The First Victim lbadm-6

by Ridley Pearson

  She ran to the chain-link fence, exposed and vulnerable, the camcorder hanging at her back. Crossing that fence offered a finality for her. Once on the other side she was fully committed. But there was no moment of pause. Her fingers webbed tightly through the rusting wire and she pulled herself up, higher with each grasp. The fence wobbled and threatened to throw her off. She reached the top edge, a row of twisted wire spikes. Twice she tried to throw her right leg up and over. On her second attempt, the cellphone spilled from her coat pocket and clapped loudly down onto the asphalt. Mistaking it for a gunshot, she vaulted the fence effortlessly, clawing her way down the other side and jumping the final four feet. The camera slapped her back as she landed. She froze, her knees throbbing, ears ringing. Her cellphone lay broken in pieces on the other side. So much for the cavalry. But there was no turning back.

  She hurried across the open wharf and into shadows thrown by the docked ships. Lightheaded, almost giddy, she felt like a teenager sneaking out of the house.

  A wharf rat the size of a house cat skittered along the very edge where she stood, heading directly for her. She didn’t scream, but her body locked, seized by fright, and she couldn’t so much as take a step. The rodent saw Stevie and slithered out of sight, but the experience stung her. Su-Su would have said the rat was good luck, guiding her. That the rat had come to her as a teacher, not a threat. It was this flicker of remembrance of her former governess that supported Stevie’s decision to do this, reminded her of her father’s efforts to smuggle Melissa out of China alive. And it was there, standing on that deserted wharf, that for the first time Stevie confronted the small glances and occasional touches exchanged between Su-Su and her father. There, as an adult, she suddenly reinterpreted those glimpses of intimate contact. Realization charged through her: Father had been in China nearly a year before summoning Stevie from the school in Switzerland. The dread of truth crept into her. Those looks between Su-Su and her father. The occasional tears. The reality of the nickname Su-Su had given Mi Chow, the risks Father had taken to get Mi Chow to America. The legal adoption. Melissa was no political prisoner born to parents killed during the Cultural Revolution: all fiction for a necessary illusion. Melissa was, in fact, just as Su-Su called her from the very beginning: Little Sister.

  True or not, at that moment Stevie accepted it, embraced it, the depth of her feelings for the girl making so much more sense. No matter what, she believed-a necessity perhaps born of the moment. No matter. Suddenly, there was no courage, no fear, no question about any of it. She felt bulletproof. Righteous.

  The power cable climbed up the line toward the ship’s bow. She climbed the net on the tanker’s side, pulling herself higher and higher above the wharf, finally reaching the upper deck and the lip of slimy steel. She peered over this edge thinking there was no landscape as eerie as something man-made left abandoned. The lines creaked and sighed. Water slapped lazily all around her. The electric hum grew perceptibly louder.

  She pulled herself under the rail and down onto the cold damp deck, and crawled into the shadow. She crouched and hurried toward the bow past ladders and winches, railing and line, the air thick with rust and algae. She reached the power cable and followed it to starboard, to where it spilled over the side and down to an abandoned river ferry listing badly to port, its stern also low in the water. The ferry’s deck was a good fifteen to twenty feet below her, the heavy cable passing across it and on to the next ship. Elevated on the tanker, she took a moment to look around at the graveyard. Deck, rail, stacks and bridges.

  Gray decaying steel. Rust the color of dried blood. To her right she saw a steady path of gangways, ladders and planks leading one deck to the next out to the center of the graveyard and a large fishing trawler where it stopped.

  Below and to her left the black cable ran straight for that trawler, looking like a piece of thread dropped from the sky.

  She could see Melissa here-could recall the videos. Excitement stole through her. Little Sister!

  In the distance she heard the air brakes of a bus or truck. There was no mistaking that sound.

  She crossed back around to the other side of the tanker in time to see a figure scramble down a steep path through the vegetation to the only gate in the chain-link fence. A big man. A man wearing a sweatshirt and a hood. Stevie ducked out of sight.

