“I’ve got to find some way get Alexeeva to tip the hand on Dagney. His interest in Moates’s Eternal Fund may be the best carrot I’ve got, and it may blur his vision just a bit in spite of recent events. He’s got a reason for eying this account. Maybe it’s an intense one. Moates may need him too for a cash infusion.”
“Ponzi schemes don’t usually last forever, but Moates is light on his feet, and I predict he’d be quick to come out swinging at anyone who bothers him,” Rose said. “He gets in much trouble, he’ll start challenging warrants.”
“I’m working to avoid some of that.”
“Given what you’re turning up about Alexeeva’s propensity for long games, I don’t know if he wants something in his back pocket or if he has immediate plans for Moates.”
“Let’s hope for immediate, but regardless of the goal, if I can get them in a dance, it gives me a way to sniff around Alexeeva’s operations with an eye toward finding his hidey holes.”
“So, get the conversations going, see what happens? Be careful.”
“Always.”
Chapter 28
When the burner rang the next day, I thought it was probably the Holsts calling for a progress report. I was wondering how I’d spin an account of shaking down Hollie King and Owen into assurances that I was gathering valuable intel, so I was a little slow to answer.
I discovered instead Grace had word that their counselor had decided, under prodding, that Dahlia was ready to talk to me about information I might need. They thought that I might be able to elicit information she wasn’t willing to share with others.
I had been spending the day scrolling information Jael had been churning up. It could certainly wait, so I agreed to meet mid-afternoon. They’d arranged to have the counselor come to them.
They had just moved to a new location, a borrowed apartment, because they’d grown afraid they were being watched at the local BnB where they’d spent several days.
Grace greeted me at the apartment door. She looked a little less emaciated than our last encounter, as if one daughter’s return had fed her a touch of new energy. She wasn’t fully restored, but her eyes were slightly less lost and sunken, her skin tone a little less ashen.
“How are you, Mr. Reardon?”
“Okay,” I said.
She showed me into a living room where a TV played an old movie, and Adam waited with a woman with straight, chin-length brown hair. She wore a simple and professional blue dress. Her arms and face were almost pale.
She wasn’t exuberant about seeing me but offered her hand in a cordial fashion with a polite smile.
“I’m Andrea Sims.”
“Pleased,” I said as a preamble to awkward silence.
Finally, after a bit of that, she put her hands together and the corners of her mouth ticked up in a polite and well-practiced smile.
“I don’t suppose there’s been time to fill you in on me,” she said. Her accent was soft and Southern, not a New Orleans accent. I couldn’t place where she was from.
“I’m a licensed professional counselor. I have specialized training in working with survivors of trauma, abuse, and betrayal, and I also work with patients experiencing anxiety and depression as well as behavioral issues. The Holsts have authorized me to talk to you about Dahlia, and they’ve filled me in about your…circumstances.”
I gave a nod.
“You should know we’re skirting the edge of reporting requirements, even with patient confidentiality protections. I understand there’s some concern over tipping your hand in your investigation.”
“That would be right.”
“You’re going to find Dahlia lacks specifics. Since her sister is now classified as missing, I don’t have true knowledge of a child abuse or child endangerment situation or even knowledge she’s alive. Police have an open file on her and the culprit you suspect has already been investigated. My wiggle room is limited, but I’m giving you as much leeway as possible.”
“Understood. We don’t have a direct tie to anyone on this, just a location where I found her, and the original phone calls, Mr. Holst’s word against the third party.”
Mostly true.
She nodded.
“I also want you to know I have a family. My first child just turned a year old, so I can empathize with your personal situation as well as the Holsts.”
“How are things going with Dahlia?”
“We’re making progress, building trust. I want to be careful that you don’t dredge up things she’s just learning to cope with or trigger a re-experiencing of trauma or open the door again to intrusive thoughts.”
“Has she been harmed?”
“Emotionally, yes. Has she been physically or sexually abused? No. That may come as a surprise, but she apparently was treated with a hands-off approach. The separation, the sense of loss and trust are severe, though.” She nodded toward the Holsts. “The family wants the missing girl back, but they want this daughter back as well from an emotional prison. We’re trying to get her there.”
“You understand the culprit we’re dealing with and the potential danger of reprisal?”
“Well, we’ve tried to minimize danger with this location. I’m sure you’re good at making sure you’re not followed.”
“Not as good as I once thought, but I’m pretty confident about today.”
“Great, other than that, I’m counting on you to keep me out of it.”
“It’s probably best if you don’t give me your business card. So, what can I ask and what are the trigger warnings?”
From the flash in her eyes, she didn’t like the way I said trigger.
“It would be better if you didn’t press too hard about things she’s experienced. She’s having bad dreams, and she’s perpetually afraid someone’s coming for her. We can summarize what we know up front and let you focus on information that might help you in locating Dagney.”
“Okay.”
