Lost Girls (5 page)

An Inspector Singh of the Mount Lavinia police spoke next, telling the group about a man in Sri Lanka who owned a certain vessel that visited China and the coast of South Korea. Nearly a million people had been displaced in his country in the past five years, one-third of them under the age of eighteen. And they were eager for his help….

Lieutenant George Basescu of the Romanian National Police described a warehouse in Bucharest converted to a human shopping mall. The defendants, all low-level criminals, displayed their human wares on a makeshift stage in a showroom with gaudily carpeted walls and mirrors. When the girls were not being paraded on display, they were housed behind another wall made of cinder block and soundproofing foam, in eight-by-eight-foot cells with toilets. They came from everywhere, but mostly from war-torn Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. What might be of interest to the others was that when the warehouse caught fire and police found the charred remains of the women still locked in their cells, there was a Rolls-Royce parked in a cargo bay. It was registered to a flamboyant Korean known only as Jong-pil. And Jong-pil suddenly disappeared from Bucharest’s nightlife scene. His whereabouts remain unknown to this day.

A regional directorate of the Border National Police Service in Bulgaria once had a narcotic informant who was present at a conversation about women being trafficked from Bulgaria to Haiti. A dark-skinned, one-eyed man bragged that he tattooed the women’s faces with a voodoo image before he sold them into slavery in South America.

A nineteen-year veteran of Thailand’s police spoke of reversing trends in Southeast Asian human trafficking. Wealthy Thai men, instead of exploiting the children of their native impoverished population, were buying Eastern European children for back-alley brothels in Pattaya….

A Texas Ranger talked about adolescents’ being recruited in Mexico by a phony employment foundation to work in New York City hotels as housekeepers. They met in a hotel parking lot in Nuevo Laredo and were trucked across the Texas border, where they were forced to work as prostitutes in a Houston brothel.

The stories went on for six hours.

Brigham swirled the port around the rim of his glass, laid the letter on his lap, and took off his reading glasses. “So what did you think of Captain Metcalf?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?” Sherry said, feeling heat rise from the back of her neck. Brigham watched her, amused; she’d asked one too many questions about the Navy Seal since returning from Denali. He could see the color on her beautiful face. She fussed with her luxurious chestnut hair, twirling it around her fingers in a rare moment of awkwardness.

“The senator’s son was quite taken by you, I heard. In fact, you were all he talked about once they got his sister back home.”

Sherry kept her head down, binding the hair tightly around her finger.

“I mean, how well you handled yourself on the mountain and all, that kind of thing.” Brigham watched her carefully. “You don’t just go out and do things like that when you’re blind. Metcalf admired your strength, he kept saying.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Well, I thought he was quite capable himself, very, um, competent I guess is the word.”

“Uh-huh.” Brigham smiled, taking a sip of his drink. “Yeah, competent.”

Sherry decided to change the subject. “He said it was very difficult for his sister to talk about what happened up there. I was given the impression she and the dead man might have gotten close on the mountain. Close, but she still didn’t know anything about him.”

Brigham was silent on the subject.

“I can’t stop thinking about that, you know,” Sherry Moore said.

She laced the fingers of both hands behind her neck. “I really can’t, Mr. Brigham, and I’m trying. Honestly trying.”

Brigham grunted. “You want to finish these or what?” He picked up the letter from his lap and flapped it noisily in the air. They were going through the week’s mail, a ritual of sorts. Sherry and Brigham would often choose a handful of letters from her public PO box and debate the merit of answering pleas for Sherry’s assistance. Sherry handled only a small number of cases a year, the most compelling usually from law enforcement, but occasionally she was so moved by a particular letter that she might contact the author. It was Brigham’s role to play devil’s advocate at those times.

“I want to talk about it again.”

“We already talked about it, Sherry,” Brigham said grumpily. “You know what kind of a world this is. You can’t take it on single-handed.”

