I flipped the phone shut and returned it to my jacket.
* * *
DALRYMPLE’S WAS A ROADHOUSE with weathered beams and fishermen’s nets out front. Inside, the walls were adorned with paintings of ships sailing the high seas, life buoys, and other bits and bobs of nautical gear. The place was hopping, most of the tables filled, waitstaff busily crisscrossing the floor.
Arnie must have been watching for me, because he appeared out of nowhere, all smiles.
“Hey, great, thanks for coming,” he said, shaking my hand. “Roy’s in his office.”
He led me down a hallway, past the two restroom doors, then opened a third door marked Office.
Seated behind a desk was a large bull of a man, hairless except for a thick mustache.
“This is the guy,” Arnie said.
“Close the door,” Roy said. Arnie did so, and the restaurant din faded away immediately. “You’re Tim Blake?”
“Yes.”
The restaurant décor was carried through to the office. More nautical art and several scale models of sailing ships dressed the shelves. One particularly spectacular one, with magnificent tall sails, sat on Roy Chilton’s desk. He noticed me looking at it.
“The Bluenose,” he said, coming around the desk and shaking my hand. “A schooner from Nova Scotia. A fishing vessel that was also a racing ship.”
Roy Chilton moved his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “So, my brother tells me your daughter’s missing.”
“Yeah. She’s in a lot of trouble, and I need to find her right away.”
“Arnie here thinks I might have something important to tell you, but I don’t know that it’s got anything to do with your daughter.”
“Just tell it,” Arnie said.
“Arnie says he already told you about that Bluestein, what I caught him doing here.”
“Yes.”
“I’d appreciate you not spreading that around. I kind of made a deal with the little shit’s dad to keep the lid on it.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Kid caused me a lot of grief. I’ve still got the credit card companies nosing around. They’ve red-flagged us.”
“Is this about Jeff?” I asked.
Roy shook his head. “Not really.” He cleared his throat. “You get a lot of turnover in this business. People come and go. Worst is when a chef quits on you. Those you can usually hang on to for a while, maybe years, if you’re lucky. But waitstaff, dishwashers, cleaning staff, they come and go. And you gotta be careful who you hire. Illegals, that kind of thing. Some managers, they don’t give a rat’s ass. So what if someone doesn’t have papers or a Social Security number. You pay them dirt cheap under the table, who cares. Truth is, I used to operate that way, but not anymore.”
“Problems?”
“I’ve seen things,” he said.
“What sort of things?”
“For a while there, I was getting workers through a guy. He came by, made a pitch, said he could get me help for less than I was normally paying people, and I thought, great. So he brings in these people, I don’t know where the fuck they were from. One from India, I think, a couple from Thailand or China. Let me tell you something. These people, they worked their fucking asses off. Did any job you told them. But you think they’d talk to you? Have any kind of conversation? I mean, okay, English was not exactly their first fucking language, but they wouldn’t even look you in the eye. They couldn’t wait tables. Didn’t speak English good enough. Had them in the kitchen, and cleaning up. You know what the thing was about them?”
“No. What?”
“They were always scared.”
“Because they were here illegally,” I said.
“Yeah, but it was more than that.” He went back behind his desk, but stood. “This guy supplying them, he’d drop them off at the beginning of their shift and pick them up at the end. I drew up a schedule, so they’d know what days they had off, and the guy says oh, fuck that. You can work ’em seven days a week if you want. And he says, don’t worry about long shifts. You want to work ’em twelve, fifteen hours, that’s okay, too. I tell him, listen, that’s against the law, and he says, you don’t have to worry about that. He says his workers aren’t covered by those laws.”
“Who’d you pay? Him or the workers?”
Roy Chilton cast his eyes down, as though ashamed. He looked back up. “Him. Because it was his agency. So I’d pay him—cash—and then I assumed he’d pay the workers.”
“You think they got the money?”
He shrugged. “So, he’d bring them over at the beginning of a shift, and he’d be here to get them at the end. All these people saw was the inside of that van and the inside of my restaurant. You’d look in their eyes, and I swear to God, they all looked dead. Their eyes were fucking dead. Like they’d all given up. Like they’d lost hope.”
He swallowed, looked down again, took a breath. Like he was gathering strength. “One time, there was a girl working here, Chinese I think she was. Really pretty, or at least she would have been, if she ever smiled. She worked in the kitchen, and I sent somebody to get her, bring her in here. Someone else had called in sick, and this girl, she worked her ass off all day, you know, and I just wanted to tell her, if she could even fucking understand me, that she did a hell of a job and I really appreciated it. So she comes in, and she closes the door, and I start to tell her she’s done good, right? And I can tell she doesn’t get what I’m saying. But she comes around the table here, she gets down on her knees, like she’s getting ready to, you know…”
“I get it.”
“And I tell her, no, get up, I don’t want that. But she just assumed this was part of the job.”
I said nothing.
