Aruban Nights (Coastal Fury Book 19)

by Matt Lincoln

  I looked back down at Andre with a renewed desire to get justice for her. She’d fought so hard to stay alive and was still fighting even now. I would not let her down.

  10

  Ethan

  Two hours had passed since we’d arrested Andre. Holm decided to head home to get cleaned up and change into a clean pair of clothes since he really couldn’t continue working while covered in blood like that. Now, I sat in Diane’s office, going over Andre’s information while we waited for Holm to come back.

  “His full name is Andre Moore,” Diane informed me as she handed me a tablet with the man’s name, photo, and criminal record displayed on it. “Lives in Los Angeles. Priors for domestic assault and distribution of drugs.”

  “There’s California again,” I muttered as I read through the file.

  “You definitely weren’t wrong in looking at that as a possibility,” she replied. “We also looked into his history a bit further, though. It seems like he takes cruises fairly often. A lot more often than the normal person. Go to the next page.”

  I swiped through to the next file and realized what she meant. In the last year, Andre had purchased tickets on over a dozen cruises, all following the same basic route and all stopping at least once in one particular place.

  “Aruba,” I read it out loud. “They don’t all have the same itinerary, but they all stopped there.”

  “That’s right,” Diane replied. “So it looks like you weren’t wrong about that, either. In any case, let’s wait until Holm is here before we go any further, or else he’ll be out of the loop.”

  “Good idea,” I replied as I handed the tablet back, my mind full as I digested this new bit of information and went over everything else that had happened that day. “Have you heard any updates about Gabby, the officer, or that other man who was stabbed?”

  “The officer’s fine, thankfully,” Diane replied immediately. “It wasn’t anything life-threatening. The other man was the same, though I hear his wife has been singing his praises ever since.”

  “Well, he did throw himself in front of that knife.” I smiled at the memory. “Husband of the year right there.”

  Diane smiled as well, for just a moment, before it slowly slid off her face. “As for Gabby…” she trailed off, and for a second, fear filled me.

  “Did something happen?” I asked, sitting straight up in my chair.

  “No, nothing like that,” Diane hurried to reassure me. “She’s alright. She’s in recovery. Her injuries were a lot more severe, though. Honestly, she should have died. It’s a miracle that she’s alive right now, but she is alive. How this will affect her mental health when she was already so traumatized, that’s more difficult to determine.”

  “She’ll be okay,” I insisted confidently as I sat back in my seat again. “Holm said she was a fighter, and she is. Other people in her situation would have long since given up. She’ll make it through this.”

  “Let’s hope that she does,” Diane replied just as there was a knock on the door. “Come in!”

  “Did I miss anything?” Holm asked as he pushed the door open and stepped inside, no longer coated in blood.

  “Not really,” I replied as he came to sit down next to me. “We were just talking about you, actually.”

  “Me?” He frowned at me in concern. “Good things, I hope.”

  “Nope,” I replied flatly. “All bad things.”

  “Haha,” he replied sarcastically as he turned to look at Diane. “So have we figured out what happened back at the hospital? How could so many people mess up to the point that they let Andre get all the way to Gabby’s room?”

  “Ah,” Diane replied curtly as she pressed her lips into a tight line. “Don’t even get me started. I’ve spent the last hour tearing that hospital administration a new one. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that level of incompetence. First, the receptionist doesn’t ask for any form of ID and just lets anyone who claims to be a detective waltz right in. Then the officer on guard was left alone because the hospital and police station can’t sort out a decent rotation schedule--” She sighed and shook her head. “Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. You two need to focus on Moore. Let me handle the rest.”

  “Moore?” Holm looked between us with a puzzled expression. “Who is that?”

  “Andre’s last name,” I clarified. “Priors for domestic assault and drug dealing.”

  “So the usual.” Holm shrugged. “Of course.”

  “And he’s from California,” I added, “with ties to Aruba.”

  “So he’s related to both locations?” Holm looked at me in surprise. “That doesn’t make our decision any easier, and there’s basically no chance that we’re getting a chance to speak to Gabby now.”

  “We can decide where you’ll go after you speak with Moore,” Diane decided. “Depending on what he reveals, it might be prudent to prioritize one location over another. And here.” She handed me the tablet again. “I received the footage from the ship, both of him and of the other suspect. See what he has to say about that.”

  “We’re on it,” I replied as Holm and I stood up to head over to the interrogation room. We fell into step silently as we walked out of Diane’s office and through the bullpen, back toward where Andre waited.

  As we walked, I felt a fresh wave of rage and disgust at the man wash over me. All the terrible things that Gabby had told us about were bouncing around inside my head, along with the horrifyingly bloody scene I’d walked into just earlier today. I felt so much anger toward the man, but I needed to control it. I couldn’t let my emotions get the better of me, and I needed to focus if I was going to manipulate Andre into telling us what we wanted to know.

  As Holm and I stepped into the room adjacent to the actual interrogation room, I turned to look at Andre through the one-way glass. He was sitting in the metal chair and looking around at the walls of the room as though trying to come up with an escape route.

