After the talk, Livia approached him and asked where in America trafficking was worst. He told her it was everywhere.
“But how does it work?” she said. “I mean, you’ve rescued sex slaves, agricultural slaves, domestic-labor slaves . . . How do the people who want a certain kind of slave . . . I mean, how do they . . .”
Velez rubbed his goatee. She guessed he was about fifty, but there was something appealingly boyish about his face, and she wondered if the goatee was intended to make him seem older. “You’re asking, is it like a help-wanted ad in a newspaper?”
“Yes, that. How do the buyers connect with the sellers to get the kind of slave the buyer wants?”
“Believe it or not, it’s a market, in some ways like any other. It starts at the wholesale level, and moves down to retail. Say a Mexican coyote gets a truck across the border. There are a hundred people inside. The coyote’s contacts will include smaller wholesalers—some looking for domestic labor, some agricultural, some nail salon, some sex workers—”
“And children.”
“Yes, unfortunately, children, too.”
She nodded, processing the information, trying not to let herself have feelings about it. “And then, what, these smaller wholesalers distribute to even smaller ones?”
“That’s right. Until the buyer is, say, a restaurant that needs a single dishwasher. In many ways, it’s a lot like any other market. Take produce, for example. There’s a farm that grows all kinds of crops. The farmer takes the crops to market. There, wholesalers say, ‘We’ll take ten bushels of wheat, a hundred pounds of tomatoes, a thousand ears of corn . . .’ based on what the wholesaler thinks he can sell. And then the wholesaler takes the produce to another market, where supermarkets and restaurants say, ‘Oh, I’ll take a hundred of those radishes, the same number of lettuces . . .’ Eventually, you have individual shoppers buying these items one by one in a supermarket. Or as part of a meal in a restaurant.”
Despite her efforts, she could feel her normally suppressed grief over Nason moving closer than usual to the surface. She pushed it back. She couldn’t think about Nason now. She needed this information.
“You said . . . a hundred people. In a truck. You mean a shipping container truck?”
“Yes, exactly. In fact, in Texas in 2003, nineteen people died in a container attached to the truck that was carrying them from Mexico. So many of them were packed in, they couldn’t breathe.”
“But didn’t the traffickers want to sell those people? They can’t sell them if they’re dead.”
“It was over a hundred degrees that spring, and I doubt the coyotes thought they would lose so many. But remember, when you’re trafficking people, there’s a ratio. If you don’t lose any, you’re not bringing enough. Here’s what I mean. Say you bring ten people in a shipping container and no one dies on the way. Okay, you get paid for ten. But if you bring a hundred, and ten die, you get paid for ninety. The expense of the container, bribes, logistics . . . it’s all the same either way. So is the risk. So the financial incentive is to pack in a lot of people. It’s no different from the slave ships that brought Africans to the American colonies. They had a ratio, too. The shippers didn’t expect the entire cargo to make it. They preferred that all would suffer and a few would die. That’s how they maximized profits.”
Livia wondered why the shipments from Bangkok to Portland, and from Portland to Llewellyn, had been so small. At the time, it had been horribly uncomfortable, and such a small space with a dozen or so other people in it had felt cramped and claustrophobic. But from what Velez was saying, sharing a container with only a dozen or so other people was practically deluxe. Well, she supposed there was a range, with containers packed lightly, on one end, and deadly overpacking like the one in Texas, on the other. She imagined slowly suffocating in a packed, furnace-like, stinking metal box, with similarly terrified, suffering people jammed together on all sides. It sounded even worse than what had happened to her and Nason.
Or maybe not.
She thanked Velez—for the talk, for the additional information, and most of all for the work he did, because what he did was so important.
But as much as she appreciated people like Vachss and Velez and was tempted to follow their path, she realized that police work was her real calling. She wanted to carry a gun. And not just prosecute the monsters, but hunt them. Catch them. Snap handcuffs around their wrists and put them in prison forever.
Or else put them in the ground.