“That boat’s not a classic,” I said. “It’s just old. What do you tow it with?”
“Another classic: a 1971 Datsun pickup.”
“Geez, how many miles?”
“Over three hundred thousand. ‘Course it’s not the original engine.”
“Now that’s just ancient.” I giggled. “And ugly.”
He didn’t laugh back. He had this deadly serious look on his face. “So what’s the difference? Between old and classic. To you,” he said.
I couldn’t help it. The look on his face. The more I tried to stop, the harder I laughed. Then I began to snort. I hate when that happens.
He was examining the detail in the acoustical ceiling tile. I was about ready to regurgitate french fries through my nose. That was when we heard Solange cry out as though she had been struck.
Rusty was the first one off the bed. He couldn’t find the edge of the curtain at first, and he pulled at the fabric and got tangled in it when it didn’t slide open as he expected. I saw a pair of sneakers run past beneath the hem of the curtain as Rusty struggled. Once he finally drew the curtain aside, we saw Solange, sitting up in bed, her eyes wide open, staring straight ahead.
“She okay?” I hollered as I slid off the bed and under the curtain on the door side of the room.
“Think so,” I heard Rusty say as I went out into the hall. I swung my head, checking both directions. There were several possibilities. To my right, there was a tall black male orderly pushing an empty wheelchair. To my left, a black female nurse and a white male orderly were leaning on the nurses’ station, talking. There were patients and visitors walking everywhere. The corridor was crowded with people wearing white sneakers. I jogged right and caught up to the man with the wheelchair just as he turned into a room.
“Good morning, Mrs. Johnson,” he said to the large lady in the bed. His Haitian accent was unmistakable. He reached down to lock the wheels on the wheelchair. “Are you ready to go to radiology?”
“Excuse me,” I said.
He turned and looked at me expectantly. He was a large man, well over six feet tall, and somewhere in age between forty and fifty. He had a thin mustache and a small goatee.
“Were you just in room four twenty-five?”
“No. Not me. I came from Patient Relations. Must have been somebody else.” He smiled and walked over to Mrs. Johnson to help her into the chair. He was very relaxed, and he looked like he was accustomed to wearing green scrubs. “How are you feeling today, pretty lady?” he asked the white-haired woman as he pulled back the covers on her bed. I noticed he wore large silver rings on three of the five fingers of his right hand. I couldn’t make out the designs. “Let’s go, dear.”
He lifted the heavy-set woman from her bed as though she weighed next to nothing. His name tag said “Todd,” but he didn’t look like a Todd to me. As he swung the older woman around to the wheelchair, he saw I was still standing there. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” He settled the woman into the chair, then turned to look expectantly at me.
I backed out of the room. “No, thanks,” I said. I checked down the hall in the other direction, but the nurse and orderly were gone.
Rusty came charging out of room 425, and I headed back down the hall to hear what he had found. By the time I got there, he was standing nose to nose with the cop in front of the nurses’ station.
“What the hell do you mean, you didn’t see anything? Somebody was just in there.”
The female Haitian nurse who had been so kind yesterday hurried into Solange’s room.
“Is she all right?” I asked.
“She seems to be okay,” Rusty said, not taking his eyes off the other cop.
“I mean I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” the duty officer said.
“Maybe you were distracted by something else.” Rusty thrust his chin toward Jenna.
“People have been coming and going all day,” the officer said. “I’ve been watching. Hell, you were in there. Why didn’t you see anything?”
Rusty turned away without answering that question. No matter how he worded it, it wouldn’t sound good.
I left them arguing and tried to go into Solange’s room. The Haitian nurse waved me off, motioning me back outside. She had the blood pressure cuff on the child’s arm.
I crossed to the desk and slipped behind the counter. “Jenna, do you know a guy who works here named Todd?”
She rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth. “Yes. What did he say now?”
“Nothing really, I was just wondering, what does he look like?”
