Lost Girls (15 page)

He had been saving the money to send Yousy to America.

There were two meetings in Contestus that evening and the staff was visibly shaken. Men with strange accents spent the afternoon walking the floors, moving from room to room with countersurveillance equipment. Some watched monitors on laptops supported by neck straps. Others used wands to sweep air-conditioning ducts, electrical plugs, lamps, telephones, and panels over light switches. An equal number was combing the grounds with portable microwave dishes.

Bedard had found plenty to worry about this last week. He was thinking he had already stayed at Contestus too long.

He refused to have a conversation with anyone, even the most trusted of his staff, until the castle was swept for listening devices. One could never be sure if one of his staff had left a little present from some intelligence agency with a spy satellite or an offshore fishing trawler crammed with eavesdropping equipment. One could never be sure of anyone’s motives for doing anything these days. Not in Haiti. It was a dog-eat-dog world.

Perhaps the incident at sea with Jill Bishop was an accident. Perhaps no one had intentionally plotted to draw attention to him. Perhaps he was unnecessarily paranoid and his fear that the Americans were always just around the corner was all in his mind.

They had gone over this months ago in a meeting at his estate in Colombia. Thiago Mendoza was lying dead in his casket in Barranquilla and the cartel was introducing Mendoza’s son Sergio to the principals of the organization. There was nothing to suggest that Bedard’s operations were receiving more or less attention from law enforcement in the last year. No unusual boardings or heightened inspections of his cargo ships around the world. Nothing even to suggest there might be subterfuge in the ranks, a condition he credited entirely to the alarming reputation of his chief of security, Matteo, and soldiers, all former members of the Tonton Macoutes. But there was tension in Colombia following Thiago Mendoza’s death, and Bedard had the castle swept twice before Thiago’s son Sergio set foot on Haitian soil. The young man had wanted to see this aspect of his father’s business as well. How and where the cartel’s women, trafficked from Eastern Europe, were being introduced to the West.

And Bedard wanted to make certain that Mendoza’s Colombian rivals didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. Bedard wanted to ensure he didn’t go down in history for hosting the event that killed the world’s twenty-second-richest man.

A steel door swung open and Bedard walked in. For all his years Bedard could instill fear when he entered a room.

He still wore the black accouterments of the Tonton Macoutes and a pearl-handled Colt .45 on his hip. He removed the thick-framed opaque sunglasses so long associated with the Tonton Macoutes—it was no lie that Papa Doc had wanted his secret police to wear sunglasses day and night to fuel rumors that they were dead men brought back to life as zombies; that behind the dark glasses their eyes had no light.

Bedard laid the glasses on the table. He wanted these men to look into his eyes. He wanted them to see his anger. His dark hands trembled with it. A pale scar, which halved one cheek, began to slide back and forth as he clenched and unclenched his jaw.

Matteo, Bedard’s bodyguard, pulled the door closed behind. Bedard, tall and menacing, looked down at them with his one good brown eye. His white eye, the glass eye, never moved. At last he took the seat at the head of the table. The smell of his sweet cologne settled around the room.

The pudgy middle-aged man sitting nearest him was sweating streams from his brow that coursed behind his ears to drench his collar. He was nervous and the smell of Bedard’s skin made his stomach sour. He reached for the water pitcher, hoping he wouldn’t get sick, but then thought better of it, retrieved the hand, and placed it on his lap. To have water might be construed by Bedard as a sign that he felt at ease, and this evening Philippe felt anything but.

A plasma screen on the wall came to light playing a taped news broadcast showing a reporter standing in front of an old brick building in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica.

Matteo turned up the volume with a remote. “…Sources from the Jamaica Constabulary have confirmed that the body of a young Caucasian woman was recovered in the Jamaica Channel this morning. Jamaica Defence Force launches have been sent to check the area for possible wreckage due to a boating accident. Police say a photograph is forthcoming. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard will take a second look into the murder investigation of soccer coach Bob Woolmer, found in his hotel room at the Jamaica Pegasus last…”

The screen went black.

Bedard’s nose glistened with oil. His ears were sharply pointed and seemed too small for his body.

“Someone speak!” he shouted. Veins continued to pulse along his neck and raised the temples on either side of his forehead.

“She jumped, patrón,” the man sitting next to him said. “I couldn’t stop her.”

Bedard’s head swiveled to the old security guard. “Jumped,” he repeated. “Jumped you say, Philippe?”

The security guard nodded vigorously. “There was nothing I could do, patrón.”

“Who opened the door, so she could…jump?” Bedard asked. “Are you telling me she opened the door of the airplane herself?”

Philippe sighed, clasped his hands before him as if in prayer, and raised and lowered the mass of twisted fingers and fists. “It was hot, patrón, and I opened it to keep her from being sick.”