  CHAPTER 72

  Mama Lu looked like a prizefighter, dressed as she was in a powder blue silk robe embroidered in yellow and orange with scenes of peasants tilling the rice paddies. Her rich black hair was hoisted into a bun and secured with what looked to Boldt like an orphaned enameled chopstick, and her false teeth shined with the brilliance of having been recently dipped and cleaned. There were acres of cloth in that robe and years of wisdom in those agate eyes, and she could tell both from Boldt’s solemn expression and his timing that they had problems.

  ‘‘Come sit down. My legs tired.’’

  The apartment above the small grocery was three or four times the size that Boldt had originally believed. The first room where she chose to receive guests and take her meals was simple and spare for the benefit of appearances; but as she led Boldt into the inner sanctum of room after room of stunning Asian antiques and artwork, of jade and scrolls and intricately carved ivory, he grabbed a glimpse of the real woman with whom he came to cut a deal.

  ‘‘You are bothered, Mr. Both,’’ she observed. ‘‘Please to sit.’’

  He took a velvet-padded captain’s chair with mahogany arms of lion’s paws. She seemed to occupy the entire love seat where she sat. It fit her like a throne. ‘‘You like tea, don’t you?’’ She rang a small glass bell summoning a young woman of twenty dressed in a simple black silk dress and rubber slaps. ‘‘Tea,’’ she instructed. ‘‘He takes half-and-half and sugar in his,’’ she said, surprising him.

  ‘‘Is there anything you don’t know?’’ he asked.

  ‘‘We shall see,’’ she said, allowing a smile.

  He nodded. She had such an uncanny way of coming directly to the point without ever seeming direct at all.

  ‘‘I know about the helicopter,’’ she informed him. ‘‘And yes, even the arrests on Delancy Avenue. I know that you do not visit an old woman late at night looking the way you do without much on your mind. So what is it, Mr. Both?’’

  ‘‘It’s bad,’’ he said.

  She bowed her formidable head slightly. ‘‘Whatever is, is,’’ she said unexpectedly. ‘‘It is neither bad nor good. It exists for the reasons it exists. To qualify it is to contain it, to limit its undermining potential. Let us not judge too quickly, Mr. Both.’’

  Boldt bit back his temptation to speak too quickly.

  She sighed. ‘‘Are you here to arrest me?’’

  ‘‘I hope not,’’ he conceded.

  ‘‘The patrol cars,’’ she said, explaining how she guessed this. ‘‘The press?’’

  ‘‘On its way.’’

  ‘‘Most impolite.’’

  The tea was delivered silently and artfully, a graceful dance of arms and hands and gold-rimmed cups of bone china. The young woman was beautiful and smelled of lilac. When she left the room her dress whispered them quiet again. Boldt sipped softly and drank a tea as rich as any he had tasted, hoping she might say something. He finally said, ‘‘I can connect your import company to the polarfleece recovered in that first container. If I have to, I’ll use it.’’

  ‘‘A Customs violation. A federal charge. This is not your business, Mr. Both.’’

  He said nothing.

  ‘‘What do you need?’’ She added, ‘‘What do you come for?’’

  ‘‘The grocery deliveries.’’

  ‘‘I am not only person with groceries, Mr. Both.’’

  ‘‘I know what I know, Great Lady, but I’m powerless to do much of anything with it. Our system is weak. It’s flawed. It’s corrupt. But it’s all I have. It’s my only tool.’’ He added, ‘‘It’s a ship.’’ She twitched. ‘‘We know this. You know this.
I need the location-now, tonight. Right now! I’ll arrest you, embarrass you, if I’m forced to. I’m out of bullets.’’

  She smiled, shocking him. ‘‘My problem is your problem,’’ she said. ‘‘If I am the source of this information, if that should ever come out, I will make an early grave. That does not interest me.’’

  ‘‘I can get Coughlie,’’ he said, ‘‘but it has to be tonight. It has to be now before he can move his operations.’’

  ‘‘You know much,’’ she said.

  ‘‘And if you don’t tell me?’’ he asked, feeling her resistance to actually speak the information he needed. ‘‘If I figure it out myself?’’

  ‘‘Self-knowledge only true knowledge.’’ She smiled again. Those teeth were perfect.

