Nate, page 12
“That’s another hazard of the trade, isn’t it?” he asked, with a nod. “So many people don’t know what they could do with these gifts. They seem to run energy and use it completely comfortably, without having a postmortem on it,” he noted, “and that’s always fascinating to me.”
“Of course. It would be to me too,” Madeline confirmed. “It’s pretty amazing to think about what people can do with energy. I think the postmortem comes more into play when two parties are involved in sharing a long-term mutual relationship. Otherwise, if it’s just someone learning and experiencing what their special skills can do, then engaging in the energy work can be awesome on its own.”
Nate nodded. “But when they apply themselves and can really harness that energy, it is freaking unbelievable. That’s one of the reasons why going to Terkel’s place and working with him and his team is so important to me. I dare say, it’s also why it was important for Bullard to see if you could work with his group.”
She chuckled. “My energy healing is something I do automatically. Working with it all the time makes me wonder what more I can do, where I could learn more about how to utilize it. I sure don’t know enough,” she muttered. “I understand that Bullard knows, but I’m really not anxious to travel.”
“I know he feels terrible about this happening to you while you were traveling to his clinic,” he reminded her. “I hope you don’t hold him responsible. He’s really a great guy.”
“Oh, gosh no, I absolutely don’t hold him responsible at all. This was one of those U-turns in life that you take because circumstances showed you another path. I don’t know quite where that U-turn will take me. I just know that Africa doesn’t seem to be a good fit for me anymore.”
*
Nate didn’t know what to say to her at that point, but he was trying to be as honest as he could. When his phone rang, he checked his screen. “Terkel, what’s up?” he asked.
“Just heard from the detective about the diamonds,” he murmured. “Did you tell her?”
“I haven’t yet.”
“Do it now, and then we need answers to some questions. She may have to go back down to the police station.”
When the conversation was over, she looked at him, her gaze wide. “What was that about diamonds?”
With a fresh cup of coffee in hand, he sat down with her and explained what the forensic people had found in Anna’s hair.
The color blanched from her face as she stared at him. “Good God,” she murmured. “So she took the stash from my bag and decided to steal from the smuggling ring?”
Nate grimaced. “Probably so.”
“But how did she hide it from her partners in crime? Her hair was down in the earlier cam footage with that first guy. Were the diamonds already there?”
“We don’t know for sure, not based on the quality of the security feed. Her hair was shiny, and the diamonds were also black. Seems she painted them.”
“Can you paint diamonds?” she asked.
“Presumably Anna found some way to do it, but I don’t know firsthand,” he shared, with a shrug. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, I guess.”
“Always,” she murmured. “This is not something we want to be involved in.”
“That’s why the cops didn’t believe your story at first and why we couldn’t understand why—because they didn’t let us in on the smuggled diamonds element. Now the bigger problem is, if the cops are thinking that, then what are the smugglers thinking? If the smugglers didn’t get their diamonds, but they have your bag, and you were kept with Anna, they could imagine how she might slip you the diamonds. Anna taking the diamonds from your bag is what we think got you into trouble in the first place and is what ended up getting Anna killed.”
“Oh my God.” Madeline bolted to her feet and started to pace. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? The cops and the smugglers think I have the diamonds.” She turned to face him, stunned at this turn of events. “To even think I do or worry that I do is bad news.” She stopped, picked up her coffee, and stared out the window. “I can’t believe that I didn’t have a clue,” she muttered. “I feel so stupid.”
“How would you have known?” he asked. “What would be your clue that you were in the midst of a diamond smuggling operation?”
She blinked. “Right. … It’s probably even more foolish to think I would have known rather than be oblivious, isn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“God.” She scrubbed her face with her free hand. “I’m a mess. I’m a freaking mess. I can’t even think clearly.”
“You’re doing fine.”
She turned and glared at him. “Would you have known they were diamonds?”
He frowned, then shook his head. “I probably wouldn’t have had a clue. I don’t understand or even pay any attention to most hair contraptions that women use to begin with,” he admitted. “So, painting and then hiding black diamonds in her black hair as a disguise is a very smart one, in my layperson’s opinion.”
“It was a pretty good place for Anna to hide them, wasn’t it?” She sat down, casting her mind back. “She was only alone in that hotel bathroom for a minute or so. She came out and seemed to have run her fingers through her hair—which was a wig we now know—and washed her face, and so did I, right? We were just trying to get through the kidnapping nightmare.”
“So, she still had the diamonds at that point, and that was her get out of jail free card,” he muttered, “but she was trying to do it in such a way that she didn’t have to give them up. Getting out of jail free is one thing, but having enough money to go live a new life somewhere safe, and not have to be a smuggler, that was a whole different story.”
“Do you think she was forced into it?” she muttered.
“I don’t know. That’s a part of her history that we don’t have here. All I can say is, at the end of the day, she had the diamonds, and she chose not to hand them over, even after her own partners in crime had drugged her and had held her against her will. That tells us she was desperately trying to get out of her association with them.”
