This was a quiet neighborhood and there were only three major highways out of Long Island―the Southern State, the Northern State, and the Long Island Expressway. That didn’t give him the options he liked. And these cops had absolutely nothing to do with their time, so an abduction or killing would bring out every lawman within thirty miles.
He flipped through the printouts of all the chat sessions he had downloaded from Rachel’s PC. She had chat archiving enabled, so he could read word for word what she said to her newly found sister―Achara. Touching story. Of course, Olivia had already told him about Achara in her interrogations. Valiant effort she was making, trying to get her sister out of the whorehouse. And feeling so guilty that she herself fell into whoredom. And this one, Rachel, now posing as Olivia and trying to rescue her. But this kabuki dance had to come to an end now. Those files she had stolen were traceable to him. She had violated him and she would be violated. He had to kill her before she realized what she had taken.
He circled the block again and thought how a home invasion would go. Only the kid and her parents. Father’s an accountant. Wouldn’t expect much resistance from him. A triple murder would be a big deal in this town. They might find some way to get the Feds involved. No, he needed something cleaner, more surgical.
He got back onto the Northern State toward the city. An hour and twenty minutes later, he was in front of Columbia University on Broadway. Nice looking girls walking around. And brainy. The campus must look nice in the spring with the girls all wearing summer dresses, tube tops, and shorts.
He fired up his laptop, googled Furnald Hall, Columbia University and got:
Layout
Furnald is ten stories high with 187 singles and twenty-four doubles. Each floor contains a separate men’s and women’s bathroom that the residents must share. In addition, a large lounge is situated on every floor that has a sitting area with a cable television on one end, and a kitchen with two ovens and two sinks on the other end. There is also a spacious main lounge on the first floor.
Using the floor plan, he located her room on the eighth floor. He went over the class schedule again. Assuming she wasn’t cutting class, she would be crossing the campus several times a day. Heavy academic load too. He would relieve her of that burden. This wasn’t going to be easy either. Not many escape routes out of Manhattan. The car circled the campus several times as the killer contemplated the problem.
Then he came upon the perfect solution.
t was one of more than ten brothels on the street. Fifteen girls sat in plastic chairs outside their rooms waiting for men to pay 110 Baht―about five dollars―for their bodies. Many of the girls were foreigners from South China, Burma, Nepal, and the Philippines who were enticed here with offers of lucrative jobs as barmaids and domestics. Once here, their passports were taken away, their virginities sold for two to three-hundred dollars and their enslavement began.
Some of the girls were sold by their parents for four-hundred dollars. Others were pawned and handed a bundle of cards. Each time they serviced a customer, a card was removed from the bundle. When the bundle was gone, their freedom could be redeemed. Some had a thousand or two thousand cards in their bundles.
Achara didn’t have a bundle. At thirteen, she was adopted by a man who she thought was going to be her father. She was sold to Tong for five-hundred dollars and told to strip and sit in a room for eight hours a day watching porn movies. This was her training. The madam instructed her on special techniques to please men. Her virginity was sold to an Arab. When she refused to have sex, she was dragged into a dark, windowless room and left there without food or water. On the third day, she still refused sex, so Tong knocked her to the ground and slammed her head against the concrete floor until she passed out. When she awoke, she was naked, a rattan cane smeared with pureed red chili peppers shoved into her vagina. She agreed to anything if they would take it out.
As a beautiful fair-skinned girl, she attracted fifteen men a day and was making Tong a lot of money. To pay for the makeup, clothes, and extra rice required to stay attractive, she, like the other girls, borrowed money from the moneylenders at five-hundred percent interest. This money would have to be repaid before she could leave the brothel. Achara was now three-thousand dollars in debt.
At sixteen, she was one of the oldest girls. The customers wanted eleven and twelve-year-olds these days. Still, she serviced eight to ten men a day and did a lot of the chores. Her best job was going to buy beer because it gave her a chance to get out of the brothel for a brief time.
She stood outside her room waiting for them to send her off for beer, so she could pick up the money at Western Union. The WU office wasn’t far from the beer distributor, but it was a lot of money and she was worried they would give her a problem.
Tong, the brothel owner, gave her the sign, thrusting his thumb toward his mouth. He was thirty-seven with his black hair slicked back and four rings on each hand like the rap stars in the USA. He loved jewelry, and several gold chains slapped his bare chest when he moved. The shirts were always open all the way to his stomach as though he had a great body, but he didn’t. Chain smoking had given him yellow fingers and a permanent stench to his breath, even when he wasn’t smoking. The fingernails were meticulously manicured and polished to show the world he didn’t work with his hands. The sunglasses, which he wore almost round the clock, covered the wrinkles of his tired eyes. He didn’t like people seeing him without his sunglasses, and he would turn his back like some girls are shy about their bodies.
Achara got her bamboo pole that she used to balance the two cases of beer for the one-mile round trip. There were closer places to buy beer, but the warehouse was cheaper.
First, she called to confirm that the money had arrived as her sister had told her to do. It had. For ID, she asked if they would accept a copy of her orphanage discharge paper which had her picture, though it was an old one. The lady said yes.