“I’m not trying to. I was just thinking about what I saw up there on the mountain.” Sherry reached for her drink and stirred the ice noisily with a finger. “I think he was overwhelmed by it himself, Mr. Brigham. Why else would he remember such horrible things in the last few seconds of his life?”

“Maybe he didn’t know they were the last few seconds of his life,” Brigham countered her. “You’re the one who’s always pointing that out to people. Context, you like to preach. You can’t take things out of context and put them back together again.”

Sherry heard Brigham uncorking the port, a bottle of Graham’s 1994. Try as she might, she could never acquire a taste for the stuff, but she delighted in stocking his favorites in the house.

“Are you done ridiculing me? ”

Brigham sighed audibly, sat back, and raised his goblet.

“What is it that I’m missing, Mr. Brigham? You actually seem to bristle when I bring up this castle and those women. Do you know something I don’t?”

“Leave it, Sherry, just leave it,” Brigham said.

“Is it what I saw that’s the problem for you?” she persisted.

Brigham sighed and set down his glass.

“It’s not what you saw, Sherry. It’s who he was. Who Sergio Mendoza was.”

Aleksandra felt the eyes of the dead girl on her, staring out of a bloodless mask of skin and red hair. Twenty hours of gravity would do that to a face, when the heart stopped pumping, capillaries and veins begin to drain to lower parts of the body. Pockets of dark purple formed wherever blood was trapped, under forearms and thighs, sometimes the feet looking discolored as if the corpse was wearing black socks.

Her buttocks would be one of those places, though you couldn’t see her buttocks in four inches of diesel fuel, vomit, and shit.

Today was the first day in a week they could see one another’s faces. Today one of the ship’s crew smelled the diesel fumes rising from the false hold and realized that a fuel tank had sprung a leak. Before today, in utter darkness, one of the girls might succumb to the fumes and pass out in a corner, might fall facedown in the muck, not to be found until it was too late. Two had died that way during the storm their first night at sea, drowned in their own waste.

Aleksandra stared up at the light.

The opening wasn’t a hatch in the truest sense of the word. It looked more like a section of flooring that had been cut out of the desk and then laid back in place. She knew they were near the engine room from the rumbling and pervasive vibrations in the walls surrounding them. She had heard of false holes welded into the hulls of freighters to smuggle illicit cargo and had no doubt they were sitting in one.

She looked at the young faces around her. Some looked as young as fifteen.

Before the “hatch” had been removed, Aleksandra would not have bet on any of their chances for survival. They would simply have exhausted all the oxygen in the hold and begun to suffocate, one by one. Now that they could breathe again, Aleksandra was encouraged to live. Aleksandra was resolved not to die without a fight.

She looked around the narrow hold, thinking they hadn’t been the first to suffer this fate. The compartment had probably been constructed to move heroin or cocaine across the oceans. The space they occupied was no wider than her shoulders. They had to step over one another to walk to either end in hope of finding some privacy.

How many women had died here before them? Dozens? Hundreds? She’d known just how close a call they’d had on this trip when she saw the captain’s face looking down at them. He was screaming at the crewman to extinguish cigarettes for fear of igniting the fumes.

The smell must have been unbearable coming out of that compartment. Fuel, vomit, and shit and of course their filthy bodies, both dead and alive.

She was worried he might simply order them to flood the container with fire retardant and then seal it again. It would have been the safest thing to do under the circumstances. The price of a few bodies could hardly be worth the risk of fire at sea—an errant spark, hot ashes from a cigarette sucked into an air vent, lightning, static electricity, anything could follow the vapors to its source.

But he didn’t. He just left them there, hatch open to ventilate the hold. She could only guess that they were nearing their destination and the captain wanted to be paid before ridding himself of his cargo. No one was going to pay him for dead bodies. Or maybe it was what he saw when he looked in that hold. Maybe he couldn’t stomach the idea of more death.

The absence of a hatch gave them light and fresh air, but temperatures in the hold were near suffocating and the engines rattled violently. They were all light-headed and nauseous, all still vomiting.

