by Jane Haddam
“I take it you’ve already heard it. Why don’t you tell me yourself and we can skip this part.”
“You may have questions I haven’t thought of. Questions I can’t answer.”
“I have a million questions, and nobody can answer them.”
The phone shrilled on the coffee table. Tibor leaned forward and hit the switch that activated the speakerphone. Then he said “Hello,” and there was static.
“Father Tibor?” Russ said.
Father Tibor watched a crease of pain cross Gregor Demarkian’s face.
This was the real problem with crime, and with evil of all sorts. It changed people. It changed the people who committed it, and it changed the people who experienced it. In all his years as a priest, Tibor had not been able to figure out how to handle that part of it.
“I am here, Russell,” he said. “Krekor is also here.”
“Damn,” Russ said.
“I’m not interested in being here,” Gregor said. “So this had better be good, because if it isn’t, I’m going to leave.”
“I have said nothing about it so far,” Tibor said. “I have left it up to you.”
“Damn,” Russ said again.
There was a sound on the other end of the line of scraping and coughing. Tibor wasn’t sure where Russ was when he made these phone calls. Some of these phones were out in the open where anybody could overhear the speaker. Others were more private. There had to be rules for who got which phone when, but Tibor didn’t know what they were.
“Listen,” Russ said. “I told Tibor. I’m not promising anything. This is just something I heard.”
“We know,” Tibor said.
“And this is a state penitentiary,” Russ said. “The people here, they’re here because they’ve committed ordinary crimes. Robbery. Murder. Lots of drug violations. But just because they’re here because they got convicted of some state thing doesn’t mean they haven’t done other things. You get that? Lots of other things. And some of those things could be federal crimes.”
“I think we all understand that,” Gregor said.
“Okay.” Russ was taking big gulping breaths. Tibor tried to hear noise in the background, but couldn’t. “Okay. There’s a guy here, in for selling narcotics. Bad guy. Scary as hell just to look at. I’m not going to give you the name. There are gangs here. He’s a big noise in one of them. I’m not in any of them. I don’t feel like getting whacked right at the moment. You understand that?”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
“Okay,” Russ said. “I’ve been thinking about all this, Gregor. If he’d shot at you, you’d be dead. Although I don’t know what good it would have done him, either.”
“Russ—”
“Never mind,” Russ said. “Listen. This guy keeps telling this story. Back in Central America, this guy says he hired himself out as a coyote. He took money from people to bring them into the United States illegally. He charged whatever the traffic would bear and then on the trip he said there were … perks. Do you want to know about the perks?”
“I can guess,” Gregor said.
“Yeah,” Russ said. “He can be explicit about the perks. Anyway, the deal was the more money people could put together, the more likely it was that somebody would bring them up here. But there was this situation. The coyotes run with gangs, just like the drugs do. And the gangs took care of their own. There was this guy named Roberto Rodriguez. He was an up-and-comer with the drug guys. He had a girlfriend, let’s not talk about the girlfriend and how he got her, but he got her. And he kept her. And she had a child. His child. They weren’t married, but he damned well knew it was his child. Got all that?”
“I said it was not an unusual story,” Tibor said.
“She was fifteen when she had the kid,” Russ said. “And Rodriguez took care of them. Set them up in a place. Got her mother to stay and help out. The mother was very religious and hated him, but Rodriguez must have figured that would help. The mother wouldn’t put up with any shenanigans. So they’re all living together in this house, and the mother gets sick. Really sick. It gets to the point where she’s lying in a room in the dark, praying the rosary nonstop, that’s all that’s happening anymore. It’s getting inconvenient, right? And Rodriguez is getting to be a big noise. He has responsibilities.”
“Just like a CEO,” Gregor said dryly.
“Don’t laugh,” Russ said. “You don’t think that’s how these guys see themselves? Anyway, comes a day, the mother’s feeling a little better, she can look after the kid while Rodriguez and the girlfriend go out. So Rodriguez and the girlfriend do go out. They go to a restaurant or something. I don’t know what it was all about, but they go. They’re gone a couple of hours. Maybe longer. The girlfriend’s supposed to be a real piece of work. Maybe that’s just my guy talking. He thinks all women are real pieces of work. It doesn’t matter. They went out. They came back. And when they came back, the mother was stone-cold dead in a back bedroom and the kid was gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Gregor asked.
“Gone,” Russ said positively. “Just plain gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth. And it’s Rodriguez’s son, right? He went looking. He had his people looking. Nothing. Nobody saw anybody going in and out of the house that day. Nobody saw the kid. Nothing. They start fanning out across the landscape. They talk to everybody. They invade people’s houses. They torture people. They intercept coyotes and caravans and everything else you can think of. Still not a thing. But they do get hold of a rumor.”
“This is the part,” Tibor said. “This is what I wanted you to hear for yourself.”
“Rumors aren’t facts,” Gregor said.
