The Stolen Ones (10 page)

“I SWEAR TO GOD,
I don’t know anything.”

Jimmy Callaway was sweating, a lot. It was oven-hot in the Duluth PD’s interview room, where Donna McNaughton had taken the club manager while Stevens and Windermere tore Club Heat to pieces.

They’d found enough to validate Shannon Spenser’s assertions about the place. Jimmy Callaway had kept meticulous records for each of his dancers, everything from tips earned to clients entertained to the price he’d paid to purchase the girl in the first place.

Windermere had studied the manager’s logbook for a long time. “Goddamn it,” she told Stevens. “This guy has dates of delivery for each girl, starting a couple years back, one girl at a time. Paid thirty grand a head, until he started buying in bulk.”

“‘In bulk.’” Like buying steaks at Costco. Stevens felt his stomach turn.

“I guess he wanted to see how long it took for each girl to earn back her purchase price,” Windermere said. “Looks like a lot of lap dances.”

Shannon Spenser charged her clients two hundred dollars an hour, Stevens remembered. She’d have to work a hundred fifty hours to earn thirty grand. At Club Heat, though, Stevens figured the girls would be lucky to earn ten percent of what Shannon Spenser was making.

He’d left Windermere to the logbook and concentrated on cracking Jimmy Callaway’s safe. The thing was locked, but Stevens found a scrap of paper taped to the underside of Callaway’s bottom desk drawer, the one with the stack of
Hustler
magazines and the fifth of rum.

“Bingo,” Stevens said, examining the string of numbers on Callaway’s note.

Windermere looked up from the logbook. “‘Bingo’?”

Stevens worked the safe’s combination, felt the lock disengage. Swung the door open and laughed out loud. “Oh yeah,” he told Windermere. “Bingo.”

>   >   >

NOW STEVENS AND WINDERMERE
stood in the Duluth PD interview room, watching Jimmy Callaway sweat and stammer his way through a clumsy alibi.

“I don’t know anything,” the club manager told them. “I thought they were just normal working girls. I’m as surprised as you are.”

“We have your logbook showing purchase prices, Jimmy,” Windermere said. “And Stevens here had a peek in your safe.”

Callaway blinked. His face went pale.

“That’s right,” Windermere said. “I gotta say, we’d be a lot more inclined to believe your bullshit if you didn’t have fifteen of your dancers’ passports stashed away in there.”

“Romanian, Bulgarian, Polish.” Stevens ticked off his fingers. “Hungarian, Croatian . . . Where’d you get all those passports, Jimmy?”

Callaway ran his hands through his hair. Stared down at the table. When he looked up again, his face was ashen. “He’ll kill me,” he said.

Windermere sat down across from him. “Not if you help us, he won’t.”

“I don’t even know that much,” Callaway said. “I just took delivery.”

“Who is this guy?” Stevens said. “What do you know about him? How’d you get involved in all this in the first place?”

Callaway gave himself a moment to resist. Then he seemed to deflate. “I was running girls,” he said. “
Real
girls. Streetwalkers, but legit.”

“You were a pimp,” Windermere said.

“Pretty much, yeah.” He shrugged. “I did okay at it, too. I mean, not great, but I was eating. So, one day this guy pulls my card, tells me he has a deal for me. Says he can set me up so I’m running my own show, making insane money. He showed me some figures, man, and it was unreal.”

“So you went for it.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Apparently Callaway thought the question was rhetorical. “Yeah, man, I went for it. The girls weren’t cheap, but they worked for it. Long as you kept them in line, anyway.”

Stevens felt his muscles tense, his fists clench at his sides. He cleared his throat. “You had, what, fifteen girls? Where’d you keep them?”

“Rented a couple townhouses a mile or so from the club. Three bedrooms each, three girls to a room,” Callaway said. “It worked fine. They never tried to escape. Hell, they were terrified, and where the fuck would they go? You saw how we kept their passports.”

“Uh-huh,” Windermere said. “And you got a delivery from where?”

“East Coast somewhere,” Callaway said. “Nobody told me anything. I called the number they gave me and told them I wanted a couple girls. A few weeks later a truck showed up with a couple girls in it.”

Windermere pushed him a pad of paper and a pen. “Write down that number, Jimmy.”

“They switch phones all the time, though,” Callaway said. “Sometimes I have to wait for them to call me, just so I know how to get in touch again.”

“Let us worry about that,” Windermere told him. “Just give us the last number they gave you and we’ll take it from there.”

Callaway looked a half second from puking, but he scribbled something down. Windermere passed the paper to Stevens, who couldn’t place the area code off the top of his head. “This guy who approached you, you dealt with him the whole time?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“And he’s the guy bringing the girls into the country.”

“No.” Callaway swallowed. “
That
guy, he’s the main guy. The guys I was dealing with were some lower-level guys. I think they were just, like, the drivers.”

“Show him the sketches,” Windermere said.

