is why it was so important for me to know I could trust you, Miss Moore. Before I acted on your request to Mr. Graham that I call, I tried to learn as much as possible about you. Frankly, I was surprised by what I read. Even more surprised after I made a few inquiries. I am even ready to allow there are things in this world that no one can label or understand. It was Graham who convinced me in the end, however. Graham says that Admiral Brigham all but asserts you can walk on water, Miss Moore, and Graham says no one takes the admiral lightly. If you are willing I would like you to bridge that gap between Jamaica and Haiti. Madame Esme has only asked that I convey to you her wish that you will use the utmost discretion with what I shared with you today.”

“You have my word, Mr. Dantzler, but tell me about Bulgaria, please. Exactly what was known last year that didn’t pan out?”

“In a nutshell, the Bulgarian’s informant said a large number of women were being trafficked out of the Black Sea port Burgas, to South America. The informant described the buyer as a dark-skinned black man with a white glass eye. As I said, this man bragged about tattooing the women’s faces with a human skull before he sold them.”

“Interpol found the ship?”

“Interpol found a ship, but by the time they got to it, the information was several months old. The ship had been twice resold and she was dry-docked in Singapore being refitted to barge coal. The paper trail it left was as useless as the information about its owners, a law office in Liberia.”

“So,” Sherry continued, “you want me to go to Jamaica, to see the body that was thrown from an airplane and then tell you if the woman had memories of where she had been before her death.”

“The plane was not marked, Miss Moore. There will never be another way to connect this woman to Haiti, if in fact that’s where she came from.”

“What’s going on in Jamaica now, because of this woman’s body, I mean. What am I walking into down there?”

“The Jamaican police inspector was very discreet about what he saw. We know he filed a report with the ministry that he discovered the victim of a probable drowning. He made a show of sending coast guard vessels out to look for signs of a boating accident. Nothing more. He couldn’t keep the press from reporting a body was found. The inspector was seen transferring the body from his boat to his vehicle. But all they have been told is that she was found in the water and that she was Caucasian and blond. Soon, however, they will want a picture and a name to go with the body. If they don’t get a name they will begin to get suspicious. You remember how it went on another island in the Caribbean several years ago.”

“Of course,” Sherry said. “And if it leads to Haiti, Mr. Dantzler?”

“Then we will talk again, but please, Miss Moore, one thing at a time. I made a promise to contact you if anything came up relevant to what you saw. I have done that. Perhaps what you see in Jamaica will be enough to lead our police colonel friend in Haiti to a specific location. We wish we could approach the Haitian government and ask them about the dead man in Tiburon directly. We wish they would be cooperative about the unidentified airplane seen heading toward their country, but the police in Haiti are far from cooperative. Please understand, Miss Moore, that Haiti is not without its good people, good politicians, and good policemen. Men like the colonel I spoke of. But those with the best intentions are caught in the reality of Haiti’s corruption. Haiti is like Doctor Dolittle’s Pushme-Pullyu creature with two heads going in opposite directions, neither being able to take a step forward or backward. We are concerned for the safety of the dead man’s family in Tiburon. We are concerned for the safety of Madame Esme’s aid worker. General inquiries might only lead to more deaths. Haiti is a country of extreme poverty and civil unrest. They don’t have the time, money, or talent to investigate or prosecute organized crime. They will not be moved to pursue unverified sightings of captive women from dead or anonymous sources. They do not care about bodies that fall from airplanes in international waters. And, on top of it all, a third of Colombia’s cocaine travels through Haiti on its way to the United States and Europe. If they won’t intercept whole shiploads of cocaine, why would they help us locate a few women?”

“Point taken,” Sherry said.

“I do not want this girl from the airplane to have died in vain. If we do not learn something specific about where she came from, the investigation is over. Perhaps it is already over. Perhaps the traffickers are destroying evidence even now. But we must try. I can arrange for you to fly to Kingston this afternoon and have the police inspector meet you. I will brief him about what you are supposed to do. I would also tell you the obvious. A tattoo suggests the buyer deems the women disposable. If there are others out there anywhere in the Caribbean, they are in grave danger.”

“And exactly what is it that you will tell the police inspector about me?”

Dantzler muffled a laugh. “Of all the things I’m not sure of right now, that one weighs most heavily on me.”

K
INGSTON
, J
AMAICA

Rolly King George sat in a corner of a waiting room in the basement of University of the West Indies Hospital, flipping through magazines and tapping his foot impatiently on the stained linoleum floor. He had just delivered the young woman’s body via an underground ramp to the hospital’s basement loading dock. A cell phone call to a friend produced attendants who moved the body to a cold chamber in the hospital’s teaching morgue. The young woman would be safe there from prying eyes until she could be examined by the chief of pathology and scheduled for autopsy.

An old woman sat across from him, her pale green eyes set in skin like burnt parchment. She watched him carefully as she pared a coolie plum with a pocketknife, most likely waiting for someone in X-ray. Radiation was just down the hall from the elevator that went to the morgue, and it had been another bloody night in St. James Parish. Inspector George was avoiding the reporters roaming the halls looking for relatives of the shooting victims. The old woman must have wandered into the waiting room taking refuge from them as well. If she was one of the relatives, she showed no outward sign of grief. But expressions weren’t always telling in parish ghettos. For many, life and grief were interchangeable terms.