Achara was lucky she wasn’t a foreigner. The foreign girls had all had their passports taken away. The brothel never knew about the orphanage paper. She was going to rip it up last year because she hated it so much, just to cut all ties with her past and begin again. But she kept it.
There, on Nimmanhemin Rd, Soi Fifteen was the Western Union. Her heart began to pound as it had three years ago when she first entered the brothel. If Tong found out about the money, he would kill her for it. Achara passed the entrance and explained that she was there to pick up the money.
“Name?”
She gave it.
The man’s brow furrowed when he looked at the screen. “Thirty-two hundred USD?”
“Yes.”
“Thirty-two hundred?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a lot of money.” He wasn’t making any clerk motions and Achara wished that she had a watch, so she could glance at it now and look important.
“Why so much?”
“Here is my identification.”
“That looks like an old photo.”
“I called a half hour ago and the lady said this was good identification. That’s my money.”
“We don’t take such ID. And you’re underage, I see. You have to be eighteen to redeem money here.”
Achara knew he was looking for a bribe or he would have dismissed her already.
“I need my money,” she said.
“What can we do?” he said like one who has not a care in the world.
“I’ll give you twenty.” He smiled and shook his head as he lit a cigarette.
“How much you want?” she asked.
“Five-hundred.”
If she had a gun, she would have blown his face off.
“Thirty and I suck your dick.” That seemed to make some inroads. “If no, then I tell them to cancel and send it to my brother. I still get my money. You get nothing.”
The clerk weighed the options. Thirty was a week’s pay plus some free yumyum. He nodded and pointed to the toilet.
“Money first,
” she said.
The clerk was either anxious to get to the sex or he had trouble keeping numbers in his head. He had to count the money three times. Then Achara counted it three times.
“Receipt?” she said. He printed out the receipt. After everything was deep in her jeans pockets. She said, “Okay, we go.”
When she exited the Western Union, her biggest problem was hiding the two huge bulges in her pants. She went to get the beer. Time was short.
At the beverage warehouse, she bought a bundle of incense sticks that were held together by two sturdy rubber bands. In a bathroom Achara secured the two bundles of cash to her ankles by first inserting them in her socks. Now she bought a case each of Singha and Leo and was off to the brothel. Along the way, she stopped at the Internet café and sent a message that she had received the money.
When she returned, Tong was beating Bopha, the Cambodian girl. She had hidden ten bhat from him and he was heaping all his fury on her with a rattan cane―the kind the police stations used.
While Tong got drunk on the Singha, Achara waited for her cousin, Luk, to arrive with the passport. She had called her aunt from the Internet café and was told that the passport had arrived from the USA by overnight delivery. Achara learned over the years to not let apparent good luck make her feel good. The disappointment was too much for her. She would believe it when she held the passport in her hands. For now, she had to hide the money before another client arrived.
Her room consisted of an eight-foot by five-foot area with a pink curtain at the entrance. Inside was a mattress and a small table where she kept her Buddha and her vihara, or spirit house. It was only a small plastic spirit house, not a beautiful one made of teak. According to custom, when people finished building their house, they created a guardian spirit house, then invited the holy deity Pra Prom to reside there. One day, Achara was going to build her own house and only then invite Pra Prom to inhabit the vihara. She could not invite him into a brothel.
She pulled the sheet off the mattress. The stains were so large and dark that the mattress looked like an old map. Another girl had just died on this mattress when they gave it to Achara. That had always disgusted her, and she feared the spirit of the dead girl. She never slept well on it. Six weeks ago, in preparation for using the mattress as a hiding place, she cut several seams and taped them so they would look like repairs. Several searches later, Tong didn’t bother un-taping all the seams, having found nothing in the past. She now untaped one of the slits and removed the stuffing. Once she had made enough room, Achara quickly put the money into the opening and refilled it.
Tong was busy drinking now, but Pairat, his assistant, was standing on the porch as always, talking. He was about twenty-two and always wore sunglasses on top of his head. He had an endless supply of friends who came by the brothel in their Vespas, and they also liked to wear their sunglasses on their heads. He enjoyed bossing the girls around and yelling at them even when they weren’t doing anything wrong. He yelled at Achara to get outside and sit in front of her room. She put on her white short-shorts and tube top, and sat in the breeze.
Before long, an old man clambered up the steps. She didn’t look at him, hoping he would pick the new Burmese girl who was younger, or Lin, the Chinese girl who had beautiful white skin. She didn’t want to leave the breeze, but he pointed to her and she had to go with him.
Four men and six hours later and still no Luk. She began to conjure what might have happened. They decided to sell the passport―would a passport be worth anything if it had someone else’s picture in it? They got jealous and threw the passport away―this was the worst scenario. Everyone was jealous. Even if what you had was insignificant, someone around you was jealous of it. Once, one of the girls took her plastic Buddha and kept it for days. Achara kept shouting at Pairat to find out who took the statue. He slapped her and she still shouted that she should have her Buddha returned. Finally, he went around to all the girls’ rooms searching until it turned up in the quarters of a Chinese girl from a hill tribe.
