Reported missing by Craig Nolan. Brother.
She picked up her phone and dialed again. This time, he answered.
“I found something interesting in these files, Steve.”
“Ashlyn—”
“She’s still missing?”
Steve hesitated. “What does the file say?”
“Look, these files have been missing for weeks. If there was an update for any of them, it wouldn’t be in here because Nolan’s had them locked in his desk.”
“Then how did you get them?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”
“Ashlyn, is this what it’s come to? Sneaking around, going through people’s desks? Why didn’t you go to Craig?”
“I—” She glanced around, suddenly aware that her volume had increased while they’d been talking, then leaned back for a second and closed her eyes. “I know you trust him, but there are things he’s hiding. Things that, as far as I can tell, have nothing to do with his sister.”
“At some point you’ll have to decide who to trust, Ashlyn.”
She opened her eyes and looked in the rearview mirror as the hum of a truck engine faded. The occupant of the truck got out and shut the door, his empty hands raised as he approached her car.
“I’ve almost worked that out,” she told Steve. “I have to go.”
“Okay. Be careful.”
Ashlyn flipped the phone shut, opened the car door and got out. “Dare I ask?”
“You used your cell phone.”
“Does anyone on this team work within the law?”
Tain glanced at the bag on the front passenger seat of her car. “Not anymore.”
She almost smiled.
“Can we talk?” he asked her.
“Where?”
“Drive. It’s safer.”
For him or for her? She was beginning to wonder, but didn’t argue. She got in the car and it only took a moment to stuff the files back in the bag and put it in the backseat. As she backed out of the parking spot she glanced at Tain. “You have fifteen minutes to persuade me this is worth my time.”
“In that case, I’d better start talking now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Twenty months ago
“All I know is, they’re planning for Saturday.”
“They aren’t saying what the shipment is?”
Jenny shook her head. “Not exactly. We hafta do diff’rent things, dependin’. They don’t have me doin’ clothes, so I don’t think it’s girls.”
“Doing clothes?”
“They burn whatever they come over in, get rid of it. Make sure the last clothes they were seen in are never seen again.”
Tain nodded. It made sense. “So you’re thinking drugs.”
“Eddie said somethin’ about snow.” Jenny made a face at him. “Eddie never was too smart.”
She was fidgeting with a stir stick, the fourth she’d cracked apart since they’d sat down. Her strawberry-blonde hair had an oily sheen and a few fresh pimples dotted her pale skin. She was wearing those gloves, the kind that had the tips of the fingers cut out.
Tain never could make sense of that particular fashion trend. Why wear gloves in the summer at all? Unless they were work gloves or gardening gloves…
That was when he realized there must be marks on her hands, wounds that were reopened before they could properly mend. For Jenny the gloves weren’t about fashion. They were about function.
He sat back as the waitress approached their table and slid two plates of food and two glasses of orange juice in front of them. Jenny always picked the booth in the very back, where she could curl into the corner and keep an eye on everything around her. They were in a roadside diner not far off the highway, but far enough off to not be a truck stop. It was the kind of place that had clung to its faded green and dusky white décor not out of nostalgia but because of budgetary restraints. The uniforms the staff wore were so faded Tain wouldn’t have been surprised if they were hand-me-downs from the original staff. He’d met Jenny on the outskirts of Nighthawk Crossing and driven more than a hundred kilometers from her hometown, to a place she’d never been to, and still she glanced around the restaurant as she wolfed down the eggs and toast, keeping watch for any familiar faces.
“Okay, look. You need to go, just like normal. Do whatever they ask you to do. You’ll be arrested along with them.”
“I don’t know if I can do it this time.”
“If you aren’t there it’ll look suspicious. They’ll start wondering if someone talked to the cops, and if you’re the only one missing they’ll know it was you.”
She sat still for a moment, then reached for the orange juice. “What about the other thing?”
“The girls?”
“Yeah.”
“You told me about the ones they smuggle across the border, in both directions. Runaways recruited for prostitution. Once we get these guys we’ll try to track down all the victims.”
She shook her head. “No. I mean the other girls. The ones I gave you dates for.”
Tain hesitated. “There are girls who’ve gone missing around those times. You mean they aren’t part of this other thing?”
She fidgeted with the empty orange juice glass and shrugged her right shoulder. “How many did I give you days for?”
“Nine. Is that how many there are?”
Jenny shrugged and shook her head. “I’ve never seen them all together.”
“But you have seen them?”
Jenny’s wide eyes searched the room before she looked at Tain again. “Once. Some of them.”
“But you said—”
“Look, I overheard them talkin’. Sayin’ these ones weren’t for the other stuff. There’s a cellar at the inn and it connects with tunnels, over across the street to where the inn staff used to stay. That’s where my room is, part of the cellar. I saw two of them there once. The girl they’d had for a while, she wasn’t too skinny, not like the ones they use for the other stuff. She was out to here.” She made an arc with her hand that indicated a swollen belly.
