by SLMN
Mary-Joy looked up at the picture that had been taken of Macy dead in the dirt. She and Macy had been bunkmates in the dormitory. The broken girl, with the white sightless eyes, did not match her memory of the mightily smart tenacious girl from Florida who Mary-Joy had known. Mary-Joy imagined Macy would have been successful at anything she tried in the future—if she’d had a future.
Macy arrived on the island a year after Mary-Joy had been sold by her mother to traffickers for the price of six months’ Shabu. Macy and Mary-Joy couldn’t have come from more different worlds—Mary-Joy from the landfill life and Macy from the affluent upper middle class of South Florida. Mary-Joy had been sold openly to traffickers. They had come to the shack, given a handful of notes to Angel, tied Mary-Joy up, gagged her, and carried her out of the slums, past the shacks of her neighbors.
Macy on the other hand had been on her father’s boat on a fishing expedition during a lazy Sunday afternoon. Macy had told Mary-Joy that another boat had signaled to them that they were in distress. Macy’s father had taken his boat alongside it, and what initially Macy had thought was a robbery turned into something much worse. The three men on the other boat had drawn weapons and stepped onto Macy’s father’s boat. They clubbed the man unconscious and tipped him over the side “for the sharks.”
Macy had been tied, taken to the other boat, and stowed in a cabin with a bag over her head. Her arms were tied roughly behind her back.
Mary-Joy had made the journey to the island from the Philippines, first chained inside a container on a cargo ship, left in the dark with a barrel of brackish water. It was enough to last the month of the trip, with boxes of candy bars as her only source of food. She’d been in the container with four other girls who had also been taken from the slums at the same time as her. One had died three weeks into the journey. Because of the dark, she and the other girls hadn’t been able to see the corpse they’d dragged to the corner and covered with blankets in the dark.
But they had been able to smell her.
After the journey to a port of which Mary-Joy had no idea of its location, they’d been released into the hot breath of an intense summer heat. The light had hurt their eyes. Living off candy bars and dirty water had not done their health any good whatsoever. Their mouths were sore, their skin broken and spotty. They’d been told by the three men who seemed to have the run of this area of the cargo ship—the same three who had taken her from the slums—that if they made any noise they’d be killed on the spot. Mary-Joy was so grateful to be out of the container that she readily agreed. The Port was hot, colorful, and bustling with life. All the faces around the dock were black African, and no one paid any attention to the ship or the girls it was transporting.
The surviving girls were allowed to shower, given fresh clothes, and driven to the airport, where they had been flown for another six or seven hours. They landed at a small airfield in a jungle, and then were transported to a rusty old single funnel steamer, which then took them out to the island.
The boat was ancient and asthmatic, its decks weathered and unvarnished. It looked as if a derelict house had been placed on top of an iron hull and pushed out to sea. The hull had once been bright red, but was now stained with rust and crustaceans. Black smoke belched from the funnel as it steamed, and the girls—chained into the forward cargo space, beneath the poop deck—got no rest from the thudding and banging of the engine as it propelled the boat through the waves.
Macy had been taken in by her captors, who from the description, seemed to be the same three that bought Mary-Joy from her mother to a landing stage on a remote Caribbean island. They were then flown in a small luxury jet to the same jungle airfield where Mary-Joy had been taken, and then brought on the same streamer to the island.
Mary-Joy’s inner strength, grown and nurtured in the most hellish environment ever created—the Filipino slums—had not exactly prepared her for life on the island, but it made her strong enough to cope. That resolve meant what happened on the island had not torn her down inside. Macy, however, had been the opposite. In the three years of degradation, humiliation, rape, and abuse—both physical and mental—she was driven to believe that being dead, getting to the rocks on the other side of the Enchanted Forest, and throwing herself onto them, was a far better option than trying to escape the island or waiting for a rescue that would never come.
She’d told Mary-Joy a little of the plan she’d concocted to escape the next time Lobo came to the island to abuse her. Mary-Joy had tried to persuade her not to do it. She wished she could have injected the younger girl with some of her strength, and some of her resolve. But it was clear that Macy was determined that she needed to die and that throwing herself onto those rocks was the best way to do it.
Mary-Joy sat on Macy’s bunk as she heard the alarms, the dogs barking, the helicopters lifting off, and the commotion in the compound. She’d buried her head in Macy’s pillow that still smelled of her skin and the perfume she’d been made to put on before she met with Lobo.
When the dogs stopped barking, the helicopters returned to the helipad, and the noises of the compound had returned to normal. Only then, when she knew it was over, did Mary-Joy allow herself to cry for her friend who she knew had escaped the island—but only to her death.
To have the sickening evidence, blown up and printed on a glossy picture and then pinned to the notice board in the D-Wing Dormitory, made those tears want to rise again in Mary-Joy’s eyes.
But she didn’t give the black uniformed guards the satisfaction of seeing how the picture affected her. While some of the other girls sobbed quietly on their bunks, or others purposefully looked away, Mary-Joy walked the length of the concrete-floored building and stood in front of the picture. She stood there staring at the body of Macy and looked at the shape and hollows of death in her stomach and her cheeks. She viewed the claws her fingers had become in pain, the pulled back grimace of her lips and then hard into the whites of the dead girl’s eyes.
