“You’d come here,” Cain said. “To your consulate. They’d issue a temporary passport.”
“And I might not even miss my plane,” the old man said. “Because they can print a temporary passport onsite. Right here in San Francisco.”
“It’s not going to do me any good if you talk in circles,” Cain said.
“Harry Castelli Sr., your ambassador, could have done the same thing. And once he set someone up with a temporary passport, she’d be a U.S. citizen as far as immigration is concerned—whatever nationality she’d had when she woke up that morning, it wouldn’t matter.”
“Castelli was issuing false passports?” Cain asked. “We’re talking about the ambassador to the U.K., issuing false passports.”
“Temporary passports. But that’s not how we got into it. We weren’t investigating passport fraud—it wasn’t our jurisdiction, however broad a view we might have had on that subject. We were looking into missing girls. And then one thing led to another.”
“How many missing girls?”
“Twenty-two,” the old man said. He hadn’t paused to think about it. He had the number right there, because it had been weighing on him for thirty years. “Immigrants, mostly. Eastern Europeans, Russians. The youngest was seventeen and the oldest was twenty-six.”
“Immigrants, but living in London?”
“In London, or near it,” the man said. “This was the early eighties. We didn’t have computers like we do now. No program crosschecking the files, flagging related cases. Which meant that back then, these things could go on and on. Like a coal fire, underground—by the time you notice, it’s out of control. It took a sharp young man in Missing Persons to put it together.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. A man saw the pattern and brought it to me. In every instance, the young woman had been gone for weeks before the families came to us. Months, sometimes. Because the girls had said they’d got jobs. That they had to move away to start.”
“What kind of jobs?”
This time, the man did pause.
“We don’t know what they were promised,” he said. “But we know what they got.”
He opened the envelope again and set a flash memory drive on the table next to Cain’s saucer.
“You won’t want to watch this,” he said. “But you’ll probably have to.”
“What is it?”
“You might not have ever thought about this. But it’s obvious, once you start looking into it—back then, after VCRs but before the Internet, there was a lot of money in a certain kind of video.”
“You’re talking about pornography.”
“That word covers a lot of ground. There’s plenty that’s fairly mundane, but then there’s the rest of the spectrum. So many needs to suit, fantasies people can’t say out loud. Everything from simple meanness to open brutality. And here’s another thing you probably never wanted to think about. On the worst of those films—the dark end, so to speak—what you see on the screen isn’t acting. It isn’t consensual.”
“Then what is it?” Cain asked.
“It’s rape. It’s murder. And it’s real.”
“It’s Carolyn Stone on this?”
He was holding out the flash drive. But the old man shook his head.
“It’s an Estonian girl. Katarina Vesik.”
“Who?”
“She was an immigrant, from Tallinn. Her family came over in ’eighty-two, when she was sixteen. She wanted to model, so she was hanging around the agencies, the fashion shops. Trying to get into parties, trying to get noticed. Someone noticed her, I suppose—she went missing in September. Her brother brought us the tape in February of ’eighty-four. There was no telling how long he’d had it, no guessing how he’d come by it—and we worked him hard.”
“But you must have had a hunch.”
“We thought he ordered it from a magazine ad. Or he got it in exchange for something in his own collection—which he would have tossed out before coming to us. We thought he would’ve liked it just fine, the video, except it was his little sister. And it seems like they kept her for a while, made a few others.”
“You saw other videos?” Cain asked.
“Never—but in this one, she’s half starved. Wounds, all over her, that are weeks old. Some of them almost healed.”
“Jesus,” Cain said.
“We said that too. The state she was in—you know it must have taken the brother a while to put it together. He might’ve watched it two or three times.”
Cain looked out the wall and saw the strange symmetry in the way everything had presented itself. The Met and the SFPD had each come into this case because of videos that had landed on their laps. The brother and his snuff-porn tape, John Fonteroy and his dying confession. In the end, the cancerous undertaker hadn’t been able to say what he’d really seen. What he’d been a part of for so long. The guilt was too great to look the camera in its eye and say that he’d seen Carolyn Stone go into the casket alive. He knew how many had come before her and could only guess how many would follow.