Bedard snapped open a gold cigarette case and removed an American cigarette.

“Is that right?” Bedard put the cigarette in his mouth, waited for Matteo to step forward with a lighter and light it.

“When it is hot in the airplane you open the door?” Bedard looked at the pilot, then back to Philippe.

The pilot sitting at the opposite end of the table looked at his hands and finally shook his head.

The security guard squirmed in his seat, but did not speak.

“What happened then?” he directed the question to the pilot.

“He was playing with her, Commandeur.”

“Playing?” Bedard repeated, looking at the security guard, then back at the pilot.

“Scaring her, Commandeur. Philippe wanted her to strip. He told her he would throw her out of the plane if she didn’t strip.”

Bedard raised a hand to silence the pilot, turned to face Philippe.

“Why don’t you tell me the story, Philippe? What were you doing with the girl?”

The old guard shrugged and exhaled a great sigh as he looked up at the ceiling. “I just wanted to see her body.”

“You wanted to see her body?” Bedard repeated.

The guard nodded. “I was only playing with her a little, patrón.” Philippe used the thumb and finger of his right hand to demonstrate how little.

There was a sound, a human growl.

“But she is dead,” Philippe said, holding out the palms of his open hands. “She cannot tell anyone anything, patrón. I will pay you for her.” He tried to smile, the salt of his sweat stinging his eyes that he dared not reach for to wipe or dry.

“You will pay me,” Bedard repeated flatly. The smell of his skin seemed to ripen with his agitation. “Do you know what she is worth, Philippe?”

Philippe shook his head sadly.

“Fuel the plane,” Bedard said to the pilot menacingly. “You will take Philippe to the compound in Santa Marta.”

Bedard turned to Philippe. “You will stay in Colombia until the rest of us arrive.”

Philippe looked around the room, unsure of himself at first, then a broad smile formed on his face and there was an audible sigh of relief. He leaned forward to shake Bedard’s hand, wet shirt peeling noisily from the back of the leather chair.

“Yes, patrón, thank you, patrón.”

Bedard ignored the guard’s outstretched hand and rose from his chair. “Wait upstairs,” he said to Philippe, and the pilot and the grateful men nearly ran from the room.

When they were gone, Bedard turned to his bodyguard.

“What do you wish me to do, Commandeur?”

“Go with them, Matteo. When you are off the coast of Colombia, throw Philippe from the plane. Then come back to Port-au-Prince and look into this matter of the colonel.”

“Yes, Commandeur.”

“How soon until the explosives are set in place?”

“We began drilling again this morning. The new man says we will be ready in three days.”

“Make it two and put jet-boats in Tiburon harbor. I want them armed and ready to move.”

Sherry Moore gripped the arms of her seat as the Air Jamaica flight bounced along the runway, turbines reversing thrust to break the jet’s speed. She might have been grateful to know she’d missed seeing the skeleton of a burned-out DC-9 pushed off into the jungle at the end of the tarmac.

“You should feel quite at home, I suspect,” Brigham growled, reaching for the computer bag between his feet and turning on his cell phone.

“Home?” Sherry asked.

“The temperature, the goddamned ninety degrees.”

She smiled. He was talking about the temperature in Kingston, of course, the stewardess’s announcement a minute before. Sherry loved the heat, actually flourished in it, if such a thing were possible.

They taxied for a minute, then coasted to a ramp outside customs.

Twenty minutes later they were streetside and getting into the back of a marked taxi.

“The chapel at the University of the West Indies Hospital.” Brigham’s face was beaded with sweat, his arms sticking to the dirty plastic upholstery. The radio was blasting reggae. A stick of incense burned from a clip on the dash. The smell was sickeningly sweet.

“Our man will meet us at the hospital chapel, the Mona campus; he says we won’t attract attention there.”

“What does he sound like?” she whispered cautiously, but the music was so loud that the driver could not hear.

“Jamaican,” Brigham said flatly.

“Well, he must be an important Jamaican”—Sherry ignored Brigham’s grumpiness—“if he’s trying to avoid the press.”

Brigham had to laugh. “I think he was worried about you, my dear.”

Sherry put her head against the seat rest.

In fact she had been thinking about the press this morning. She couldn’t leave her driveway without telephones ringing around Philadelphia and everyone wondering where she was going.

She wore frameless sunglasses and a white baseball cap with the bill pulled low over her forehead. Sherry didn’t use a walking stick unless she was alone or on unfamiliar ground, so it wasn’t always immediately apparent she was blind. Adding to the effect, she was fit and quite agile on her feet, and while she couldn’t rely on it entirely, Sherry was making small advances in echolocation, a means of determining her direction of travel by listening for the returning echoes off objects around her.

The cab dropped them in front of the university chapel. A walkway led them from the street to a trio of great arches and the welcoming shade of a portico.

