“You’re back where you were, Heat, clutching at straws.”
Watching Keith Gilbert rock back in his executive chair, the picture of confidence and self-possession, sage words reverberated from her past—the wisdom of her beloved mentor, Captain Charles Montrose, who once said, “Nikki, never underestimate the ability of the devils among us to see only the saints in themselves. How else could they go about their day?” Heat decided it was time to hold up a mirror.
“Fabian Beauvais was planning to get married. His fiancée’s name was Jeanne Capois. She’s dead now. Murdered.” Nikki briefly took in Zarek Braun. The man in charge of that killing registered nothing. “But before she died—and, probably why she died—Jeanne sat for some interviews with a documentary filmmaker. She had some interesting revelations.”
Detective Raley started the video selects he had copied to the thumb drive. The beauty of Opal Onishi’s interview technique was that it required no setup. Even edited down to four minutes of essentials, Jeanne Capois’s story was self-contained. Her lovely image filled the flat screen and, thus, the entire conference room as she recounted the journey she and Fabian had made from Haiti to America by way of the filthy, crowded, suffocating hold of a cargo vessel.
The core of her narration spoke of hopes raised, then dashed, then crushed over weeks that turned into months of squalid living conditions, debasement, and cruelty from their various overseers before landing in New York for hopeless days and nights of soul-robbing labor in exchange for a shitty meal and a putrid mattress in a locked room. “At first, I always asked the others,” she said, “‘Why don’t you run?’ and they would all say the same: ‘Even if we could get away, where would we go?’” Their bondage came from deadbolts and violence, for sure. But penniless foreigners, illegals in a strange land with no connections, were doubly captive.
“Fabian said he would make us free, and I believed him. My Fabby, he has intelligence and courage. So we did our labor. And we kept doing it, waiting for our chance. I was afraid they would put me into prostitution like the other girls, but they kept me in the entrep?t—the, um, warehouse—sorting papers and putting the tiny shred pieces together to make documents. I was worth more than sex work because I could read.
“We did that all last year. Then Fabian—he’s so smart—he got trusted with an outside job. With one of the crews that harvested paper from trash at office buildings. So he did that and then somehow got a side job butchering chickens to make enough to get us away. We have no money, though. I clean an apartment for a nice old man But my fiancé, he says he found out a way to make a big lot of money to get us home to Port-au-Prince and have our lives back.
“From anyone else, I would say big talk. But Fabian is smart and has that courage. He said he knows who runs the boats that brought us all here, and he is going to make him pay for him not to go to the police. He found out he is a powerful, rich man named Keith Gilbert. I hope Fabian knows what he is doing. Sometimes, I think he is too smart.” Her chuckle was the last thing on the screen before it went blank.
When all eyes in the room went from the flat screen to Gilbert, he dismissed their stares. Alicia’s especially bored into him in disgust.
“Oh come on, are you serious? I deny that.”
“It’s from the mouth of one of your human traffic victims,” said Rook.
“You print that, I’ll sue.” He turned to Heat. “You try to take that to court, you’ll get laughed out. It’s hearsay. Reality-show theater. Where’s the proof? It can’t be substantiated.”
“What if it could be?” asked Alicia. His head whipped toward her, but she was leaning the other way, sober faced, to address Heat.
“If it could be, that would be important,” said Nikki.