“One night, he’s picking up one of the girls from the kitchen, it’s like two in the morning, and she was so wrung out, totally fucking exhausted. And she heads out, and I see she’s forgot her jacket. So I run out to the van, and that guy’s holding her head down in his lap, you know?” He sighed. “She had to do anything he asked. She had to put up with that shit. And you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because he owned her,” Roy Chilton said. “He owned all these people. They were goddamn slaves to him. He was just renting them out like they were fishing boats.”
“Human trafficking,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Huh?”
“Human trafficking. You lure people to this country, get them to pay thousands of dollars up front with the promise of living the American dream, and once you get them here, you own them. You control them.”
“I didn’t want any part of it,” Roy said. “Told that guy the next day, no thanks. I’d find people elsewhere.”
“I’m sure he just took them to another restaurant,” I said. “Or turned them into full-time sex-trade workers.” I paused. “But why are you telling me all this?” I looked at Arnie. “Why’d you want me to hear all this?”
“You mentioned a name when I was at your place,” Arnie said. “A weird name, that’s why I remember.”
It wasn’t immediately coming back to me.
“Tripe,” he said. “Randall Tripe. But you never said another thing about him.”
I looked at Roy. He was smiling and nodding. “That’s the guy. I’d been telling Arnie all about this, happened to mention the name—”
“And I go, hey, where’d I hear that before?” Arnie said.
“I’d heard about him since then,” Roy said. “Read about him in the paper couple of weeks ago. Somebody shot him, left him in a Dumpster. You put a guy like that in the garbage, it makes the other trash look good.”
THIRTY-THREE
DRIVING AWAY FROM DALRYMPLE’S, I felt like I was nibbling around the edges. I knew Randall Tripe was involved in this somehow. His blood was on my daughter’s car. That was definitely a connection.
Had Syd somehow gotten mixed up in his little slave labor business? Had she found out about his involvement in human trafficking? A
nd if so, how? In what circles had Syd been moving to find out about a scumbag like Tripe?
Was it possible he’d tried to make Sydney one of his workers? I could recall a TV documentary on human trafficking, how its victims weren’t just illegal immigrants, that criminals who made their living this way often preyed on people—particularly young ones—who were born right here in the United States. As long as they could find a way to control you, they didn’t care where you’d come from.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the information Roy Chilton had given me. I wanted to pass it along to Kip Jennings, but I felt so betrayed by her I wasn’t confident she could help me anymore.
Driving back into Milford, I decided to continue on with what I’d been about to do when Arnie Chilton had phoned. I drove to the Just Inn Time, parked close to the front doors, and went into the lobby.
Today, Veronica Harp was on the front desk with Owen. She smiled warily as I came in. Our last encounter, when she’d offered to make me forget my troubles—at least temporarily—by slipping between the sheets with her, made this meeting feel slightly awkward.
“Mr. Blake,” she said professionally, what with Owen only a couple of feet away fiddling with a fax machine, “how can I help you today?”
I explained that when I’d rented my room, I’d had Syd’s stuffed moose Milt in my bag, and now I couldn’t find it.
“When she comes home, I want it to be there for her,” I said.
Veronica nodded, understanding. “Let me just check our lost and found,” she said, and disappeared into an adjacent office.
I paced the lobby, five steps this way, five steps back. I did that three or four times before Veronica came back, empty-handed.
“Nothing’s been turned in,” she said.
“Is the room in use? Could I go up and have a look?”
Veronica consulted the computer. “Let’s have a look-see…. The room’s empty at the moment, but our damn system for programming new keys is down for a minute. I’ll come up with you and let you in with my passkey.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”
She came around the counter. She had her cell phone in one hand, like she was expecting a call, the key card in the other.
We went to the elevator together. “It’s possible, if one of the maids found it,” she said, “they might not have turned it in.” She gave me a sad smile. “It happens.”
“Sure,” I said again.
“You think it’s possible you might have lost it someplace else?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “But I think it was here.”
The elevator doors parted. As we started down the hall, Veronica’s phone went off. She glanced at the ID, hit the button, put the phone to her ear. “Hang on a second,” she said. She extended the passkey to me and said, “You mind? I really have to take this.”
I nodded and took the key as Veronica hit the elevator button to go back down, phone stuck to her ear.
I reached my former room, inserted the key, waited for the little light to turn green, and went inside.
The room was all made up, waiting for the next guest. Stepping into the center of the room, I didn’t see Milt anywhere. It was possible, of course, that one of the housekeeping staff found Milt and, rather than turn him in to the office, decided to keep him. Milt was pretty threadbare from years of hugging, but then again, the staff here probably didn’t make a fortune, and coming home with any stuffed toy for your daughter, even one whose antlers were nearly falling off, was better than coming home without one at all.
I walked around the room, glanced under chairs, opened the drawers of the dresser—all empty.
Then I got down on my hands and knees and peered under the bed. Clearly, vacuuming under here was not something hotel management insisted be done on a daily basis. There were dust balls the size of, well, golf balls.