A man stepped from the shadows when they appeared and extended a hand. “Miss Moore”—he smiled—“I am Inspector Rolly King George.”

Sherry also smiled and took the hand. “Thank you for meeting us, Inspector. This is my friend Garland Brigham.”

Brigham nodded and grabbed the Jamaican’s fist.

“Please call me Rolly,” the inspector said. “I have a car at the curb and we haven’t much time. There is a woman at the morgue who wishes to see the body and the prime minister herself has asked that she be given access. She is the American woman, Carol Bishop.”

“Carol Bishop is here on the island?” Sherry asked, surprised.

“She has been living in the Dominican since her daughter went missing last spring. When she heard on the news we pulled a young woman’s body from the water she took the next flight.”

Sherry nodded. Everyone knew the Jill Bishop story.

“Is there any chance it’s her?”

“Her face is badly marred, Miss Moore, she hit the water at over a hundred miles an hour, but yes, there are physical similarities. Body weight and hair color.”

“Does the press know she’s here?”

“No, Miss Moore, I took precautions, just as I reasoned I should not meet you at the airport.” The inspector sounded apologetic. “It is why I didn’t want you to go through the front doors of the hospital. No one knows the body is here, only the people in pathology and us.”

“What if it is her?” Sherry asked. “You know what will happen if this is Jill Bishop in your morgue.”

Brigham knew what she was thinking, that this was about to turn into a media circus and she had no desire to be caught in the middle.

“You understand, Inspector, that if Mrs. Bishop identifies the dead girl as her daughter the FBI will get involved. There will be nothing I can do here. The FBI won’t let me within a mile of her.”

“What will be, will be.” The inspector nodded. “But you have talked to Helmut Dantzler?”

“Yes, and he wouldn’t have anticipated this either. He would never have sent me here if he thought there was a chance the woman might be identified so soon.”

“No offense meant, Miss Moore, but I am surprised he sent you here at all. Helmut Dantzler does not strike me as the kind of man that would contemplate the supernatural.”

“Perhaps Helmut Dantzler is more complicated than you realize,” Sherry said.

“But you are even more complicated, I am told,” George said.

Sherry shook her head, smiled. “I don’t know what you heard, Inspector, but I’ll be happy to clear up any misconceptions. What I do is very simple. I try to see what someone was thinking about in the seconds before they died. Sometimes I can do this, sometimes not. To be frank, Inspector, I told Mr. Dantzler I wouldn’t be hopeful that someone free-falling to their death would be thinking about old memories. I’m not saying they wouldn’t, I’m just stating the obvious. I don’t know what her state of mind was when she came out of that plane, but one could assume it was consumed by terror.”

The halls of the hospital were cool. Rolly King George led them through corridors to an elevator that descended into sublevels. They crossed an entire wing to a door where he asked them to wait. “It is a private waiting room, a chapel for relatives,” he said.

He left them there to meet Carol Bishop.

Brigham marched in circles until Sherry made him stop. Twenty minutes later the inspector opened a locked door.

“Mrs. Bishop has identified the body, Miss Moore. It is indeed her daughter,” he said solemnly, “and I am sorry you came all this way for nothing.”

Sherry was silent.

Brigham stood. “Well, you are about to become one very busy man, Inspector George. We can find our own way out.”

The inspector hesitated a moment. “I told Mrs. Bishop you were here in the hospital, Miss Moore. She asked me why. I explained as best I could. She asked me if you would stay a few more minutes so she could greet you.”

Sherry didn’t know what to say, but she felt Brigham’s disapproving eyes on her.

The inspector, still holding open the door a few inches, looked to Brigham and raised a finger. “Please wait. Just a little while longer.”

“We’ll be here,” she said, looking up toward Brigham. “Go and tend to Mrs. Bishop, Inspector.”

The door closed and Brigham turned on his heels. “I’m giving him fifteen minutes, then I’m getting you the hell out of here. This whole thing is going to explode into a media extravaganza and you very well know it.”

Fifteen minutes later Brigham was still pacing the floor when they heard footsteps and the doorknob turned.

“Miss Moore, Mr. Brigham, this is Carol Bishop,” the inspector announced, ushering a woman into the room and pulling the door closed behind her. The inspector stepped back while everyone shook hands.

“Please sit,” Carol Bishop said to Sherry. Brigham moved to a corner with the police inspector, letting the women sit next to each other.

Carol put her hands on her knees. “I don’t know quite where to start,” she said softly. Brigham saw that her eyes were swollen. Her hands trembled, fingernails digging into the skin beneath the hem of her shorts.

“I have two daughters,” she said.

Sherry noted that she used the present tense.

