The Finder: A Novel (29 page)

"Come on, Vic," she instructed. "Don't lose interest."

He pounded her and it felt good. The hot jolt running toward the tip. She squeezed herself at just the right time and he heard a noise come out of his throat and as he shot it occurred to him that he'd enjoyed killing Richie more. You might be a sick fuck, Victor thought. Well, look where you are, you must be.

"All right now," said Violet, her voice amused. "Finally, a little emotionality. You and me. I think we got a chance at Oprah."

He sat back.

"Nice to see you enjoy yourself," she purred.

"Maybe I actually did, yeah."

"Oh, you did."

"Okay, I did. You liked it, too."

"I'm a woman of capacious appetites."

"What's capacious?"

"Big."

"Right.
Big."

"That's enough." She poured herself a glass. "You're lucky. Your real girlfriends wouldn't put up with this shit."

"My real girlfriends go out in the Brooklyn sunlight and interact with civilized society."

He wiped himself with the sheet. Violet rolled over.

"Something's bothering you."

"Nah."

"Hey, Victor. It's
me,
right?"

"Sure is."

"I'm just saying, is all. You seem like something's bothering you."

"You think you know me?"

She laughed and poured another glass. "I'm just saying, a woman can tell some things."

All right, his shrug said, I'll give it to you. He pulled on his pants and went into the bathroom.

"Plus I never complain about your girlfriends."

"How could you?" he called behind him.

"I
could.
But I don't."

He smiled. This was just play. "I got a guy messing with me, Violet. I don't know who he is."

He sensed her settling in for the conversation, pleased he'd opened up to her. "How messing?"

"Just came by the lot, asking questions." He flipped open the cabinet in her bathroom, reached his hand in the back and opened Violet's bottle of chloral hydrate, the same powerful sleeping pills that killed Anna Nicole Smith. Dissolved in both water and alcohol. He'd used five on Richie, explained to Sharon how to mix them in.

"Questions about what?" came Violet's voice.

"Just things." He poured out ten pills, wrapped them in a piece of toilet paper, and slipped them into his pocket.

"You doing some stuff these days now, Vic?"

He came back to the bed. "I'm always doing something."

She lit a cigarette. "What's he look like?"

"Regular guy. Built."

"Cop?"

"Doesn't have the swagger."

"Not confident?"

"No, no, very confident. But lone-wolf confident. Like that."

Violet was quiet. "I heard about those Mexican girls who got killed out by the beach."

He started pulling on his shirt. "Oh, yeah? I did, too."

She smoked her cigarette, wouldn't look at him. How did she know? he thought. How
could
she know? "Vic, they got killed with a load of sewage." She looked at him meaningfully. "Whoever heard of that?"

"Pretty tough to track sewage. Stuff degrades quickly."

"But the truck."

"Trucks can disappear. Guys in Queens buy them for scrap, crush them an hour later."

"But you said there's a guy—"

"Not a cop, like I said. Somebody's fucking with me."

"I can ask people," she said.

He found his shoes. "Don't ask. Just listen." He checked his watch. "Gotta go."

She looked at him. This was the moment when he used to give her a little kiss on the cheek, a momentary gentleness that recalled their shared childhood, her brain-damaged brother, the dead baby, the life together that never happened.

"Yeah," said Violet. She turned her back.

Downstairs he knocked on the glass. The Nigerian guy looked up from his freaky African newspaper.

"Hey, I forgot to ask you, you seen Richie?"

"He was here couple days ago, boss."

"Cash his check?"

The Nigerian shook his head. "Just paying us a social visit, Mr. Vic."

Fucking Richie, did he come and bang Violet twice a week, too? Did
he
tell Violet about the girls? It was quite possible.

Victor fingered the ten pills in his pocket, again checked his watch. The day had a plan. A goal. And to achieve that goal, he needed to go mix some chemicals.

She waited
in the shadows, across the street from the truck bay on Fifty-first Street. She was dressed in the CorpServe uniform she'd last worn on the evening of the attack, yet now it was washed and pressed, all evidence of those events gone. She reached into her pocket and affixed her CorpServe ID badge. Straggling workers on their way home hurried by her, men and women thinking about dinner, the children, what was on TV tonight. A few minutes after seven p.m., the forty-four-foot CorpServe mobile shredder pulled up, #6 as usual, and the truck bay door was lifted by the security men. The truck was driven by old man Zhao, who always drove it. He had a perfect safety record, she remembered, not bad considering his age. His eyesight was excellent, too; she'd ordered him to be tested six months earlier. She had a soft spot for him; maybe he reminded her of her grandfather.

The two floor cleaners would have arrived by the service entrance already and would be upstairs at work in the Good Pharma offices. The truck was now parked for the evening in the truck bay, and Zhao had started up the actual shredder unit, which ran off an electric battery, not the diesel engine. The reason, of course, was that some trucks needed to operate within completely enclosed facilities and could not be a danger for asphyxiation by diesel exhaust of the operator as well as those nearby.

She darted across the street and found Zhao. He was surprised to
see her, and she put a finger to her lips and drew him out of sight of the security camera.

"They said you were killed!" he exclaimed in Mandarin.

"Of course not," Jen Li answered him.

"They say all the operations must stay normal. Orders from the big boss in China."

Her brother, of course. "That's good."

"But everybody is nervous."

"Tell me, how did the other Mexican girls react to the news?"

Zhao shook his head. "Oh, they were very sad. I think some of the girls quit."

"What about on this job?" she asked.

"Well, they shifted some of the others. Just cleaning, I think."

"No one at the company upstairs said anything about the girls to us?" said Jin Li, scarcely able to believe it. "Did the police ask anything?"