“Oh. He’s like really old, and he’s always telling people I’m his ‘honey.’ He’s too gross.”
The Todd I’d seen was no more than fifteen years older than me, but then again, that might qualify as “really old” to this girl. “Can you give me more of a description? Is he tall, short, white, black?”
“He’s like this little old retired white guy, and I think the only reason he volunteers here is to rub up against me every chance he gets. Old pervert.”
Definitely not my Todd. “Any other guys here with that name? How about an orderly, a tall Haitian guy about forty?” She shook her head so that her blond hair flew out in a golden arc, then smiled at the cop, who had turned his attention from Rusty back to Jenna. “No, nobody here like that unless he’s new,” she said to the cop, who nodded as though he understood what she’d just said.
I grabbed Rusty’s arm. “Come on.” He was striding next to me, trying to keep up without breaking into a trot to match mine.
“Where are we going?”
We rounded the corner into Mrs. Johnson’s room. She sat there alone in the wheelchair, nodding off.
“Mrs. Johnson?”
She jerked her head up, startled.
“Where’s the orderly who was just in here with you?” I asked.
“He said he’d be right back,” she assured me. “I think he might have had to go to the little boy’s room, you know. He just left real sudden, like he had to go, if you know what I mean.”
“What’s going on, Seychelle?” Rusty asked.
I stepped out into the hall and looked in both directions. “Which way did he go, Mrs. Johnson?”
“I’m sorry, dear, I wasn’t paying much attention. Is something wrong? I did think it was a little odd. I didn’t remember anything about radiology today, but you know how it is, when you come into this place, you just stop asking questions after a while.”
“That was him,” I said, and slapped my hand against my thigh.
Rusty sighed, shook his head, and started walking back to Solange’s room. I followed him. This time we were allowed back in. Solange was now on her side in a fetal position, facing the window, her back to the room. When I got to the foot of her bed, I saw her eyes were open, staring out the window. The Haitian nurse looked very troubled as she placed a moistened cloth on the child’s brow.
“How’s she doing?” I asked.
The nurse shrugged.
I turned to Rusty. “I thought you said she was okay.”
“She was just like that when I got to her,” Rusty said. “She doesn’t look hurt.”
I turned to the nurse. “What happened? What did that guy do?”
“What guy?” Rusty asked.
When I explained about seeing the feet under the curtain, Rusty’s face told me what he thought of my story. Typical cop reaction—he didn’t want to believe he’d missed something.
“She is right, that Jenna,” the nurse said. “We have many Haitians working here, but no one by that name.”
I moved in closer, next to the nurse, and asked her, “So what did he do to her? Why’s she like that?”
“It is difficult to say.”
“We heard her cry out, like he was hurting her.”
“I checked her all over, and I cannot find any injuries, no injection site, and the symptoms came on too quickly for it to be something she was given by mouth. I have called
for her doctor. She will give her a more thorough examination, but I don’t think she will find anything.”
“What happened, then? Why is she like that?”
“I think . . .” She paused, as though choosing her words very carefully. “He hurt her here.” She pointed to her head. “He said something, and now it is in her mind, and it frightens her. She is from Haiti, and we are very superstitious in Haiti. Our beliefs are very different from yours.”
“Are you saying he put a curse on her?”
Her brow wrinkled. “Something like that. We must let her sleep. We hope she will be better when she wakes.”
The duty officer stepped into the room and motioned for us to follow him outside.
“Collazo’s on his way over. He said to tell you not to leave. He wants to talk to both of you.”
I pointed down to the waiting area on the far side of the nurses’ station. “I’ll be right back. I need to make a phone call.”
After scrounging thirty-five cents out of the side pocket of my shoulder bag, I dialed Jeannie’s number. Disappointed when I got her answering machine, I left her a message explaining about the incident at the hospital and telling her to keep it very quiet about Solange staying with her. “Somebody out there definitely wants to get to her,” I said before hanging up, “and we’d better keep her whereabouts a secret.” Rusty was buying a soda out of the machine, and he held it up to me with raised eyebrows.
