Operator - 01 (13 page)

The safe is a Secure Logic model with a biometric scanner, making it the newest piece of equipment in the entire office. The lock is keyed to the fingerprints of the owner, and placing a finger into the scanner will open it. Only Vanderhook can open the safe because fingerprints are unique.

That’s the theory, anyway.

I take a careful look at the safe and the fingerprint scanner and then, flicking off my headlamp, leave the office. I descend the darkened staircase and make my way to the receptionist’s desk, careful not to let my silhouette fall into the pool of light from a streetlamp shining through the front door of the office. I pull two pencils and a manual sharpener from a jar on Dolores’ desk and remove the spool of tape from her tape dispenser. Then I slide open her desk drawer and locate the last item I need – an emery board. Moving back to the staircase, I pull a clean sheet of paper from the copier at the bottom of the stairs. Then I return to the office, seat myself at Vanderhook’s desk and begin methodically scrubbing graphite from the tip of each pencil, sharpening repeatedly to get rid of the wood. When I have a fine pile of graphite dust on the center of the clean piece of paper, I look around. Vanderhook has a Dell computer in the corner of his desk, a small concession to modernity. I carefully pick up the ends of the copier paper so the sheet forms a tunnel. Then I tap graphite dust over the left mouse button. When enough has accumulated, I blow lightly on the graphite. A fingerprint appears. Grabbing the cellophane tape, I carefully put a piece over the print and peel it off. The print transfers. It’s not ideal, but it’s clean enough for the scanner on the Secure Logic. I seal the print with another piece of tape. I walk the tape over to the biometric safe, activate the scanner and slip in my finger with the tape where my fingerprint would go. The lock slides open.

I take a step back when the beam of my Tikka headlamp hits the interior of the safe. It is divided horizontally into two compartments. The bottom area is stacked with cash; at least a hundred thousand dollars. A pile of documents teeters precariously in the top compartment. Vanderhook’s personal records include his passport, savings account, house titles and birth certificate. Then I spot a black leather-bound notebook tucked in to the side of the stack, looking as if it’s been used frequently.

It is a book of green-ruled accountant’s paper. I sit down at Vanderhook’s desk to examine it. Two thirds of the pages are full of inked entries. Each page has dates at the top and a set of addresses down the left side. I assume the entries are dollar figures. The numbers make me catch my breath. There are at least twenty properties on each page. The total monthly take for each property is many times more than any house in Conestoga could command in rent. This volume has two years of records. On the second-to-last used page of the book I find the address of the yellow colonial that stands next to Mel’s apartment as well as two of the three addresses that Veronica has given me from the website. The last inscribed page is filled with addresses but has no payments recorded and it includes a line for another of the addresses Veronica showed me.

I consider my options for a moment and decide to risk making a copy of the book. I don’t want Vanderhook to know that anyone has been in his office, but I need some proof of what I’ve seen. Using my fleece to block the light escaping from the Xerox machine, I photocopy the entire volume. Then I replace it carefully in the safe before re-locking it. I methodically clean up the traces of my visit, returning the emery board, tape and sharpener to Dolores’ desk drawer. I lock Vanderhook’s office from the inside and carefully wipe down everything I’ve touched. Then I scan the parking lot through a slit in the blinds, only opening the window after I see that Veronica is still in her car and still alone in the lot. She is idling her Mercedes nose outwards with the lights off. I step onto the windowsill and carefully close the window behind me. Then I turn and drop, catching the second story window frame before I drop the remaining eight feet.

* * *

We sit in my car, underneath the grasping branches of a hundred-year oak on Sycamore Street, some forty yards away from one of the Vanderhook houses. It’s raining the fat cold drops of autumn and the air is heavy with moisture. I slowly work my way through the copied pages of the ledger book by penlight, committing them to memory. Veronica is reading them at the same time, leaning across the padded armrest covering the driveshaft of the GTO. Just as a forced smile releases real endorphins that can trigger authentic joy, our proximity as we lean together over the small document kindles a sense of intimacy. As we talk in muted tones, Veronica’s hand brushes mine on the armrest. She doesn’t withdraw it.

