He examined her scalp and torso, the hollows beneath her knees and armpits, any place that might conceal a knife or bullet wound. There was nothing. She had apparently been uninjured before she came out of the plane.
A wave washed over her face as he rocked her in his trembling arms. Then he looked up and replayed in his mind the image of what he had seen. First the plane was heading west, but after it circled where she fell, it turned southeast. Had the plane flown here specifically to murder this girl or had something gone terribly wrong? What had happened up there? Why had the plane changed direction?
He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled, using his free hand to guide her toward the back of his boat. Then he rolled her onto the swim platform and pulled himself out of the water, lifting her over the stern.
The trip back to the northern coast of Jamaica would take just under an hour. Under any other circumstance he would have called the ministry and had constabulary investigators meet him in Port Antonio. The parish could have taken the case from there. But this was not normal and Rolly King George, most senior investigator of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, knew there was little time to waste. He must place a very different kind of a call.
He climbed the ladder to his flying bridge and took a seat at the console. All around him shadows of lumbering clouds looked like stepping-stones through the shallow mint sea. He scrolled through numbers in a cell phone until he saw the listing “I-24/7.”
And dialed.
A few minutes later he was connected to an international operator and then to the National Central Bureau of Interpol in France.
“Helmut Dantzler, please.”
He was put on hold for nearly a minute, then connected to a second operator, an older man. “He’s not available,” the man said dryly.
“Do you have a number for him? A cell phone?”
“I’m afraid he’s in a dark spot, monsieur, may I take a message or perhaps I can help you.”
A dark spot could mean anything. Maybe he was in some remote region of the world or maybe he was in the basement having tea.
“I must reach him right away,” the inspector said. “You will tell him it is very important.”
“He checks his messages frequently,” the man allowed. “Who shall I say is calling?”
Rolly King George gave his name and cell phone number. Then he disconnected and nudged the throttles forward, turning the boat into deep water, accelerating, bow rising out of the water, propellers churning wake in a placid sea. He turned to look southeast once more. Eighty miles away lay the mountainous coast of Haiti. Was the plane heading for Haiti? Perhaps it had come from Haiti as well? He looked at the body lying beneath him by the transom. It had been over a year since the conference in Alberta. A year since he’d heard about the Bulgarian informant and a story about women with skulls tattooed on their faces.
In the year since the symposium in Alberta someone must surely have made progress on the Bulgarian informant’s story. Any organization that tattooed women’s faces could hardly remain hidden.
Inspector George had a boat slip in Port Antonio, but the marina there was full of tourists and parish police. He didn’t want to arouse curiosity, not even his fellow policemen’s curiosity right now. Anyone who saw the girl’s face would know she didn’t drown. Would know that she suffered some great trauma. Worse, they would see the tattoo on her face, and the last thing he wanted, until he talked to Interpol, was someone leaking word of that tattoo to the press.
He headed the boat toward the inlet at Frenchman’s Cove. The cove was familiar territory to him. He had kayaked these waters as a boy with a grandfather who once lived in Boston Bay. His grandma ran a jerk stand just above it on the side of A-4.
Someone would see him take the body off the boat there, he couldn’t do much about that, but he didn’t have to let them see her face. In a small marina he could control the transfer of her body from his boat into the bed of his pickup.
This inlet had been the beginning of his love affair with the sea, a place of magic for a young boy’s imagination. The cove was famous for its history of pirates and buried treasure. He remembered his grandfather’s tales of ghostly apparitions toiling on the beaches beneath Fairy Hill or at the bend in a path called See-Me-No-More. Ghosts dragging the weight of their booty and herding kidnapped slaves to launches that they would row to their mother ships at sea.
He knew that those “ghosts” were once flesh-and-blood human beings. He knew that more flesh-and-blood human beings carried on their tradition smuggling rum and marijuana and then cocaine and heroin between the islands and South America. The night waters of the Caribbean were alive with activity and they had been for as long as the islands had a history. And in that long history there had always been stories of Lost Girls.
You might not think you could make someone disappear on a tropical island, but then you didn’t think of tropical islands in terms of mountain jungles rising to twice the altitude of Denver, or of islands the size of Connecticut, with remote irregular coastlines. The smugglers knew these coasts intimately, were equipped with jet boats and pontoon planes and catamarans and motored sloops that slipped tirelessly from cay to cay. And Jamaica was a cakewalk compared to the backcountry of the Dominican Republic or Haiti or, even worse, the mainland countries like Nicaragua or Colombia, where the mountains rivaled those of Tibet, where jungles were as dark as the Congo, and law, if it be found, fell to warlords and drug kingpins and rebels. These were countries whose governments didn’t care who went missing from some foreign land. These were countries whose bigger problems were war and poverty and drugs.
Simply stated, there was more uninhabited, unpatrolled, unassailable land south of Miami than any government could hope to tame, and the indigenous populations were as inescapably tied to the fortunes of their smugglers and drug lords as they were to the wind and the rain. If someone did go missing backcountry and in one of these poor nations, you could hardly expect that there were resources to go looking for them.
Peddlers young and old began to wade toward him.