“That explains why she was so terrified, much more than I was, and that makes more sense now too. She had the diamonds on her, so she was terrified of either being caught double-crossing them, or of losing the diamonds.”
“Did she appear to be …” Nate hesitated, looking for the right word.
“What?” Madeline asked curiously. “I didn’t see her awake for very long, and I didn’t know her that well.”
“Did she seem to be somebody who could take care of herself in the world? I mean, all alone, without anybody’s help?”
Madeline pondered that. “She was so freaked out and so panicked, the same as I was, only a bit worse, that I’m not sure I can even answer that question,” she told him. “It’s one thing to consider somebody in the light of waking up to find themselves a captive, but to now know that she had the diamonds and was smart enough to get away from that scenario with them? Well, … obviously she knew more than I did.”
He smiled at that. “Yet you both got away, whether the housekeeper alone was an element the kidnappers didn’t consider or maybe because your unmasked visitor had a soft spot for women and wasn’t up for the whole kidnapping part of their smuggling ring.”
“We won’t know because, gee, look at that. … He’s dead too,” she noted sarcastically, “and that inability to kidnap women may be why. But he can’t talk, and he can’t explain himself. So it’s up to us to fill in the pieces, as much as we can.”
“I had been searching whether the dead guy, your unmasked visitor, had any prior relationship with Anna. Maybe they were in this together.”
“Which would make the most logical sense for letting us go, whether he had the housekeeper do it or not. Still, if Anna had the diamonds on her, and he knew that too, it also makes sense. But why let me go then? Why not just escape with her or pretend to get knocked out or something?”
“If Anna was working for or with him, he could tell the smuggling ring that he didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Meanwhile he could let her go because why wouldn’t he, when she was working with them to begin with, and had the diamonds on her person? Still, it was taking a big risk when you make solo decisions that the other smugglers won’t like.”
Madeline grimaced. “Often when you think you know who you’re working with, that risk is mitigated because you believe that you’ll pull it off and that nobody will know. In this case, obviously something went wrong. And it could just as easily have been what the criminals also saw on the security cameras, since our dead guy knew that somebody in the hotel security crew was in on the kidnapping event. So do we have any idea who that was yet?”
“No, the detective is supposed to be chasing that down.”
She rolled her eyes at that one. “I suppose he hasn’t gotten back to you on that?”
“No, he hasn’t, not on that issue, but I expect to hear from him anytime though, based on what Terk told me.” Nate glanced at his phone again.
“Great, I was hoping we could skip that whole meet with the cops thing for a while.”
“Potentially we can for a bit.” He looked over at her. “But, at the end of the day, somebody has to have answers, and somebody’ll have to confirm faces, and, in this case, that somebody is you.”
She winced. “I’ve confirmed Anna’s dead face, and that is enough,” she muttered. “I would be totally okay to not go to any more morgues.” He didn’t say anything to that but got up and poured her a fresh cup of coffee. She sighed as she stared down at the cup. “Makes me sound so entitled, doesn’t it?”
He sighed. “No, you just want this mess to go away, but it won’t go away very easily, and, for now, it’s just become part and parcel of us. We will do all we can, but I’m not saying there’ll be any easy answers, or any answers soon enough.”
“There haven’t been any so far, so I guess I’m not surprised.”
He smiled at her. “How about some breakfast?”
“Is there food?” She bounded up to look at the grocery bags, still sitting on the counter, but they were empty now.
“We have some. Keep in mind that we might have to move again on short notice.”
“Right,” she muttered. “Another thing I so don’t want to hear.”
He ignored her with the buzzing of text messages coming now on his phone. “So, that was the detective. He wants a follow-up meeting, but, barring that, he wants a phone conversation.”
“So why is he texting you? Why not just call?”
“He was waiting to see if we were awake,” he noted. “You know, he’s invoking some courtesy now that they know you don’t have the diamonds.” She snorted, but Nate quickly called the detective. “Most of us are up. I’ve got you on Speakerphone, and Madeline is here with me. She says to the best of her knowledge she doesn’t have any diamonds, and she didn’t have anything to do with the diamonds in the first place. She also didn’t know that Anna had diamonds in her hairpiece. And, yes, I do believe her.”
The detective didn’t say anything for a moment. “I guess that would make sense. The fewer people in the know, the better.”
“I don’t know what the street value is for something like that,” Nate pointed out, “but I imagine it’s thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“Try millions,” Detective Manshue stated, his tone harsh. “I’ve just come from forensics, and they’re still running it down, but that’s their current guess.”
“Great, so if the smugglers think Madeline has them, they won’t give up very easily.”
“No, they sure won’t, so it’s even more important that you keep her safe.”
“I was planning on it, but, yeah, I get it,” Nate replied in a sarcastic tone of voice.
Taking advantage of the awkward pause in the conversation, Madeline asked, “Detective, are you anywhere close to figuring out who did this? I really want my life back—the sooner, the better.”
