The Last Witness

by W. E. B. Griffin

  The ECC could hold nearly a hundred law enforcement officers representing—depending on what quantity of proverbial fecal matter was hitting the fan at the time—the PPD, the State Police, the FBI and DHS and Secret Service, and Interpol. Its walls of large flat-screen TVs were linked to computer servers that accessed the department’s vast databases as well as tying into endless layers of real-time communication equipment, from the closed-circuit surveillance cameras mounted citywide to any digital device worldwide that could produce and send a video or audio signal.

  The pop-up window filling Matt’s laptop screen showed:

  From:

  Date: 17NOV 0434

  To: SGT M.M. Payne

  Subject: MCCAIN, Margaret

  Attachments: 4

  Good morning, Marshal . . .

  I got the amended e-mail from Lieutenant Washington on who to patch in for the video conference call at 0700. Glad to see your name added to the list. Was wondering where you were.

  Am sending you some backgrounder information on the case.

  There’s more, but it’s really just more of the same, and I can’t send it right now because there are technical problems with the ECC.

  Had to get here early – trying to make sure the bugs I’m working out stay out. I’ve learned the hard way that electronics do not like budget cuts.

  Anyway, be sure to link in via the department’s encrypted VPN Tier-1AA gateway. Maybe there’s enough money for the department to make the rent on that.

  Also, I got from Tony Harris that DOT non-driver ID you wanted run. The Cusick girl only had two hits, both fines for personal possession of less than 30 grams of marijuana. She paid $200 for the first bust last year, and $300 for the second a couple months ago.

  The Hazzard address in Kensington blew up with all kinds of hits, though. Mostly drug-related. So I drove past it on the way home last night, and then the hits made sense. It’s a flophouse called New Hope. It was locked down for the night – the roll-up steel doors over the windows and front door closed so tight that a couple crackheads who’d shown up too late were sleeping on the stoop.

  I hate to think why a good-looking girl like that would have to be at a place like that.

  Anyway, I was going to go back by there today and look around, then let you know.

  KR

  Payne sipped at his coffee as he thought, Because, sad to say, she was probably a hooker.

  He then went to the attachments. He scrolled through them quickly at first, then went back and read them more carefully, hoping to find what he thought he had missed by scanning them.

  He didn’t.

  Mostly dead damn ends.

  And Kerry saying there’s just more of the same isn’t exactly encouraging.

  The crime-scene report was there. It detailed what he’d already learned, adding little. When he read Dr. Mitchell’s report on the autopsy of the Gonzalez girl, he was surprised to learn something new: that the medical examiner had determined the cause of death to be from two .22 rounds fired into her brain from behind her ear.

  That certainly means something—something beyond that she got whacked—but what exactly?

  There’s a rock under that rock to look under . . . just hope under it isn’t another dead end. Have to see what, if anything, ballistics comes up with.

  And the files on the two missing female case workers at West Philadelphia Sanctuary were as thorough as possible—though the investigations offered no clear clue as to what could have possibly caused their disappearance.

  Short of the obvious: “I’m sick of dealing with a frustrating, thankless job—I’m never coming back.”

  They were just hardworking people putting in their time, hoping at the end of the day they made a difference in some kid’s life.

  And there really was no information on Maggie McCain, except for the blind text she sent saying she was fine. She really had left no trail to follow.

  These could easily turn into cold cases. . . .

  Shaking his head in frustration, he created a folder on his desktop, named it McCAIN.CASE, then dragged all the files into it. Then he transferred from his phone to his laptop the images that Jim Byrth had sent him, created another folder that he named BYRTH.LIQUID.MURDERS, and dragged them into it.

  He looked back at Kerry’s e-mail, copied the paragraph about what he had found out on the ID, then went to his personal e-mail and created a new e-mail:

  From: MP

  Date: 17NOV 0434

  To: Tex

  Subject: Update on CUSICK, Elizabeth

  Jim . . .

  Below is what I got from Kerry Rapier on your mystery girl. Will send more when I get it.

  Matt then pasted in the e-mail the short text, put it in italics, then clicked on the button that was an icon of a carrier pigeon.

  Okay, on to what’s next on the to-do list: arranging for what happens with this boat and my new toy.

  As Matt was pouring more coffee not two minutes later, his cell phone rang.

  When he saw the caller ID, he wasn’t surprised.

  He muted the music from the overhead speakers and answered the phone: “And how are things this morning in the Wild West?”

  “Bigger in Texas and better than everywhere else,” Jim Byrth answered. “I was going to say something about how impressed I was that you were getting such an early start, but it just occurred to me that your time zone is an hour ahead.”

  “I’ve been up for two hours.”

  “Okay. Then that makes us even. I can’t speak for you, but first thing I did this morning was map out that Cusick girl’s address. It’s a shithole row house, almost identical to that condemned one we found El Gato holed up in—”

  With Amanda tied up . . . but being a decent guy he’s not going to pick off that scab.

  “—which is not far away, the only apparent difference being this place on Hazzard is actually habitable.”

