“Oh, yes, sir, Detective.” She dropped her feet to the floor. “I was in Thailand. Last year.”
“We checked. Sheldon was in Amsterdam, among other places. Were you there too, maybe right around the time you saw those lousy traffic jams in Brussels?”
She licked her lips. “I was in Amsterdam.”
“Anywhere else in Europe? And you know I mean where he was too.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” She didn’t answer. “Let me guess, then: you were following him because you had information that he might be able to lead you to Mariela and Mariana.” Silence. “Pretend I’m right. How long had you been following him? How far around the world did you go before you realized that she was very close to where you’d started out?”
Hannah blinked rapidly. “Almost a year.”
“And that must have burned.” She turned away. “You’ve been hunting men like that for years and taking out their operations, but you finally met someone who could best you. And then you figured out that he was playing a game with the lives of people you loved. But worse than that, he was playing you.”
“Should I call my lawyer?” Hannah asked without looking up.
“When did you finally figure it out? How much time had you wasted?”
She looked back up at him. “How much of this do you want me to do for you?”
“When did you figure it out?”
She slowed her breathing as if to calm herself. “When did I figure out that he was playing with me? Before I got back to Boston. If I’d kept playing his little game, I might only just now have figured out that it was Hilary I was looking for and I would have found flies covering Mariela’s corpse.”
“When,” he repeated, “did you figure it out?”
She smiled bitterly. “Oh, that’s easy. Three months before I met you. I figured out what Sheldon was doing. I broke a couple of lamps in the hotel I was staying in, then I traced the comms back to his law firm. I looked at the pimping case and I figured out where they were vulnerable. I made sure the DA had some information spoon-fed to them, then I got to Dorchester, rented an apartment, and befriended Maria. And that’s the truth.”
“And what else?”
She looked away. “And nothing.”
“No, what else!” Hannah jumped and the waiter turned around. “This isn’t a game; this was murder! We don’t get to decide who lives and who dies and my department has to find out who had it in them to bash this guy’s head in.” She flinched. “I need to know what you figured out, what you discovered, and what you think. I’ll say thank you, I’ll get you hired as a consultant, anything you want, but stop dodging and just tell me so we can all get on with our lives.” Her eyes filled with tears and he felt like he deserved everything everyone had said about him. “I know you aren’t used to trusting anyone,” he said more gently. “I know that you’ve seen monsters most people go their whole lives without knowing about. But I also know you’re not a killer, and you don’t approve. I know you wanted to see the son of a bitch go to trial.” He sighed. “I’ll bet a month’s paycheck that you’re already trying to figure out his operation so you can help every victim that’s still alive. Killing him made everything worse. So help me. Please.”
Hannah rubbed her forehead then wiped away her tears. “Alex Sheldon was sitting on top of hundreds of millions of dollars in human trafficking money. Trust me—it’s a business you can grow quickly,” she said bitterly, “but not that quickly. He wasn’t involved when he left Boston—”
“I know.”
“—which means he didn’t have a lot of time to build it up. Which means—”
A chill went through his spine. “That he took it over from someone else.”
She nodded. “Do you remember when he left Boston?”
The chill was spreading through him. “Yes.”
Her eyes were red. “Do you remember what else happened?”
“I arrested Tom Bartolome for— Oh my God.” Robert sat back as if he’d been pushed. “And Tom Bartolome had been living in Europe, first as John Leighton and then as Andreas Wolfe.”
“For years,” Hannah whispered.
“Son of a bitch!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
What was she doing there?
Hannah knew she should end it. She could go back to Dorchester, either to her apartment or to Maria’s place. And Maria might feel a little better if she did; no matter how many times Hannah had reassured her that she didn’t need to be afraid of Alberto Ramon coming back, she knew that in some way, he would never really leave Maria.
She should have walked out of the diner after she’d told Robert about Tom Bartolome and Alex Sheldon, but he had covered her hand with his as if he knew what she was thinking. She could have left anyway, but she didn’t want to.
Hannah wasn’t upset that they didn’t say a word to each other in the car or once they’d gotten inside his place. She didn’t want to talk either. She was relieved when he pulled her into his bedroom. She didn’t want to think about anything except the way his hands and mouth felt on her skin.
She didn’t want to think at all. She must have been getting good at that, because before she realized what she was doing, she found herself at his door again the next night.
He didn’t get up or turn around or say anything to acknowledge that she was there. She looked at the empty glass in his hand and the half-empty bottle next to him. Apparently, he was trying to stop thinking as well.
“What happened?” He poured himself another drink instead of answering. This would be a good time to leave, she thought, but she walked around to face him instead. She winced when she looked at him. He’d passed angry a while ago, but he wasn’t resigned. He was...remorseful.
She tried again. “You told Baptiste?”