“Just listen to me,” Russ said. “The rumor says there’s an operation out there that will get you into the United States, clean. Women and children only. Mostly children. The coyotes are paid to make sure these people make it to the US without having had to put up with any of those perks. They’re paid a lot more than they can get for any regular trip, but everything is checked out as soon as the passenger arrives across the border. And the people who run this thing are not kidding. Deliver damaged goods and you could end up dead.”
“And the kid went with this group of people?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t think they know,” Russ said. “According to my guy, they checked, everywhere. They looked for people with lots of sudden cash. Nothing. They chewed up the landscape. Still nothing. Rodriguez is completely ballistic. The old lady couldn’t have paid for something like that. Even an ordinary coyote costs twenty thousand dollars or more. Something like this would have cost three times this, if not more. Rodriguez is like all these guys. He set them up at stores all over the place, let them charge groceries and clothes and toys for the kid, paid off street vendors in advance, but he never gave them much in the way of cash. You don’t want your people to have cash. Some of them are going to stash it and then try to take off.”
“But the kid is gone,” Gregor said.
“And the rumors could be untrue,” Russ said. “Maybe my guy just wants to sound big. Maybe it’s nothing. But here’s the thing. Here’s what I’ve got for you in exchange for shooting you in the face.”
“Tcha,” Tibor said.
Russ gave a hollow little laugh. “The kid they’re looking for,” he said, “is a seven-year-old boy named Javier.”
3
The meeting with Meera Agerwal had been a mistake. It had been so much of a mistake, Clare McAfee couldn’t believe she had made it. She had survived this far in her life by making very few mistakes, and none of the kind that put her immediately at risk. The problem was that, in her mind, motivations were simple and straightforward, no matter how complicated they appeared on the surface. People wanted money, and power, and freedom. Sometimes they also wanted fame and prestige, but that was less likely. Prestige was fleeting. Fame was its own kind of problem, complete with people you’d never heard of who suddenly wanted a piece of your hide. Clare McAfee preferred t
o be anonymous. That way, if something went wrong, it took the people who were after you a little time to figure out who you were.
There was no time to do too many of the things she should have done to prepare for flight. She wasn’t going to kid herself. Time was very short. She had a single suitcase packed and ready at her apartment. Her everyday purse had all her identification already in it, plus half a dozen credit cards in its regular pockets and another half dozen (in different names) in the security pockets in the folds. If she hadn’t talked to Meera Agerwal, she wouldn’t have to move anywhere near this fast. She could do what she originally planned and go down to Nashville before taking a plane out of the country. It would be weeks before the bank figured out what she had done. She could have made it even longer if she had been able to cook up an excuse to take off for a while—a business meeting in Prague, a sick mother in Lithuania, her vacation time. She had been very careful about the system she had set up. She had used that system for other people as well as Cary Alder. Cary Alder was the only one of her special clients who knew for certain she was the one who was facilitating—everything.
It was always better to take a plane from an airport that did not fly directly out of the country. Nonstop international flights always originated at airports with lots of extra security, and lots of extra agency personnel to provide it.
She had her suitcase. She had her purse. She had her ticket, bought on the Internet and printed out right there in the office. First, she’d done it. Then she’d gone back and carefully wiped the memory of everything she’d done. She’d been very careful not to leave even a scrap of paper behind. Then she’d first double- and then triple-checked that her special-boarding-security thingy was up to date. She’d gotten one of those years ago, on the very first day they’d been offered. The last thing she wanted was to hang around in lines while she was being searched by the TSA.
Indian women, she thought, as she allowed herself to be processed through to the plane. The suitcase was not small enough to count as a carry-on. She got it stamped and tagged at the counter. Indian women might as well have come from a different planet. They cared about money—oh, dear God, they cared about money—but they only cared about money after they cared about all these other things, caste, public humiliation, the mere idea of having to touch anything they considered “unclean.” Dear God, what would these women have done in Lithuania or Kosovo or any of the other countries of the collapsing Soviet Union, when everybody was at war with everybody else and if you ate, you ate out of garbage cans? Welcome to the world, Clare thought. The real world. The world where an American prison would be the Plaza Hotel of bad situations.
Sometimes they held the plane on the tarmac while they were sorting out their information. Then law enforcement would come on and get you right out of your seat. They tracked you down through your ticket or your cell phone—but Clare had been smart about that, too. She had left her regular cell phone in her office, as if she’d just forgotten it on her desk. All she had with her was the Tracfone she’d picked up at Walmart and registered to her Marilyn Borden credit card.
She had bought the ticket as Clare McAfee, though. It had never occurred to her that she would have to leave in such a hurry that her name would matter.
“I don’t care where you’re from,” Meera Agerwal had said. “You’re like all the Americans. You think everybody in the world is a thief.”
Nobody got on the plane. The flight attendants fanned out to demonstrate safety procedures. Clare buckled up and ignored them. Then the pilot said something. Then the plane began to move.
Thief, Meera Agerwal had said.
Clare McAfee wanted to scream. Of course, the woman was a thief. She was a bad thief. She was so obvious, Clare had picked up on the activity the first time she’d run into it, and that was at the very beginning of the scheme. She would move the money from one of Cary Alder’s accounts to another, carefully, day by day, and the banks would report the real-time value of each of the accounts as they were asked. What was really $100,000 would look like $600,000 in no time flat. Then what was really $3,000,000 would look like $18,000,000. Anybody could do it. It took a rank idiot to skim off the edges of it so that the numbers never added up exactly.