Stevens brought out the sketches the FBI artist had made. Callaway sucked his teeth. “Fuck,” he said. “I fucking knew this thing was too good to be true.”

“The contact, Jimmy. Tell us what you know.”

Callaway studied the sketches. “Yeah,” he said. “These are the guys.” He pointed to the thug with the scar on his face. “I remember the scar. Like he’d face-fucked a screwdriver.”

Windermere looked at Stevens. “Same guys as killed the deputy.” She turned back to Callaway. “What are their names, Jimmy?”

“Names?” Callaway laughed, incredulous. “You think these assholes ever told me their names?”

“Okay,” said Stevens. “What the hell did you call them?”

“‘Hey, you,’ and ‘Yes, sir,’” Callaway said. “I didn’t need to know anything more than that.” He shrugged. “Sorry, guys. My line of work, you don’t ask too many questions you don’t need to know the answers to.”

WINDERMERE’S PHONE RANG
just after dawn.

“Carla.” It was Mathers. “I wake you?”

Windermere sat up in bed, looked around the motel room. She’d fallen asleep barely four hours earlier, her laptop open, the TV playing reruns on mute. She and Stevens had run down the phone number Jimmy Callaway had scribbled out for them, traced it to Newark, New Jersey, some corner-store disposable, paid for in cash. If the traffickers were as careful as Callaway thought, Windermere figured she probably wouldn’t find much when she tracked down the phone records, but she’d made a note to put Mathers on the trail anyway. Then she and Stevens retreated to the local Super 8 to catch a few winks, planned to start interviewing Jimmy’s girls in the morning. The
late
morning.

“Carla?”

“I don’t sleep, Mathers,” Windermere told him. “You know that. You calling because you miss me?”

“Actually, yeah,” Mathers said. “I didn’t really know what to do with myself last night, without you chirping at me and hogging all the blankets.”

“Sounds like you had it pretty good,” Windermere said. “I met a high-class call girl and a degenerate strip-club boss. And,” she said, eyeing her unopened suitcase, “I fell asleep in my makeup.”

“You get all the fun assignments,” Mathers said. “If I want to see strippers, I have to pay the cover charge.”

“As if you need a strip club,” Windermere said. “I don’t even stick you with the two-drink minimum.”

“You keep running away with Stevens, I might just pony up.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She went into the bathroom, splashed water on her face. “You call me up just to flirt, Mathers, or do you have something to talk about?”

“Depends.” She could hear the smile. “What are you wearing?”

“My chastity belt. Now spill.”

Mathers sighed. “Fine,” he said. “If I can’t get you hot and bothered, maybe this will do the trick. The
Ocean Constellation
.”

Windermere shook her head. “Nope, not feeling anything.”

“Wait for it,” Mathers said. “The
Ocean Constellation
is a thousand-foot container ship running the Mediterranean trade route to the eastern United States. It left Trieste three weeks ago and arrived in the port of Newark, New Jersey, around the same time we think Irina Milosovici arrived on American soil.”

Instantly, Windermere was awake. “Hot damn, Mathers. You
do
know how to get a girl’s attention.” She told him about Callaway, about the burner phone with the Newark area code. “But why Trieste?”

“Closest major container port to Bucharest,” Mathers said. “Irina didn’t seem to think the box was moved more than once between Bucharest and America. They must have trucked it overland before they loaded it on the
Ocean Constellation
.”

Windermere turned on the shower. “It’s perfect,” she said. “Let’s say the
Ocean Constellation
is our ship. Now we just have to figure out who sent the container.”

“I’m working on it,” Mathers said. “One more thing.”

“Uh-huh?” Windermere said.

“The
Ocean Constellation
off-loaded in Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, after Newark,” he said. “It’s supposed to head back to the Mediterranean in a day or so, but they have an outbound stop in Newark scheduled for tomorrow. If you haul ass, you might be able to get on board, talk to the crew.”

“Dynamite,” Windermere told him. “Call Newark and tell them to prepare for my arrival. Don’t let that ship set sail before Stevens and I get a good look at it.”

“Roger,” Mathers said. “Any shot I can let Irina call her family? Her translator’s getting pretty worked up about it.”

“Negative,” Windermere said. “Wait for me to get home.”

“You know, we’re supposed to let her talk to her people, Carla,” Mathers said. “Legally, I mean. We can’t just keep her locked up forever. And I don’t know if you noticed, but that translator is kind of scary.”

Windermere knew he was right. Still, something made her reluctant to let the girl do much without her direct supervision. The case was too fragile.

“Just a little longer, Derek,” she told Mathers. “See if you can keep her in check for another day at least.”

“Okay,” Mathers said. “I’ll try.” Then he brightened. “Hey, since you’re not coming home, can I have the name of that call girl you talked to?”

“You can’t afford her,” Windermere told him. “I’m getting into the shower now. Think about that while I’m gone.”

“FUCKING FBI INSECTS.”