  “Depends on how you define ‘habitable.’ There’s easily sixty, seventy flophouses like that in Kensington alone. They’re moving up from Fishtown and NoLibs, pretty much following the outpatient drug clinics. ‘The Bottom’—Frankford, in the Fifteenth District—is getting hammered. Twenty-fourth District is overrun. Just hundreds of them.”

  “No shit? Tell me what a flophouse is in Philadelphia. I know what one is in Texas—an old hotel packed with vagrants.”

  “Sort of the same thing here. If someone running a flophouse could find a hotel in Philly to turn it into one, they’d probably fill, too. They are cash cows.”

  “How so? Vagrants tend to be broke.”

  “Simple. There’s a serious shortage of places for the really poor to live. The so-called luckier ones can get in with the Philadelphia Housing Authority. But there’s easily fifty thousand people on the PHA waitlist. And you’d better be a married couple—or at least a single mom or grandmother—without so much as a parking ticket if you expect to be anywhere near the front of the line. For those who can’t and are in Al-Anon and Nar-Anon, the city’s Office of Addiction Services throws money at some licensed drug recovery houses. But those are few, and overflowing, too, leaving independent flophouses to fill the void.”

  “These flophouses actually offer Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings?”

  “They pretend to—so they can draw the addicts in with their welfare checks. The worst ones are basically no more than old row houses with a bunch of makeshift bunks—just nasty mattresses on frames of two-by-fours. They’re supposed to get boardinghouse permits from L&I—the city’s Licenses and Inspections Department—but most thumb their nose at that. They don’t want to be on L&I’s radar because they’re shady operators to start with. So at four, five hundred bucks a month, it’s a place to crash for those fig
hting a futile battle . . . and to eventually crash and burn.”

  “What about hookers?”

  “Oh yeah. Ones who, if they’re not trying to kick their habit then they’re probably hiding from their pimps. Or all of the above. Hate to say it, but that’s what this Cusick girl is looking like. Not the first, and not the last.”

  Byrth grunted. “Lots of pretty girls out there making poor choices.”

  After a long moment, Payne said, in a lighter tone of voice, “Well, the silver lining to pretty girls making poor choices is you’ve got a chance at a date. I suggest you not be too picky.”

  “Great,” Byrth said, drawing out the word, his tone sharply sarcastic. “Girls are being boiled down in drums of acid and you’re a damn comedian.” He paused, then exhaled audibly. “But, you know, you’re right. All we can do is hunt down the bad guys, and try to find some humor somewhere.” He paused again, then added, “Tell you what, Marshal . . .”

  “What?”

  “I think I’m going to make you my sexual adviser.”

  “Wait. Your what? That’s BS—”

  “No, really. You can be my sexual adviser—as in, when I want your fucking advice, I’ll ask for it.”

  Payne laughed out loud. “Deal.”

  “Anyway, how long are you going to be in the Keys?”

  “Unfortunately, we’re headed back to Philadelphia today. In a few hours. One of the main reasons I was up early was to work on the missing person case that I mentioned to you last night. Maggie McCain is her name.”

  “Why unfortunately?”

  “It’s not looking like there’s going to be a happy ending. Maggie runs a place for kids in Child Protective Services. I just found out two other women from another CPS place went missing last week. Anyway, if I can, I’ll go with Kerry this afternoon and check out the flophouse.”

  Byrth was quiet for a moment, then said, “I haven’t had one of those cheesesteak sandwiches in a while. I’ll meet you there.”

  [TWO]

  Over the Leeward Islands, Lesser Antilles

  Monday, November 17, 6:50 A.M.

  “Then Ricky, he showed up at the Sanctuary,” Krystal Gonzalez was saying as Maggie McCain watched her pacing the living room of Maggie’s Society Hill town house.

  She stopped and began crying again.

  “And then he grabbed Brandi, said she still owed him money, so that meant he owned her. Ms. Quan yelled for Ms. Spencer to call the cops. And Ricky, he said that that would be their last mistake ever.”

  The curvy, petite nineteen-year-old anxiously ran her fingers through her black hair. A very slender doe-eyed twenty-six-year-old woman of Asian descent, who stood about as tall as Krystal, appeared. She stroked Krystal’s head and said meekly, “Brandi begged us not to call.”

  A tall, sad-faced twenty-seven-year-old black woman walked up, nodding. “Said he’d kill us all. Burn down the Sanctuary.”

  “Lizzi and Brandi were afraid of the cops, that they’d arrest them, too,” Krystal said. She pointed across the room. “All they wanted was out.”

  Maggie looked to where Krystal pointed. The two attractive twenty-year-old blondes were standing there.

  “That’s why Lizzi said they went along with leaving town. She and Brandi thought they could get away on the road. But that didn’t work. And then Lizzi and Brandi told Ricky again that they wanted out, that if he didn’t let them out, they’d go to the cops. Tell them how he started giving them drugs and working them when they were underage. But then I never heard from them again”—she glanced across the room, and when Maggie looked, too, the blondes were gone—“so I told Ms. Quan and Ms. Spencer all that. And I told them about the notebooks he kept in the office and what was in them. They didn’t believe me. ‘All you girls do is lie.’ So I stole two when Ricky passed out drunk in the office.”