“I’m sure you would,” he replied, “but, if you don’t have any information for us, any further investigation won’t be easy.”
“No, of course it won’t,” she muttered. “But since I didn’t have anything to do with it, I have no information to give you.”
“Maybe not, maybe you’re just the unlucky person who got picked to move their contraband.”
“So did all the diamonds that Anna had in her possession come from my bag alone? How many can they move at a time?” she asked.
“These are fairly well-funded missions,” he muttered. “They may have used more than one mule.”
She stopped and looked back at Nate. “Do you think Anna stole my bag?” There was silence as both men contemplated that.
Nate turned to her. “Did you ever see Anna before?”
She pondered that question for a bit. “First, Anna was using disguises, as we now know. Second, I wasn’t on alert to look for criminals and don’t remember who I saw on the plane or on the bus or even at the airport. Third, I believed her when she told me that she had just left her boyfriend’s place and had gone for coffee. … Why wouldn’t they have just grabbed my bag at the airport?” she asked. “I don’t understand that.”
“Did you give them a chance?”
“Or maybe that was Anna’s job, and she missed her chance. Or maybe she did and then …”
“Then what?”
“She was wearing that auburn wig when she was kidnapped, with her stolen diamonds affixed to her real hair underneath that wig, or so I presume. From what the forensics people have told you, her real hair is long and black and shiny. Also forensics found the diamonds, painted black, on some hair extension or whatnot amid her real hair, right? The wig took some planning, and she needed the time to paint and to affix the diamonds to some hairpiece, right? So her kidnapping disguise may have been how she planned to escape from the smuggling ring. Instead she gets kidnapped.”
“So, in that case,” the detective began, “let’s say she was probably moving those diamonds on her own, but maybe she decided she needed a second score in order to really get out of town.”
“That’s possible too,” Nate noted slowly. “Can you check the buses leaving the airport and see if she got on one of them?”
“Yeah, right, I’ll do that now. If she was the one who took Madeline’s bag, that would be an interesting angle.”
“I don’t know about an interesting angle,” she replied, “but it would make sense why she was grabbed and later held with me. Maybe they thought she was trying to run away, and she didn’t get a chance to explain herself.”
Nate looked over at her and sighed. “You’re still trying to make her into a good person.”
She glared at him. “I’m not sure that she’s not a good person,” she claimed, “and I realize in these circumstances there is often more to the story. I just think we need to understand more before we automatically condemn her.”
He gently held her hand. “You’re right. There could be a lot more to her story, and the reality is that she may have been forced into this industry and just wanted out. You’re on her side, and I get that.”
“It’s hard not to be. I was in that room with her, and she was tied up just like me and just as terrified, if not more so.”
He nodded. “I’m not surprised that she was terrified. If you think about it, if she had blackmailed the smuggling ring or had betrayed them in some way, she had every right to be terrified.”
Madeline groaned. “You’re back to thinking that Anna did it on purpose, aren’t you?”
“This last part of it, yes. I think she was trying to get out, and this was her way, or at least her attempt, but it failed. Something happened that she wasn’t counting on. Odds are that the organization was more sophisticated than she realized and that more layers of people were watching Anna than she knew of.”
“Was her boyfriend the man who died at the hotel?”
“That would also make sense, but somebody else was involved too, somebody associated with hotel security, and that’s someone who we have to find.”
“Right. My vote is for the security guard at the hotel at the time they brought me in, all drugged up,” she stated.
“We’ve already got a list of names which we’re tracking down,” the detective shared over the phone, almost startling her that he was still in on the conversation. “We’ll find him.”
“What are the chances you’ll find him in a dumpster though?” she muttered.
“Unfortunately it’s quite possible. They seem to be cleaning up and taking out anybody involved, even witnesses, when they only had a problem with Anna. So you can bet nobody’ll be given a free pass.”
Nate added, “But it depends on how much value the people bring to the organization and whether they can prove that they still have that value.”
“In this case,” the detective replied, “the security guard’s position has been compromised. Because of the head nod, the silent interchange involving the one guy who is already dead, we knew somebody was involved in hotel security, so that puts him in jeopardy already. By the time we find him, he may already be dead.”
“Yeah, so do you have anybody who didn’t show up for work lately?” Nate asked. “With their recent actions, he probably is dead already.”
“I agree. So far, we don’t have a body, but we do have two people we’re still trying to locate. I’m waiting to hear back from the team on them.”
“Keep us posted,” Nate replied and disconnected. As soon as the phone conversation was over, Nate looked over at Madeline, but his phone rang again.
She groaned. “Jesus, even here we can’t get any peace and quiet, can we?”
He chuckled. “Terkel, what’s up?”
“Get a move on.”
“Ah, shit,” he muttered, bolting to his feet, even as he saw Brody racing out of the bedroom. Nate turned to her, and she was already taking the coffee cups to the counter and putting on her shoes.
“Grab any of your personal stuff from the bathroom and the bedroom,” he reminded her. “We have less than two minutes to get out.”