Mary-Joy was not going to end up like this.
She wasn’t going to be dead.
She also had a plan of escape, and it was going to get her off the island and she was going to go home, find Benjie, and live happily ever after.
But not before she’d killed Rosa.
8
The message to Gary Malcolm about killing his family was the first confirmed contact Passion had seen from the people who might have kidnapped the girls—specifically Lainey—and so it immediately made her suspicious. This change in M.O. separated Lainey’s disappearance from the others straight away.
“Why would they send you this message? How did they know you had anything to tell?”
Gary’s eyes dropped from the anxious darting to something that looked very much like shame. “I…Christ…I’m in so much trouble.”
“Gary, tell me what you know, because if you don’t Lainey may end up dead. Do you want that?”
“No! Don’t say that. They’re not going to kill her! They’re not!”
“How do you know?”
Gary shook his head.
Passion didn’t have time for this, but if she pressed too hard the terrified boy might clam up completely. She could threaten him with taking him to the police—a thing in reality she couldn’t do, because of wanting to keep her work as far from them as possible—but Gary didn’t know that. However, that again might make him run.
Gary really seemed to believe these guys would kill him if he opened his mouth to the police. Or to anyone.
“I want to go. Please. Take me…take me anywhere. I need to get out of town. I need to go somewhere where they aren’t going to find me.”
“Gary…I can help you. I promise. I can get you some money, put you in a motel, help you keep your head down until this blows over and Lainey is back. But to do that I need to know what you know. Okay?”
“You can do that? For me?”
“Yes. One phone call and it’s sorted. I promise.”
Gary rubbed the
sweat from his palms across his thighs, took another look through the Hyundai’s windows to make sure they weren’t being watched and said, “I cloned her phone. Her other phone.”
This was massive.
If the boy had access to Lainey’s secret smartphone—the texts, messages, keystrokes, and call log—that could be a huge leap forward for Passion, getting her much closer to the girl. Passion tried not to get ahead of herself in the excitement and spook the kid any more than he already was. “How?”
“Bluetooth hack. She accidentally left her phone in my car one night after I’d brought her back to the house. It had fallen out of her purse as she got out of the Camry. I saw it on the floor still unlocked.”
Passion knew the procedure well. She’d used it enough times on active investigations herself. The software was easy enough to source on the internet. “So you turned on the Bluetooth, used the hack-tool, and then took the cell back to Lainey pretending that you’d found it and was just being a good friend. Right?”
His cheeks reddened.
“You were stalking her?”
“No!” His eyes were fiery, and a spray of spittle exploded from his lips hitting Passion on the cheek. Cloning a smartphone these days was a simple enough deal if you can get at the target phone when the password was unlocked. That was the key. Anything after that was gravy. You just change the settings so that Bluetooth will accept handshakes from unknown sources and switch it on. The cloning process takes a few minutes as data is transferred. After that, the software embedded in the target cell would transmit everything the phone does from that moment on to the designated receiving smartphone or computer. It could have been easily done in the time it took Gary to drive from the Ralston residence a few miles down the road, finish cloning the phone, and then return like the Good Samaritan to show what a stand-up guy he was.
The process is easy, the results always interesting, and it gave the spy access to everything the victim says or does on his or her phone.
“I’m not stalking her. I love her.”
Passion buttoned her lip and didn’t say a word.
“She would call me up all the time to get me to take her home from one of the clubs she went to with her weird friends. I was the only one she knew with a car. She couldn’t use her allowance credit card for an Uber, because her Mom would see the bill. Her rich friends were the same, so I had a car, and I became the guy who ran her around when she wasn’t out of the house for a legit reason.”
“And you cloned the phone, why? I’m still not clear.”
“I wanted to…protect her.” It was clear from Gary’s face that he knew how lame that sounded, almost before it left his mouth, but he nodded hard enough to convince himself it was true.
“Protect her from whom?”
“Jake.” Gary spat the word out like it stung his mouth because the letters were made of razors.
Passion hadn’t seen a Jake on the friends’ lists of any of Lainey’s legit profiles. So whoever Jake was, he was someone exclusively to the contacts on her dark profile. The way Gary spoke about Jake gave Passion a much greater insight into the mindset of the boy.
He was a stalker, pure and simple, consumed by envy and jealousy. Bitter and twisted inside. Jake had become a major figure of hate.
“She was always talking about him. How much she loved him, how happy he made her. How sexy he was. About how she was going to…going to…lose her…” He could not say the word. It was stuck in his throat. “How he was gonna be her first… She wouldn’t shut up about it. Wouldn’t stop!”
Gary thumped the dash of the Hyundai so hard, Passion thought he was going to trigger the passenger airbag.
“She talked to you about this? About Jake?”
“No! To the girls I drove around with her! To Marcia and Frankie!”
Two new names for the list.
“But you heard everything?”