The Dragon smiled at Volovoi, clucked his teeth in commiseration. Beside him, Volovoi stared out the town car’s smoked windows at the Manhattan skyline across the river, the twin humps of Midtown and Lower Manhattan, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Citigroup and American International buildings, the new World Trade Center—the Freedom Tower, they were calling it—the Dragon’s city. He knew it was no accident that the Dragon’s driver had taken this route.

The FBI had raided Club Heat in Duluth. Volovoi had learned of the disaster this morning. The women were freed. The club owner imprisoned. Shortly after he’d heard the news, the Dragon had called.

“Insects,” the Dragon said, smiling again at Volovoi, a bad approximation of sympathy. The gangster couldn’t hide his delight. With the Duluth club out of business, Volovoi was down a buyer. Out thousands of dollars in revenue, money he’d been counting on to pay back the Dragon.

Shit,
Volovoi thought,
it wouldn’t be so surprising if the Dragon was behind the raid at Club Heat himself
.

Sure enough, the Dragon turned away from Volovoi to watch the Manhattan skyline. “You will need a new source of income,” he said, as though the thought had just occurred to him. “Perhaps now is the time, Andrei, to consider my New York offer.”

“Now is not the time,” Volovoi replied, sinking back in his seat. “The FBI has picked up my drivers’ trail. They will be searching for traffickers, picking at threads. Now is the time to lay low and be cautious.”

“Caution never made a man any money, Andrei,” the Dragon replied. “And surely you’d agree that now, more than ever, you’re in need of a profit. You have a new shipment coming in a couple of days. Where will you send it?”

Volovoi didn’t answer. There was money in Manhattan, he knew, enough to push the Dragon off his back forever. But there was also heavy risk. And the Dragon wouldn’t go away easily, even after the Manhattan project took hold.

If he were a smart man, he would ditch the next box, now that the FBI had begun to trace the big sister’s trail. A cautious man would not attempt to sell any more women. He certainly would not employ Bogdan Urzica and his idiot partner, not with police drawings of their faces on every news channel in America.

But he couldn’t just quit. The Dragon wouldn’t allow it, would chase him if he ran. Would hunt down his family, his sister, her children. The Dragon would demand payment, one way or the other.

“Just a small meeting with my New York friend, Andrei,” the Dragon said. “You don’t have to agree to anything, no obligation. Just allow us to lay out our proposal.”

The driver turned the town car away from the river, and Manhattan receded in the rearview mirror, replaced by grimy, soul-crushing New Jersey. Volovoi closed his eyes, imagined the FBI insects tearing down his operation. Imagined severing ties with the Dragon, the havoc it would wreak. He’d come to America for glamour and sensationalism. Such things required a man to make difficult decisions. Sometimes a man had to take risks.

Volovoi knew there was only one answer. He opened his eyes. “One meeting,” he told the gangster. “No obligation.”

The Dragon smiled back. “No obligation, Andrei,” he said. “None whatsoever.”

“NEWARK, NEW JERSEY,”
Stevens told his wife over the phone. “We’re wheels-up in about half an hour. Hopefully, someone on this ship saw something we can use to start following the trail to the bad guys.”

“This is the same ship that brought Irina and her sister over?” Nancy said. “It’s back in Newark already?”

“It’s an outbound stop,” Stevens said. “It docked in Newark last week, its first stop in America. Went down the Eastern Seaboard dropping off boxes and then turned around to pick up a few more in New Jersey before it crosses the Atlantic. Lucky us, I guess.”

“Have to be good to be lucky,” Nancy said. She let her breath out, weary. “We almost had World War Three around here last night.”

“Oh no,” Stevens said. “What happened?”

“I worked late,” she said. “Left Andrea to handle dinner for JJ. I get home and he’s starving, and your daughter is nowhere to be found. She straggles in a half hour later, says she went to McDonald’s with her friends.”

“Friends,” Stevens said.

“One friend in particular.”

“Calvin.” Stevens rubbed his eyes. “That guy still around?”

“She left JJ alone for an hour, Kirk. I don’t care about her little blossoming romance. It’s not acceptable.”

“Of course not,” Stevens said. “So what happened?”

“Nothing,” Nancy said. “She stomped off to her room, and I made JJ spaghetti. You’re going to have to talk to her, Kirk. She won’t listen to me.”

“Maybe if we texted her.”

“Ha-ha,” Nancy said. “Hurry back, would you?”

“I will,” Stevens told her. He ended the call and hurried out of the motel to where Windermere stood beside a waiting cab. She raised an eyebrow at him as he approached.

“Andrea has a boyfriend,” Stevens told her. “For once in my life, I’m glad I’m not home to deal with it.”

“Say no more,” Windermere said, climbing into the taxi. “I’d take Romanian mobsters over a moody teenage girl any day.”

Stevens laughed. “You and me both.” He slipped in beside her, slamming the door as the cab motored out of the motel parking lot toward the airport. Somewhere in the distance, the
Ocean Constellation
waited.