by Dakan
"No worries, hon," said Chloe. She took the bottle of Jim Beam from its brown paper bag and unscrewed the top.
"Why're we drinking?" asked Bee.
"We're not," said Chloe, even as she took a gulp from the bottle and sloshed the fiery liquid around in her mouth. She spat it out into the bushes and then poured half the bottle's contents after it. "We're having a party."
"Gotcha," said Bee, drawing in a deep breath and then another before taking the bottle from Chloe's hand. She took a sip and sloshed it around in her mouth for a second before spitting it out with a grimace. "Yuck!"
Chloe reclaimed the bottle and then took Bee by the arm. "Come on honey, pretend like you're having a good time, ok?"
"Ok!" said Bee, giving a fake, schoolgirlish giggle.
Arm in arm they staggered up the stairs of the guest house and through the door. The Frenchwoman was still behind the desk, still working on a crossword puzzle. She looked at them in mild astonishment, but smiled.
Chloe figured that she'd already made her for a bit of a tramp when she checked in with Paul earlier. The whiskey and the way she held Bee close against her would help reinforce that idea in the woman's mind and force out any other suspicions she might have.
"Hello again," the woman said.
"Heya," said Chloe with a wink and a leering smile. Bee giggled again, too loudly and, to Chloe's ears, too fake but she didn't think the receptionist would notice or care.
They walked right past the front desk without breaking stride and into the back of the building, heading for the stairs. Once they were out of sight from the lobby, Chloe motioned for Bee to stay still and quiet while she marched up the stairs, making enough noise that she was sure the Frenchwoman could hear her. Then she crept back down and led Bee back to Raquel's room.
Chapter 08
51
INSIDE, the room was just as she and Paul had left it. Chloe had only gone in far enough to check Raquel's pulse and feel the cold, clammy skin. She'd known then and there that it was a murder scene, and that she was in no way prepared to investigate it. More importantly, she hadn't wanted to leave any evidence that might connect her or Paul to the crime scene, so they'd left as quickly as they'd come in. Now, snapping on a pair of latex gloves that Bee had brought, she had no more excuses. It was time to investigate.
Unfortunately, she had absolutely no idea how to investigate a crime scene. She didn't even like cop shows, and the few movies and books she'd read on the subject all glossed over the boring details of looking for clues.
Sadly, no montage of thoughtful scenes and dramatic music was going to save her tonight. Hoping that Bee might have a better idea on how to proceed, she turned to her friend for support.
Bee stood by the door, stiff and scared as she stared directly at Raquel's corpse. Chloe had last seen that look on her face in a squalid little motel room in San Jose, and there had been a body there, too. She knew that Bee remained obsessed and on some deep level very disturbed by what had happened that night. Maybe bringing her to another murder scene hadn't been the best plan Chloe ever had, but there was no one else.
"Are you ok?" she asked Bee.
The small woman clutched her laptop to her chest and nodded. "Yeah. It's just so like..."
"I know, I know," said Chloe, coming over and giving Bee a hug. "But it's not the same. It's not. We didn't have anything to do with this. But now we have to find out what happened to her."
"Got it," said Bee, resolve returning to her voice. "Sure thing. Not a problem."
"Good," said Chloe, "Because I have not one fucking clue as to what we should do next."
Bee stared around the dim room and then un-shouldered her backpack and placed it on the floor at her feet.
She pulled out a flashlight and slowly, not moving from her spot by the door, started to scan every inch of the room. Chloe noticed that heavy curtains had been closed across the room's sole window and decided to take a chance. They didn't have that much time. She flipped the light switch.
Bee jumped as the room lit up. "Hey!" she said in an angry whisper.
"Sorry," said Chloe.
"Ok, ok. But don't do anything else yet. I want to preserve the scene." She put the flashlight away and pulled out a small but very expensive digital video camera. Chloe watched as Bee walked from one side of the room to the other, panning slowly in every direction. She noticed that Bee avoided filming Raquel's corpse until there was no more ignoring her.
