“She’s not going to stay here for months while this thing drags out,” he said. “She has a home in California. She’s going to college.”
Hanna met his eyes directly for the first time. “It’s what she wants.”
The pain, the inhibited movement, Hanna’s behavior were too much. He swung his legs, grunting involuntarily as he got up from the bed.
She didn’t try to stop him, only watched with detachment as he stiffly sat on the couch across from her. They’d been here like this only a few days before. It felt like much longer.
“Where is Sausa now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The first divers dove the wreck this morning. It landed just as it was supposed to, upright, between two coral heads.” She blinked and took a breath. “This is how it happens, Will. This is the life. Like I told you, it’s what we can do.”
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?” He tried to smile through the pain.
She offered none in return. “No. It wasn’t.”
A silence developed. The water shushed against the beach below, the usual voices of tourists and some calypso music burbling at the Palapa Bar.
“So, this is it. You’re going to San Pedro Sula.”
“Isabella is well-established. She knows what she’s up against — but hers isn’t the only movement in Honduras. Not everyone thinks like President Hernandez or General Pacheco. There is trust in police who want to do right, and in the civilian population.”
“Hey, I have trust. I almost told the local police everything.”
His charms weren’t working; Hanna only looked away, forlorn.
“Okay . . . What do I do?” He knew it was a childish question. The whole thing felt surreal, beyond his control, a place of loneliness waiting. He’d been there before. He thought he’d left it behind.
“I don’t know what you do, Will. No one can tell you that. You wouldn’t let them anyway.”
“How is any prosecutor going to mount a case against Sausa if we don’t even know where he is? He could be long gone.”
She regarded him levelly. “You don’t think he’s gone. Neither do I. But, if he is, we’ll sue his company. We’ll draw him out. There will be a way.”
“And we left Staryles in Oakridge. Blistering in the sun. Planning his next attempt.”
She nodded at the bag. “I don’t want that. I don’t need it. I don’t need Lazard. I’m grateful to him and to you for giving me another chance. I would have rotted in the States. Years of hearings, explanations, the whole thing following me around — I could never have done anything significant again.”
“Uh-huh.” He felt the frustration building. “You’re giving me this Mother Teresa bit: ‘help who you can, one person at a time, start with the one closest to you.’ Who’s closest to you?”
She leaned forward and put her hands together between her legs. “Will, I’m not going to carry around your baggage. I’ve tried to help you unpack it.”
“That’s great. Thanks for that. And what about the people you left behind? The people in your own country? Just because you weren’t a hotshot agent for the Justice Department didn’t mean you couldn’t still do some good.”
She watched him impassively.
“I left to avoid prison, Hanna. For exposing one of the most insidious relationships in U.S. history. Titan was working hand in hand with the government to strip the people of their rights.” He saw the sadness in her face and he amended, “We did that. Together. We’re a team, yeah? I make some . . . you know, I do some fucked up things. But it shakes it up. Right? You’re the cool head. You keep us grounded. That’s the dynamic. That’s what this is.”
He hated when she said nothing. He felt his heart harden and he fought to rise above the undertow of grief trying to pull him down.
“There’s a five-fifteen ferry,” she said at last. “I’ve left you plenty of food. And there’s money in an envelope on the counter. Cohen and Sterling paid well. Cohen’s not going to kick you out if you’re not physically able, he said. But the DNIC could come knocking. I’m going to San Pedro Sula. Isabella has a place there — I’ll be with Nicole and the other girls. Rene will be there, too. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”
“Are you going to tell Rene Sterling what happened to her father?”
“Of course.”
Hanna rose and gathered her bag by the kitchen. She stood by the door, looking at him. Then she set down the bag, came back to the couch and put her arms around him.
He felt stiff, unable to move. “I thought he shot you. I thought that was it.”
“He didn’t.”
He just stared as she held him.
She spoke softly into his ear. “You’re a good man. Be careful.”
Then she released him, walked to the door, and out of his life.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
He didn’t move for an hour. Then he cleaned himself up and forced down some food.
He pulled his notebook from his bag. It was damp, with ink bleeds. Hanna may have known what she wanted, or what she thought was right, but William felt like there were some loose ends. He turned to a fresh page.
On his first case as a detective, he’d been focused on a timeline. A young woman had been murdered. The events surrounding her death had needed to be placed in context, chronologically. Same here. He’d started a timeline for Rene, he needed to get back to it.
She had come to Roatán a month before. She’d been here a week and taken a diving course to obtain her scuba certification. In the meantime she’d been skin diving — tauchsport. Jodi Penninger, the instructor, had said she was ambitious, free-spirited, a good diver.
During that week, she was pictured with a man on a motor-scooter, named Frederick. Frederick had ventured off to the Himalayas and gotten himself killed. Then there was Tommy . . .
William went to the closet and pulled the file from the shelf. In it was the email Rene had sent to her father a day before she disappeared. He searched his bag and found the photo of Rene and Tommy, spotted with mud, its edges curled. There was Rene, Tommy, and seated nearby, Korey. Korey, curly hair and goatee. Nicole’s opioid-addicted boyfriend.
