Lost Girls (17 page)

Inspector George seemed to be contemplating the possibility.

“Except that everybody is forgetting just how dangerous Haiti is,” Brigham interjected. “How can you even consider going there, Sherry? The country is virtually lawless.”

“I need to do this, Mr. Brigham,” Sherry said.

“He is right, Miss Moore,” the inspector said. “If you were caught, the police would of no help to you. They might even turn you over to the traffickers.”

“We won’t be caught if we do this right now, and it is an opportunity law enforcement might never have again. No one is expecting us. No one knows about the child who overheard her father or the aid worker who sent the note to Interpol. No one knows that her mother identified Jill Bishop last night in a morgue in Jamaica. Two women traveling as tourists, we’ll waltz in and out of Haiti and they will never know we were there.”

“Y-you and Carol Bishop!” Brigham stammered.

“We take a bus from the Dominican. There aren’t any terrorists trying to get into Haiti. Do you think they look at the passports of every white woman who crosses the border? They’re up to their ears in Christian volunteers and nongovernment aid workers. People from all over the world are coming and going.”

Brigham frowned. There was no stopping her now, he knew.

“The FBI will not be happy about delaying Jill Bishop’s identification,” Brigham said to the inspector. The argument was weak and Brigham knew it. He also knew what Carol Bishop would have to say about the matter. From what he’d heard so far, she’d jump in with both feet.

Brigham folded his arms.

Rolly King George studied Sherry’s face. “I could state we have yet to determine a cause of death and that we are awaiting scientific evidence regarding identification. It would buy another day, but no more, Miss Moore.”

She turned to Brigham. “If Carol Bishop wants to do this, we will need to leave for Haiti this afternoon.”

Brigham nodded grimly. “And what of me? You want me to wait here and worry while the two of you are in Haiti?”

“We’ll get a room in the Dominican Republic tonight and take a bus in to Pétionville in the morning. In Haiti we’ll rent a car and be back in twenty-four hours. Really, Mr. Brigham. The fewer we are and the less we make of all this, the easier it will be. If bells are going to go off at a customs border crossing, it would be when a retired United States Navy admiral’s name is entered into their computer. Border policemen aren’t going to check on a blind woman and her companion, no matter what their names are. Right now it is best I get upstairs and tell Carol Bishop what we know. It she’s in, we’ll need to get moving.” Sherry stood. “Will you lead me, Mr. Brigham?”

Carol Bishop was adamant, as expected, about going to Haiti with Sherry.

Brigham found a
New York Times
and said he’d be in the air-conditioned lobby until they were ready to say good-bye. Sherry was beginning to think she’d made a mistake bringing him to Jamaica. She knew she had put him in an awkward situation and she knew that she worried him unnecessarily. It was the last thing she wanted to do, considering she brought him to Jamaica to cheer him up. She felt as though she’d need to make it up to him somehow afterward.

Sherry heard voices coming across the terrace: Rolly King George and Carol Bishop circumambulating the swimming pool. They were talking about an autopsy and how to handle her daughter’s remains.

George sat down at the table with Sherry. “You are right about entering Haiti on the bus, they are careless checking passports at border crossings, but I checked and there is only one bus a day. It leaves Santo Domingo at noon tomorrow and arrives in Pétionville at 6:30
P.M
. I called Helmut Dantzler and he has arranged for a Colonel Deaken of the Haitian police to meet and escort you to Tiburon. No one checks outgoing flights, so you will be safe flying out of Port-au-Prince when you return. I will meet you with Mr. Brigham when you land back here in Kingston.”

“We can trust the policeman?” Sherry asked.

“The colonel is reliable, Miss Moore.”

“Then thank you, Inspector,” Sherry said.

“May God go with you,” he said.

Sherry met Brigham in the lounge before they departed. His mood was dark and there was nothing she could say that would change it.

“You have your cell phone?” he growled.

“Of course,” Sherry said. Years before she had switched to a carrier with satellite coverage at Brigham’s suggestion. The phone was invaluable to a blind person, especially in the kinds of places Sherry had been prone to visit.

