The First Victim

CHAPTER 71

As Stevie agonized in bumper-to-bumper traffic caused by a series of weather-related accidents she left a long voice mail for Boldt, having no idea if he would ever get it. ‘‘I think I’ve found the ‘graveyard’ Melissa mentioned on the videos. It’s complicated. We need to talk. Leave a way on my voice mail for me to reach you. If I don’t hear from you, you’ll hear from me. I’m going to get you the evidence you need.’’ She hung up.

Back at the KSTV studios, she collected a camcorder- lightweight and easy to use. She was on her way back down the hall when the night watchman caught her with a shout.

‘‘Ms. McNeal!’’

She stopped and turned, impatient to her core.

‘‘Damn glad to see you! Security people be looking everywhere for you! Police and feds been calling every fifteen minutes! They lost track of you. You had better stay put ’til I can hook you up with them again. They’re all pissed off.’’

‘‘Sure thing,’’ Stevie said. ‘‘You make the call.’’

The man waved and turned into an office.

Stevie took off at a run.

With absolute certainty that she had found the sweatshop, it all began to add up for her: the darkness of Melissa’s video, that echoing, reverberating sound. A ship!

The drive to Salmon Bay took less than ten minutes but occupied a lifetime. She accepted the danger she knew she faced as penance for involving Melissa in the first place. It seemed only right that she should have to relive Melissa’s hell in order to get Boldt the evidence he needed. No flashes of her life passing by, no nostalgia. She had a job to do. She was in her element.

She parked in the back lot of a marine supply store a hundred yards east of the impound area and went off on foot, staying away from the water’s edge and electing to thread her way through two rows of boat storage that housed skiffs and rowboats and sailboats stacked five high on steel shelving and covered by a tin roof. The property included two warehouses-one for dry storage, the other a repair workshop, its northern boundary fenced off from the government impound by a rusted ten-foot chain-link fence that bore ancient NO TRESPASSING signs. Stevie moved carefully, shadow to shadow, alert for night watchmen or sentries, alert for any sign of activity that might confirm the existence of the sweatshop. At last she came to the end of the storage and tucked herself beneath the hull of a ski boat from where she had a view of the impound facility: dozens of rusting boats and ships, all tied one to the other in an unplanned confusion. Algae-green lines drooped and sagged toward the water like awkward smiles. A graveyard indeed. The ships were old ruins of rust and corrosion-fishing trawlers, small freighters, power cruisers, sailboats, tugs-all put into illegal service at some point: drug running, guns, human beings-a harsh and mechanical landscape overcome by decay and neglect.

She saw no hint of life, no evidence of the sweatshop to film. A wooden gangway lay on the asphalt next to a barge, the only indication of a way up to the flotilla, but it would require at least a couple men to move it into place. The assortment of boats and ships was secured to pylons where seagulls slept with their heads tucked into their wings. See no evil. . she thought. Past these, any semblance of order was lost, the boats tied together at random one to the other in a patchwork of fiberglass and metal and inflatable bumpers, most crippled and listing.

However improbable, however unlikely, there was a sweatshop hiding among the carnage. Brian Coughlie had chosen well-the last place on earth one would expect the sweatshop, and a place under his professional control. The sweatshop. Melissa!

Reenvisioning what she had seen from the helicopter, she tried to locate the vessel rimmed in the electronic lime green of the binoculars. Somewhere in the middle of the pack she decided, resigned to getting out there. But in fact the aerial view did not translate well to a five-foot-seven-inch woman standing thirty yards away from the flotilla’s perimeter, the first obstacle to which was a chain-link fence. In junior high maybe, when gymnastics had been a regular part of each afternoon, but suddenly the ten-foot-high rusted wire fence looked insurmountable.

Crouched beneath that ski boat, she heard a steady electrical hum. This hum meant electricity-electricity, power lines. The story slowly pieced together, her eyes found and followed a thick black cable that ran down a power pole at the farthest corner of the compound. The cable had been stuffed into the overgrowth to hide it, but it finally broke out of the bushes where it was tied to one of the massive rope lines that held the ships to the pilings, wrapped around the line like a fat snake. Stevie was no stranger to power cables, but as thick as her wrist, this one was clearly no simple ship-to-shore extension cord. This was some kind of major power supply-thousands of volts, like the one that fed KSTV’s control room.