  ‘‘A ship,’’ he said. ‘‘A trawler. An old trawler.’’

  ‘‘What does police do with cars belonging drug runners?’’

  ‘‘Forfeited assets,’’ Boldt said, trying to follow. ‘‘We impound them. The court collects any property. .’’ He caught himself.

  Her eyes sparkled.

  ‘‘Forfeited assets are auctioned off,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Not if no one wants to buy,’’ she corrected.

  ‘‘My God!’’ he gasped.

  Another wide grin.

  Boldt was dialing dispatch before he even reached the stairs.

  CHAPTER 73

  Rodriguez waited on the wharf while Stevie watched through the camcorder’s telephoto lens as two men hurried along the improvised path of ladders and wooden ramps connecting the various boats. Finally reaching the barge, these two secured a gangway for Rodriguez to use, and the three of them then hurried toward the trawler, their urgency and tension evident from the shouting. They were too far away and it was too dark for her to record their faces or anything they said, but she recorded them anyway.

  Their route was unexpectedly long and involved, the path between the ships anything but a straight line. One finger on the camera’s trigger, another pressed tightly to block the red light that showed while recording, she followed the three to the trawler where they disappeared around its far side.

  She zipped the camera away in its case and worked herself down an accommodation ladder that led off the tanker’s starboard side to the heavily listing ferry below. Reaching the deck, she faced a gap of six to eight feet to the next boat. With the stern submerged, she saw no other way off.

  This next boat carried one of the planks, a stepping-stone in the improvised path forged between the shore and the trawler. That next deck would put her on the route to the sweatshop. She saw no choice but to jump.

  A few feet into flight, a fraction of a second into the air, she knew she wasn’t going to make it. She slammed into the adjacent hull, reached out and grabbed hold of a stanchion. Her face took the brunt of the miss, her left eye banged up and swelling. The black water below invited her to fall. She managed to pull her other arm up, swung herself like a pendulum, and hooked her heel on the edge of the deck. She pulled herself aboard, the camera following. Splayed out on the deck, struggling to find her breath, she took a moment to recover, testing the tender flesh around her eye.

  She hurried to the stern and onto the man-made path. Three vessels later she descended a ladder to an old rusted cabin cruiser. She stopped. She wasn’t alone.

  She smelled the cigarette smoke too late, realizing all of a sudden that this funky old cabin cruiser was being used as a gatehouse along the route.

  ‘‘Yo!’’ a man’s voice called out.

  She had literally rocked the boat when stepping down onto it, and the sentry called out accordingly. In a catlike motion, she leapt from the deck up over the wheelhouse as the sentry made a lazy effort to identify his visitor. She backed up, facing the stern but completely exposed, as first the sentry’s head and then his incredibly wide shoulders appeared in the cabin hatch not five feet away from her. To move-even to breathe-would give her away. She stood absolutely still, her lungs filled to capacity, her breath held and burning in her chest. The black-haired head pivoted left to right and left again. Another inch or two and he’d pick her up in his peripheral vision.

  ‘‘Yo?’’ he called out a second time, though more softly. ‘‘Kai? Timmy?’’ No answer.

  She prepared to kick him in the face if he glanced back, cocking her right leg back in preparation. He’d never know what hit him.

  Again, he looked to his left. Then he climbed back down the steep stairs and into the cabin.

  She listened intently, not daring to move. A minute passed. Two. She felt the boat move and feared his coming topside again. But instead she heard him urinating. She crept slowly and quietly to the steep ladder leading off the boat’s far side and climbed, her skin prickling. She moved much more slowly, boat to boat, carefully assessing her situation. Planks and gangways, ladders and crudely fashioned steps. The shore grew increasingly distant. She encountered a set of six garden hoses taped together, water gurgling inside. That mechanical hum grew ever louder. A snoring beast. She marveled at Melissa’s resourcefulness. The woman had the footage to prove she had made it inside. No small feat.

