Authors: George D. Shuman
A Bertram sportfisherman rolled in calm waters off the coast of Jamaica. Rolly King George, wearing only sunglasses and a pair of black swimming trunks, looked across the portside rail of his boat with powerful binoculars. His huge black arms were beginning to dry the chalky white of sea salt. One of several dive tanks was strapped to his buoyancy compensator and regulator and dropped carelessly like the flippers and mask at his feet. Two stiff wahoos lay against the wall of the transom, dark holes trickling blood from their silvery sides and pooling on the fiberglass floor, eyes wide and glazed, staring toward his bare feet as he contemplated what he had just seen.
Rolly King George, senior investigator of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, was on holiday and spearfishing in the shallows south of White Bay when he first heard the airplane’s growl. It was an old plane, a Douglas DC-3, and it was flying south in cloudless skies. Heading toward the mainland of South America when he first saw it. Pushing one of the wahoos over the side of his boat, he’d slipped back in the water, put a shot of air into his buoyancy compensator to keep him afloat, and used a hand to shade his eyes from the sun as he watched the plane’s approach.
Unmarked planes were hardly unusual in the Caribbean; plenty of islanders maintained personal planes on private airstrips, not to mention that DC-3s were the favorite of drug runners—old and gutted of their seats, they could be bought cheap at thirty or forty thousand dollars and disposed of once their job was done.
But something about the plane kept him looking up and treading water as it came overhead, and then he saw the black outline of an open door and suddenly a body came out, arms flailing, legs kicking as it plummeted to the sea.
It seemed to take forever but at last he saw a small spray by green shallows.
The plane banked hard, circling low over the place where the body had dropped, then it changed direction and headed southeast. He followed it until it disappeared into the horizon.
It didn’t seem possible and yet it had happened. Now he was back in his boat with his eye on the place where he had seen the body hit the water.
He pushed the throttles with shaking hands and twin Cummins diesels screamed as the boat rose out of the water.
Minutes later he reached a sandbar, pulled back on the throttles, and tossed the binoculars on the dash, then trimmed the inboards to prevent the propellers from dulling in the bottom furrows. He killed the engines and vaulted over the rail into thigh-deep water.
She was lying facedown, young and trim and wearing only red bikini panties. Her long blond hair floated lazily about her head. Blood wiggled like red threads from both of her ears.
He looked around. There was nothing else in the sky, nothing on the ocean’s horizon. No one had seen what happened here, only he.
He turned his attention to the girl, examined the back of her head, then her torso and legs. He pushed down on one of her shoulders, rolling her over in the water, and he groaned when he saw the damage to her face. He put a finger on the carotid and raised her eyelids with a thumb. Then he used the thumb to stroke the tattoo just below her right eye, a grinning purple skull wearing a black top hat.
“Lost Girl,” he whispered, heart pounding in his chest.
She had been beautiful, he thought, young and beautiful, but now her skin was a maze of fractured blue lines. Rolly King George had seen trauma like hers to a body only once before, when a young Italian boy leaped off the cliffs over Treasure Beach in Jamaica. Her skin was like a road map of her circulatory system, veins bursting just beneath the surface.
He examined her scalp and torso, the hollows beneath her knees and armpits, any place that might conceal a knife or bullet wound. There was nothing. She had apparently been uninjured before she came out of the plane.
A wave washed over her face as he rocked her in his trembling arms. Then he looked up and replayed in his mind the image of what he had seen. First the plane was heading west, but after it circled where she fell, it turned southeast. Had the plane flown here specifically to murder this girl or had something gone terribly wrong? What had happened up there? Why had the plane changed direction?
He grabbed her by the ankle and pulled, using his free hand to guide her toward the back of his boat. Then he rolled her onto the swim platform and pulled himself out of the water, lifting her over the stern.
The trip back to the northern coast of Jamaica would take just under an hour. Under any other circumstance he would have called the ministry and had constabulary investigators meet him in Port Antonio. The parish could have taken the case from there. But this was not normal and Rolly King George, most senior investigator of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, knew there was little time to waste. He must place a very different kind of a call.
He climbed the ladder to his flying bridge and took a seat at the console. All around him shadows of lumbering clouds looked like stepping-stones through the shallow mint sea. He scrolled through numbers in a cell phone until he saw the listing “I-24/7.”
And dialed.
A few minutes later he was connected to an international operator and then to the National Central Bureau of Interpol in France.
“Helmut Dantzler, please.”
He was put on hold for nearly a minute, then connected to a second operator, an older man. “He’s not available,” the man said dryly.
“Do you have a number for him? A cell phone?”
“I’m afraid he’s in a dark spot, monsieur, may I take a message or perhaps I can help you.”
A dark spot could mean anything. Maybe he was in some remote region of the world or maybe he was in the basement having tea.
“I must reach him right away,” the inspector said. “You will tell him it is very important.”
“He checks his messages frequently,” the man allowed. “Who shall I say is calling?”
Rolly King George gave his name and cell phone number. Then he disconnected and nudged the throttles forward, turning the boat into deep water, accelerating, bow rising out of the water, propellers churning wake in a placid sea. He turned to look southeast once more. Eighty miles away lay the mountainous coast of Haiti. Was the plane heading for Haiti? Perhaps it had come from Haiti as well? He looked at the body lying beneath him by the transom. It had been over a year since the conference in Alberta. A year since he’d heard about the Bulgarian informant and a story about women with skulls tattooed on their faces.
In the year since the symposium in Alberta someone must surely have made progress on the Bulgarian informant’s story. Any organization that tattooed women’s faces could hardly remain hidden.