We’ve spent nearly five hours taking a tour of four of the addresses from the Vanderhook ledger. As we observe these dilapidated houses from a distance, a pattern soon emerges. All of the houses have Vanderhook “For Sale” signs up, but they’re all occupied. Despite being past the hour of the evening when most Conestoga families have long since settled in, the Vanderhook properties seem busier than Chuck’s Diner after church on Sunday. Cars arrive at regular intervals. The routine is identical at each property. A car pulls into the driveway, rolling to a stop a few feet short of the garage door. The car hovers there for a moment, then the garage door opens. The delay is longer than you’d expect for someone fumbling for a remote, and the garage doors glide open without the usual clatter. There is invariably a second car in the garage with a cover thrown over it. The pattern proceeds with military precision. Twenty minutes later, the garage door opens again; this time the other car leaves. Exactly twenty minutes after that, another car arrives to fill the open slot, and so on. We’ve only seen two departures from this pattern. On Van Buren Street at a rose-colored ranch house, a black Lincoln MKZ pulls up to the dark house late, having missed the expected interval by ten minutes. The garage door never opens and the car drives away after a moment. On the street we’re observing, a shiny black Mercedes slides into the garage just after we start observing. It’s a new S550, easily a hundred-grand car. In Conestoga, not even the meth dealers can afford a ride like that. We’ve been sitting for more than an hour, and the car hasn’t emerged yet, nor has anyone else entered.

“This isn’t just some unauthorized subletting to illegal immigrants,” I murmur as I flip back through the copied pages of the Vanderhook ledger.

Veronica arches an eyebrow in an expressive way that says “no shit.”

“Yeah, yeah – obviously,” I mutter.

“Prostitution?”

“Probably,” I reply and stop for a second, replaying our tour of the yellow colonial next to Mel’s apartment in my head. “But more than that, I think. I think we’re looking at a sex trafficking operation.”

“You mean white slavery? That kind of thing?”

“It’s the only reason you’d put deadbolts on the bedroom doors and bars on the windows. You’re trying to keep someone in, not out. Gangs out of Eastern Europe run most of the sex trafficking trade. They lure girls in with advertising for good paying jobs like modeling, then addict them to drugs and force them into prostitution.”

“Why go to all that trouble? Aren’t there plenty of prostitutes in the U.S. already?”

“They make more money because they don’t pay the girls. Plus they get a steady supply of new blood.”

“It’s disgusting,” Veronica says acidly and I nod. “And this real estate agent is part of this?”

“It’s actually a pretty clever scheme. I bet all of these houses are foreclosures. That means they’re vacant and banks don’t keep tabs on them as well as homeowners would. If the neighbors get suspicious, these people can just disappear and pop up in another house in another neighborhood the next day. That could be what happened with the house next to Mel.”

“And you think the Sheriff’s part of this?”

“It makes sense. If the neighbors notice something unusual, they’d call the police. All the Sheriff has to do is make sure the operation moves immediately and everyone stays happy.”

“Unless someone gets a glimpse of what’s really going on,” Veronica says, catching the disturbing implication of this line of thinking.

“Right. If someone actually figured this out, they’d threaten the entire operation. That’s a lot of cash. So there would be a big incentive to get rid of anyone who got too nosy.”

“What could Mel have seen?”

“I don’t know. But she speaks Russian, right? What if she somehow talked to one of the girls? Or just saw enough of what we saw to figure things out? If Russians or Ukrainians are running this ring, they don’t fool around.” As I say this, I remember a particular trip to Sevastpol, the transshipment point for many bad things on the Black Sea.

“So what do we do? Confront the Sheriff?”

“No, definitely not. I have a friend at the FBI. I think if I tell him what we saw and give him a copy of this ledger, it’ll be enough for him to wind this up pretty quickly.”

“What about Mel? How will we find out who killed her?”

I think about this for a moment. The hardest thing for me to know is my own feelings. What we’ve seen convinces me that the killer will be sent to jail with all of the other felons running this racket. Is that enough? Then I realize that we have another possible approach. “Buddy Peterson must have been tipped off by whoever killed Mel, or he wouldn’t have beat EMS to her place. I bet he’d cut a deal to save himself and give up the murderer. We can talk to the FBI about that.”

It doesn’t feel satisfying to either of us. But I’m not planning to try to twist Buddy Peterson’s arm to figure out what he knows. Those days are over.