Aleksandra looked at the young faces around her and wondered about their stories. They were Russian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovakian; all had somehow been lured to port cities on the Baltic Sea. The irony was that she, Aleksandra, who understood better than any of them what was happening to them, was not supposed to be among them. She was the mistake. She had never been part of the kidnappers’ plans.

Aleksandra Goralski, Warrant Officer Class One of the Central Investigation Bureau, Polish National Police, was in the Baltic harbor of Gdansk to explore concerns about a corrupt chief customs commissioner. The commissioner had begun to exhibit sudden and extreme changes in his lifestyle, a lifestyle that included a teenage mistress, vintage cars, and a pleasure boat far beyond his means.

Because the commissioner was well connected to the Polish minister of interior, the assignment was conducted with great secrecy. Aleksandra conducted clandestine surveillance of her target in Gdansk, where she found his house and personal affairs in order. Nothing seemed amiss, or at least nothing that would explain a large infusion of cash in his life. He had received no inheritances, his bank statements corresponded with a salary of 48,000 euros, but the dacha, cars, and pleasure boat were worth more than a million three, and that meant he was acquiring large sums of cash.

Then Aleksandra heard a story about the commissioner and a Liberian-owned freighter that was in harbor. A delivery boy for a local butcher who carted meats to the docks supplying ships that were about to set sail said he knew the commissioner’s Mercedes-Benz and had twice seen the man boarding the
Yelenushka
while it was in port. He had put a hundred pounds of beef on the ship himself. The crew said they were bound for Haiti.

Chief commissioners in Poland were still chauffeured bureaucrats, the kind who preferred the aroma of caviar and Cuban cigars to that of salty brine and dead seagulls. Why would a chief commissioner be boarding a filthy cargo ship bound for Haiti?

Normally a ship the size of the
Yelenushka
would have a crew of ten, but not all of them would be on board that night. Tonight they would be out drinking, Aleksandra had told herself, out having a last fling on the wharf, saying their good-byes before they set sail. She’d wondered if it would be possible to look in the holds or break into the captain’s quarters and rifle his desk, an idea that by Aleksandra’s estimate was not out of the question. She had done crazier things in the armed forces when fighting the Taliban in their caves in Afganistan.

If cash changed hands with the chief customs commissioner, it might have something to do with the ship’s manifest or what was in the holds. Perhaps there would be other incriminating documents or evidence of contraband, something that would explain the commissioner’s odd visit.

The docks had their own kind of quiet at night—the sound of water cascading from the ship’s bilges into the harbor, the metallic clanking of mechanics’ tools, whining forklifts, and sparking welders. The noise was on a scale that made you feel puny, so many vessels towering hundreds of feet above the waterline.

Boarding the ship was easy; the shadows were plentiful, and the
Yelenushka
was in a remote area of the docks. If anyone had arrived early, she surmised they would already be asleep or she’d hear their footsteps long before she encountered them.

She wore dark clothing and avoided pools of light, reached the gangway stairs, and climbed them two at a time. Once on board she’d used the light from halogens over the superstructure to guide her way through a field of shrink-wrapped pallets on deck. When she reached the steel-encased doors to the ship’s stairwells she kicked off her shoes and laid them next to a bundle of medical stocks bearing the symbol of the Red Cross and stamped
PORT-AU-PRINCE
.

She had just passed an open door to a steel stairs leading belowdecks, was just reaching the shadows of the superstructure when she heard a muffled scream. The sound could have been anything, made by seabirds or a rusty hinge, perhaps one of the containers straining against its bindings, but the second time she heard it she knew it was human and that it was coming from belowdecks. It would only take minutes to investigate.

Aleksandra returned to the open door, pulled the Glock Model 19 from her waistband, and crept down the metal stairs barefoot to the level below. There were dim floor-level lights along a steel corridor and she followed its course to a perpendicular hallway with doors off to one side. The floor was vibrating under her bare feet—the ship’s generators were humming.