Inspector George had a boat slip in Port Antonio, but the marina there was full of tourists and parish police. He didn’t want to arouse curiosity, not even his fellow policemen’s curiosity right now. Anyone who saw the girl’s face would know she didn’t drown. Would know that she suffered some great trauma. Worse, they would see the tattoo on her face, and the last thing he wanted, until he talked to Interpol, was someone leaking word of that tattoo to the press.
He headed the boat toward the inlet at Frenchman’s Cove. The cove was familiar territory to him. He had kayaked these waters as a boy with a grandfather who once lived in Boston Bay. His grandma ran a jerk stand just above it on the side of A-4.
Someone would see him take the body off the boat there, he couldn’t do much about that, but he didn’t have to let them see her face. In a small marina he could control the transfer of her body from his boat into the bed of his pickup.
This inlet had been the beginning of his love affair with the sea, a place of magic for a young boy’s imagination. The cove was famous for its history of pirates and buried treasure. He remembered his grandfather’s tales of ghostly apparitions toiling on the beaches beneath Fairy Hill or at the bend in a path called See-Me-No-More. Ghosts dragging the weight of their booty and herding kidnapped slaves to launches that they would row to their mother ships at sea.
He knew that those “ghosts” were once flesh-and-blood human beings. He knew that more flesh-and-blood human beings carried on their tradition smuggling rum and marijuana and then cocaine and heroin between the islands and South America. The night waters of the Caribbean were alive with activity and they had been for as long as the islands had a history. And in that long history there had always been stories of Lost Girls.
You might not think you could make someone disappear on a tropical island, but then you didn’t think of tropical islands in terms of mountain jungles rising to twice the altitude of Denver, or of islands the size of Connecticut, with remote irregular coastlines. The smugglers knew these coasts intimately, were equipped with jet boats and pontoon planes and catamarans and motored sloops that slipped tirelessly from cay to cay. And Jamaica was a cakewalk compared to the backcountry of the Dominican Republic or Haiti or, even worse, the mainland countries like Nicaragua or Colombia, where the mountains rivaled those of Tibet, where jungles were as dark as the Congo, and law, if it be found, fell to warlords and drug kingpins and rebels. These were countries whose governments didn’t care who went missing from some foreign land. These were countries whose bigger problems were war and poverty and drugs.
Simply stated, there was more uninhabited, unpatrolled, unassailable land south of Miami than any government could hope to tame, and the indigenous populations were as inescapably tied to the fortunes of their smugglers and drug lords as they were to the wind and the rain. If someone did go missing backcountry and in one of these poor nations, you could hardly expect that there were resources to go looking for them.
Peddlers young and old began to wade toward him.
“Ga-lang-bout-yu-business,” Rolly King George said, nosing the Bertram alongside the dock at the Villas in Frenchman’s Cove. George sometimes found patois less intimidating when trying to communicate with his countrymen.
He looked back to ensure that the woman in the stern was completely covered with a tarp.
“No-badda-me!” he snapped, putting the transmission in neutral and stepping off the side of the boat. He slipped lines fore and aft over pilings and looked around.
A handful of tourists watched curiously from the open decks of the Villas. An old bearded Jamaican man with gray dreadlocks raised a conch shell and blew a mournful note from the demarcation rope around the Villas’ private beach.
Rolly King George called a teenage boy who was raking pawpaw leaves, showed him his badge and a ten-dollar bill, and held up the keys to his Toyota pickup truck, parked in Port Antonio. “Yuh drive, bwoy?”
The boy nodded.
He told him where the truck was parked and put the money on the dash of the boat next to an automatic pistol.
“No lick it up, bwoy; mi know every ding.”
The boy reached for the keys, nodding enthusiastically as he dashed off in bare feet. The police inspector settled in for a wait.
The boy would have to hitch a ride to Port Antonio, twenty minutes one way. He must have been fortunate, for in only an hour he was back, and George was moving the wrapped body from the boat to the bed of his truck, where he secured her under a canvas. He wasn’t worried about the forensics or transfer evidence by now. The ocean had done its damage. If there were evidence to be found, it would be
in
her body, not on it. The food in her stomach, the chemicals in her organs, tissues, blood, the fillings in her teeth, foreign DNA, the inks used to tattoo her face.
Two hours later he was sitting in traffic on the outskirts of Kingston when his cell phone rang.
“Helmut Dantzler.” The German’s accent was crisp and formal.
“Mr. Dantzler.” Rolly King George was stopped in traffic behind a taxi that had hit a pickup truck carrying crates of chickens. People were shouting from their cars, feathers floating on the air.
“Inspector Rolly King George from the Jamaica Constabulary Force. I was in Alberta at the summit last year, we shook hands by the elevator before you left. You asked me if I knew Prime Minister Simpson-Miller and I did give her your respects.”
“Yes,” Dantzler said curiously. “I remember you.”
“We heard a story at the conference from a Bulgarian policeman about women being trafficked to South America. A black man with one eye was bragging that he tattooed their faces with a skull. You were going to have your people at Interpol check on the ships that were in harbor at the time.”
“Yes?” Dantzler said cautiously.
“I have one.”
“One?”
“She is dead, one of the tattooed women. There is a skull wearing a top hat on her face.”
There was a moment of silence before Dantzler spoke. “Where are you?” he asked.
“In Kingston. I am taking her to a safe place.”
“How did she die?”
“She was thrown from an airplane into the sea.”
“You saw this?” Dantzler said incredulously.
“Yes. I was in my boat, off the southern tip of Jamaica,” the inspector said. “The door was open on the side of the plane when the body came out of it. The plane circled her once, then headed south.”
“Markings on the fuselage?”
“None.”
“Who knows about this?”