“No thanks, I’ve had enough.” The junk food congealing in my stomach felt like an indigestible lump. I sat down on one of the chairs in the waiting area, and Rusty joined me. The silence between us stretched out until I felt the impossible happen. I was actually looking forward to seeing Collazo.
The elevator doors finally slid open, and Collazo stepped out with an attractive light-skinned black woman in a dark suit. She looked too confident and competent and “in charge” to be a local cop.
“Hi, Maria,” Rusty said, and he stepped up to shake her hand. Manicured, buffed nails, no polish.
“Rusty, what a pleasure.”
Something passed between them, a look or a spark. I could feel the heat. Out of nowhere, I wondered if they had slept together. He turned to me. “Seychelle Sullivan, this is Special Agent Maria D’Ugard, FBI.”
Her grip was beyond firm. Her grip said Wonder Woman. “Sullivan. You’re the tug captain who found them.” She flashed me a two-second smile showing perfect white teeth that contrasted beautifully with her flawless cocoa-colored skin. Standing in front of her in my jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, I felt like a kid in the principal’s office.
“That’s right.”
The uniformed officer brought over a couple of chairs and then returned to his post, but not before checking out Agent D’Ugard from head to toe. At least I was glad to see he had moved his chair just outside the doorway to Solange’s room. Collazo did not remove his jacket as he and the woman sat down opposite us, but he did take a handkerchief from his breast pocket, ready to mop the sweat. D’Ugard crossed her legs to put her rock-hard calves on display. “Tell us what happened here,” she said.
Rusty jerked his head up, and we both started to speak at the same time.
“Go ahead,” I said. “You tell them.” He gave them a fairly straightforward version of what happened.
Collazo said, “You’re certain there was someone in the room who did or said something to frighten the girl.”
“No doubt,” Rusty said. “The girl’s safety was my first concern, however, and by the time I got to the corridor, the perp was gone.”
Interesting. When I saw him charge out of the room, there was no indication of his looking for a perp. Was he stretching the truth to look good for Wonder Woman?
“I’d like to have us all put our heads together on this,” Agent D’Ugard began. “Miss Sullivan, we are going to share some information that is privileged. I trust you will not share this information with anyone else.”
I nodded.
“We”—she made a circle in the air with her index finger— “local police, Immigration, and FBI, together with the Coast Guard, as an interagency group, have been conducting an investigation into an immigrant smuggling ring based in the Bahamas.”
“Yeah, Collazo told me. It’s called DART, right?”
She flicked her eyes in Collazo’s direction, and even I could feel the rebuke. “Yes, well, while we are concerned about the recent deaths, there are larger concerns. From the condition of the boats we’ve intercepted and of their cargo, we think they have traveled only a very short distance, probably from the Bahamas.”
Tough lady, I thought. She can refer to men, women, and children as cargo?
“Originally,” she continued, “it was just a local matter, but when these murders started, the FBI was brought in. Assuming they are taking place as this one did, beyond the twelve- mile limit, then they come under the category of ‘crimes on the high seas’ and only the federal government has jurisdiction.”
“The Border Patrol,” Rusty said, “became aware of an increase in undocumenteds around March. As the seas calmed down this spring, we’ve seen numbers like we’ve never seen before.”
“Miss Sullivan, this immigrant smuggling group is highly organized and efficient,” Agent D’Ugard continued. “It’s not unusual for them to lose boats like the Miss Agnes—they don’t care, as they have plenty more. At prices ranging from several hundred dollars to seven or eight thousand per head, smugglers are finding that transporting immigrants is as lucrative and less dangerous than the drug trade. If they get caught, the sentences are lighter than they are for drugs, too. We’ve seen quite a lot of crossover from the one trade to the other.”
“I get all that. I’ve seen the changes in the marinas. I know there are lots of go-fast boats switching over to human cargo. But your whole DART thing is about the murders, right?”