I found a skin magazine, a package of cigarette papers, a paperback novel by John Grisham. Where the bed met the wall, there was a dark blob. I reached my arm under, grabbed hold of it tentatively.
It was furry.
I pulled it out. It was Milt. I picked the larger bits of dust off him and tried to blow off the rest.
“Got ya,” I said, holding Milt, looking into his goofy face, touching the right antler, which was hanging by a thread. “I thought I’d lost you.”
And then, suddenly, sitting there on the hotel bedroom floor with Milt in my hands, I felt overwhelmed.
Cried like a baby.
I allowed myself three minutes to feel bad, then got to my feet, went into the bathroom to splash some water on my face, dried off with a fresh towel, and left the room.
I WAS HEADING BACK TO THE ELEVATOR, Milt in hand, when I heard muffled screaming coming from a room at the end of the hall.
A woman’s screams. Short ones. Every few seconds.
Not frightened screams. Not screams of terror. They were cries of pain.
I started heading to the end of the hall, pausing at the doors, trying to figure out which room the cries were coming from.
“Aww!” a woman shouted. Nothing for a few seconds. Then, “Aww!”
That meant waiting a moment at each door, listening for the next cry to determine whether this was the room.
I was hearing another voice now, another woman. She was shouting, “You don’t go home! You here to work! You try to run away again, they make me do this even harder!”
I had the right door.
Then a noise that sounded like thwack.
And then the woman screamed, “Aww!”
Something horrible was happening in that room.
I reached into my pocket, felt the key card. Veronica had called it a passkey. I took that to mean that it would let me into any room, not just the one where I’d stayed.
I like to think I would have gone through that door to help any woman who was in trouble, but at that moment, I was going through that door because I thought it might be Syd.
I put the card into the slot, waited, hoped for the light to turn green.
It did. I withdrew the card, turned the handle, and burst into the room.
“What’s going on in—”
And I stopped, tried to take in what I was looking at.
Standing in front of me was the woman I’d run into in the hotel breakfast nook. Cantana. She was in her hotel uniform. She was holding in her right hand a thin chrome wand, or stick. I looked a little closer and realized it was an old car antenna.
The other woman in the room was kneeling at the foot of the bed, bent at the waist so that her upper body and arms were splayed out on the bedspread. She was dressed similarly to Cantana, but the big difference was, there was blood seeping through her uniform on her buttocks. She turned her head toward me, and there were tears on her cheeks. She was Asian, mid-twenties.
“What you want?” Cantana asked me. “How you get in here? What you doing with that?”
She was pointing at Milt.
I was speechless. I started backing out of the room, Cantana still yammering at me. “What you doing in here? Can’t you see we having a meeting?”
Once I was all the way into the hall, Cantana slammed the door in my face. I stood there, dumbstruck, then turned around slowly.
What the hell was that?
That was when I found myself staring directly at the fire extinguisher station recessed into the opposite wall. The extinguisher sat behind a labeled glass door.
The letter “I” in the word FIRE was nearly worn away.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE PICTURE.
The picture that was emailed to me, to make me think that Syd had been spotted in Seattle.
It had shown Sydney, in her coral scarf, walking past a fire extinguisher station. And the “I” in FIRE had been worn away, just like this one.
I didn’t have that picture in front of me right now, but I was certain this was the spot. This was where Syd’s picture had been snapped.
She’d been in this hotel.
She’d worked here.
She’d been working here all along. She hadn’t been lying.
It was everyone else who had been lying. Everybody here had been primed to tell the same story. To say they didn’t know Syd, they’d never seen her.
Everybody here was covering their collective ass.
But if that was the case, then I wasn’t safe here. Not if I gave any indication that I’d figured out the truth. Especially after walking in on Cantana disciplining that other hotel employee. Whatever had been going on in there, it wasn’t some kinky sex scene. The woman bent over that bed was in genuine distress. Her screams had been real. She’d broken the rules and was paying the price for it.
I had to get out of here. Once I was out of here, then I could call—
“Mr. Blake?”
I hadn’t even heard the elevator open. I looked down the hall and saw Veronica Harp stepping off.
“Have you gotten yourself lost?” she asked. “The room you were in was at the other end of the hall. But—oh!—I see you found it!”
She was pointing to Milt.
“Yes, yes, I did,” I said, walking toward her.
“What were you doing down here?” she asked.
“I was just… a little distracted. I had Milt in my hands here and walked right past the elevator without noticing.”
“Do you have my key?” she asked.
I reached into my pocket and handed it to her. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t want this falling into the wrong hands!” she joked, putting it into her own pocket. I hit the elevator button. The doors, which had just closed, popped open again. Veronica boarded the elevator with me.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look a little… rattled.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I mean, you know, as fine as I can be, considering.”
“Sure, sure,” she said. “I understand. Listen, about the other evening, I want to apologize.”
“No, don’t worry about it.”
“No, I think I came on a bit strong.”
“It’s okay, really.”
We reached the first floor and the doors parted.