Achara asked her why she had stolen the statue and the girl replied that she was jealous that Achara believed in God while she herself believed in nothing.
At two in the morning, Luk arrived. She hadn’t seen him since he was eleven. Now he was a young man of eighteen and she was suddenly ashamed. She was never ashamed in front of strangers, but this was her blood. He was a cashier in Wal-Mart and respectable. She invited him inside and greeted him with a traditional Thai Wai bow. Smiling, he handed her the passport. She opened it and they both gazed on a face which was hers, but more beautiful than hers. At the top of the first page, it said United States of America and the closeness of those words to her face made her feel that the mythical land was already near. She lit a candle to heat some tea and they sat in glowing silence. Luk said, “You are going to paradise.”
U there?
Here. How are you? typed Rachel.
Good.
Did you buy the ticket?
Yes, write this down. Flight 1343 Cathay Pacific Airways arrives at Kennedy Airport day after tomorrow at 2:30 a.m. your time. But don’t tell your parents until I arrive.
Don’t worry. U r welcomed here.
But keep it secret for now. If they stop me at JFK I can ask for political asylum. But before I arrive, it can be a problem. So don’t tell anyone―OK?
KK. Did you read the email I sent with questions and answers for Immigration here?
There was a pause.
Yes.
Let’s go over that so you know exactly how to answer, typed Rachel.
No time now. Have to go.
You have everything you need? How will you get away to get to the airport?
I have a plan. But have to go now. I won’t be online again. Bye.
Rachel checked her Outlook. She had sent the email with high priority and with “Request a Read Receipt” checked off.
Achara hadn’t opened the email.
cKenna played the Belinda video over and over. It bugged him that the guy filming her was right there in the room with her and there was nothing he could do to see him. No cameraman shadows on the wall. When they erased the girl’s body from the video, could they have taken any other valuable evidence with it?
There was nothing to look at except the wall, the girl’s head, and the Christmas tree. When the tree came into view, he put it on pause and advanced as slowly as he could. That didn’t do much good since the pause feature froze the frame in a blur. Hanging off the tree were the usual lights and made-in-communist-China crap. Gingerbread cookies, nutcracker, globes, clip-on candles, snowflakes. Nothing unusual.
He burned the .avi file onto a DVD and put it in his full-size DVD player. The resolution was better than on his laptop. Now he could slow down the action and there was no blur when he froze it. The first appearance of the tree revealed nothing. The second time it appeared, a silver globe ornament caught his eye. Its spherical reflective surface acted like a wide-angle lens. The cameraman wasn’t reflected as there were branches obscuring that angle, but it did reflect something. He sat in his apartment replaying that over and over. The reflected image was of something rectangular on the floor. A vent? A fireplace? A low book case?
He focused on the image within the rectangle. There were figures in black and white. They were distinct, but distorted by the spherical surface, and McKenna couldn’t make out what they were. A store logo? McKenna reviewed the notes he had taken when he had questioned Massey both times in his office. There was no mention of a rectangular object on the floor. Also Massey’s office walls were off-white, not beige. Of course, that could have been painted over.
The object could have been something transient like a shopping bag with something printed on it. He went back to the start of the video, pausing every few moments. There seemed to be a lighter area on the wall like the outline made by a painting or a photo after it had hung there a long time before being removed.
There was a Picasso in his notes. He didn
’t know the name of the painting, but it had a horse in it. He googled, Picasso painting with a horse.
Guernica. That’s what the tree ornament reflected.
f traffic on the Belt Parkway held up, Rachel could make it to the terminal by two-thirty a.m. Achara would still have to go through Immigration, so figure two-forty, three a.m. She could probably park right across from the arrivals terminal at this hour.
She had left Joules’ house at 10:00 p.m. and gone back to her parents’ home. She decided to take a nap for an hour, but overslept. After washing her face and brushing her teeth, she crept out of the house, let the car roll down the driveway, and took off.
Over the last three days, they had downloaded thirty-six gigabytes of data from the computers belonging to Perlman, Sartorius, and Massey. They were never able to connect to Armand Greyson’s machine. So far, they had found child porn on Sartorius’ and Massey’s computers. The kids ranged from about eight to fourteen. Rachel had gone through hundreds of files, but there was nothing pointing to Olivia. No photos, no emails mentioning her, but there was still a lot to go through. At what point should she get Detective McKenna involved? How would she explain how she got access to the computers? Her parents would kill her if they found out. The men with child porn on their machines could be locked up, but what about the others? Unless Sonia testified against them, the law couldn’t convict them of statutory rape. Rachel hadn’t witnessed what went on in the bedrooms. But none of that would get Olivia back.
Rachel was counting on Joules to help her go through the rest of the files tomorrow. He said he would work on them while at school. What would she do without him? What did he think of her right now, after finding out she was in the homes of all these perverts? He was too discreet to press the matter. But was that out of politeness or indifference? If she had fallen in his estimation, what could she ever do to pick herself up again in his eyes? She hoped he understood that whatever she had done, it was to get her sister back. With Olivia absent, Rachel realized how important Joules was to her, even if he didn’t feel the same way.
The Schwarzschild Radius Page 18