“You have me in speed dial?”

“Yes,” she groaned, like an overprotected child.

“I want you to listen to me, Sherry. Just listen, okay.”

“Yes, Mr. Brigham, I am listening,” she said.

“If anything seems at all wrong, anything at all, if you are the slightest bit uncomfortable about anyone or anything going on around you and you aren’t free to talk, I want you to dial my number and hang up when it rings. You have GPS. I’ll be able to find you.”

Sherry nodded. She knew this was a serious conversation to Brigham and she didn’t want to give the impression he wasn’t taken seriously, though she was sure he was being overly dramatic.

“I will be fine, Mr. Brigham. There’s going to be a policeman with us. What could go wrong? We’ll be in Tiburon harbor tomorrow night and back here by noon the next day. I promise you, though. If anything is out of the ordinary, I’ll call. In fact I’ll call you when we reach Tiburon just to let you know we’re safe. Deal?”

Brigham grunted.

“Please,” she said. “Relax, Mr. Brigham. Enjoy the weather. Get into the ocean. Get a drink and watch the girls.”

She took his hand in both of hers. “I’ll be back in no time.”

He nodded and she kissed him on the cheek and said good-bye.

The setting sun’s light caught the face of Louis XIV, sitting horse-top in Place Bellecour. A tall rigid man carrying a leather satchel crossed the square, joining an American wearing a sports coat over a polo shirt.

“Graham, it’s good to see you again.” Dantzler extended a hand. “How was Saint-Exupéry Airport?”

“More like Tel Aviv every day,” Graham said. “I miss the innocent days when there were no machine guns in terminals. You heard about Mogadishu?”

“A thousand dead and counting,” Dantzler said.

“The European Commission should be concerning themselves about complicity in war crimes, or perhaps they think they are immune,” Graham said. “The security adviser told their representative in Kenya the Ethiopians were violating the Rome statute.”

“And the Red Cross is reporting the worst fighting in fifteen years. How do they keep doing this?” Dantzler waved a hand through the air. “Funding war criminals as peacekeepers. Doesn’t anyone feel stupid down there?”

He stopped and squinted at the dying sun. “A warrant officer named Aleksandra Goralski was on assignment for the Polish National Police when she went missing in the Baltic harbor of Gdansk six months ago.”

“Routine assignment?”

“Not at all. She was with the Polish Central Investigation Bureau looking into a corruption allegation about a customs commissioner.”

“Jesus,” Graham whispered. “That could be it. Do you have enough handwriting to work with?”

“Three words isn’t much, but they’re looking at it now. She has plenty of known handwriting from the police department they can compare it with.”

“What can I do?”

“We’ve identified the ships that were in port when Warrant Officer Goralski went missing. I was hoping you could take a run at them.”

“You’re thinking if DEA might connect one of the ships to the Mendoza cartel?”

“DEA, ICE, FBI, I don’t care who it comes from,” Dantzler said. “What about Bishop and Moore?”

“They’re in the Dominican Republic, crossing into Haiti tomorrow at noon by bus.”

“Do you see problems?”

“They’re going to Haiti, aren’t they?”

“What’s the scenario?”

“Tourists bound for Tiburon harbor. It’s a well-photographed location, quite beautiful, I’m told. They’ll be in Pétionville outside of Port-au-Prince around six thirty
P.M
., which puts them in Tiburon by midnight, seven
P.M
. our time. You’ll be back in Washington then?”

“I’m on the red-eye,” the CIA man said.

Dantzler nodded. “I wasn’t comfortable with them traveling alone, so I asked our contact, Colonel Deaken with the Haitian National Police, to meet them. He wasn’t happy about Carol Bishop entering Haiti. He said it would cost him his job if he was connected to her.”

“He must have considered the possibility that Jill Bishop was in Haiti.”