"A detective came around last night." The old man pulled out a card and handed it to Jin Li. She fingered it, felt the hard edge of it. Detective Peter Blake, the lettering said, Brooklyn Homicide Division. The man who had called her. She slipped it into the pocket of the coveralls.

"What'd he say?"

Zhao straightened up, ready to make his report. It was evident he'd sought to memorize the conversation. "He asks if we saw anybody follow the little Japanese car with the two girls in it. I say no. He asks if you were in car with the girls. I say I do not know. He says why you do not know. I say I did not see where you go, I drive the truck. He says where does Jin Li go most nights? I say I think to her apartment. He says where is that. I say I do not know. He says does Jin Li have American boyfriend named Raymond Grant and I say I do not know but I think maybe yes. He says that he thinks I know. I say yes, I have heard about this American boyfriend but I have never seen him. He says did the Mexican girls smoke pot? I say that I think they did, because of smell in the car. He says how do you know smell of pot? I say this is
smoked in China except in my village we called it the pig that floats. He laughed. I liked this detective, I know you are sorry to hear this. A very professional man. He says, where else did these girls work? I say well mostly in this building but sometimes other places, too. He says why and I say because sometimes we do not have enough people in each place. He says did these Mexican girls get in any trouble on the job? I say no, I don't think so. Very good workers. He says what about their boyfriends, do they sell pot to people in company? I say no, Jin Li will fire everybody who buys pot in company. He says can I read English good. I say no, just traffic signs and beer bottles. He likes that. He says he reads beer bottles, too. He says why do I think somebody kill some Mexican girls. I say I do not know. He says maybe Jin Li kill Mexican girls then run away. I say I do not think so. He says why not. I say you are nice to those girls. Everybody think you are best boss they ever had. He say he think Mexican girls sell some drugs to everybody, maybe drugs from their boyfriends. He say Mexicans getting big in the drug traffic in New York, most people think it is other people. I say I do not think so. He says he wants dog to sniff me and sniff the truck. I say okay. They bring in the dog and he does not say I have pot. He smelled me, he smelled this truck. I like this dog, very good number-one dog. He says he thinks Jin Li knows how come some Mexican girls died. I say I think you good person, not like that. He says why are you not very upset about Jin Li. I say I think she is okay, she is smart. He—"

"Okay," Jin Li interrupted. "Next time you hear something like this, you call me. Anything you think I need to know. You have my number. Leave a message in Chinese if I don't pick up. Okay?"

"If you say so."

"Now, I want you to take me upstairs."

"But you can go up."

"No, I don't think so. I don't want the elevator camera on me. Just put me in the roller bin, throw an empty bag on me."

Zhao did not like this, but he allowed her to climb into the bin. He dropped some empty garbage bags over her, then summoned the freight elevator. She heard him call one of the CorpServe workers on
his radio. A moment later the elevator arrived and he wheeled in the bin.

"Floor number two-four," he said in English, then left.

Jin Li heard the doors close.

"MeezaJin?" came a voice. One of the Mexican girls.

"Don't talk to me," she answered. "The camera is on us. Don't look inside the roller, just look at the door, okay?"

"Okay, jes."

"Just roll it through the lobby, through the main door, and stop it next to the little kitchen."

Which the woman did. Jin Li climbed out into the kitchen, where there was no security camera. She knew this kitchen well, had used the coffee machine in it many times. The CorpServe worker stood there, waiting for instructions. Jin Li also knew that the security man moved ceaselessly from floor to floor, appearing on every floor once every half hour or so.

"In ten minutes I want you to be here with five or six full bags. You are going to put them on top of me and take me down, okay?"

"Jes."

"Leave the roller here."

Jin Li knew this floor, had walked it dozens of times, knew its layout, who worked where, and what the best sources of information were. The floor had four sections: executive, legal, fiscal, and research. The best information usually came from research and fiscal, but she figured that she would search in the executive section. She wanted an indication that someone at Good Pharma was worried about CorpServe spying on it. Then she could tell Chen to stop doing whatever he had done that had alerted them, or to cover his tracks, if possible.

But where, exactly, to look? The CEO of the company was a tall, elegant man named Lewis Henry who seemed never to be there. The people who seemed to really run the company were the vice-president, a man named Reilly; the comptroller, a woman named Moritz; and the director of research, a man named Brenner. She inspected Moritz's
office first—not her trash but the papers on her desk. Nothing there but long printouts of manufacturing costs at a plant in Puerto Rico. What am I looking for? she wondered. A note, a report? It seemed unlikely she'd find anything like that.

She entered Brenner's office. His desk was piled with neat, spiral-bound research reports. She flipped one open. It had to do with a new product for "sexual response enhancement in females." Tested on 406 women aged twenty-two to sixty, median age forty-one, the results showed that "71 percent of the respondents had enjoyed an increased—" This isn't what I'm looking for, thought Jin Li, keep moving. She studied the papers piled on the man's windowsill. Apparently he was a pack rat of sorts. The reports were organized by clinical trial date and research product. I could spend a year reading in here, she realized. She retreated out of the office, looked at her watch. Four minutes.

Next came Reilly's corner office, a large room with a conference table to one side and matched set of sofa and chairs at the other. Four windows. Private washroom. Framed photos and articles on the wall. From the earlier papers she'd seen, it seemed clear that he was the public face of the company, did a lot of deal making and communication with investors. Was quoted in the newspapers. She examined the picture on his desk. A smiling, attractive woman looked back. Probably was a high school cheerleader or something, Jin Li thought dismissively. She pulled open his desk drawers. Nothing of interest. As with the other offices, a computer hummed to one side of the desk. She assumed that all the computers were shut down automatically, but to test this notion, she pushed a key with her knuckle. The computer beeped and a prompt for a username and password appeared. Forget that, she thought.