The First Victim

CHAPTER 77

Stevie McNeal stared at the image on the video monitor in KSTV’s control room. Through the soundproofed glass she looked out on the news set where she had spent the last few years of her life. It was relatively dark out there on the set, a few overhead room lights throwing out just enough light to keep one from tripping on cords and wires. It looked foreign to her, this place. She wasn’t sure she would ever sit in that chair again.

On the monitor was an image of the equally dark sweatshop-‘‘the Sweatship,’’ as the local news radio station had immediately dubbed it, a name that seemed likely to stick. Darkness pervaded her consciousness as well. She felt heavy with grief and burdened with guilt, and thought that the station was a lonely, even somewhat frightening place at three in the morning. A night watchman patrolled the building, checking up on Stevie about every half hour, but it did little to assuage her fears. She wouldn’t have done any better at the hotel; not knowing what she and Boldt had worked out. Sleep wasn’t an option.

Melissa was still missing. She had not been found among the recaptured population.

When the clock read exactly 3:00 A.M., she reluctantly placed the call to Coughlie’s pager and dialed in the control room’s direct line. When the phone rang a few minutes later its ringing jarred her, and she actually lifted out of her chair, despite the fact she was expecting the return call.

‘‘McNeal,’’ she answered.

‘‘I’ve been calling your cellphone for the last two hours,’’ Brian Coughlie said.

‘‘It’s broken.’’

‘‘You’re at the station. I tried the main line. A machine picks up.’’

‘‘We need to talk, Brian.’’ Despite her efforts, her voice sounded filled with defeat and sadness.

Steady breathing on the other end of the line. Coughlie said nothing.

She said, ‘‘We need to talk about this. Tonight. Before tomorrow morning. Before the meeting.’’

‘‘I agree,’’ he said.

‘‘West side of the building. There are fire doors that lead into the studio. Knock, but not too loudly. There’s a night watchman on duty. If you use the main entrance, your visit will be logged into the computer. I think we’d both rather avoid that. Am I right?’’

‘‘West side. Fire doors,’’ he said.

‘‘The guard makes his rounds every half hour. If you get here at thirty-five after, we’ve got twenty minutes or so in the clear. Can you make it?’’

‘‘Twenty-five of,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ll be there.’’

The twenty-some minutes passed interminably. She was not only emotionally drained but physically exhausted. She checked all the equipment for the third or fourth time-she’d lost count. Every monitor in the studio carried the freeze-frame image of the sweatshop floor with the sixty or seventy bareheaded women leaned over their sewing machines-overhead monitors, the huge SONY on the wall, the counter-top monitors used by the anchors. The effect was overwhelming, magnifying the power of that image manyfold.

The guard passed through right on time, offered her a little wave, walked the studio and left by the door through which he had come. Her head ached, dull and heavy, a result of fatigue and her battered eye, but her heart beat quickly with a combination of anticipation and adrenaline. Everything she had worked for since Melissa’s disappearance came down to these next ten or twenty minutes, and it was this compression of time that rattled her. That and the fact that every time she thought it was almost over, it came to life again, like something beaten but not killed. She found it difficult to concentrate, to hold a single thought in her head.

When the knock came, it split her head open like an axe. She hurried out of the control room, down the three steps to the studio floor level and across to the fire doors. He knocked again, though she didn’t immediately open the doors, for it took her longer than she thought to find her composure and collect herself. She exhaled slowly and pushed the door’s panic bar. Aptly named, she thought privately.

Brian Coughlie stepped inside. Even given the dim light, she saw that his eyes were bloodshot and frantic. As he caught sight of the overhead monitors and the image of the sweatshop, he fell into a kind of trance.

‘‘I have to hear your side of this,’’ she whispered.

He snapped his attention away from the monitors to look at her, though it drew him back as she reached to pull the fire doors closed. She walked past him and toward the control room, saying nothing, knowing he would follow, relieved just the same when she heard his footsteps. A moment later he closed the control room door and took a seat in one of the producer’s chairs. He gripped the arms of the chair like a person expecting an earthquake. ‘‘My side?’’ he inquired.

‘‘I’m willing to believe there’s an explanation.’’ She wouldn’t look at him, her attention riveted to the monitor and the image there, she wouldn’t allow him to work on her with his controlled expressions.

‘‘Explanation?’’

‘‘I could tell you what we’re going to see on these videos tomorrow morning, or you could tell me why we’re going to see it. And you can bullshit me or not-that’s your decision. But it’s late, and I’m exhausted, Brian.’’ She carried that swollen eye like a badge of honor. ‘‘So maybe you just cut the shit and tell me what’s going on here.’’

‘‘I’m on the video?’’ he guessed.

His lip and forehead shined with perspiration. Stevie wore a cardigan, as the control room was kept in the middle to low sixties.

‘‘Do I accept these images or not?’’ she asked.

‘‘Maybe we had better watch and see,’’ he suggested.

‘‘No, no, no! That’s just the point. I can’t afford that. I can’t have you adjusting your version of the truth to what you see on the tape.’’

