by Paul Heald
She looked at him and, discerning no immediate threat, took a plate and sat down. If her presence were awkward to him, he gave no sign, and the meal passed without incident. She decided to say nothing to Brenda for the time being. She was happy, but her boyfriend was a shit. It was an old problem, but one that would resolve itself soon, as the American announced that he was departing for good. Despite his lack of evident ill will, Elisa made sure that she was never alone in the apartment with him again. He stayed three more days, either closeted with Brenda or typing furiously on his computer, never acknowledging that they had ever clashed.
Elisa doubted that he had said anything to Brenda, since she seemed utterly untroubled in her relationships with either her boyfriend or her flatmate. She did, however, give the impression that she and Jacob were sharing some sort of secret. Elisa caught them talking excitedly in hushed tones on several occasions, as if they were plotting something important. Their intimacy was not merely physical, and this was borne out by the length of their bedtime conversations every night. Once their lovemaking was over, they had a lot to talk about, and by the time Brenda’s confidante and coconspirator was gone, Elisa had gotten very tired of listening to Haydn.
Three days after the incident in the kitchen, Jacob left, failing to say good-bye to Elisa, but leaving a broken-hearted Brenda once more sobbing in her bedroom.
“I’m going to America,” she said when her roommate knocked softly and entered her room. “He says he doesn’t want me to, but I’ve got to see him again.” She sniffed and clutched her pillow tightly to her chest. “He can’t stop me from coming.”
“Why doesn’t he want you to come?” Elisa was sympathetic, but at the same time she rejoiced that the affair seemed to be over and that she would not have to hurt her friend by revealing what kind of a person her lover was.
“He said that I wouldn’t like it in the South, that he was really busy, that he’d be traveling, that it was too expensive.” She sniffed. “Just a bunch of vague bullshit.”
Elisa hesitated. She did not want to play her trump card. What if Brenda did not believe the story of her breakfast encounter with Jacob? What if she were blamed for Jacob’s abrupt departure? “Do you think he might have someone else in Georgia? He’s a really handsome guy. There’s got to be plenty of girls chasing after him,” Elisa finally ventured.
Brenda looked down. “Maybe. There was this girl in some of his Facebook posts.”
“You know,” Elisa said as she sat down next to her friend, “it would look pretty desperate to fly to America and embarrass him, especially if he’s trying to choose between you and someone else. Why don’t you just let things be for a bit? He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would react well to a lot of pressure.” She handed over a tissue. “If you play it cool for a while, good things are bound to happen.”
Brenda blew her nose and then nodded reluctantly. “Maybe. I get it. Being clingy never works.”
Elisa gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze and breathed a sigh of relief that she did not have to dump even more sorrow on her broken-hearted friend.
XVI.
TEAMWORK
Melanie hung up the phone and stared out her office window. A spring rain had washed away Atlanta’s usual yellow haze, and in the distance she could see the top of Stone Mountain, the massive pluton that the Klan had once used as a semaphore station for cross burnings. From her vantage point on the twentieth floor, the city looked densely green, apparently covered by a thick canopy of trees, but she knew from her morning commute that asphalt was really the dominant underlayment of the landscape. The vista was just an inviting illusion.
Unfortunately, the owner of the website posting Diana Cavendish’s photos appeared to be just as illusive. Professor Hopkins had just informed her of his dead-end attempt to track down the operator of Mygirlfriendsbikini.com, and she was tempted to ask her former FBI boyfriend for a little more help. But if the price for information about the disconnected Arkansas phone number was their upcoming dinner, what would he want in return for tracking down a website owner? She had already mentally taken sex completely off the table, despite the fact that months had passed since she had been with someone. The one and only booty call given to Sammy Goodson after their break-up had been a disaster. An hour in the shower had been insufficient to scour away the memory of a smile that had shown he was getting just what he wanted and giving her nothing she needed.
Nonetheless, a grown-up should be able to ask a favor of another grown-up without offering an excessive quid pro quo. The visit to Vidalia to interview the parents of Jacob Granville had piqued her interest in the Cavendish case, and she really wanted to track down the mysterious pictures of Diana. Granville’s parents clearly believed their son was still alive, and the we he used in his last email suggested Diana might be with him. Had they staged a crime and run off to Mexico? If so, why? Or had he killed her and was sending bogus messages to cover up his crime? Of course, even that scenario required some evidence of a motive for killing in the first place. She doubted the victim’s new haircut had provided adequate provocation, but you never knew.
The other clues offered by the Granvilles were similarly tantalizing. What was Jacob’s interest in the Arkansas congressional delegation? Perhaps the reason his name had been entered in the FBI database had nothing to do with the disappearance of Diana Cavendish at all. Online sources had revealed one Arkansas senator and one representative on the committee overseeing the FBI and the CIA, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
The YouTube evidence was even more opaque. Although the Granvilles had retained all their son’s papers, Melanie remembered the uploader as j-gville and easily found his YouTube channel. Jacob had uploaded two videos before his disappearance, and both were confusing. The first video was shot in a trailer, apparently in Georgia, if the Braves T-shirt worn by the primary interviewee was any indication.