“I did.” He was going to talk to her, but he wasn’t going to look at her. “And he told Commissioner Walker. And she told the mayor.” Hannah felt her fingers go cold for a moment. “And instead of lunch, the three of us met in his office. Along with the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the Bartolome case.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, hey, no problem.” He put down his drink but still didn’t look at her. “I might as well not have been in the room. No, Hwang didn’t have anything to say to me, or even Baptiste. He spent thirty minutes reaming out both Walker and the ADA. He was so pissed that even though he doesn’t report to Hwang, he called the DA to make sure he wasn’t going to lose his job.” He winced. “And then Walker spent an hour alone with Baptiste. I’m not sure what happened in that meeting, because when Baptiste came back he couldn’t look at anyone and kept his office door closed until I left.”
“I’m sorry about Baptiste.”
“Thanks.” Robert looked at her now with an expression that made her eyes sting. “I’ll be sure to pass that on since when he’s speaking to me again. Anything else I should tell him?”
Hannah felt something bubble up in her throat. She didn’t want to let it out, but she wasn’t going to be blamed by one more person for something that wasn’t her fault. “You want me to apologize for telling you?”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
She couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Why weren’t you curious about what the hell Bartolome had been doing in Europe for a decade and a half? You already knew he’d killed the guy he was posing as when he came back to Boston. You thought that was the only thing he’d done?”
He sprang to his feet. “We checked with Interpol!”
“Did you check to see how he financed his life before that? Did you think he was a waiter?”
“That wasn’t relevant to the investigation we were running for what he did here!”
There it was. Why had she thought he was different? “So to hell with anything else he may have done or anyone else he might have hurt. Don’t worry, no one else cared about those people either.”
“Except you, the Goddess of Mercy who hears everything.” He took a step closer so she
was forced to look up. “There is something I still don’t understand. If you didn’t know about Hilary, then how did you know to come back to Boston? And how did you know that Maria was connected to all of this? Sad to say, but the world is filled with Marias used by their boyfriend-pimps.”
No harm in answering this. “Chatter. And you’re wrong. There are a lot of pigs out there, but not a lot of Marias stand up to them and live to talk about it. That caught notice.”
“Whose notice?”
She searched for words. “The people who took Mariela and her mother...I had figured out who they were a long time ago, but not soon enough. When I found them, they told me who they sold Mariela to.”
“Were they the same people who killed her mother?”
He was asking her like they were talking about people who weren’t people. “No. She was taken when she tried to escape.”
“Go on.”
Just another day at the office... “I was always two or three steps behind, so I decided to get smart and trace my way down. There were only so many big players; that made it easier.”
“When did you realize Alex Sheldon was your man?”
“Three years ago.”
“Not too long after he might have been a player.”
“Wrong. He was in the game before that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he repeated.
Because it was too dangerous. “When did I have a chance?”
“Give me a break. And why go after him in a roundabout way like that?”
“I wasn’t after him, okay? I was looking for Mariela and Mariana. And I didn’t know he was back in Boston. In fact, he wasn’t back in Boston, remember?”
“Was he the reason you left the States?”
She tried not to think too much about all the time she had lost, because the rage could be overwhelming. “Yes.”
“Tell me how you figured it out.”
“Prostitutes in Brussels and then Amsterdam. They like them young there.” She wasn’t going to tell him the horror stories she’d heard from the victims. “There was a lot of chatter about a new ‘shipment’ of girls—some of them were young, but some were around Mariela’s age.”
He narrowed his eyes. “And right where he could have guessed where you’d see it.”
“No,” she said, fighting tears of anger. “Right where he knew I’d see it. I got there and helped shut down a pedophile ring, but by then, I knew I’d been had. The ring reported to one of Sheldon’s rivals.”
“So why did you go to Thailand?”
“Because he hadn’t hidden his investment in a shrimping operation there, and his ‘investment’ was people; people stored like so many tools until you needed to take them out and use them.” She flashed to him asking to come below deck with her on their way to Spectacle Island, and now no amount of blue skies or sea air in that memory was going to rehabilitate it. “So I went there, knowing I was being had. I started...figuring out a way into his operation.”
“You hacked his network.”
Not me. “No comment.”
“And what did you find?”
She remembered sitting at the screen when she finally got to read the messages. “Frantic references to a child someone was trying to take out of the country and the unwillingness of that person to ‘dispose’ of the mother, and a couple of vague mentions to what had happened to the grandmother. They didn’t use real names, but the same people kept bitching about a woman named Maria in Dorchester. That’s why I came back.”
“And then Sheldon wanted you in Hong Kong. Why?”
She hadn’t realized he’d heard that part of their conversation in the MFA, so now she couldn’t think of a way to cover. This was the problem with not thinking. “There’s a lot of forced domestic labor there, and he has contacts with people who smooth things over with the right people. He left enough information that I could have at least embarrassed a lot of highly placed officials and made the mainland take notice. Irresistible if I hadn’t already made plans.”
“Did he want you there before or after Abassadi?”
“The same time.” She shuddered. “Protests give great cover.”