‘‘It’s not a matter of me adjusting anything. Until tonight it was a matter of Need to Know. Not even Adam Talmadge knew about the operation. I couldn’t tell anyone.’’ He glanced to ensure the control room door was tightly shut. ‘‘I accepted my first bribe a year and a half ago. I laundered their cash and mine through the car wash. I documented every meeting, every bribe. The idea was for me to remain undercover until I had hard evidence against the people actually running things, not just the street-level thugs. It went much longer than I expected. Adam would have never approved it. I still don’t have enough to convict. It blew up on me tonight. That happens. But the way it’ll look now. . the way it’ll look if people see me on that video without knowing what was really going on. . You see? If this tape gets out, then it’s a year and a half of my life down the drain. My career.’’

‘‘Melissa?’’

‘‘The count was off. I had a tough choice to make. I could blow the whole operation and save your friend, or I could stay in character and see her as a threat. You may not understand this right now, but I didn’t have any choice. I had to weigh the benefits of one against the good of many.’’

‘‘You killed her?’’

‘‘Listen to me. The system does not work. You can color it; you can spin it; I don’t care. It’s busted, and it’s never going to be fixed. Not ever. It’s corrupt. It’s rigged. It’s supply and demand, that’s all. These people will do anything, risk everything, to live here. That’s the demand. It’s endless. It goes on at every border, every crossing, every port, every airport twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They want in, and they’ll do anything to get it. If we catch them again, we slap their hands and send them home within the week. They try again. New contacts. More money. Another go. And if we catch them, we slap their hands and send them back.’’ He checked the door again. ‘‘The point is, we had to chase this thing higher up the ladder. I took that upon myself. I’ve risked everything here.’’

She said softly, ‘‘You let those women die in that container.’’

‘‘Not true,’’ he objected. ‘‘I didn’t run this thing, I protected it. Or I pretended to. They paid me to.’’ He kept eyeing the equipment, trying to figure out what device drove the freeze-frame image of the darkened sweatshop.

‘‘The captain of the Visage?’’ she asked.

He glanced around the small room nervously, as if he expected someone else. The sweat had returned to his forehead. He whispered to her hoarsely, ‘‘If I didn’t pass information along, then they’d have found me out.’’

‘‘You told them the police were going to question the captain.’’

‘‘You know what it’s like undercover for that long? You know what happens to you?’’

‘‘What happened to Melissa?’’

‘‘I changed the whole operation,’’ he told her, avoiding an answer. ‘‘When I came in there was no way out for these women! No one ever intended to give them their freedom. They paid for a new freedom; what they got was slavery. It was me who got Klein involved, me who pointed out there was just as much profit in selling them a driver’s license as there was reselling them into prostitution!’’ He was red in the face and practically coming out of his chair.

‘‘Pointed out to whom?’’ she asked angrily. ‘‘I thought you hadn’t made the connection to the higher-ups?’’

Coughlie cocked his head at her like a puzzled dog.

‘‘You know what I think, Brian? I think you’ve made it all up. I don’t know if you fooled yourself at first into thinking you were running an undercover operation, but I doubt it. I think that was your fallback plan all along-to come up with some cockamamie story about a one-man sting. I think you slipped. You saw an agency swallowed by bureaucracy and a tide of humanity that was never going to be checked. You saw all that money, and all that opportunity-all the corruption around you-and you-’’

‘‘I’ve documented everything,’’ he protested. ‘‘Every cent.’’

‘‘And it doesn’t mean a thing if it wasn’t okayed by Talmadge.’’

‘‘And if Talmadge is on the take? How could I risk that?’’

‘‘You’ve got it all figured, don’t you? Getting people killed, accepting bribes. You can justify it all.’’ She added, ‘‘Am I supposed to erase the video for you? Erase it and forget all about Melissa?’’

‘‘She infiltrated the operation. I didn’t even know about it until you confirmed it.’’

‘‘You’re going to blame me? You. . bastard!’’ She dove at him. The chair went over and she clawed his face, drawing blood. Coughlie dumped her and smacked her across the jaw and jumped to his feet. He grabbed hold of the cable running into the TV monitor and followed it to the console and began tearing equipment off the shelves, frantically ejecting cassettes and tearing the tape from them. ‘‘Where is it?’’ he roared.

‘‘It doesn’t exist!’’ she hollered back him, freezing him.

He turned, wild-eyed.

‘‘There is no tape!’’ she said.

He drew his weapon. ‘‘I want it now.’’

Holding her hands out in front of her to ward him off, she sat up slowly and reached for the console. Her palm held down a square button. ‘‘Okay,’’ she said, her voice echoing through overhead loudspeakers. She pointed into the studio, a dazed Brian Coughlie still holding his weapon on her.

An exhausted Lou Boldt stood on the other side of that glass. First one, then a second uniformed officer stepped out from behind the huge black curtains that surrounded the studio’s walls. All held handguns trained on Coughlie.

She said, ‘‘The tape you saw on the ship? A blank. Boldt arranged to have it delivered. It was the psychologist’s idea-Matthews. She said your ego would allow you to believe you could convince me to destroy it.’’

‘‘I was undercover!’’ he shouted through the glass. ‘‘I can prove it!’’

‘‘Where’s Melissa? What have you done with her?’’

‘‘Drop your weapon!’’ Boldt’s muted voice shouted back.

Stevie tripped another button on the console. ‘‘I taped your visit, Brian. The whole confession. How’s that for irony? I’ll probably win that Emmy Melissa promised after all.’’ She stepped up to him. ‘‘Where the hell is she?’’