“Ga-lang-bout-yu-business,” Rolly King George said, nosing the Bertram alongside the dock at the Villas in Frenchman’s Cove. George sometimes found patois less intimidating when trying to communicate with his countrymen.
He looked back to ensure that the woman in the stern was completely covered with a tarp.
“No-badda-me!” he snapped, putting the transmission in neutral and stepping off the side of the boat. He slipped lines fore and aft over pilings and looked around.
A handful of tourists watched curiously from the open decks of the Villas. An old bearded Jamaican man with gray dreadlocks raised a conch shell and blew a mournful note from the demarcation rope around the Villas’ private beach.
Rolly King George called a teenage boy who was raking pawpaw leaves, showed him his badge and a ten-dollar bill, and held up the keys to his Toyota pickup truck, parked in Port Antonio. “Yuh drive, bwoy?”
The boy nodded.
He told him where the truck was parked and put the money on the dash of the boat next to an automatic pistol.
“No lick it up, bwoy; mi know every ding.”
The boy reached for the keys, nodding enthusiastically as he dashed off in bare feet. The police inspector settled in for a wait.
The boy would have to hitch a ride to Port Antonio, twenty minutes one way. He must have been fortunate, for in only an hour he was back, and George was moving the wrapped body from the boat to the bed of his truck, where he secured her under a canvas. He wasn’t worried about the forensics or transfer evidence by now. The ocean had done its damage. If there were evidence to be found, it would be in her body, not on it. The food in her stomach, the chemicals in her organs, tissues, blood, the fillings in her teeth, foreign DNA, the inks used to tattoo her face.
Two hours later he was sitting in traffic on the outskirts of Kingston when his cell phone rang.
“Helmut Dantzler.” The German’s accent was cris
p and formal.
“Mr. Dantzler.” Rolly King George was stopped in traffic behind a taxi that had hit a pickup truck carrying crates of chickens. People were shouting from their cars, feathers floating on the air.
“Inspector Rolly King George from the Jamaica Constabulary Force. I was in Alberta at the summit last year, we shook hands by the elevator before you left. You asked me if I knew Prime Minister Simpson-Miller and I did give her your respects.”
“Yes,” Dantzler said curiously. “I remember you.”
“We heard a story at the conference from a Bulgarian policeman about women being trafficked to South America. A black man with one eye was bragging that he tattooed their faces with a skull. You were going to have your people at Interpol check on the ships that were in harbor at the time.”
“Yes?” Dantzler said cautiously.
“I have one.”
“One?”
“She is dead, one of the tattooed women. There is a skull wearing a top hat on her face.”
There was a moment of silence before Dantzler spoke. “Where are you?” he asked.
“In Kingston. I am taking her to a safe place.”
“How did she die?”
“She was thrown from an airplane into the sea.”
“You saw this?” Dantzler said incredulously.
“Yes. I was in my boat, off the southern tip of Jamaica,” the inspector said. “The door was open on the side of the plane when the body came out of it. The plane circled her once, then headed south.”
“Markings on the fuselage?”
“None.”
“Who knows about this?”
“I was seen putting her body in my truck so I had to notify the Ministry of Justice. I told them she was a drowning victim and that I am taking her to the morgue.”
“That is unusual?”
“I am the senior investigator in major crimes. They will accept it for now.”
“Nationality?”
“She is a white woman with blond hair is all I can say.”
“Where exactly is this safe place you speak of, Inspector?”
“The University of the West Indies Hospital in Kingston has a teaching morgue. I know the administrator. He will keep her locked away from the press. But soon the ministry will want to know about my drowning victim. Can you send somebody?”
“You understand we are not a law enforcement agency, Inspector. We have no police powers. We only share intelligence.”
“I understand who you are, but what of the informant in Bulgaria? Someone has been working this case.”
“The informant in Bulgaria was found dead,” Dantzler said. “The investigation went no further.”
“But the ships that were in harbor at the time, you were going to check on them.”
“And we never found proof.”
“Here is the proof,” Rolly King George shouted. “Do not treat me like a civilian.” He slammed a fist upon the steering wheel.
Dantzler hesitated again, then spoke more softly.
“The Bulgarian informant was killed a month after our summit in Alberta. The nationals think he was fingered by the Russian mob. We looked at the records of ships in port at Burgas at the time and only one freighter sailed west beyond the coast of Africa. It was a Liberian-owned freighter and it was bound for Port-au-Prince, Haiti. By the time we actually located it and got policemen on board, it had been twice sold and was dry-docked in Singapore being refitted to barge coal.”
“There is no evidence. That is what you’re saying.”
“They cut up the hull. If there were even traces of contraband they were long gone before we arrived.”
“What did the ship’s owner say?”
“The ship’s new owners are attorneys. None had ever seen or set foot on the ship. Her manifest listed humanitarian aid and tractor engines.”
“Crew?”
“The records were lost when the ship changed hands, or so we were told. There are no records of the crew.”
“What about satellite images?”
“Everything we could access was pointed at Iran at the time. This was 2007, remember.”
“What do they say in Haiti?”