Pregnant.
“The other one, they’d just gotten her. She was tied up. They always kept them tied at first.”
As far as he could tell, Bobby and Eddie were pretty small-time criminals who’d stumbled upon an easy trade. Eddie was a trucker and didn’t get much hassle at the border because he lived on the Reserve. Bobby’s family had owned the shipping company for years, and they’d been plying one form of illegal trade or another for as long as Blind Creek Shipping Co. had been in business.
Tain knew that could happen when Reserves bordered each other. There were different rules, and Aboriginal policing was nothing short of a nightmare. Some might say it was a joke, but he wouldn’t go that far. He understood the politics, the conflicts, the inherent distrust passed down from one generation to another.
There were reasons he didn’t want to work on Reserves.
“Where are they keeping them?”
Jenny took another glance around as she reached for the fork and twirled it in her fingers. “I don’t know. The pregnant one, I’d seen her when she first came, when she was tied up and skinny. Eddie stays at the staff house.”
“What about Bobby?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes, sure. But not all the time.”
Why keep a group of missing girls at an inn downtown? Tain understood that the same person who ran the shipping company owned the inn, but it still didn’t make much sense. There were too many risks…
He looked up. Jenny was watching him. Light never danced in her eyes. She looked like she’d lived a lifetime and a half already, instead of just the meager handful of years she’d spent in the Interior.
Since their first meeting, he’d done some checking. Her mother was a known prostitute. She’d forced Jenny into the trade as soon as she developed, but Jenny had left the house to live in a small shack, working odd jobs and stealing what she couldn’t afford to survive.
It was no surprise she’d ended up working for Hobbs. She was small and wiry and had the ability to get into a lot of tight spots, and she was already a thief. Despite her appearance at the moment, she had the looks to survive by moving from one bad relationship to another if she needed to. The odd time Tain had seen her when she’d been cleaned up he’d hardly recognized her.
“And they’re all involved with this? Bobby? Eddie? Kurdy?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t know about Kurdy. That day I saw the two girls, they’d sent me down for some cleaner. As soon as I saw them I grabbed what I needed and got out of there, but I dropped a jar on the stairs. Kurdy started comin’ down and Eddie lost it. I think he mighta beat him half to death, but Bobby stopped him.”
“You think Eddie didn’t want him to see the girls.”
“Not those ones. Kurdy, he’s got a thing for young girls.”
Tain had heard. “But you figure Bobby knows.”
Jenny shrugged. “Eddie does whatever Bobby tells him to. It’s always been that way, since they were kids. Thing is, seeing Eddie go at Kurdy like that, that was scary. Eddie was the kind of kid who tried to be cool but wasn’t, you know what I mean?” Her eyes had a faraway look for a moment. “I used to think he was a nerd, a real loser, but he coulda been real sweet. If it weren’t for Bobby. He wasn’t mean the way Bobby was.”
“Any chance you can find out more? Where they’re keeping them?”
She shrugged again. “I-I don’t know. I’ve only seen a few of them.”
“But the dates?”
“Eddie’d get real funny when they had one of the girls there. I guess ’cos I work with the other ones sometimes, they weren’t worried about me. Probably just didn’t want Kurdy touchin’ them, you know? But Eddie’d get edgy. I just kinda knew when they had a girl there.”
The waitress returned with the bill, and Tain reached for his wallet. As he put the money on the table, he looked at Jenny, still sneaking glances around the room, unable to let her guard down long enough to eat a simple breakfast.
“If it’s too much for you, Jenny, we can pull you out now.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ll get you out. See what we can do to set you up with a place. Vancouver. Victoria. Give you a fresh start.”
“But those girls…”
Tain looked her straight in the eye. “Jenny, you’ve done a brave thing. The crimes on Reserves are a huge problem, and we want to do anything we can to stop the drug trade. What you’ve told me should be enough to put a major trafficker out of business permanently. You deserve a second chance.”
The hard lines on her face softened and her eyes glistened with unshed tears. “But you said yourself, if I’m not there, they’ll work it out.”
Tain nodded.
“So I need to be there for at least a few more days.”
“Okay. But then we’ll talk about a new home, job training. Maybe college.”
Jenny offered him a wry smile. “Sometimes, you just gotta accept that not everyone’s meant for an easy life.”
He was tempted to say few were, but kept the comment to himself. “I know you’ve been trying to help us put a stop to this for a while now, and we’ve let you down. You never did say why you decided to talk. What was it, Jenny?”
She stood and paused a moment, then reached down and patted her stomach, then started walking toward the door. As Tain got up and followed her out, he wondered if Jenny would be strong enough to make a fresh start, strong enough to make a better life for herself and her child, or if she’d find herself caught in the cycle of prostitution and poverty that she’d been raised in forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Eighteen months ago
“The night of the raid, it all went bad.”