Meera Agerwal was a rank idiot.
She was a rank idiot with a persecution complex and a sense of entitlement that rivaled—well, anything. Entitled to the money. Entitled to get away with it.
JFK airport was not very far. The plane went up and almost immediately began to come down. It was just a puddle jumper. She would have been better off if she had been able to get a plane she could stay on. Now she would have to change planes, check in at another counter, do something about the suitcase. Maybe she could leave the suitcase. The airlines were supposed to move it for you, but usually she checked. Just in case. She didn’t trust the airlines. She didn’t trust anybody. She should be in Nashville on the way to Atlanta.
The airplane was rolling to a stop. She had been so far into her own head, she had barely noticed it landing. She waited until the stop was complete and the flight attendants came out to wish them all a happy day. Her flight out of JFK went to Brussels—a nice bland European country, no red flags for politics or religion. On that flight she had a business-class seat. That was bland, too.
I think I’m going to be sick.
Clare got out of her seat. The plane was not crowded. She clutched her purse against her body. She walked up the narrow aisle to the disembarkation door. The flight attendants were standing in a row near the door. The sweat was coming out of her scalp in pulsing waves. It made the roots of her hair feel as if they were falling out. All the muscles in her body were shaking.
Nobody can tell I feel like this, she promised herself, making herself walk faster. There was a deep, hollow echo in the disembarkation tunnel.
In the airport itself, there was a different echo, but Clare McAfee didn’t notice it.
What she did notice was the four men waiting at the door. All of them were dressed in black. None of them had on one of those flashy vests that identified them to the world at large.
She knew who they were anyway.
FIVE
1
Horowitz and Morabito had information. They had stacks of printouts, computer screens full of the same information, form after form of impenetrable jargon accompanied by footnotes on subjects Gregor couldn’t identify. What it came down to was this: the blood and hair on the tire iron was mixed. Most of it belonged to Miguel Hernandez. Some of it, near the curved end, belonged to Marta Warkowski. That suggested that Hernandez had died from being hit, not being shot. The coroner concurred. What had looked at first sight like a bullet hole was a gash from the small hook near the tire iron’s curve. The gun on the floor of Marta Warkowski’s room had not killed Hernandez. The rest of the forensics team had come up with a set of fingerprints from the gun, but little else. It had not been recently fired. It had not left a bullet or a shell in the room.
Gregor’s feeling that he was only being consulted on this case because Horowitz and Morabito thought the brass wanted them to consult was stronger than ever. These were two experienced detectives. They knew how to do their job.
He tried anyway.
“You have to assume she was attacked somewhere outside her apartment,” he told them. “There doesn’t seem to be anything in these reports about finding her blood or skin or hair in the apartment, other than what would be usual because she lived there. If what caused the coma was that she was hit on the back of the head with the tire iron, there would be something.”
“She was hit on the back of the head with the tire iron,” Morabito said. “The reports say so.”
“They do,” Gregor admitted. “But that blow could have been secondary. If she was hit with something else, or if she fell against something else, and everybody assumed she was dead—”
“Right,” Horowitz said. “They moved her. They were going to dump the body. They realized she was still alive. They
decided to finish the job and make sure, so they hit her again.”
“I don’t know that they hit her the first time,” Gregor said. “Cary Alder said she came up to the office that evening. He says Meera Agerwal will corroborate that. I don’t see Hernandez coming up to the office here on his own. I really don’t see Juan Morales going there, or anyone like Morales. There wouldn’t be any point. But if Marta Warkowski was hit, or fell, in the office, the person who hit her or caused her to fall—”
“Cary Alder? Meera Agerwal? You don’t think they would have called the cops?”
“If they thought she was dead?” Gregor asked. He had to remind himself that these two men didn’t know all the circumstances, although they’d heard rumors. “It would depend on what happened and who did it. But you’ve got to keep a sense of place. These men don’t belong here. It was late. Most of the building would have gone home. If they parked in the back and came up the service elevator, they wouldn’t look too out of place. I’m sure that happens all the time. But now consider St. Catherine’s Parish. Cary Alder would look out of place there. So would Meera Agerwal—in fact, she did, when she let us into that apartment. Remember? And the people in the parish wouldn’t tell us anything about Hernandez or Morales. They’re their own people. There would have been somebody in the vicinity who would have been more than happy to give up Cary Alder.”
“Somebody legal,” Morabito said sarcastically.
Gregor ignored him. “The van was mostly clean except for the tire iron,” he said. “That means they must have parked the van in the local garage and then cleaned it, then brought the tire iron with them to Marta Warkowski’s apartment. With the tire iron as sticky as it was, there was no way they could have made that van look as clean as it appeared to us if it had been sitting in the back there after it had been used on Hernandez. Still, I can’t believe they’re Good Housekeeping. Forensics went over the van?”