“The port authority has no record of the ship, nor is there a record of a crew coming ashore.”
“They are bought,” George spat, turning the wheel to avoid a police car that had wedged itself between his truck and the taxi. The traffic was beginning to move once more. “They are bribed.”
“That is our world, Inspector George, but you already know that.”
“What am I to do with the dead girl?” George asked, looking in the rearview mirror. “I don’t have resources to investigate what happens in international waters.”
Dantzler hesitated, then spoke gently.
“We never doubted the Bulgarian’s story was true, Inspector. Colombian cocaine being trafficked east into Bulgaria, Ukrainian women being trafficked west on the same ships. It only makes sense.”
“And Haiti is south of us,” George added.
“Haiti is well known as a hub for South American cocaine and close enough to Brazil to facilitate human trafficking,” Dantzler said. “But we haven’t found anything concrete. We have no intelligence.”
“The tattoo is of Baron Samedi,” George said. “Baron Samedi is the skull wearing a top hat.”
“Yes,” Dantzler said, “a symbol of Haiti. I get the picture, Inspector.”
“It is voodoo,” the inspector said. “Do you have people inside Haiti?”
“Our resources are poor in Haiti to say the least.”
“What about surveillance?”
“The American DEA is quite active in the Caribbean, but their considerable efforts are focused on what is leaving South America, not going toward it.”
George grunted.
“Your plane may belong to one of these traffickers, Inspector George, and it might have been headed for Haiti or it might have been flying over it to the Dominican Republic or to Puerto Rico or Grenada. I do remember you from Alberta, Inspector George”—Dantzler’s voice went uncharacteristically soft, almost kind—“and I did speak with Prime Minister Simpson-Miller. She told me you gave her my respects, thank you. She also told me you are a man of intelligence.”
Dantzler hesitated a moment.
“I want you to stay by the phone, Inspector George, while I make a call. Perhaps there is someone who can assist you.”
14
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
An electronic tone sounded. The belt under Sherry Moore’s feet began to decelerate; it was the last of forty minutes, in which she’d run four and a half miles. She grabbed a hand towel from the rail and dabbed her face as the treadmill slowed to a halt. The phone had rung twice in the last thirty minutes. She snatched a bottle of water from a mini fridge and walked across the solarium to a lounge chair and the phone. She picked up the handset and pushed a button for messages.
The first recording was of a disconnect. The second was from a man with a German accent. He left a number with the country code 33—France, she knew. She had friends in Rennes who called frequently.
It was November and snow was just around the corner, normally not Sherry’s favorite time of year, but Sherry considered this a good year, perhaps even a healing year. She had promised herself that as the holidays approached, she would find opportunities in which to enrich her life. What good was shunning four months of every year, after all? It was like throwing a third of one’s life away.
She smiled at the thought of embracing snow, thinking that if her old friend John Payne knew she was in search of the holiday spirit he would have turned over in his grave.
She dialed the number and waited.
She had entered herself in a Thanksgiving 5K in Philadelphia to sponsor the United States Association of Blind Athletes. She’d agreed to address a graduating class at Temple University’s Health Sciences Center, a favor to her confidant Garland Brigham, who taught marine science at the u
niversity twice weekly. Since her experience on Denali she’d also considered a weeklong adaptive downhill skiing program for the blind, in Vermont, but that wasn’t until January, so she still had time to test the holiday waters before she committed herself to make a deposit. By far her most outrageous plan was to buy a Christmas CD for her stereo, something by Il Divo, she’d decided. If anything would shock the people who knew her it would be the sound of holiday music emanating from her speakers.
What, no humbug! her neighbor Garland Brigham would tease.
“Interpol,” a woman answered.
“Sherry Moore,” she said tentatively. “Your number was left on my answering machine?”
“Yes, Miss Moore, you’ll be holding for Mr. Dantzler. Just a moment, please.”
Sherry pushed the record button on her answering device.
A moment later the German gentleman came on. “Thank you for returning my call, Miss Moore. I hope it is not an inconvenience.”
“Not at all,” she said curiously.
“My name is Helmut Dantzler, Miss Moore. We have mutual friends, I understand.”
Friends, Sherry thought. Graham and Brigham? Brigham had not acknowledged that he knew anyone at Interpol, as well.
“I know a man named Graham told me he had contacted Interpol, but I must say I didn’t expect to hear from you.” Sherry said it pleasantly. It was not a riposte. “To hear from you so soon, I mean.”
“Actually, I’m surprised myself,” Dantzler said flatly. “Your story about captive women was intriguing, Miss Moore, but hardly unique. I wouldn’t even know where to begin trying to portray the extent and reality of sex trafficking; the stories are universal and beyond horrifying. What got our attention was the tattoo you mentioned on one of these women’s faces. We’d heard a similar story told by a drug informant in Bulgaria, just over a year ago. Women were supposedly being trafficked out of Eastern Europe to South America and the buyer was tattooing their faces with skulls. The informant was dead before we had a chance to interrogate him ourselves. Other details of his claim could not be verified. Then a week ago the story resurfaced.”
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