Ridley Pearson - The First Victim

He turned around. She had been smart enough to wear a Gore-Tex jacket. It was green and complemented her eyes. ‘‘How does a person get there? How does a person cross that bridge?’’

‘‘You don’t have to cross a bridge. You simply have to acknowledge the other side, allow the other side to exist as equally valid as your own.’’

‘‘But it’s not equally valid!’’

‘‘So you have your work cut out for you.’’

‘‘I’m supposed to start reading the Bible or something,’’ he said sarcastically.

‘‘Maybe just talk to her about it,’’ Daphne suggested. ‘‘That’s the best bridge of all.’’ She tugged on the hood and a rivulet of water streamed down to her shoulder and cascaded off her elbow. ‘‘Why are we here, anyway?’’

‘‘I’m beginning to wonder,’’ Boldt admitted. ‘‘I thought I came here to find more graves, more bodies.’’ He added, ‘‘Maybe it was just to find what’s buried.’’

‘‘More bodies?’’

‘‘If they buried one, why not others? I’m sitting there in a waiting room at Boeing, and I’m seeing graves in photos of airplane hangars and I’m thinking Jane Doe wasn’t alone up here.’’

‘‘Isn’t it pretty tricky to exhume?’’

‘‘Extremely difficult, especially given we don’t know where to look. But if there are other women buried up here, they may hold information we need. This missing reporter mentions ‘the graveyard’ on her video. I’m thinking that’s the connection we’re missing.’’

‘‘She followed someone here?’’ Daphne suggested. ‘‘Followed someone from here?’’

‘‘The gravedigger maybe. Someone who could tell them when a fresh grave came available. They keep the women frozen until they have an opening.’’

‘‘Melissa made the connection.’’

‘‘Maybe. But if the gravedigger was on the take. .’’

‘‘He’d have to have a way to contact them,’’ she said, completing his thought.

‘‘My job is to find Melissa before she ends up here.’’

The rain slackened off and Daphne drew the hood away. She fluffed her hair and shook her head side to side. She said, ‘‘Has it occurred to you how complex an operation this is? The ships, the containers, the cargo, the rendezvous, transportation, fake IDs, graveyards, brothels, sweatshops.’’

‘‘At thirty thousand dollars a passenger, the margins are pretty good.’’

‘‘But who could pull off something like this? And with the INS out there, how long could they get away with it?’’

‘‘Big players,’’ he said. ‘‘Has to be. On that end, the Chinese Triad would know about it or control it. On this end, people like Mama Lu. That’s why I’m so interested in her. You’re right: It’s huge. It’s no mom-and-pop affair, that’s for sure.’’

‘‘But to get away with it. .’’ she said, coming back to her original thought. ‘‘My job in all this is to come up with a psych profile, a personality sketch of our suspect. I built a model. Closest thing I could come up with was a beehive. Lots of worker bees following orders. They handle the day-to-day.’’

‘‘The gangs.’’

‘‘Exactly. Then come the drones. They can give orders, but they take orders, too. You work your way up this succession of power, and the thing I kept coming back to, the bee in my bonnet-if you will-is that in the upper ranks, up near the very top, it requires, even necessitates, someone in a position of strength. Not power, not physical might; I don’t mean that. But strength: connections, knowledge, insight.’’ She added, ‘‘No matter what model you use, they don’t get away with this without someone in that position. Luck only lasts so long. The way you win in a game this big is not to rely on luck at all.’’

‘‘Stack the deck,’’ Boldt said.

‘‘Yes. Stack the deck.’’

‘‘They’ve bought someone off,’’ Boldt said. ‘‘That’s what you’re saying.’’

‘‘I don’t like it, either.’’

It started raining again. Daphne jerked the hood up over her head.

Boldt stood in the rain. ‘‘Imaging systems.’’

‘‘What?’’

‘‘I saw it on the Discover Channel with Miles. Archeologist, using technologies developed by oil companies. They found dinosaur bones without digging.’’

‘‘Dinosaurs?’’

‘‘So why not humans?’’ he asked, looking up and indicating all the headstones.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 2811 DAYS MISSING

With police refusing to share the video, and no word from Brian Coughlie, with it being a Friday and another long, long weekend looming before her, Stevie elected to turn to viewers for help, knowing full well it would entail an enormous risk. Now in the eleventh day of Melissa’s disappearance, she felt she had no choice. She had never experienced the bright burning glare of the studio lights quite like this-they felt more like those used in interrogations in old black-and-white films, blinding and intimidating, meant to extract the truth.

With her own words spread out on the news desk before her and echoed on the TelePrompTers, with these words hers and not some news writer’s as they typically were, she found the anchor desk, the wireless microphones and the penetrating stare of the clear glass camera lenses suddenly terrifying. Jimmy Corwin looked on from behind the thick glass of the control booth, his agitated expression a mixture of stunned amazement, twisting curiosity and deep concern. It wasn’t every Friday morning that Stevie McNeal showed up at the station at

5:30 A.M. demanding a two-minute segment on the Wake-up News and another one-minute piece on the Seattle Today cutaways that frequented the national morning show. He had negotiated such appearances by her as part of their deal when he gave Stevie the container assignment, but he had never expected her to deliver.

An eerie silence enveloped the set; the morning crew were on pins and needles because they didn’t have down the peculiarities of how to manage the afternoon talent. Or so Stevie surmised. That along with her tired appearance and her lack of makeup. She wore only some lipstick. She had sent both the hair girl and powder boy packing-there would be no touch-ups between shots. She wore a dark cotton turtleneck that did not emphasize her curves. In fact, all of this, along with having her hair pulled back, meant that there was nothing suggestive about her whatsoever. The sexploitation of the news would have to wait for the next fresh face to come along. She was done with it.

Now, as the floor director’s fingers rhythmically counted down five. . four. . three. . Stevie turned inside herself searching for that sense of calm that she knew had always been there when she most needed it. The cameras were aimed on her , she reminded herself; the lights aimed on her ; the hundreds of thousands of viewers hanging on her every phrase, every syllable, every nuance. Nothing compared with live television.

She was not thinking of the container series, she was not aiming to impress New York or Atlanta, she was making an effort to save a friend, a sister. Her Little Sister.

Mi Chow she had been called back then, for the name Melissa had not yet been given to her. Stephanie didn’t recall exactly how old they had been at the time; but she did remember that they’d been small enough that she had needed to stand to see out the side window of the chauffeur-driven Chrysler as it passed an open-air market, the craggy faces of the Chinese women and men hiding beneath the enormous straw hats, worn as protection against the unbearably hot sun.

Mi had occupied the center of the backseat flanked by Father and a beautiful English woman that Stevie had seen at Father’s parties. Stevie could still see this woman’s hat and black veil, her bright lipstick and dark blue dress. Shiny blue leather shoes with spike heels.