  “How do you want to go about this?” Holm asked me as we both stood in front of the glass.

  “The way I see it,” I replied as I looked at Andre, his eyes darting around like a cornered animal, “Andre’s afraid. He was so afraid of Gabby speaking that he went through all the trouble of sneaking into the hospital to kill her when he could have slunk away safely.”

  “Didn’t seem like that much trouble,” Holm grumbled. “Since the receptionist just let him in.”

  “Unfortunately,” I sighed. “Regardless, he was scared enough of getting caught that he was willing to kill someone to avoid that happening. I say we play up that fear. Figure out exactly what it is he’s afraid of and make him think that’s what’s going to happen if he doesn’t fess up.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” Holm replied. “Ready to go in?”

  “Ready,” I replied. Holm put his hand on the door handle and pushed it open. The moment he did, I saw Andre go rigid, putting on a tough face as though he hadn’t just been panicking a moment earlier.

  “Hello, Andre,” I greeted the man as Holm and I stepped into the room and sat down in front of him.

  “What do you want?” he asked right away before I’d even had a chance to say anything other than “hello.” I looked closely into his eyes. He was putting on a tough front, but his shoulders were hunched and stiff, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He was nervous and digging for information.

  “What do you think we want?” I threw his question back at him as I set the tablet down on the table. I didn’t turn it on, but his eyes flicked to it immediately, his throat bobbing as he swallowed at the sight of it. “You’ve committed a lot of errors in the past few days, Andre, made a lot of mistakes. Do you want to talk about some of those mistakes?”

  “Go to hell,” he snarled at me in response. That was good. It meant that he couldn’t think of any reasonable defense and was already resorting to petty insults.

  “Your first mistake,” I turned the tablet on without acknowledging his barb, “
was getting involved with these traffickers in the first place. You’re based out of California, right? We were a little confused about the connection between there and Aruba, but it’s all becoming clear to us pretty quickly.”

  I wasn’t being entirely honest since we didn’t know exactly how everything was connected. Really, I was just dropping locations to see how Andre might respond, and he didn’t disappoint. He clamped his mouth shut the moment I mentioned California, and his fists clenched the more I disclosed little details.

  “Your second mistake was running.” I sighed as I leaned back in my chair. “I mean, the crime was bad enough, but resisting arrest always makes the sentence worse. Everyone knows that. Judges hate that kind of thing.” I turned to Holm. “What do you think? Double the sentence?”

  “It’s hard to say,” he mused as he followed my lead, shaking his head. “But I know whatever sentence he gets is bound to be a lot worse after what happened today.”

  “Well, that goes without saying,” I scoffed, chancing a glance at Andre out of the corner of my eye. He had frozen solid, and even the mean scowl on his face had crumbled into a weak grimace. It looked like I had been right, and we were chipping away at his confident facade. “I mean attempted murder? Against a defenseless young girl and a pregnant woman? The judge is going to have a field day. I’m thinking life, personally. Maybe even the death penalty--”

  Andre gasped aloud at the term, and I knew we’d gotten him. So that was what he was so afraid of. That was the reason he’d gone through the effort of trying to permanently silence Gabby. He’d been so scared that her testimony would lead to his own death if he were caught.

  Ironically, he’d possibly sealed his own fate by trying to kill her.

  “You look a little pale, Andre,” I said to him in mock concern. “Anyway, where were we? Right, we were just about to talk about what happened earlier today. Or would you prefer to start with what happened back on the ship? We caught you on camera, you know?” I tapped my finger against the tablet screen for emphasis. “It’s amazing what technology can do nowadays.” I tapped my finger against the tablet screen for emphasis. “There are cameras everywhere on that ship, and we caught some pretty damning footage of you doing some pretty suspicious things there.”

  I picked the tablet up and opened it up to the video in question. Hayes had done an excellent job of splicing everything together so that it clearly showed Andre lurking outside the bathroom before running off and then later, in the atrium being rough with one of the victims before she collapsed. Rather than watch the video myself, though, I focused on Andre’s face as I played the security footage for him. The effect was immediate, with Andre becoming visibly more distressed as the video played.

  Once it was over, I set the tablet down.

  “So why don’t we have a talk?” I looked him in the eyes, my tone low and serious. “And don’t try to tell us you have no idea what we’re talking about because we’re well beyond that point. We have you right here on the boat, and we caught you red-handed attempting to silence one of the victims.”

  “Why should I say anything?” he snapped, his voice quavering like a frightened child’s. “I’m going to get the death penalty, anyway. Screw you!”

  “Because maybe there’s a way to save yourself,” I retorted. “Like I said earlier, in the end, the sentence is really up to the judge’s discretion. Judges hate when criminals do stupid things to land themselves in even more trouble after they’ve already messed up, but they generally like it when they cooperate with investigations and do what they can to make amends.”

  “You’re saying…” Andre muttered warily. “You’re saying that if I talk, then I won’t get the death penalty?” He stumbled over the words as though he could barely even stand to say them out loud.