Raquel lay face down on the bed, her head turned away from the door. Although it had been hard to see in the dim room when Chloe first found her, with the lights on it was easy to discern that there was in fact clotted blood in her hair on the back of her head. None on the bed itself, though. Chloe moved around to the other side of the bed, where Bee was squinting in discomfort as she videotaped Raquel's face. It was a mass of bruising, with two black eyes and a badly bruised cheek. Her dead eyes stared back at the camera.
"Watch out there," said Bee as Chloe approached the body. "There's some powder or sand on the floor here."
Chloe looked down and saw a scattering of white sand on the rug. She bent down and touched it with her finger. "Beach sand," she told Bee.
Chapter 08
52
Bee just nodded as she panned up and down the dead body. Raquel wore stylish red shorts and a tight black tube top. She didn't have any shoes on. Chloe scanned the room, looking for signs of footwear that she might've worn to the beach. She saw a suitcase propped up against the bathroom door, but a quick check revealed a small padlock. Chloe estimated that she could pick it in under a minute, but she'd come back to that.
"Do you mind if I check inside the dresser?" she asked Bee, who had just finished videotaping Raquel and was now headed for the bathroom.
"Just be careful with prints," she said without looking up from her camera's display.
Chloe gingerly opened the armoire cabinet, revealing a TV that looked untouched. The drawers below were also empty. She hadn't even had time to unpack, and there were no shoes, sandals or footwear of any kind in sight. And there was no closet. She bent down low and peered under the bed. "Any shoes in there?" she asked Bee.
"Uh-uh," Bee replied as she walked back into the bedroom, closing the camera's display. "Nothing in here at all."
"She didn't even unpack," mused Chloe.
"Or the killer took her stuff," said Bee.
"Why take her shoes though?"
"Some weird foot fetish thing?"
"Maybe," said Chloe, although she didn't think this was about sex. Raquel was a good-looking woman, and if the murderer had a thing for her, she doubted he'd have left her clothes on like that after he went to the trouble of beating her to death.
Chloe went back to the body and looked at Raquel again. Her knuckles on both hands were bruised, and there were scratches on her arms. "She fought back, whoever it was." She bent forward for a closer look at the hands. She didn't quite have the nerve to touch them yet. She smelled something then. Not rotting yet, but salt water. She touched the sheets around the body but couldn't feel anything through the latex gloves. She pulled off one glove and touched the sheets. Damp. But only around the lower half of the body. Check that. Only around her shorts, which were soaked through. But her shirt was dry.
"Check this out, Bee," she said, turning to see what her friend was doing. Bee was using her magnifying glass to look at the window frame. "What're you doing?" she asked.
"I think somebody recently unscrewed this window," said Bee. "And then screwed it back in again."
"What's out there?" Chloe asked as she came to see what Bee meant. She saw that all four screws had been undone recently, or at least since they'd been painted over. She inched the shade up a bit and peered outside. A back alley, dark, with a fence across the way. Bee had picked up a fleck of paint with her tweezers and showed it to her. Chloe nodded.
"Ok," Chloe said, turning back toward the body. "No shoes. Shorts are wet. Sand on the floor. No signs of s
truggle when she was obviously in a hell of a fight. No way she was killed here."
"She was at the beach and someone attacked her," said Bee. "And then brought her back to her room through Chapter 08
53
the window. That's kinda weird, isn't it?"
"That's fucked up is what that is," said Chloe. "Why would they do that? One look at her and you can see she didn't die in her sleep."
"I heard sometimes that bruises don't show up right away when you're dead. Maybe they didn't know how bad she looked?"
"Maybe... but that doesn't sound too likely, does it? And what's with the shoes?" Chloe went over to the suitcase and got out her lock picks. "While I'm opening this, do you want to take fingerprints or something?"
"I...um...I couldn't find any graphite. I told you."