Inspector George was thinking about his phone call to the Ministry of Justice. His superiors were far more concerned with where in the ocean the woman’s body had been found than with what had happened to her. They would give him some freedom to do as he wished with the body as long as he asserted she had been found in international waters.

George knew that last night’s triple murder pushed year-to-date homicides beyond all previous years and there were still three months to go. It was a nightmare for Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller. She already had her hands full with corruption allegations and now the drug gang wars were drawing attention to Jamaican street crime. If there was one thing that would exacerbate Jamaica’s delicate economy it was a decline in tourism, a fact the World Bank had not failed to point out in a report to the United Nations. Crime would do the island irreparable harm, and the prime minister, in handling the economy, could not afford to lose the respect of cabinet members.

Inspector Rolly King George knew that the prime minister would not want the story of this woman’s murder to bring more attention to Jamaican crime. Anything he could learn that would continue to distance the victim and her murderers from the island would be in the government’s own interest. He had already assured his own commissioner there would be no record of this woman on Jamaica—no hotel register, no flight record, no cruise ship, no entry through customs. And because of his assurance he had been allowed to delay the official report.

The inspector’s cell phone rang and he answered it while getting to his feet. The old woman watched him head for the door, laying a slice of plum on her pink tongue with the blade of her knife.

“Hello,” he said, breaking left down the corridor for an exit sign. “Rolly King George?” Dantzler said with his stiff German accent.

The inspector found a door to the hospital’s courtyard and made for a park bench surrounded by peach-colored hibiscus. He took a seat and looked up to see a jet’s billowing vapor trail connecting the towers over both wings of the hospital. Air conditioners rattled in windows, dripping water that evaporated before it could pool on the yellow grass. He had been up since dawn and hadn’t eaten since last evening; his stomach growled.

“Yes,” he said.

“I have a favor I wish to ask of you that will require a degree of faith on your part. I would like you to allow a friend of ours access to the body. If you agree to this, I will ask her to fly to Jamaica this afternoon.”

Inspector George looked up at the sky and shook his head as if to clear it. The vapor trail between the towers was beginning to dissipate.

“You said her. You are sending an investigator? A scientist?” “Not in the truest sense of the word, but let me ask you, Inspector George. Do you believe there are people who can commune with the dead?”

Sherry Moore sat with the telephone receiver on her lap. There was an overnight bag kept packed by her front door. She thought about it a long moment before she dialed. She had never asked Brigham to travel with her before, but her friend had seemed listless these last few months. She wondered if he wouldn’t appreciate a diversion, a variation in his routine.

She picked up the receiver after a moment and dialed the number.

“Hello?” he barked.

“Mr. Brigham,” she said merrily. Sherry had always been uncomfortable calling the retired navy admiral by his first name, Garland.

“Sherry,” he said pleasantly.

“I heard from Interpol this morning and was thinking I might ask a favor since you don’t have classes tomorrow.”

“Do tell,” he said. She could hear the sound of a television in the background.

It wasn’t like Brigham to be watching television during the day. It wasn’t like him to be inside the house, for that matter. Even in winter he was constantly tinkering in his yard, burning leaves or playing with his log splitter, hauling cartloads of firewood behind his little tractor.

He’d seemed bored lately. Bored of his university classes. Bored of his Thursday-morning breakfast club or whatever they called themselves. Bored or just in a rut, she thought. Sherry knew how easy it was to smile your way through life without ever letting on you were not well on the inside. She had managed to hide it for the better part of a year when she was coming apart at the seams over the death of John Payne.

“Jamaica,” she said cheerily. “I’ll know in thirty minutes or so.”

“A pleasant island as long as you stay out of the cities. We’ll be sunbathing, I take it? Somewhere by a tiki bar.”

Sherry wondered if her neighbor hadn’t been into his bottle of port this early in the morning.

“Here’s the deal,” Sherry said, wanting to keep it light. “We land in Kingston, take a quick cab to a hospital, I’m in and out of a morgue and we are on the way to Ocho Rio for a night on me.”

“Sounds fabulous, can I think it over?”

Brigham knew, of course, she was going with or without him. “It’s a very worthy cause, Mr. Brigham.”

“I’m thinking,” he said.

“You have thirty minutes and I’m calling a cab.”

“I’m in,” he said abruptly.

“Damned right, you’re in,” she huffed, “and Mr. Brigham?”

“Sherry?” he answered.

“Thank you for always being there.”

Sherry replaced the receiver and sat in silence. She would never wish on anyone what she had gone through last winter—that darkest chapter of her life and a depression so prevalent that it had threatened to kill her. Only Brigham had saved her. Saved her life, for that matter.

She would make it a point to keep an eye on her friend from now on. If he was slipping into a funk and needed some diversion, she intended to be there to do something about it. She intended to save him this time.