  If nothing else, it was obvious that Andre was afraid of dying. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure that the death penalty even applied in a case like this since he hadn’t actually succeeded in killing Gabby. Then again, I supposed in a way he could be held responsible for the deaths of the dozens of other victims on the ship. Either way, I wasn’t about to correct him.

  “That’s a definite possibility,” I replied vaguely. “All I know is that, as the acting agent on this case, if and when I’m called to the stand to testify, the judge will almost certainly ask me how you behaved during the course of the investigation. Really, it’s up to you whether I tell him that you cooperated or that you refused.”

  Andre stared back at me for a long, tense moment before he finally sighed and looked down at the table in defeat.

  “Okay,” he mumbled. “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Let’s start from the beginning,” I replied. “What is this group that you’re a part of? How long have you been doing this?”

  “This?” he repeated. “You mean moving drugs? I dunno. A year maybe?”

  “And all that time, you’ve been using human drug mules to move your wares?” I asked. The term tasted bitter as I said it, and I had to fight to maintain my stoic composure.

  “Yeah.” Andre shrugged. “It’s easier than trying to get it through other ways. Cops check your bags. but they don’t check other people.”

  “Right,” I replied flatly as I thought to bring up something I’d noticed earlier. “Do you only use women as mules?”

  “I guess,” he replied with uncertainty. “We’ve used a few guys too, but women are just easier to get our hands on, you know? We already have a lot of them around working for us.”

  Fury rose in me again as I heard him nonchalantly talk about “getting his hands on” women as though he were talking about objects and not living humans. This man really felt no remorse about anything he had done and was talking to us purely to save his own skin.

  “And where do you get these women?” I asked.

  “Just around,” Andre replied with another shrug, as though he wasn’t discussing something completely heinous. “Off the street, mostly. Runaways, homeless chicks, junkies. People that nobody’s going to miss.”

  “And what exactly do you do with them?” I trudged on. Really, I’d prefer to be almost anywhere else than listening to this human pile of trash explain all the awful ways he abuses his victims, but I needed to get to the bottom of this.

  “Pimp them out, mostly,” Andre replied. “Unless they’ve got a passport, of course. Those are rare, though. Not a lot of girls out there rich enough to have a passport but still messed up enough to end up on the street.”

  “Why is the passport important?” I asked him, even though we’d already known the answer to that for a while.

  “They’re useless for transporting the drugs unless they have one,” Andre explained. “They need an American passport to get back into the country. When we find one that has that kind of document, we usually send them straight to the boats. We make more money that way than we do making them work the streets.”

  “And that’s what you did to Gabby,” I concluded, bringing the conversation back to her.

  “Who?” Andre frowned at me in confusion. “Oh, Black Hair, the one in the hospital. Yeah, that’s what happened.”

  I struggled to maintain my composure. Was he messing with me, or did he honestly not remember the name of the girl he’d abused and then tried to murder? Either way, he was pissing me off, and I fought the urge to deck him across the face right now.

  “And that’s why you were at the hospital today,” I accused him, unable to keep the contempt I felt toward him out of my voice fully. “You wanted to silence her before she had a chance to speak to us.”

  “Well, yeah,” Andre scoffed as though it should have been obvious. “I couldn’t let that little girl squeal and mess everything up for me!”

  “Well, you were too late,” Holm interjected. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was as done with Andre’s crap as I was. “We’d already spoken to her. So you went and made things worse for yourself for no reason.”

  Andre gaped back at him, hi
s mouth opening and closing like a fish’s. “She should have just died like the rest of them,” he muttered under his breath.

  “You really are a monster, aren’t you?” I asked him, shaking my head as I did. By this point, I was already well aware that Andre was scum, but to think that he would so brazenly make a statement like that right in front of us. “On that note, would you care to explain to us just what happened on the ship? I’m assuming that you didn’t mean for the victims to die since that probably wasn’t very profitable for you.”

  “I have no idea what happened,” he grumbled, his face twisting into a scowl. “I’ve done tons of trips just like this. Never had anything like this happening. Heck, I didn’t even know it was the drugs, at first, not until all the girls started dying and no one else. That’s when I knew that something must have gone wrong and decided to lie low until we got back to shore.”

  “Maybe it had something to do with the fact that you wouldn’t let them eat,” I suggested, recalling what Bonnie had told us about the effect that stomach acid might have had on the drug packets.

  “Huh?” Andre stared at me in confusion. “What does that have to do with anything? That’s never been a problem before.”

  “You mean you always starve your victims?” Holm glared at Andre. “Even when it will take days for the ship to get back to shore?”

  “Yeah, so what?” Andre scoffed in response. “A couple of days without food won’t kill them. They’re carrying thousands of dollars worth of product!”

  “And the drugs are coming in from Aruba?” I changed the subject. I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything he said anymore, but I still felt a jolt of anger with every disgusting, cruel thing that came out of his mouth. I wanted to get to the point and get the information we needed so Holm and I could toss him back in a cell where he belonged.