by Nevada Barr
“You look like shit,” Clare said kindly.
“It wasn’t a bullet,” Anna volunteered. “It was a chunk of Dougie’s rib.”
“God! I hope they loaded you up with antibiotics,” Clare said. “Have you called your husband?”
Anna hadn’t. She’d been awake between the anesthesia and the nap—the doctor had told her about the bone fragment. She’d told him she’d fallen while running along the river walk, tumbled down the rocky side toward the river, and felt something gouge into her. He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t seem to believe much of what his patients told him and had neither the interest nor the time to try to ferret out the truth. There’d been time to call Paul then, but she hadn’t gotten up the nerve.
“You want to call him now?” Clare asked.
“In a bit,” Anna said.
“Is he going to be pissed?” Clare asked.
“In a word,” Anna said. “What’s happening with everything?” she asked to change the subject. “I take it you aren’t going to be arrested for murder.”
Clare didn’t laugh. “Believe it or not, it was a close thing. Cops—all cops—hate to be wrong. I was interrogated for over six hours. They stopped short of waterboarding, but just barely. You can’t believe how bad they wanted to get me on something. I have to go back for another ‘session’ tomorrow.”
“The death of the police chief and his minions?”
“It looks like I’ll get a pass on that. I guess the brotherhood breaks down with corrupt locals and federal agents. They’ll leave me alone if I keep my mouth shut. The statement given to the newspapers was that the girls had been kidnapped by a person or persons unknown and that I found them locked in the storage garage behind Bonne Chance. The ‘unsub’ ”—Clare gave a wry smile at the jargon—“is suspected of setting fire to the warehouse to destroy evidence.” Clare sat again. Her eyes never off the three children for long, she watched them dancing the dog around the pitcher. “The police came when the fire trucks did. They got a guy driving a van that they think was the van they were going to transport the kids in. The FBI grabbed him, and maybe he’ll talk. Nobody wanted to tell me much. I know the other children were taken to a shelter. They’ll try to find their parents but aren’t hopeful. Most of them were probably sold rather than kidnapped, and most of them are from out of the country. The two older girls who were watching Vee and the littlest kids were graduates of the whorehouse and shouldn’t face any kind of prosecution.”
“The policemen and Dougie’s bodies burned?”
Clare nodded. “Yes, but they’ll still probably be able to identify them. The fire department got the fire out fairly fast, from what I hear. I don’t know what will be said of police participation. The agents who talked with me don’t want to make too much of it yet. They want the man called the Magician. Evidently he’s the core of the operation, him and two others they know of. David—” At the sound of their father’s name, both Vee and Dana looked up hopefully, and Anna guessed Clare hadn’t told them he was dead yet.
“David was working with the FBI to find this Magician. He was doing everything he could to get Dana and Vee—and Aisha—back.” This comment was for the three little girls, Anna guessed, so they would feel better about their father. After what they had suffered, it would be a comfort to know their daddy had never abandoned them.
“Was that why your house—” Anna began, but Clare shook her head fractionally and looked at the girls. She gave them a smile. They went back to their game.
Clare pulled her chair up close to the bedside and partially pulled the curtain between her and the children. Leaning her elbows on Anna’s bed she said, in a voice scarcely louder than a sigh, “Yes. That’s why the house was bombed. The FBI said David had told them a container holding illegal aliens was arriving in the harbor. He gave them the wrong dock number, and by the time they got there it was empty. They thought it was an honest mistake.”
“You don’t?” Anna asked and was shushed though she hadn’t said anything alarming.
Clare went on in a faint whisper. “I think Aisha was arriving in that container. That’s why David and Jalila rushed out to meet it. I think he wanted time to get her away before the FBI arrived. He lied so well the Feds didn’t get there till after Dougie and Blackie had come and gone—there to harvest children. I think there were dead children in the container and Blackie and Dougie took them.”
“Why?” Anna asked, genuinely confused. The obvious and odious answer clicked in her brain, and she wished she hadn’t asked.
“Not that—God, at least I hope not that,” Clare said, reading Anna’s look of revulsion. “It’s possible they switched Dana and Vee with the corpses. If the children weren’t dead, I don’t think they would have killed them.”
“Unless they were too ‘broken’ to be of any value,” Anna said.
“God,” Clare said again. Shaking the idea from her as she might shake a spider from her hair, she went on. “The agent who talked with me did say they thought some men had followed David and Jalila to his apartment. Probably because they figured out David was exposing them. They killed Jalila and left her corpse in David’s apartment so it would look like a domestic thing—David, me, and the lover. Then put David back in bed and fired the house. That’s when I think they put the dead children in the house and took Dana and Vee to cover their losses.”
“Why—” Anna began, but Clare held up a hand, stopping her.
“We’re never going to know why they did what to whom, why they carted bodies all over hell and gone, unless Blackie tells us. My guess is Blackie and Dougie were trying to cover their tracks at the behest of their boss, who knew the Feds were closing in.”
For a while Anna digested the information. She hoped Blackie would cooperate with the FBI, hoped he would finger the rest of the ring, but had a feeling he might not live long enough to do it. Even if he lived and talked, Anna doubted he knew who the Magician was. That this creature was still out in the world sickened her. After a while she nodded toward the curtain. “Are the girls . . . okay?”
Clare nodded. “So far as it goes,” she said tersely. “Vee and Aisha were in the nursery. It had been on Bourbon Street, but when an agent got too close, they moved to the fancy house. The littlest were saved for special occasions.”
Anna waited.
“Medicinal uses,” Clare said.
It took a second or two, but Anna got it. It was still believed in many parts of the world that sex with very young virgins cured AIDS and other STDs. This time it was she who called upon the Almighty: “God.”
“Or not,” Clare said.
Clare was but inches from Anna’s face, breathing on her. Something was wrong, different. “You don’t smell like an ashtray!” Anna exclaimed.
“Clare Sullivan, mother of two—now three—doesn’t smoke,” Clare said evenly.
“And Jordan?”
Clare winked solemnly. “He may sneak a fag now and then.” With that she stood and shook out her skirts. “We should go. Give you some privacy to call your husband. Besides, the four of us need some serious nap time.” To Anna’s surprise, Clare leaned down and kissed her on the cheek before she left.
For a while, Anna stared at the phone beside the bed as if it were a snake about to bite her. It crossed her mind just not to tell Paul anything, but, as a good and attentive husband, he was bound to notice a new vicious scar on her middle. Then she thought of lying to him, feeding him the same line she did the doctor.
She was more afraid of losing him than of anything she’d ever been afraid of in her life. He would forgive her. Not only was he a good man, but he was, after all, in the business of forgiveness. Technically, the only promise she’d broken was to tell him beforehand if she planned on doing anything risky, but love wasn’t about the technicalities. It was about the totality of who one was and the respect for the totality of the beloved. Anna had not been open or forthright. She’d let in the creeping darkness of half-truths, evasions, and secrets.
She’d broken trust. That sort of break was long in the mending.
She picked up the phone and set it on her lap. Steeling herself, she dialed his number. When he picked up she told him everything, every law broken, every lie by omission, every move she’d made. Then she shut up.
And listened to the silence.