"Oh, well, ok. Maybe you could scrape under her nails for tissue for a DNA test?" suggested Chloe, sure she'd seen that in a movie.
"Do you know how to do a DNA test?" Bee asked.
"No. How hard can it be? We'll check on the Internet." She knew this sounded pretty farfetched, but she wanted to cover as many bases as possible. Maybe she could use a police contact to do it or something like that.
"Ok," said Bee, although she didn't actually move any closer to the body.
It ended up taking just over a minute to open the lock, but only because her picks were a little big for something that small. Inside she found clothes, toiletries and two pairs of shoes and some sandals, none of which had sand on them or were damp. She unpacked everything in the case, placing it in neat piles on the floor. Chloe felt around the edges and the interior, looking for the hidden storage space she assumed had to be there. She had them in all of her luggage.
And there it was, tucked into the base of the suitcase, built into the actual plastic frame. She used the edge of her pocket knife to lever the small compartment open and was surprised to find it entirely empty. She found it very unlikely that Raquel hadn't found any use for the hiding spot. As she carefully replaced Raquel's clothes exactly where she'd found them, and locked the case again, she realized that she probably wasn't the first person to do that tonight. The killer had probably already done the same thing, except he got all the good stuff and took it with him.
"Fuck," she said, looking over at Bee, who was using an Exacto knife to scrape under one of Raquel's fingers, depositing the contents in a small ziplock bag.
"What?" asked Bee.
"There's nothing fucking here," she said exasperated. "No phone, no computer, no PDA. Nothing. Whoever did this already took everything good."
"Does that mean we can leave?" asked Bee.
"Yeah," she said. "Just as soon as we search every last goddamned inch of this place one more time.
They did just that. Bee used an RF detector to look for bugs and hidden cameras. Chloe mentally kicked herself, realizing that they should have swept for bugs before they started talking. Bee probably would've thought of that if she hadn't been so freaked out by the whole dead body thing. Not that Chloe could blame Chapter 08
54
her. She was pretty fucking freaked out as well. Chloe tapped and prodded at every surface that might hide something. A check of the mattress revealed no cuts or sewn seams, so she assumed there was nothing in there either.
After half an hour she finally said, "Fuck it. Let's go."
Bee, who'd taken apart the smoke detector, looking for cameras, said, "This thing's clean. Do you want me to put a camera in here?"
Chloe looked at her, surprised. "You brought a camera that'll fit that thing?"
Bee smiled. "I always have a camera that'll fit things like this. Do you want a bug in the clock-radio too?"
"How long?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe less since I've already got this thing open."
"Let's do it," said Chloe. "They say the villain always returns to the scene of the crime."
"I think that's only in movies," said Bee.
"That's ok; what I've seen in movies is all we've had going for us so far anyway."
Chapter 09
55
Chapter 09
"YEAH, yeah, I get all the anti-corporate, anarchist bullshit. Yadda, yadda, yadda," said Eddie. "But can you please just explain to me how the hell any of this is worth my time?"
Isaiah had outlined his plan in detail from beginning to end, just as he had for Paul. Eddie and his companion (whose name turned out to be Marco) sat quietly and listened. Marco had tried to fire up his laptop to take notes, but Amelia had asked him not to, for security's sake. He had shrugged and shut it off, and still hadn't said a word to anyone. Paul had watched Eddie as his attention had floated around the room, maybe listening to Isaiah, maybe not. Now he'd apparently had enough theory and wanted some practical examples. Paul didn't blame him.
"We have a very specific plan in mind. A plan that will net each participating Crew millions of dollars."
"And you need to form this alliance thing to pull it off ?" asked Eddie, the mention of millions having obviously regained his interest.
"What we want do to is something akin to paradigm ju jitsu. We want to use the corporate power structure to take down the corporate power structure, and forming our own corporation is the first step."