“She hasn’t seen her sister in years. They were separated right after they were taken. If she’s had direct contact with the gentleman you have reason to suspect, she doesn’t remember it. She simply had a message for someone at the club and slipped in to deliver it.”
“Of course he’d be careful. Where’s she been kept?”
“Dahlia, here and there. I’m told you think she might have been out of the country for a while. She doesn’t know. Lately, she’s been moved a bit, usually apartments it seems. A lot of couches. I think they moved her to wherever they needed her. It seems she’s been used mostly as a messenger.”
“Street kid no one would pay a lot of attention to.”
“Exactly. Goes even to the attire you found her in and what she’s mentioned so far.”
“No indication of prostitution?”
“No. We don’t know about her sister of course.”
“Can we get started?”
“Let’s try this.”
She led me back to a bedroom where she tapped on the door.
“It’s Andrea.”
A sullen voice sounded a “come in” on the other side, and we walked in to Dahlia in jeans and a new tee shirt with a band that might have been popular, but I wasn’t sure. Arms folded, leaning against pillows, she looked weary and closed off. She was tapping keys on a gaming device. New magazines someone had thought might appeal to a teen rested beside her, and a plate with wadded fast food packages and a few remaining fries sat on a bedside table.
“You remember Mr. Reardon,” Andrea said.
“My white knight returns.”
A white rattan chair sat in a corner. I nodded toward it and ticked an eyebrow up at Andrea. She nodded, so I pulled it over to the edge of the bed.
“Can I talk to you a bit?”
“The brain wizard here must have okayed it, so I’m sure there’s no stopping you.”
Andrea took a seat at the foot of the bed and folded her hands on her lap.
“It’s to help your sister.”
“If she’s alive
. You may be looking for a corpse. They always told me, I did anything wrong, anything went wrong, she was dead. You might get us all killed doin’ it.”
“You been threatened?” I asked.
“You could say that.”
“This is territory that gets upsetting,” Andrea said.
“Ya think?” Dahlia asked.
“Andrea tells me you’ve been moved around a bit. You remember any addresses?”
“Think you’re going to find a landlord without a fuzzy memory?”
“I can try.”
“In the Quarter sometimes, then out and about. All over. I was in Westwego then 9th Ward a while. And Algiers. You ever been there?”
“It wasn’t my district. I went once to pick up a guy on a warrant. He had a lot of friends on his block. Got interesting, but that’s another story.”
“Nobody bothered the people I was with. I don’t think anybody would spill much to you.”
“So, you’ve been working pretty much as a messenger? Go between?”
She shrugged. “Something like that. Sometimes they’d just have me take pictures with a phone. One they’d had made special for me. Couldn’t call home.”
“You get much of a sense of what you were passing messages about?”
She folded her arms and pressed them into herself, taking an interest in her feet. “I was told not to ask questions. I’d go to rooms where a bunch of guys were working on computers.”
“If you can remember anything….”
“One time they were kind of excited about some black guys. One of them getting a sentence.”
“Drug dealer?”
“Yeah.”
“Hank Carner,” I said.
That recognition clicked, and she dropped the snark just a second.
“That sounds familiar.”
“Drug trafficker. Got a federal life sentence. Opened the door for some other entrepreneurs to step in.” The news had reached me up in David Wade about a year and a half earlier. He’d been a target of the feds for a long time. I’d worked cases that had ties to Carner. Gunplay and death were usually ancillary to drug trafficking.
He’d been nabbed not in a gun battle and not in a sting set to snare him. He’d taken a meeting with a guy in Texas that authorities there had under surveillance, passed the wrong suitcase at the wrong time, ill-advisedly handling it himself.
“So, they were excited by that? News he was caught?”
“Yeah,” she closed her eyes tight as if fighting to recall. “Kinda that they thought they knew who’d be stepping up.”
“Interesting. What else did you do?”
“Sometimes I was shuffling flash drives,” she said. “No idea what were on those.”
“If these guys couldn’t move data online without getting it noticed they wouldn’t be very good,” I said. “That can’t be all you did.”
She ticked her head in an “all right” acknowledgement in conjunction with a roll of the eyes.
“They’d send me over to guys who had places they wanted me to look around or post me to watch since I wouldn’t be noticed. Punk kid having a smoke.”
“What are we talking here?”
“Lots of places. Businesses sometimes. Warehouses. Places at the port.”
“You took pictures there?”
“Yeah, but they even had drones out there at times.”
“They mention cargo theft?”
She shrugged. “Didn’t share with me.”
“You were never asked to entertain clients?”
Andrea took a step toward me but didn’t interrupt.
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“Never said.”
“Never came up?”
Andrea put a hand on my shoulder at that point.
“Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough, though you know what they say about….”
“Were you ever used to calm other young people down?”
She shook her head.
“Never any heart to hearts?”
A no.
“Never just asked to show up and look well fed in front of other kids your own age?”
Andrea’s grip tightened.