“My name is Moussa Ibrahim.” A slim African man spoke shyly into the camera in broken English, as if he were somehow embarrassed by his tale. “I farmed the cotton in Mali. I come to America with my son last year.”
In fits and starts, he explained that he had worked the family cotton farm for years, barely surviving in good years and nearly starving in bad ones. Eventually, the price paid for his crop was insufficient to satisfy his creditors and feed his family, so he was forced to sell the land and move to the city. The pitiful proceeds of the transaction provided food for a couple of months before he, his wife, and their three children were reduced to begging in the streets and sleeping in a corrugated lean-to on the edge of a brutal shantytown. His large dark eyes glistened as he related how his wife was the first to die, her horrible hacking cough finally silenced in the feverish endgame of tuberculosis. His youngest daughter followed her mother, taken by a bout of dysentery that soon killed her older sister. Only the son remained.
“This is my son, Adama,” Moussa managed with a weak smile.
The camera panned across the trailer to a child sitting in a chair and coloring fiercely in a book on the kitchen table. His legs were bent and twisted, encased by a pair of braces rhythmically knocking against the table.
“I carried him on the plane to here. He can walk better now.” Moussa explained how a generous émigré uncle had finally responded to their plight. His expression of gratitude to the US for welcoming him and giving his son hope did nothing to lessen the impact of what Melanie had seen.
The second video was equally compelling.
“My name is Marisol Fuentes, and I live in Sabinas, Mexico.” A thin young woman choked back a sob even as she started to speak. Her large brown eyes only occasionally glanced up at the camera as she told her tale.
She worked in a textile factory just south of the border, where the maquiladoras took advantage of zero tariffs and near-zero enforcement by the Mexican government of its own labor and environmental laws. She touched a bruise on the side of her face and explained how sickness had forced her to miss a da
y of work at the factory. Despite the fact that she had worked the previous fifteen days consecutively, her foreman had shown up at her tiny apartment. Without a husband to protect her and her twelve-year-old daughter, he had raped both of them, and when she had told his supervisor, the foreman returned and beat her.
“I have no one here. My village is in the mountains,” she explained as she gestured with a hopeless brown hand. “Many miles fuera … away.”
She talked about the futility of complaining to the police about those who ran the factories on which the local economy depended, and she had kept quiet, praying each evening that her tormentor would not return. Her daughter ran out of the room when the camera panned toward her.
“She don’t talk no more,” was all Marisol could get out before starting to cry again. When she gained a bit of control, she managed to urge the unseen interviewer to talk to other women in the town and hear their stories.
Had Granville himself shot the footage? And why had he posted the interviews? Almost no one had seen them; they had fewer than a hundred views combined. Although both the stories detailed extreme suffering of parents and children, they seemed very distinct in time and place. But these kinds of stories sometimes won Pulitzers, so he might have been trolling for the most compelling subjects, regardless of source. Or maybe he was just a sadistic bastard who thrived on the pain of others.
In any event, she wanted to know more about Granville, and that started with tracking down the source of the Arkansas phone number manned by an unknown woman who seemed just as interested in his case. And that brought her to her impending dinner date with Sammy Goodson.
* * *
Melanie had taken steps to ensure the meal would be extravagant. Sammy would be anxious to pay, for all the wrong reasons, so she had booked a table at the hottest new restaurant in town, one whose owner had just finished in the top three on Top Chef. If she were going to put up with her ex for a long dinner, then she was going to have a pricey bottle of wine and a stunning five-course meal.
She arrived at the restaurant stylishly late and saw the G-man leaning against the bar, drinking something brown out of a glass tumbler.
“Still addicted to the smoke of Scottish turf, I see.” Sammy claimed to be an expert on single-malt Highland scotches, and his bookshelves at home contained more than twenty varieties, crowding out all tomes but those relating to gourmet whiskey consumption. The booze tasted like stale cigarette butts to her, and she suspected his appreciation for the drink was entirely feigned.
“You look lovely this evening.” He ignored her barb and looked her up and down with an appreciative smile that barely escaped being a leer. “Are you still a gin-and-tonic girl?”
She ordered a glass of a reserve Oregon pinot noir from the bartender in response and sat down on the stool next to him. “Not anymore,” she said with a brief glance in his direction.
He was almost six feet three inches tall, distinguished features marred by a crooked nose hinting he’d given as good as he’d got in some barroom brawl. She knew better—his mother had accidently opened a car door into his face when he was eight. His thick brown hair was graying slightly at the temples, which added even more character to an otherwise distinguished countenance. With the exception of those who had slept with him, her girlfriends back in Washington thought her crazy to have dumped him.
“So, what sort of bad guys are you tracking down these days? Still spending ninety percent of your time away from home?” She smiled and settled in for a good listen.
He was appropriately vague about the antiterrorist bit of his agenda but had a good story to tell about an investigation into a major drug-smuggling operation, where a famous defense lawyer had been observed on a yacht full of his client’s illicit merchandise, taking full advantage of the prostitutes traveling with the gang’s ringleader. The US attorney in the case was planning with great relish to call the lawyer as a surprise witness for the prosecution, and Sammy could hardly wait to hear him attempting to explain how his cocaine-fueled threesome with a pair of teenage Columbian girls was protected by attorney-client privilege.