  The scavenged trawler loomed in front of her now, huge by comparison with the other boats around it, rising up out of the wreckage of ship decks, cabins and stacks-a rusting mass of iron and steel out of proportion with its neighbors, its joints frozen with rust and corrosion, consumed by decades of salt and storm, sun and wind. A skeleton of its former self. Huge sections missing, scavenged for resale or sold off as scrap, its profile a twisted torment of bent metal and ragged cuts.

  She crossed the decks of the remaining two ships, staying low and in shadow, her full attention on that towering trawler. The hum developed different tones, no longer so indistinguishable, but split into a high whine, a tremendous metallic clatter and a low guttural growl. She thought her heart might explode in her chest.

  Melissa had been caught. This fact remained foremost in her mind. The big man’s arrival spoke volumes to Stevie. With all that had happened, would they move to close down shop? She resolved to get some footage, drive to Public Safety and make her case, providing Boldt the necessary probable cause to involve the FBI. Behind her, on shore, an eighteen-wheel truck arrived. A figure climbed out. She crouched and ran toward the trawler. She would have to hurry. The driver had left the truck running.

  CHAPTER 74

  "What the hell does that mean?’’ Boldt thundered, unable to believe what he was hearing.

  ‘‘It’s a federal impound. Federal property. It is beyond our jurisdiction.’’ Lacey Delgato, the deputy prosecuting attorney with whom LaMoia had met, had a voice that could scratch glass. She was plump and wore her clothes too tight. She talked behind an ironic grin that leant her an imperial arrogance. ‘‘It’s an INS impound, Lieutenant. If anyone’s going to bust in there, it’s them.’’

  ‘‘But that’s just the point. Right? That’s exactly why we want in there ourselves.’’ He had checked his voice mail only moments before. Suddenly McNeal’s oblique message made more sense: She realized the graveyard was under Coughlie’s jurisdictional control.

  ‘‘I understand that, but it isn’t going to happen. You crash those gates and you lose anything and everything you discover.’’

  ‘‘So I have to go back to Talmadge.’’

  ‘‘Right.’’

  ‘‘And if he’s in on it?’’

  She shrugged. ‘‘Chalk one up for the bad guys.’’

  ‘‘Unacceptable.’’

  ‘‘Suggestions?’’

  ‘‘Other fed agencies? Do they have access?’’

  Delgato pursed her lips and gave her next words considerable thought. ‘‘U.S. Attorney would have to be brought in. If you gave him enough evidence, enough probable cause, he might work the Bureau for the raid.’’ She added, ‘‘The Bureau could invite you along for the ride. Nothing preventing that. Yeah. It could work, I suppose.’’

  ‘‘Put it in motion,’’ he
said. ‘‘I’m going to get a surveillance team in place.’’

  ‘‘Tomorrow, I’m talking about,’’ Delgato complained. ‘‘No way this is going down tonight.’’

  ‘‘Make the calls,’’ Boldt ordered.

  ‘‘It’s late.’’

  ‘‘Now.’’

  ‘‘I’ll wake him up.’’

  ‘‘You want a hundred lives on your hands? You want this whole thing to come down to your refusal to make a call, to wake someone up? Fine,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ll make a note of it.’’

  ‘‘You had better be right about this,’’ she threatened.

  ‘‘Amen,’’ Boldt said.

  CHAPTER 75

  The constant coming and going had worn a trail through the rust and corrosion on the trawler’s deck, beating a path around to the far side where any opening of a hatch or door was fully blocked from view of land. Even from across Salmon Bay, because of the trawler’s angle in the graveyard, there was no chance of anyone being seen using this entrance. Coughlie had found himself the perfect hideaway.

  The ship’s deck vibrated underfoot like a kitchen appliance. She left the worn route and found her way along the determined shadow on the port side, moving incredibly slowly, every pore in her body alert, every hair at attention. She passed one door after another, having no idea where she was or which to use, and it was only her reporter’s eye that finally spotted the fresh litter of cigarette butts accumulated around one particular door at her feet, causing her to stop and press her ear to this door.

  A confusing rumble filled her head, the clatter louder but distant. She looked up to see the tractor trailer truck backing down between two rows in the boatyard. The trailer stopped just on the other side of the chain-link gate and the air brakes hissed.