A shrug from Dahlia. “That might have happened and I didn’t realize it. Shit.”
Andrea released her grip a little but didn’t let go.
“You’ve been shown his picture. You never saw Alexeeva before the other night?”
She looked down a bit and shook her head, letting just a bit of the façade slip.
“If I ever saw him, I don’t remember it.”
“You weren’t told to look for him at the club?”
“I was told to watch for a skinny guy to come out. I just got tired waiting.”
What a happy accident for me.
“Hear the name Ryan Moates?”
“Sorry.”
I looked up at Andrea, who still hovered near my shoulder.
“You haven’t seen your sister in all this time?”
“No?”
“No one mentioned her to you?”
“No. She never came up. I stopped asking. I just got desensitized to all of it, I guess. I’m sure Andrea here has a term for it.”
“Well thanks,” I said.
I let Andrea lead me back to the living room. The Holsts’ eyes looked deep and sunken with glimmers of hope in and around the haggard exhaustion.
“Did you learn anything?” Adam asked.
His wife put a hand on his forearm then clutched the fabric of his shirt.
“Nothing specific. There were some things I could glean. Alexeeva’s interested in who has money, possibly even money shipped in.”
“Nothing about Dagney’s whereabouts?” Grace asked. The glimmer glowed a little brighter.
I hated to throw water on it, but I shook my head. “Dahlia doesn’t know. This did sort of give me a line on some things, maybe something that will help one of the avenues we’re pursuing, but their purpose with her was mundane.”
I wished I could give them more, almost as much as I wished I had more definitive information about Juli. I could project my unease to the heights they were experiencing. Sleep if it came couldn’t provide any rest. The tight feeling in the stomach could never relax. The thoughts never stopped and the dreams were bad.
How could you rest, put your head on a comfortable pillow, close your eyes in peace if a loved one was out there somewhere being tortured? What right did you have to rest? To comfort? To respite?
I wished I had more, thought about mentioning more, but I didn’t want to over promise.
I said: “I’ll keep working.”
Chapter 29
If I was picking up anything from Dahlia’s account of her experiences, it was that Alexeeva was interested most in keeping an eye on people who had illegal money or who might be amassing interesting amounts of it. That further pointed at why he’d be interested in Moates and the Eternal Fund.
So, when Holton or Hollie showed up for her next assignation with Owen, Crystal had drawn him away. She found me at the door to the town house instead.
I was back in my suit, all shaved and proper, standing just under the eaves for the shade so I stayed crisp and didn’t break a sweat. I still wasn’t the sight she wanted to see. She’d hoped I’d gone away.
“I was wondering when you’d show up again.”
A couple of days after our past visit, she’d left a nondescript message in the in-box we’d set up for the business card I’d left, just as she’d promised. I’d been too busy to get back to her right away, but letting her stew hadn’t seemed like a bad idea.
She made no move to open the door, though she maintained a stern air. She wore a severe gray pants suit this afternoon, armor for tough meetings, I guessed. You could have chipped ice with the stiletto heels.
“Can we sit down and talk?”
She drew in a breath suggesting the demeanor was built on foundational Jell-O. I ticked my head toward the door. She didn’t let the demeanor d
o more than flicker, but she took out a key, unlocked, and we stepped inside. The living room was cool and a little dim with just the light from the windows. I had to hand it to Owen. He kept the place neat, and he was saving energy while he was away.
I offered up a silent prayer for the AC while she flicked a switch that awakened lamps in the living room and gestured toward an armchair. She dropped with her handbag onto the sofa, crossing her legs and leaning forward.
“Have anything for me, Mrs. King? May I call you Hollie?”
“I’d rather you not call me at all.”
I had put that one right over the plate for her, but she could have given me other suggestions or told me I could talk to her attorney. She was in the game, playing things cautious. Dirty hands lead to that.
“But I was in the neighborhood.”
“You waited a while to show up again,” she said.
“I knew complying with my requests might take a little while.”
My other distractions had been beneficial. She knew the approach we’d made had to be a little unorthodox and had probably hoped it would go away. Now, here I was to drill a hole in the bottom of that boat.
“You made demands,” she said. “Without any offers.”
“You know I can’t promise any deals that would hold up. You need the prosecutor in the room for that. Do you want that?”
“Should I call for my lawyer?”
“Last thing we want is to get you officially on the books. This goes well, you need to be able to parachute out. Not that you’re not a great catch, Hollie, but we’re trolling for other fish.”
She hesitated. She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t involved in the kind of crime stupid people pull. That would be me.
I’d hoped to offer a good reason for cooperation keeping her from getting cautious enough to demand something in writing. Cooperation needed to seem more desirable than the wise move.
“I’m not the one you’re after?”
A bit of hope appealed to her.
“Not you. Not Moates, though I assume you have some data for me.”
She touched her handbag, and when she noticed my warning expression she slowed. I didn’t really expect a polite little handgun, but I was prepared for that contingency.
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