William pulled the MacBook from the bag. Hanna must’ve taken a flash drive with her instead of the computer.
The battery was dead — even in sleep mode it had given out. He found an outlet and waited while the MacBook stirred back to life. He grabbed the cordless phone beside the bed and brought it to the counter. His latest burner phone was lost, his brass knuckles gone, too.
He went through several prompts to place the international call. The line connected and he prepared to leave a message — young people never answered their phones — but a male voice answered, “Hello?”
“Thomas Dooley? This is William Chase. I’m an investigator who’s been searching for Rene Sterling.”
Tommy said nothing for a moment. William could hear noises in the background, the beeping of a work truck backing up, the sputter of a jackhammer. “Oh. Well, I already talked to the cops . . .”
“I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. Who did you talk to?”
“Uhm, guy named Catarino. But that was a long time ago. Nobody’s found her, yet?”
The way Tommy phrased the question got William’s attention. “She ever call you, Mr. Dooley?”
“Hey, so I’m at work . . . Can we, ah . . .”
“I know where she is. I know she kept it from her father. Mr. Sterling is dead, now. I’m just following up. Can you give me five minutes?”
“He’s what? Holy shit. Is she in trouble? Or danger? ’Cause I really gotta . . .”
“I’ll let you go in a second — please just tell me if she’s contacted you.”
“You should talk to that Deon guy. I don’t know. Shady character.”
William thought the remark sounded a touch racist. “Has she called you, Tommy? Anything?”
Someone shouted in the background, it sounded like they were accosting Tommy for bei
ng on the phone. “She’s sent me a couple emails, that’s all.”
“Yeah? What did they say?”
“Just that she was doing alright, she’s, you know, she’s really found something for herself. Some meaning, or something. That’s it. Look, I’m sorry. I really gotta go.”
He hung up.
William set the phone aside and pulled the emails Sterling had provided. There were several between Sterling and Tommy. And there was the one from Rene. Short and sweet. But William felt it took on a different significance now, one line in particular.
I’ve met some good people down here — my friend Deon,
even a girl from the States.
The “girl from the States” Rene referred to was most certainly Nicole. Rene had met Nicole’s boyfriend, Korey, who was already, at that time, working for Alexandra and Sausa.
You should talk to that Deon guy. Shady character.
William didn’t think Deon was the problem. Maybe Tommy had a thing for Rene, and was just jealous. The only thing Deon had to do with it all was that he’d once dove for drugs. Arnold Sterling knew that because Sterling knew Laron Booth. So when Rene had innocently mentioned Deon to her father, Sterling flipped out. His daughter was getting too close to people he knew. Bad people.
How Rene found her way to Isabella remained unclear, but it could’ve been as simple as Rene bumping into Isabella who’d been on the island preparing for the benefit dinner.
Still, William felt that something had to have catalyzed Rene’s actions. What would provoke a young woman to abandon her life and join the human trafficking fight in a foreign country? It didn’t happen every day.
Had she met Sausa? Maybe caught a glimpse of him? What if she’d recognized him?
Sausa worked with Grantham Ltd. Her father worked for Provost.
William turned to the laptop, which had life in it again. He searched for David Sausa, Grantham Ltd. He devoured every profile, picture and article he could find, then crossed-referenced Grantham Ltd. with Provost Petroleum. Provost was the third-largest refinery in the States with a crude oil refining capacity of over two million barrels a day. They moved crude oil, NGLs, feedstocks and petroleum-related products efficiently through the company’s distribution network.
And there it was — Provost used Grantham Ltd. shipping lines to move their products in the Southeast and Gulf Coast regions.
William found several pictures of Sausa and Sterling together at various functions. One, he recognized as the Roatán crime-watch photo from Facebook.
There was more than a good chance, with her father and Sausa working together for years, attending functions and family get-togethers, that Rene had already known David Sausa. For God’s sake, it looked like the man was a family friend.
William sat back from the laptop and gazed out at the ocean, turning it all over in his mind.
Rene had gone on a Central American backpacking trip, ending in Roatán. Her father wasn’t too happy about it, but he’d let her.
She’d made the trip with Tommy and Frederick. Tommy was older, nineteen, already out of high school and working construction, from the sounds of it. Rene was only seventeen. Still a senior at a private school. She’d left on her winter break and never returned. Because somehow she’d discovered what Sausa was doing.
She couldn’t tell her father, and she didn’t want to go to the police. So she’d sought out Isabella, a trafficking survivor with a high profile. Someone leading the charge to raise awareness and prosecute trafficking and sex crime offenders.
But how? How had she found out about Sausa’s activity?
It had to be Korey and Nicole. It had to be this woman, Alexandra, the recruiter. The whole thing hinged on Rene discovering what her father’s partner David Sausa was doing on Roatán, and the question was how.
* * *
William punched in the code to the closet safe and opened the door. Staryles’ gun was there. Hanna had stashed it and left. She had to know William would find it. It was as if she was saying: the choice is yours, William.
With the gun was the bracelet — the proximity token that enabled its operation.
He slipped it on.