Big enough for a sweatshop, she thought. Big enough to follow.

The camcorder strapped to her, she considered her choices: The barge was the lowest of all the waterfront boats, clearly the more easily scaled, but it also offered the most exposure. The tanker to the left, on the other hand, although harder to scale, offered good cover, and the loading net that hung from its side appeared scalable, if not precarious.

She ran to the chain-link fence, exposed and vulnerable, the camcorder hanging at her back. Crossing that fence offered a finality for her. Once on the other side she was fully committed. But there was no moment of pause. Her fingers webbed tightly through the rusting wire and she pulled herself up, higher with each grasp. The fence wobbled and threatened to throw her off. She reached the top edge, a row of twisted wire spikes. Twice she tried to throw her right leg up and over. On her second attempt, the cellphone spilled from her coat pocket and clapped loudly down onto the asphalt. Mistaking it for a gunshot, she vaulted the fence effortlessly, clawing her way down the other side and jumping the final four feet. The camera slapped her back as she landed. She froze, her knees throbbing, ears ringing. Her cellphone lay broken in pieces on the other side. So much for the cavalry. But there was no turning back.

She hurried across the open wharf and into shadows thrown by the docked ships. Lightheaded, almost giddy, she felt like a teenager sneaking out of the house.

A wharf rat the size of a house cat skittered along the very edge where she stood, heading directly for her. She didn’t scream, but her body locked, seized by fright, and she couldn’t so much as take a step. The rodent saw Stevie and slithered out of sight, but the experience stung her. Su-Su would have said the rat was good luck, guiding her. That the rat had come to her as a teacher, not a threat. It was this flicker of remembrance of her former governess that supported Stevie’s decision to do this, reminded her of her father’s efforts to smuggle Melissa out of China alive. And it was there, standing on that deserted wharf, that for the first time Stevie confronted the small glances and occasional touches exchanged between Su-Su and her father. There, as an adult, she suddenly reinterpreted those glimpses of intimate contact. Realization charged through her: Father had been in China nearly a year before summoning Stevie from the school in Switzerland. The dread of truth crept into her. Those looks between Su-Su and her father. The occasional tears. The reality of the nickname Su-Su had given Mi Chow, the risks Father had taken to get Mi Chow to America. The legal adoption. Melissa was no political prisoner born to parents killed during the Cultural Revolution: all fiction for a necessary illusion. Melissa was, in fact, just as Su-Su called her from the very beginning: Little Sister.

True or not, at that moment Stevie accepted it, embraced it, the depth of her feelings for the girl making so much more sense. No matter what, she believed-a necessity perhaps born of the moment. No matter. Suddenly, there was no courage, no fear, no question about any of it. She felt bulletproof. Righteous.

The power cable climbed up the line toward the ship’s bow. She climbed the net on the tanker’s side, pulling herself higher and higher above the wharf, finally reaching the upper deck and the lip of slimy steel. She peered over this edge thinking there was no landscape as eerie as something man-made left abandoned. The lines creaked and sighed. Water slapped lazily all around her. The electric hum grew perceptibly louder.

She pulled herself under the rail and down onto the cold damp deck, and crawled into the shadow. She crouched and hurried toward the bow past ladders and winches, railing and line, the air thick with rust and algae. She reached the power cable and followed it to starboard, to where it spilled over the side and down to an abandoned river ferry listing badly to port, its stern also low in the water. The ferry’s deck was a good fifteen to twenty feet below her, the heavy cable passing across it and on to the next ship. Elevated on the tanker, she took a moment to look around at the graveyard. Deck, rail, stacks and bridges.

Gray decaying steel. Rust the color of dried blood. To her right she saw a steady path of gangways, ladders and planks leading one deck to the next out to the center of the graveyard and a large fishing trawler where it stopped.

Below and to her left the black cable ran straight for that trawler, looking like a piece of thread dropped from the sky.

She could see Melissa here-could recall the videos. Excitement stole through her. Little Sister!

In the distance she heard the air brakes of a bus or truck. There was no mistaking that sound.

She crossed back around to the other side of the tanker in time to see a figure scramble down a steep path through the vegetation to the only gate in the chain-link fence. A big man. A man wearing a sweatshirt and a hood. Stevie ducked out of sight.