“Yes! It was as if she didn’t care I was there. I was just the driver. I was just the guy who hung on her every word, and did whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted!”
Gary was a confused kid, but that didn’t stop Passion from thinking he had all the makings of a slimeball when he grew up. The typical entitled shithead who thought every woman owed him their minds and their bodies. And that sense of entitlement lead to stalking, bullying and in this case the cloning of Lainey’s smartphone.
“The last dump of info I got from her account was her promising to meet Jake outside their house on Luxor—he’d come down from Dallas and he’d rented a car. They were going to the Sheraton. He’d booked a room and…”
His voice choked with emotion.
“I don’t know how she could do this to me. Doesn’t she get how loyal and loving and dependable I could be?”
It was all Passion could do not to reach across to the boy and shake the self-pity out of him until it made his eyes rattle. The boy needed a good hard slap and an injection of humility. But even with that in mind, Passion knew that getting to the information contained in Lainey’s phone was absolutely imperative.
She could do all the slapping she wanted later.
“The cops took your home PC and Laptop. Was Lainey’s cloned information downloaded there?”
He actually looked hurt at the mere suggestion. “Do you think I’m crazy? Of course not. The PC and laptop are shared with my sister. Dad wouldn’t let us have one each.”
Passion wanted to kiss Gary’s dad.
“So, your phone?”
Gary nodded, holding up his S8. The gel case was grubby with fingerprints and maybe the splashes of tears. Gary thumbed through the menus to the Bluetooth app, which had a separate password to the phone and opened it up. The page was arranged in several sections. Text. Email. Social Media. Key Stokes. Passwords. Lainey’s phone had been raped of all its information, and every few hours it would be dumped silently—at pre-arranged times if it was on, or when it was next switched on, or connected to a Wi-Fi. It was an insidious piece of software, created by assholes, and exploited by scum like Gary.
It was also Lainey’s lifeline.
“May I?” Passion said, holding out her hand.
Gary hesitated, but eventually handed her the phone. Passion knew, because she’d used the very same software in the past, that there was a pop-open menu which gave the option to forward the information to another account. She typed in her email account, and copied in Bryan.
“I need the app password to forward the information from the cloned phone. What is it?”
Gary’s face dropped, and his eyes looked away, the shame now burning in his cheeks, like the light from the summer sun.
“I didn’t hear you Gary, what’s the password?”
Another spray of spittle as Gary looked up and enunciated the letters like he was taking part in a Spelling Bee final: “L…A…I…N…E…Y…W…I…L…L…B…E…M…I…N…E…1…4…3…”
Spelling out the password didn’t make it kick at Passion’s anger any less. But she typed it in, and then threw the smartphone back to Gary.
Her own phone pinged to say the information from the Clone App had landed on her own cell from the Agency Cloud. Text, pictures, messages, and passwords were siphoning onto her own memory card now.
Ping. Done.
Passion had all she needed from the boy, and suddenly felt dirty just being next to him. All her life there had been a succession of boys like Gary who had grown into men like the on-shoot photographer.
Passion had gone past the shaking and slapping stage, and would have been quite happy to punch the boy square in the chops for behaving the way he did. It was not a psychotic obsession or a demand of entitlement due, which drove men like Gary and the photographer. It was their inability to blame anyone but themselves for their personalities and behaviors. Women were objects. Meat. A meal ticket. They were holes to be used and abused, and it didn’t matter what the women thought. Sure they’d dress it up as love or harmless lust, but in reality they were predators. One step up from pon
d scum.
Passion shook her head, trying to dampen the rising anger there. She didn’t have time for this. She had a kidnapped girl to find.
Passion reached across Gary, her elbow scraping against his chest.
“Owww!” Gary had never sounded more like the whiny toddler he really was.
“Get out.”
The look of shock on his face was complete. His eyes immediately filled with tears.
“Get out before I kick you out.”
She deftly unclipped his seatbelt and let it roll back into its sprung container. “You’ve got five seconds.”
“But you said you’d help me! You said you’d get me a motel!”
Passion shrugged. “I betrayed you, Gary. Like you betrayed Lainey. Just be grateful that I don’t pass that betrayal onto the Police. And I’m only doing it because the information I now have might lead me to her.”
Gary got out onto the hot tarmac and looked around. “I don’t even know where I am!”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Passion said as she pulled the Hyundai away in a wide circle, using the forward momentum to close the car’s open passenger door on its own.
The last Passion saw of Gary was him standing stunned in the middle of the parking lot, crying. His shoulders shaking and the look of a lost little boy on his face.
Passion didn’t give one single damn.
Jake-Not-Jake shoved Lainey’s phone at her face. “Who cloned your fucking phone, cunt?” She’d been pulled from the trunk of the Buick. They were standing in an underground parking lot. The place was deserted, apart from the car that had brought her here. Jake-Not-Jake put the gun back in the belt on his paunchy stomach then ripped the tape from her mouth so she could speak.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jake-Not-Jake slapped her. Hard. Because her ankles were taped together, she fell hard against the Buick. Mustache’s arm snaked through hers and pulled her back into a standing position.