Staryles had only grazed his arm with the gunshot. Hanna had made it out with barely a scratch. For a hitman, Staryles was a piece of shit. He may have been effective from a sniper’s range, or by planting a car bomb, but up close and personal he was lousy.
Still, if Staryles was alive, he wouldn’t let this go. And William was reminded that Staryles might have a dual agenda.
He stared in at the gun. Custom made, assembled by Staryles, with added sound suppression. There was no ammunition left. Staryles had either spent the rounds or Hanna had taken them.
Shit. William turned from the closet and looked at the black box beside the laptop, seeing it with new eyes.
They’d gotten incredibly lucky. If things had gone slightly differently, Hanna could be dead.
This whole idea, this plan to travel the world and take down corrupt elites — it was just a fantasy. Life kept changing, kept moving. Even armed with the information in the storage drive, its electronic fingers pointing to the most insidious actors on the geopolitical stage, there were no guarantees. There was no real hope of changing the world. At least, not the way he’d dreamed.
He hadn’t really wanted to tackle it all one person at a time, one case at a time, had he? He’d wanted to set fire to the whole thing. Hanna was right — he was just another anarchist, blindly faithful that justice could be restored by wiping the slate clean. But he could never wipe the entire slate clean.
And if Staryles, or someone like him, ever got a hold of the black box, there would be only more trouble.
William lifted it off the counter. He held it over his head, stretching his arm, reopening the wound so that fresh blood oozed beneath the bandage. He hesitated for a moment, his mind at last seizing on what he had to do. Then he threw the black box on the ground, where it smashed to bits on the clay tile.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
William left the room with his bag packed and Mateo drove him to the ferry terminal. The 5:15 ferry was gone; the next boat departed for the mainland in three hours. He said goodbye to Mateo and wandered along the wharf toward Ship Divers. He kept his eyes out for DNIC, which could be closing in on him.
The Zodiac was tied to the dock. An instructor helped a group of divers shed their gear by the freshwater pool. He glanced up at the office with the bay window. It looked deserted.
William hung back as the happy divers walked into the building, chatting about the day, then wandered towards the outpost building where he and Hanna had first met Jodi Penninger.
William stepped in, chiming the doorbell. A young woman behind the glass counter sat pecking away on a laptop. She turned and gave him a smile. “Hi. Can I help you?”
“I’m waiting for the ferry. Mind if I just have a look around?”
“Let me know if I can help you find anything.”
“Sure.” He drifted over to the spindle rack of sunglasses. He had no idea what had become of the pair he’d bought here a few days before. He pulled a new pair from the rack and tried them on, dipping his head to see his reflection in the small mirror. His skin had tanned and a beard had nearly grown in. His facial cuts had healed with time and salt water. Even his dark hair had lightened a little. He looked like a real Caribbean traveler now.
He browsed the equipment — masks and snorkels and weighted vests hung on a partition. Brochures were stacked by the windows overlooking Mahogany Bay. He picked one up and leafed through it: divers in scuba gear swimming amid schools of shining fish. In another picture, a team swam near one of the shipwrecks. A third showed a diver within the wreck, visible through a rusted porthole, giving the thumbs-up.
There was a brief bio for Jodi Penninger on the back. The blond-haired man looked years younger and stood with a woman. William remembered Penninger’s speech the afternoon he’d arrived with Hanna: Yeah, oh yeah. Founde
d it in 1993 with my late wife, Maryanne. I built it from two complete sets of equipment into ten . . .
At the bottom corner of the page was an insignia for a company William recognized: Seascape Marine, Inc.
He stared at the name. The pages rattled in his grip as his mind sifted through the information: Seascape Marine was the parent company of Grantham Ltd, the shipping line which owned Voyager. Sausa had said so himself at the planned wreck.
William called over to the young woman. “Excuse me, you know about this company, Seascape?”
“Sure. What about them?”
“Where they based out of — you know?”
“Uhmm,” she looked around, as if the answer lay in her vicinity. Then memory shone on her face. “They’re Canadian.”
Lacomb was Canadian, the man who was killed the previous year in Coxen Hole. At a bar called La Cueva.
Jodi Penninger might’ve been of German heritage, but his Ship Divers operation had been bought by the Canada-based Seascape, which owned David Sausa’s company.
It was too much to be coincidence.
“Thanks,” he said to the clerk. “I’ll be back. Just gonna wander around outside.”
“Sure,” she said.
He left the building and walked the grounds. He remembered seeing the first camera mounted to the upper corner of the main building. There was another one hidden in the lush palm planter. He found a third on a light fixture not far from the freshwater pool. Cameras all over.
He climbed the wide deck stairs up to the office with the bay window. The door was open, and music drifted out from a radio. Somebody was home after all.
A toilet flushed behind one of closed doors and a moment later, Jorge stepped out, zipping his pants. He startled when he saw William in the doorway. Then he smiled and quickly crossed the room. “Hello, sir.”
“Hello again.”
“How can I help you?”
“I’m sorry to just walk in — the door was open . . .”
Titan Trilogy 3.5-Black Soul Page 20