“Theresa, my oldest, is in law school at the University of Michigan. Her classes are in session and she’s been quite busy before the midterm break. I know Theresa misses her sister, but they were two very different people, Theresa always so serious and Jill so idealistic. She liked art and music, Bob and I were worried that she would drop out of school and join the Peace Corps or something equally stupid.” She laughed a little hysterically. “She was constantly taking up causes and raising money for this group or that, volunteering at crisis centers, telethons, walkathons, you name it and Jill did it. She was one of life’s optimists. The kind of people who believe they can make a difference. I didn’t know until she went missing, and mostly from her sister, Theresa, that Jill was feeling the pressure we were putting on her over school. How silly we were in hindsight. How fucking silly.” She stamped a foot hard against the floor and bit down on her lower lip.

Carol Bishop leaned forward in her chair, sun-browned elbows on her knees, rough hands wringing as she spoke. Brigham thought she looked like a shipwreck survivor that had been found long marooned on some island.

“My husband travels and we don’t talk so much anymore.” Carol Bishop’s look was one of resignation. “He needs to know that I found our daughter, of course, but not this very minute, not just yet. There are other things that matter more to me now. There are things even more important than grieving.”

Carol leaned forward, knees close to Sherry’s.

“Inspector George told me about you.” Carol Bishop made a face. “I mean, certainly I know who you are, but I never expected to meet you under the circumstances.”

Sherry held her tongue, not knowing where this was going.

“The FBI hasn’t spoken to me in two months.” Carol smiled. “I only get excuses from them these days. When I call to ask if anything’s changed they tell me the case agent is out of the office. You know how it gets when all the leads go cold. They know she isn’t coming back, they know…” Her voice got shrill and then faded as tears began to fall. Carol used the back of one hand to wipe her cheeks. “You really can’t blame them. I mean, what can they say to me anyhow?”

She thumped the heel of her hand against her knee.

“But I was right about what happened in Santo Domingo. Something bad did happen to Jill in that marketplace. And now that I’ve seen her lying here looking like she does, I know that something bad was happening every day since.”

Carol started to bawl. Brigham pulled tissues from a dispenser and handed them to her.

Carol dabbed her eyes, looked up at the ceiling; her eyes glazed over, she was somewhere else for a moment, not there. Then she cleared her throat and crushed the tissues in a balled fist.

“I know I’m not making myself clear”—she looked at Brigham, then at the inspector—“not making sense to any of you, but you see I can’t just go back to the United States and forget all of this happened.” She shook her head. “I can’t go back to living with what has happened to my daughter. My husband might be able to do those kinds of things. He’s a move-along kind of man. He would remind me that we have another daughter to care for, that we have our own lives to think about, he would say that life does go on.”

Suddenly Carol grew tense.

“But life doesn’t go on for Jill. Someone took that from her and when they did, they took it from me. They were saying that my daughter’s life didn’t matter anymore. That all those years I bathed and cuddled her and watched her dance and sing and grow into a beautiful young woman, didn’t matter. That she was something they could brand with a tattoo and treat like an animal until they were done with her.”

Carol Bishop’s lips formed a strange smile; she dabbed at her tears. Brigham watched the transformation taking place, first around her eyes, the circles of exhaustion beginning to straighten into hard lines. The look of utter grief was replaced by something more primal.

She squeezed Sherry’s hand, her jaw set, resolute. “But they were wrong.” Her voice was barely audible, and Brigham, sitting by the air conditioner, found he was drawn forward in his seat to hear her speak.

“I want to know who did this to my daughter and I want them to share my pain. Then and only then will I attempt to go on with what is left of my life.”

“Mrs. Bishop, the police can only do—” Inspector George began to say, but Bishop’s hand flew up to silence the inspector.

“It isn’t always about the law.” She shook her head. “It isn’t always about books and codes and borders.” She looked around the room. “Jill was my daughter, my blood, my genes. My commitment to her childhood didn’t end when she walked out the front door of our house and it doesn’t end now because we happened to have left the confines of the United States. We are all human beings, for Christ’s sake.”

She looked at Sherry Moore’s face, seemed to study it a moment. “You came here because you thought you could help the inspector somehow. So I have a request to make, a favor to ask of you, Miss Moore. The FBI has had their opportunity. They have done what they could. Now, since you are already here and since you were going to do this thing before you knew who my daughter was, I would appreciate if you would go see her and tell me about my daughter’s last moments on earth.” She held on to Sherry’s hand. “Would you please try to do that?”

Sherry looked her way for one long moment, trying to imagine the woman’s face.

“Mrs. Bishop,” she started, but Carol reached up and touched Sherry’s lips gently with a finger.

“Before you say no, I am begging you, Miss Moore. You must have thought there was at least an outside chance you would learn something from my daughter’s last seconds alive. You wouldn’t have come all this way otherwise.”