  She held up the thick, well-worn spiral notebooks.

  Maggie looked at them, then looked back at Krystal.

  Now Quan and Spencer were no longer in the living room.

  “I texted Ricky, said I was done doing that shit. Told him to leave me alone or he’d never get his books back.”

  Krystal, motioning with the books for Maggie to take them, said, “It’s here. Now we can be safe.”

  Then she softly repeated it, “Now we can be safe.”

  Then Krystal was gone, and the notebooks sat in a pool of blood in Maggie’s burning kitchen. . . .

  —

  “Excuse me,” an insistent female voice said, causing Maggie McCain to slowly open her eyes. She felt someone shaking her, then realized that it was her seatback being pushed and that the nasal voice was that of a flight attendant, who added, “You’re going to need to put this upright for landing.”

  As American Airlines flight 504 banked over the Caribbean Sea on final to land at Cyril E. King International, Maggie wiped tears from her cheek.

  So, how long are the bad dreams going to go on?

  She slid open the window shade and stared out.

  Monsters like Ricky can’t get away with this.

  The sun was coming up, casting dramatic light across the verdant hills of the islands rising from the vast blue ocean. Bright colorful houses dotted the hillsides down to where the larger resort hotels spread out along the white sand beaches.

  Normally, the beauty stirred a sense of excitement and adventure in Maggie. Now she felt neither, only a surreal numbness.

  First thing I am going to do, she thought, is get that bastard where it matters most to him—in the wallet. Let him worry and squirm.

  I know what money he’s making, and the outrageous, disgusting way he’s making it.

  And I can use his books to get him, too.

  He’s going to learn you don’t fuck with a McCain.

  She watched out the window as the airliner settled toward the sea, coming so close to the surface that it looked like it might land on the water. Then at the last minute its tires finally chirped as they touched down on the runway, the threshold of which began right at the water’s edge of the small island.

  “Welcome to the tropical paradise of Saint Thomas, United States Virgin Islands,” the flight attendant’s nasal voice came across the intercom, her tone attempting to be perky.

  —

  Backpack slung over one shoulder and wearing sunglasses and the Georgetown Hoyas cap, Maggie deplaned and made her way through the concourse to Baggage Claim Two. She passed plenty of police. There were uniformed local cops, as well as federal agents, ones with their shirts lettered ICE or DEA. She kept telling herself that she had nothing to worry about from the Drug Enforcement Administration or Immigration and Customs Enforcement—or any other cop. And none seemed to pay another young American woman any particular attention, which she thought more or less supported that.

  Then again, she realized, she really didn’t know who might be looking for her.

  She saw, not surprisingly, that a lot of women were talking on their cell phones, and wondered if she should pull hers from her backpack in order to blend in. She immediately decided against that, because the last thing she wanted to do was turn on the phone. If a cop noticed her pretending to converse over a darkened phone, one clearly dead, it would raise more flags than simply not having a phone out in the first place.

  Near Baggage Claim Two, she found the man holding a clipboard so that it showed the YELLOWROSE logotype and TRADEWINDS ESTATE. He was a short, brown-skinned, potbellied, gray-haired islander with a friendly face. She walked toward him, and as she approached she saw that his name tag read MANUEL. Pleasantly addressing him by name, she introduced herself as Alexis Stewart, and after he had turned over the clipboard and confirmed she was indeed on his shuttle bus list, she went to the baggage carousel to locate her luggage.

  It was there within minutes, and another twenty after that Manuel had all five o
f the newly arrived guests of the Tradewinds Estate aboard the turquoise open-air safari bus, an older Ford F-250 flatbed pickup converted with a thatch roof over passenger benches that could seat fifteen. He’d used up at least half of that time squeezing their luggage into a rear compartment.

  Maggie decided the other four guests, judging by their rings, were married couples. They had found their seats in the first and second rows of the safari bus. They talked among themselves, their conversation animated and covering the usual small talk, beginning with, “The islands are just so amazingly beautiful.” “Is this your first time to visit?”

  Maggie, having seen the dynamic happen time and again, knew the odds were high that during their stay the women would become fast friends, with the men dutifully following suit.

  Which was one reason Maggie discreetly had taken her seat on the second-to-last row, and proceeded to pretend she was reading a paperback. She was grateful the shuttle wasn’t an enclosed van, which would have put her in closer proximity to the others and they likely would have attempted to draw her into the conversation. While she was prepared with stories of what she was doing there—starting with “a birthday vacation”—she really didn’t want to lie if it could be avoided. And not talking was simply a way of doing exactly that.

  The turquoise safari bus, merging with the traffic flow on the left side of the street, turned off the airport property and followed Veterans Drive along the coast. The rising sun was quickly warming the cool morning, the temperature, according to the flashing WELCOME TO SAINT THOMAS sign they just passed at the airport, already approaching eighty.

  As the humid salty air blew through the open bus, Maggie breathed in deeply and thought that it felt good.

  Or maybe it’s that I’m out of Philly . . . and in a place that’s far away . . . and feels far safer.