More light was coming from an open door down the hallway. She could hear the sounds of a coil spring mattress in motion and relaxed, a smile forming on her face. These were crew’s quarters. Some young man must have smuggled a last lay on board before dawn.

She started to back out, feet silent on her return to the stairs, but then a metal door above her slammed and she heard boots strike the stairs. There was nowhere to go, only back through the corridor toward the crew’s cabins. She tucked the weapon into her belt at mid-back, deciding to talk her way off the ship. There was no point in drawing attention to the investigation. No point in alerting the commissioner she had learned about his visits to the
Yelenushka
.

She messed up her hair, pulled her shirttail out over her slacks, and undid a button at the neck. If challenged she would claim she was leaving one of the men’s cabins.

The boots continued to clank down the steel stairs; they would appear at any moment now. Five more steps, three, two…then she saw feet, bare feet, not boots, small feet, not a man’s.

They belonged to a pale young girl wearing a trench coat over jeans. She was carrying a threadbare suitcase and there was a man behind her with a gun against her head.

“Well, well, what have we here?”

He was large and mustached, wore a navy knit cap and black leather jacket. Aleksandra turned to run, but there was a man behind her now, fat, wearing nothing but briefs and cradling a sawed-off shotgun.

A universal axiom among law enforcement officers was “Charge a gun and run from a knife.” But the man on the steps was using the young girl for a shield. He would get many clear shots before Aleksandra could get past the hostage. The man with the shotgun, on the other hand, might worry about the noise of the weapon or the shot pattern in the small hall, which would undoubtedly strike his compatriot at the stairs. Perhaps his hesitation would be long enough for Aleksandra to knock him down.

She pivoted and ran toward the fat man, reaching for her Glock with one hand and using the other to meet the blow he was about to deliver with the shotgun, which he was now wielding like a club. She heard her hand crack when the barrel struck, fired a wild shot into the ceiling and then another that tore a ragged red line across the man’s large stomach as her collarbone hit the floor.

The fat man was stunned, raking his belly with thick fingers until he was confident there was no hole, and he literally roared as he went for her throat, but this time Aleksandra didn’t miss. The 9mm Hydra-Shonk hollow point round went through the fat man’s stomach and blew a 13mm hole out his back. He never got to close his fingers around her neck.

Then the butt of the sawed-off shotgun struck her temple and she heard wood splinter. Aleksandra saw an explosion of white and tried to pull her knees toward her chest, to instinctively make herself as small as possible; her gun hand, the one that was not broken, barely extended from her chest, wavering around, but not knowing where to shoot.

The man in the leather jacket stepped on her wrist, crushing the weapon against her ribs. Then she heard a rush of air as the stock of the shotgun came at her head again.

There were few coherent moments after that. Once she was cognizant of warm fluid in her ear. Once she thought she heard a ship’s whistle blow. Once she felt the weight of a man’s body pressing upon her. When she finally came to, she was wearing someone else’s clothing and compressed in a dark, narrow room with other women around her.

If there was such a thing as destiny, it had delivered her into their hands. Except that Aleksandra did not believe in destiny, could not believe in a destiny such as this.

She knew the others were thinking about what they could have done differently, knew they were lured here under some pretense and were thinking about the decisions they’d made that had changed the course of their lives.

It hardly seemed fair that such small things could impact for eternity and yet it was true. Change one thing and you changed the end of the story. Today, instead of being trapped in the hold of a freighter, she might be rowing a boat in Lazienki Park, planning the New Year’s celebration with her lover.

The girls would all be thinking about their choices. Choices you had to live with, even the most innocent of choices.

Someone moaned in the shadows, but whether it was from physical pain or the pain of remembering was impossible to tell. Most of the girls had been raped in the cabins before the ship set sail. She had been raped, she was sure, perhaps by the chief customs commissioner himself. She was sure he would have been there to enjoy the send-off.

She stared up at the sheer steel walls rising above them and looked down at the dead girl once more. The little redhead had robbed the crew of the pleasure of exploiting her.

Aleksandra wondered if she might not have gotten off easy.