* * *

I’m lying on a bed in my motel room in Conestoga when I hear the door to the bathroom squeak open. By the time we finished our surveillance it was nearly two a.m. and Veronica asked if she could crash in my motel room. I didn’t know exactly how to interpret the request, but I said yes. My room comes equipped with two beds and I feel a combination of relief and disappointment when she drops a small overnight bag on the second bed, the one that my duffel is not sitting on. She offers me the bathroom first and I take it, cleaning up and changing into sweats. Then she disappears into the bathroom for a half-hour. As the door finally opens, I catch sight of her framed by the light of the forty-watt bulb that hangs naked over the sink mirror. She is wearing a blue college sweatshirt over gray sweatpants.

I put my book, a Civil War history by James McPherson, down as she slides under the covers of the twin bed next to mine. She starts talking randomly, which seems to be her habit when she’s nervous. But after a few moments we both relax and the talk drifts off. I’ve just turned off the light when another idea comes into my head. It’s not a good thought.

“Something has been bothering me about that yellow house, the one next to Mel’s place,” I say, flicking the light back on. Veronica lifts herself up on her elbows and squints at me. “This whole business could be something worse than we were thinking.”

She looks at me with those green eyes. I don’t think I’ve quite noticed the color before.

“White slavery rings usually control the girls with drugs and with money – piling big bills up on them and making them earn it back. But the window bars and deadbolts we saw in that yellow house don’t exactly fit with that scenario. A twenty-year-old Czech or Romanian girl in a small town in upstate New York would already be pretty well isolated. She’d be here illegally and wouldn’t speak the language. So I doubt they’d need the bars to control the girls, unless…unless possibly we’re talking about underage girls. Young girls. That would also make the numbers in the Vanderhook ledger make more sense. Given what he’s making for just supplying the houses, these Russians are sitting on a goldmine. One that they would kill to protect.”

When I look at her again, there are tears in Veronica’s eyes. “And Mel, if she thought a child was being hurt…she would have done anything to stop it.”

I nod and see that Veronica has suddenly gone pale. For a second I wonder if she’s going to faint.

“Mike, there’s something. I…I may know something more about this,” she says.

She must see me stiffen, feel the coldness that flows through me suddenly, because she shakes her head emphatically. “It’s not like that. But there was something – something that happened in Russia when Mel and I were there. I need to think about it. If I tell you and I’m wrong I could ruin someone’s life. Let me sleep on it, okay?” I look at her closely. She’s not lying, at least.

In a few minutes her eyes close and she’s out cold from sheer exhaustion.

I don’t sleep much at all.

Chapter Five – Tuesday

A confetti spray of waxy green bits of foliage erupts inches from my head as I tumble sideways over the four-foot hedge. It takes a second for my brain to catch up with my body and understand why instinct has hurtled me into somebody’s front yard. As my hip clears the prickly shrubs by an inch and puffs of erupting dirt in the yard tell me that 9mm rounds have just missed me, I replay the last five seconds of my life. I was jogging, enjoying the pre-dawn chill in the air. It was quiet. I may be the last person in America who runs without an iPod, but the training gets ingrained: it’s impossible to be aware of your environment when you’re listening to hip-hop. The trigger that awoke my dormant survival reflex was the combination of three sounds: the V-8 engine of a last-generation Ford Crown Victoria slowing to a bare murmur as it pulled up ten yards behind me, followed by the slight whine of an electric window being lowered and the barest clink of metal tapping glass. Before my conscious mind could process these things, I was flying sideways over the hedge. As the ground rises to meet me, my body twists in the air like a cat so that I land flat on my stomach, facing the two-story Victorian whose yard I’ve violated.

As my head snaps up toward the house, I’m suddenly nose-to-nose with a 120-pound Rottweiler, dripping saliva from bared yellow fangs. I can see the rippling muscles in the big dog’s hindquarters coiling to spring at me and I start to raise my forearm protectively when puffs of brittle, un-raked leaves erupt in a straight line heading towards me from my right side. As one lands neatly between the dogs paws, the Rott yips and springs to my right. I roll to the left. The string of bullets follows me. The rounds come from a silenced Heckler & Koch MP5, one of the deadliest little machine pistols around. The silenced gunfire sounds like an air rifle, louder and more metallic than the “pluff” noise-suppressed weapons invariably make in the movies. The last round of the burst almost stitches me, which is impressive marksmanship considering that I’m concealed by the hedge. I make a mental note that the shooter anticipated my move even though he couldn’t see it. As I roll past the end of the house, the bullets abruptly stop flying and I get my feet under me and run at a crouch through the side yard to the back of the Victorian. I hear a door on the big Ford open and slam shut just as I reach the back yard and duck behind the protective cover of the house.