Tain’s voice drifted off. They’d been in the car for almost an hour, his story interspersed with long silences, but Ashlyn didn’t push him. She kept driving, waiting for him to tell her the rest.
“The trucks were by the book. Instead of pulling them off the road or holding off on the shipment, they dumped every bit of contraband they had and scheduled a clean load.
“Jenny wanted out after that, and at first, I worried about pulling her. We could guess they knew they had a leak, but we didn’t know if they knew who it was. If I did pull her out, they’d know it was her and they’d be out on the streets, free to try to track her down. And leaving her where she was had risks because I couldn’t figure out how they found out about the bust.” Tain shook his head. “I finally pulled her out.”
Ashlyn glanced in her side mirrors. They were all alone on a logging road that wove into the mountains a few miles out of town. She pulled the car over. “You did the right thing.”
Tain looked over at her. “Jenny jumped at the sound of someone sneezing three apartments over from hers. She couldn’t shake the fear. She didn’t know anybody. She’d spent so long thinking she’d never amount to anything, hearing her mother tell her she was useless.” He turned to look out the window. “She believed it. And she thought she’d spend the rest of her life waiting for them to show up.”
“So why not get it over with.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s what she thought.”
Ashlyn thought about what he’d told her. “It was Jenny’s tip that connected a group of missing girls. The bust went bad, but you pulled together the files and persuaded Sullivan to listen to you.”
Tain shook his head. His mouth opened, but then he closed it and didn’t speak.
“What happened?”
“I went to Summer. She talked to the press.”
“You mean, you told her you thought you knew where her sister was and nobody was investigating?”
He looked at her. “I let it slip. I had a lead. A lot of girls had gone missing, but now that there were a few white girls, we stood a chance of getting the funding for a proper investigation.”
Ashlyn closed her eyes. He’d poked the racial hornets’ nest himself.
“And ever since then you’ve been distancing yourself from the Native groups lobbying for answers.”
Tain stared straight ahead. “It’s an explanation, not an apology.”
She felt the corner of her mouth tug into a smile and looked down until she could straighten her face. What she’d come to expect from Tain was just that, and here he was, giving her more answers than she’d asked for, but she still didn’t know why. He wasn’t seeking her approval.
“I know you didn’t leak the information to the Native leaders.”
“How?”
“It’s still in your desk drawer.”
He turned to face her. “That’s what you were doing at the office this morning. How do you know I wasn’t waiting for things to cool down, or I didn’t make a new set of copies because you’d seen those ones?”
She paused. “Because I know who’s been leaking information to the Native leaders.”
Tain’s eyes widened. “Who? How?”
Ashlyn held up her hand. “You first. You fabricated the report of Jenny’s disappearance?”
“It was the only chance we had to protect her. If the men she’d been working with thought we believed she’d been abducted, maybe they wouldn’t try to track her down.”
“Or maybe they’d be more determined than ever to silence her. They’d know they didn’t have her.”
Tain leaned back in the seat, staring straight ahead. “I guess that’s what happened. It was a mistake.”
“But you thought it might throw them off. Make them think you were looking in the wrong direction.”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.
He’d tried to find a way to protect Jenny Johnson, whose disappearance was used to finally launch the task force. Winters had been following up, investigating. Tain’s former partner.
“What did Winters have to do with it?”
“He didn’t know.”
“But something happened?”
Tain was quiet for a few minutes. The entire time she’d been listening to him he hadn’t raised his voice, he hadn’t asked for forgiveness. He’d simply told his story.
What he didn’t know was that she, thanks to the file she’d found in Nolan’s desk, already had most of the facts. What Tain was telling her merely hung the meat on the bones, connected the dots. She’d seen the pieces of the puzzle, but Tain had put them together in a way that made it all make sense.
“Winters was good. Nolan’s good too, not that I’ll admit it to him. I hid the information that connected the cases because Winters started to piece it together. He was reading up on the failed bust, and he started digging on the shipping company.
“One morning, he called and said he had something on Bobby Hobbs and he wanted to see how tough he was. It was the day I’d found out Jenny was back in town, and I was on my way to talk to her.
“At first, he was angry. He said it was just like me to never be there to back him up, while I left him to do God knows what.
“Then he blew it off and said not to worry about it, that Nolan was supposed to be starting that day and he’d take him instead.” Tain paused. “I should have talked him out of it. When I was on my way back to town, I saw Nolan outside the station, talking to Sullivan. I’d never even met him before, but I knew it was him, because of”—Tain’s face twisted for a second—“something I’d seen once. Different case. The way my gut twisted, I headed straight out for the shipping company.
“I found Winters’s car partway back to town. Someone had taken a shot at it, and when the bullet hit him he’d lost control.”
“Was there a search?” She didn’t remember hearing about the incident, and the attempted murder of a fellow officer was something every RCMP officer would know about.
Lullaby for the Nameless (Nolan, Hart & Tain Thrillers) Page 56