"There are a thousand different advantages and we can go into details if you like, but none of this means anything if we don't have a goal. A target. An enemy we want to take down. To extend the jujitsu metaphor, setting up the shadow corporation is like buying our gear and training to fight. To put it into practice, we need an opponent. We need a corporation to go after."
"We steal from big companies all the time," said Eddie. "What's new there?"
"I'm not talking about stealing from companies. I'm talking about destroying them. Shaking them to their foundations until they crumble, and yes, making a bunch of money for ourselves in the process. If money's your goal, Eddie, then trust me; you'll make more working with us on this than you'll ever see on your own.
Just like I'll make more working with you than I'd ever see on our own. Pooling our resources and focusing our energies through the shadow corporation lets us overcome challenges that are otherwise insurmountable for each individual crew."
"I've heard of Crews going this way," Eddie scoffed, settling back into his chair. "Trying to run a gang like a business, with board meetings and reports and rules of order and all that shit. It doesn't help. It just confuses people and they end up making dumb mistakes."
"Don't misunderstand me. I'm not talking about forming a real business with any of you. Not at all. My Crew doesn't run like some goddamned corporation and it never will. To hell with corporate structure. All I want is corporate power for my own damn self. For all of us. And I've got just the candidate in mind for our first victim."
"It's a holding company based in the Caymans but run out of Miami that you've never heard of. Nor do they want you to ever hear about them. They're not publicly traded. They don't advertise. They do control hundreds of other, equally unknown corporations and front companies, and they're in the business of making lots and lots of money by one of the oldest, nastiest methods on the planet. They're in the slavery business."
"You're kidding," said Eddie. "There's no slavery anymore."
"What world are you living in, fella?" Winston chimed in. "It never went away."
Chapter 09
56
"No, it never did," agreed Amelia. "It might go by different names - forced labor, indentured servitude, sweatshops. But it's still very much a problem."
"I'm not sure how it's my problem though," said Eddie.
"It's only your problem if you want it to be, but I would suggest you stop thinking of it in such simple terms.
We're talking about not a problem but an opportunity. A chance to both do some good and make some serious money."
"Ok, I'll try to look at it your way," said Eddie. "Assuming the money really is what you're saying it will be.
What's the plan then?"
"We're not going into any specifics on the plan. We're not going to tell you the name of the company, none of that until we all agree to work together and form the shadow corporation. What I can do is give you a broad overview. This holding company, let's call them Company X, makes most of its money importing people from Southeast Asia and Africa to work in sweatshops here in the states. They charge the workers a huge fee to come over and then pay them so little for their work that it's impossible for them to ever pay Company X
back. The real money of course comes from the employers, who pay money to Company X to provide the so-called "workers," or, to call them by their true names, slaves."
"There's always stuff like this on the news," said Eddie. "What makes these guys so special? And you know, what I never understood is why the people don't get up and leave if the work's so shitty."
"They don't leave because they're locked in and under guard at all times. They're very literally slaves - fed just enough to keep them pro ductive, stored in overcrowded barracks when they sleep, and beaten or killed if they try to leave. Women are typically subjected to rape by the guards or forced into prostitution, and forced to have abortions if they get pregnant.
"As for what makes Company X so nasty, well, there are a couple of factors. First of all, they're very, very good at it. They run slaves into places like Guam, the Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and other U.S.
protectorates so that companies can use the labor and still put "made in America" on the labels. They know all the right officials to pay off, including key congressmen and law enforcement officials. Hell, they've even got their own lobbyists in Washington. And why are they so well funded and organized? Because they have so many investors.
"Company X sells bonds to investors to cover their costs and purchase their slaves. Oh, you couldn't call up your broker and order some - they're only offered to a few thousand select customers who care a lot more about profits than about where those profits are coming from. The bonds have a phenomenal rate of return, sometimes as high as 50 percent for a short term investment. Most of these investors don't necessarily know they're supporting slavery, but they do know that they're turning a blind eye to something shady. And it's that kind of behavior we're going to punish."