“I’m sure the entire Haitian government did, but they weren’t about to invite the FBI in for a look around while Bush is scolding Préval for getting into bed with Castro and Chávez. I’m sure the Bishop girl is still a hot topic in the palace.”

“But he agreed?”

“As long as his name doesn’t come up in any investigations. He’ll meet them tomorrow evening in Pétionville and drive them to Tiburon himself. They should return before noon the next morning.”

“Did you tell him how Jill Bishop was found—about the airplane, I mean?”

“He doesn’t need to know.”

“Well, I feel better, I must admit. It wouldn’t do you or me any good if something were to happen to Carol Bishop in Haiti.”

“The airplane that Jill Bishop came out of, nothing new?”

Graham shook his head, reaching for a handkerchief from his back pocket and blowing his nose. “I looked at the surveillance photos again, plenty of runways and DC-3s in the jungles, but nothing we haven’t seen before. You know what air traffic control is like there.”

“What if Moore pulls a rabbit out of the hat and they find a castle. What are we going to do then?”

“I don’t know,” Graham said, “but you’ve seen Carol Bishop on CNN. She pulls no punches. If they find anything she will not let us sit on it, not for a moment.”

“Maybe we made a mistake calling in Sherry Moore.”

“We” meant “he,” Graham knew; Dantzler was the one trying to appease Admiral Brigham. How could he have known that Sherry Moore would insist on going to Haiti from Jamaica? She was just as headstrong as Bishop. The two of them together were the virtual powder keg ready to blow. “Too late for that, Helmut, admonish me later.”

“You said you were looking for possible links to the Mendoza cartel.”

Dantzler stopped and set his valise on a wall, opened it, and took out a thick legal envelope. He removed a file folder and began to read. “Patrick Dupont’s great-grandfather made a fortune off rubber plantations in Haiti during the Second World War. The son was educated in the States and moved to Rio de Janeiro with his mother after a divorce. The old man left them a small fortune, enough to open successful nightclubs in Ipanema, and this was long before the tourist boom of the sixties. The son still owns the original clubs—they were gold mines then and now—but he’s also laid claim to a significant percentage of Brazil’s private clubs, sex tourism destinations. I don’t need to tell you Rio de Janeiro’s rank in human trafficking.”

“Dupont still has ties to Haiti?”

Dantzler nodded. “Properties. A villa in Pétionville, an estate west of Jéremie. We can’t put him with Mendoza, but he has traveled to Haiti a few times this year.”

“Who else?” Graham asked.

“ICE agents found two Canadian women in a crack house in Calakmul, Mexico, last year.” He replaced the envelope and took out another, shook out the documents. “The women were kidnapped while backpacking in 2002. Typical story, rape, heroin addiction, they were forced to prostitute in brothels in the Yucatán Peninsula. They were found when Mexican nationals shot up the house looking for a kidnapping fugitive. Each of the girls had a red chili pepper tattooed on her breast. It designated them property of Angel Ochoa, the methamphetamine kingpin in Belize.”

“Haiti’s connection?”

“Ochoa networks meth through a company in Les Cayes that purports to export native art. So do a lot of other South American dealers. He’s got a house there and a hangar for his Beechcraft.”

Dantzler opened another file from the envelope.

“Former Tonton Macoute commander, suspected drug and small arms courier, named Jean Bedard.”

“Tonton Macoutes,” Graham repeated. “Papa Doc’s secret police.”

“Very bad man,” Dantzler said. “Bedard has a glass eye. Remember the Bulgarian informant mentioned a one-eyed man in Burgas?”

“Go on,” Graham said.

“Bedard’s primary residence is in Colombia, near Barranquilla and Mendoza’s estate, though he still has property in Haiti. He made tens of millions during the Duvalier years. His legitimate business is coffee and produce, but he’s all over DEA’s intel files on cocaine trafficking.”

Dantzler handed Graham the envelope and closed the valise. “All right.” Graham sighed, tucking the envelope under his arm. “I’ll see what I can do with them. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” Dantzler nodded. “Let’s hope we all get through tomorrow.”