Melanie was watching him closely and nodding when the maître d’ arrived and took them to their seats. The table for two looked down on Centennial Park and the view was extraordinary.
“I had to grease him with an extra twenty,” Sammy explained, “but it was worth the wait, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.” She studied him carefully as he beamed at her, and she was relieved to discover no leftover romantic feelings for him whatsoever. None. It was a liberating discovery, and her face creased into a smile that he probably misunderstood. She suddenly felt enthusiastic about the prospect of a gourmet meal and found herself totally immune to the pompous and self-aggrandizing monologues that inevitably accompanied dinner with him. She even forgot to ask about the phantom Arkansas phone number until the waiter brought them dessert and coffee.
“Hey, Sammy,” she asked between bites of warm salted caramel, “what did you learn about that disconnected phone number listed on the FBI database? You know, the link to the missing couple I was telling you about.” She could not decipher the expression on his face. “You know,” she insisted, “it’s kind of the whole reason why I agreed to meet you for dinner.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied, “I was just hoping you’d forgotten.” He reached for her hand, but she pulled it just beyond his fingertips. “We were having such a good time, and now you want to ruin things.”
“I don’t want to ruin anything.” She leaned back in her chair and indulged him with a smile. “And you’re right, I’ve been having a surprisingly good time, but that doesn’t mean I’m not curious about an anonymous person who takes my report of an inquiry into a five-year-old kidnapping and then has the phone disconnected before I can follow up.” She didn’t add that the person she had named in her call, James Murphy, had subsequently been the victim of a mysterious burglary.
“Do you think maybe once you could just put your curiosity to the side and let me take you dancing instead of talking shop?” His eyes sparkled in anticipation of extending the date. He was a good dancer, damn him.
She leaned further back and crossed her arms. “Stop stalling. I love talking shop.”
“Okay,” he groaned and pulled his hand back to his side of the table. “I made an inquiry higher up—never mind to whom—and got bitch-slapped so fast it made my head spin. I was told to forget I ever heard of that phone number, and I had to promise to make you forget it too.”
“What?”
“I’m not kidding, Mel.” He leaned forward, his face a study in earnestness. “Forget you ever heard of the case, forget you ever called the number, forget you ever asked me to check it out. Just drop the whole fucking thing.”
“Who told you this?” She was livid. No one in the FBI hierarchy, not even the director, had the right to call her off an investigation, no matter how half-assed it was.
“I’m pretty sure it’s some politico on the congressional intelligence oversight committee, but I have no idea who.” He smiled, confident of having spoken the last word on the matter. She stared at him unblinking. “I’m serious, Mel.” He changed the tone of his voice and sounded instantly more professional. “There’s nothing there. Just forget that you ever called that number.”
“Who told you this?” She repeated her question, a diamond edge to her voice.
“Uh-uh,” he grunted with a shake of his head and a staccato emphasis on the following syllables, “No. Fucking. Way.”
She was about to jump on his chest and drag the truth out of him when she remembered that he had always, deep down, been a loyal taker of orders. If some superior had told him to shut up, then a dozen terrorists with a crowbar would be unable to make him talk.
She forced herself to relax and took the last sip of her coffee. She’d hit another dead end, but the evening was not a total waste. The food had been fabulous, and she had finally buried the ghost of lovers past.
> He interpreted her demeanor as submissive and managed to clasp her hands. He looked into her eyes with a warm smile. “I had a great time tonight, Mel.” He really could be charming when he tried. “Wouldn’t it be nice to extend it a few more hours?”
She returned his smile with a twinkle in her eyes and gave his hands a squeeze before pulling her own onto her lap and replying with a distinct “No. Fucking. Way.”
* * *
Just before lunchtime, James Murphy noticed Thorsten Carter entering the newsroom with an attractive young woman by his side and saw the receptionist point them to his work space. As the senior reporter at the Clarkeston Chronicle, he was the only non-editor to merit his own office. He did not, however, merit a new desk, and so he sat behind a battered oak monster pitted with so many cigarette burns that it looked like the no man’s land between World War I trenches. Given that smoking had been banned in the newsroom for over twenty-five years, the textured mosaic of charred wood had achieved a historic status at the paper.
“Hi, Father Carter!” James stood and waved them in, quickly clearing a pile of papers off the only chair he had available for guests. “What brings you to the pulsing news hub of Clarkeston, Georgia?”
Before he could answer, the woman thrust out her hand. “I’m Miriam Rodgers, and we wanted to have a word with you.”
“Miriam is the daughter of Ernest Rodgers, my predecessor at St. James,” Carter quickly added.
“Oh my God,” James said, recognizing her from Jacob Granville’s prom picture, discovered on his trip to Vidalia. “I knew your father, but I’m not sure that I’ve seen you since you were a teenager.” He gestured at the open chair but she refused to sit down. “What do you want to talk about?’
“My father’s boxes that have gone missing.”
Of course. He noticed a sheepish expression on Carter’s face. Time to pay the piper. “Why don’t we walk down the street and chat over a bite to eat. My treat.”