She could tell he was confused. “Cover? For what?”
He’d figure it out sooner or later, and it didn’t matter. “For what happened to Abassadi.”
She saw the realization wash over him as he pulled away. “The son of a bitch was going to kill you?” he whispered.
“That would be my guess.” She wanted him to stop looking like that, so she tried to make a joke. “I guess I had a motive to kill Sheldon. Happy now?”
He took her into his arms. It was the touch she’d been waiting for since she’d come back that she could now admit she’d missed. “No,” he said. “I would have beaten him to an inch of his life if I’d known that before he died.”
She let herself sink into the comfort of his body. “Don’t hurt yourself. It wouldn’t be the first time someone wanted me dead, and I bet it won’t be the last.”
“Will you stop it? And if you knew that, why did you get so close to him that night?” He held her closer. “Why did you want to get him alone?”
He was too comfortable for her to be around. "Because I wanted him to go away, and I wasn’t afraid of him.”
She wanted to get away, but his grip on her tightened. “When are you going to stop acting like you don’t matter?”
Everyone mattered to her, and no one more than the people she hadn’t been able to save. All of her failures were the weight of the world. Finding Mari and Mariela had lifted some of that; why couldn’t that have lasted?
She knew she was crying. She put up her hands to shield her face. She didn’t want him to see how much she’d disappointed so many people in the most important way. “When I’ve made up for all of the times I had to choose...” Her body shook and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. “When I make up for all the times I didn’t get everyone out or I didn’t get where I was supposed to on time. When I don’t go to sleep thinking about kids who don’t get blankets after working sixteen hours. When I can do something to make up for all of it.”
She felt his hand on the skin underneath her shirt. So comforting, so dangerous. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry about Hwang, and I’m sorry about Tom Bartolome.”
He kissed her neck. “I’m sorry too.” He kissed her mouth. Once past the acid of the alcohol, he was warm and spicy. “And you matter to me.”
A fresh round of tears escaped. “You’re going to figure out really soon that you’re too good for me.”
“Why do I always think you’re smarter than you are?” She wanted to tell him that he was starting to catch on, but once he kissed her, she forgot what she wanted to say.
Chapter Twenty-Five
This was going to be a good day again. That was what Mariana decided when her father agreed not only to take her to the playground, but also to take Hellie with them.
It would have been better if her mother could have come, but right then, she was just happy that her mother was sitting out in the living room again and not locked in her room.
It made her sad that her father would say he was going to check on her mother “for just a minute” and then not come back out for almost an hour. Aunt Hannah made sure she was there every day, and that made her a little bit less lonely, especially when they would snuggle on the couch and Hannah would read to her until she fell asleep.
Now when Mariana woke up in the middle of the night, she would call for Hannah, not her mother or father. That made her sad too, because she knew how upset her father would get.
Sometimes her father would scoop her up in his arms and tell her he was the luckiest man in the world because he had her as a daughter, and he would hug her and promise her that nothing was going to happen to her. And because she could feel his heart beating next to her and it sounded so much like her own, she felt like she was in the safest place in the world.
But sometimes her father would be
angry. Never at her or her mother, but usually at Aunt Hannah. Hannah tried to pretend that she wasn’t upset, but Mariana saw her wiping her face more than once. Mariana felt so bad for her aunt then, because she wanted her to be happy.
“When can we see Robert again?” She remembered that he’d walked her and Hannah through the North End the day she met her father and was reunited with her mother. She could tell that he liked her aunt in that way grownups liked each other, and she thought Hannah was happy when she was with him. But lately, she seemed sad. Hannah had smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “As soon as Daddy thinks it’s a good idea to go out again.”
Hannah had brought Hellie to Mariana’s apartment and stayed there with her mother. It was the only way her father would agree to leave, but he didn’t seem happy about leaving her mother with Hannah. It was only when her mother said—in that voice that wasn’t much stronger than a whisper—that Mariana needed “fresh air and friends” that her father agreed.
Now they were out, and it seemed like at every corner, he had something to point out to her and Hellie. But eventually, she and Hellie couldn’t wait to get to the playground with the tadpoles, and more than once, he had to tell them not to run away from him.
“Hellie, we have to find all of the frogs!” Mariana said as soon as they were at the playground gate.
Hellie giggled with excitement. “Let’s have a race to see who can find the most.”
“Just stay where I can see you,” her father called out to the girls. “The both of you.”
“We won’t leave the gates, Daddy, I promise.”
He patted the both of their heads. “Off you go then.”
Hellie ran through the playground and proudly reported her count to Mariana. “I know there’s more than that,” Mariana said. Hellie ran through the park again, this time adding three more to her count.
“No, now there’s too many!” Mariana exclaimed. They walked together throughout the playground, each pointing out a tadpole the other missed. Eventually, they took to pacing the perimeter of the playground while they talked.
Justice, Mercy and Other Myths (The New Pioneers Book 7) Page 13