“That is one facet of the investigation, but stopping this entire organization engaged in human trafficking is my first priority. Miss Sullivan, this is more than just an assignment to me. It’s personal. My family immigrated to this country from the Dominican Republic.” I was surprised when she said that, as she had no accent. “These people are preying on Dominicans, Haitians, Chinese, East Indians, people from all over. The importers are increasingly brazen, and they don’t care about the lives of their cargo, as they have already been paid.”
“But why kill people? They’re in business to smuggle them in. I don’t get that part.”
“They do it because they can. If anyone complains about the conditions on a boat, they kill one person, and that silences the rest. We suspect that last fall they dumped an entire load of Haitians out in the Gulf Stream when they thought they were being intercepted. A local fishing boat found several bodies, but most of the others were never recovered. Sources in Haiti estimate there had been thirty people on that trip.” She leaned forward, over her crossed legs, and looked directly at Rusty. “We believe there is one man leading this group. Although we have not been able to identify him, we know he is extremely dangerous. He has absolutely no regard for human life.”
Although it seemed like I was intruding into a personal meeting between Rusty and Agent D’Ugard, I said, “Okay, I get it. There’s some really bad guy out there trafficking in human beings. What does this have to do with me?”
All three of them looked at one another as though trying to decide who would speak first. Agent D’Ugard seemed to draw the short straw.
“We believe that this young girl can identify several key players as well as the location of their camp in the Bahamas. Has she spoken yet?”
It had been fairly easy to dodge this issue up until now, but here I was being asked while surrounded by three cops of one sort or another. “Yeah, she has spoken to me a couple of times.” They all hitched up on their plastic chairs. “But that was before this incident in her room just now. I’m not sure what happened to her in there, but I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get her to open up again. I m
ean, this morning she was playing with toys and acting like a pretty normal kid. Now, she looks like some kind of zombie.”
“You don’t really think—” Rusty began.
“No, I’m not talking about Voodoo like in the movies. But let’s face it, after what she’s been through, she must be pretty fragile psychologically. Think about what she’s seen. She was in a boat with a dead woman watching seagulls eat the woman’s flesh.” I paused for a moment to let that one sink in. “So go easy on her, okay? Here’s what I’ve found out so far. Her name is Solange, but she doesn’t know her last name. She was a restavek, basically a child slave, in Haiti, in the town of Cap Haitien. A man she refers to as ‘the bad man’ was the captain of the boat that brought her out of Haiti. He came to her house and took her away to a boat that took them to the Bahamas.”
Wonder Woman interrupted me. “She is certain this man was the captain of the boat?”
I shrugged. “She seemed to be. She said they stayed in the Bahamas quite a while, and then they got on another big boat—possibly the Miss Agnes—to come here. The same man captained both boats.”
“What about the dead woman? Did the child know her?” Rusty asked.
“She said she was no relation, but she seemed to watch out for Solange, even in the Bahamas. Her name was Erzulie, I think. Oh yeah, and the kid says her father is an American, that she learned to speak her English from him. She doesn’t know his name, just that everyone called him Papa Blan— that means white father—and she was under the impression she was coming to America to be with him.”
“She saw who killed the woman,” Collazo said.
“She says the bad man did it. It wasn’t really clear whether she witnessed it, or was just told he did it. All I know is she’s terrified of him.”
Agent D’Ugard said, “Miss Sullivan, if she can identify this man as the captain of the Miss Agnes and the killer, then that little girl is in serious jeopardy. I believe we should take her into protective custody.”
“Isn’t that what you have here?” I pointed to her room. “A cop outside her door? And isn’t this where somebody just got to her? Come on. It’s not like this is some big mob case. I know she’s not going to be high priority to you guys. My attorney, Jeannie Black, has offered to take her in.” I told them about Jeannie’s background providing foster care and about the security she could provide. To my astonishment, they relented.
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