“Well, we were kind of busy last time. And we had to report that broken window across the road.”
“Well, we’re not busy now. Come on, Danny.”
So Danny shrugged and they both got out of their cruiser, adjusted their belts, and went up to the broken side door. It was early twilight here at this time of year, still plenty of light, but it would be dark inside the church, so they both carried their flashlights. They pulled the door open and stepped in, their light beams shining across the rows of pews and, near the doorway, three of the hymnal boxes squatted on the floor.
“Looks like,” Danny said, “they couldn’t fit them all.”
“Suppose we should take these? Donate them to somebody.”
“We can take them back to the barracks anyway,” Danny said.
“Good idea.”
Aiming the flashlight this way and that, he said, “It’s a real shame. This building’s still in good shape.”
Louise bent to one of the boxes and tugged. “These things are heavy,” she said.
“Well, yeah, they would be. Books.”
“Maybe we should just take some of them now,” she said. “Be sure there’s anybody wants them.”
“Just take one book,” Danny said. “They’re not going anywhere.”
Louise lifted the top off the box she’d been trying to lift, and they both looked in at the rows of greenbacks. The two flashlight beams trembled slightly, converging on all that money.
“Oh, my God,” Danny whispered.
“Oh, Danny,” Louise wailed, “Oh, no, Danny, it was them.”
“We talked with them,” Danny said. He was wide-eyed with shock. “We stood out there and we talked with them.”
“That goddamn woman gave me a hymnbook.”
Danny’s flashlight suddenly spun around, to fix on the basement door. “Why was he down there?” he asked. “What was he doing down there?”
Bitterly, Louise imitated the guy who’d come up out of the basement. “Oh, there’s nothing down there. Appliances all gone, everything gone.”
“Louise,” Danny said, “what was he doing down there?”
She had no answer. He walked over to that door and pulled it open and shone the flashlight down the stairs. Then he uselessly clicked the light switch a few times. Then his nose wrinkled and he said, “Jesus Christ. What’s that smell?”
Detective Gwen Reversa knew there were times she received an assignment only because she was a woman, and was thought therefore to be of a more sympathetic nature than the average male cop. She didn’t disagree with the assessment, but it irritated her anyway. She would have preferred gender-blind assignments, but when the woman’s touch was wanted, she knew she was always going to be that woman.
In her current case, for instance, she was clearly the only one in the office even considered to take the squeal. It was a wrongful death emerging out of a long-term case of simple slavery. The perps were a middle-aged Chinese couple named Cho, early beneficiaries of the Chinese economic miracle. The Chos designed toys, which were made in their mainland factories and sold worldwide. So successful were they that five years ago they’d bought an estate in rural Massachusetts, less than three hundred miles from either Boston or New York, and now split their time between China and the United States.
Their staff in the Massachusetts house was five Chinese nationals with no English, illegally brought in, mistreated, and paid nothing. The finale came when the Chos’ cook died of a burst appendix. The Chos, unwilling to risk exposure by seeking medical assistance, had preferred to believe the cook was malingering and could be cured with a few extra beatings. When they’d tried to bribe a local mortician to keep the death quiet, he instead went to the police.
So now Gwen was here in this stately New England country house filled with bright-colored Oriental decorations, sitting with a woman named Franny from Immigration and a translator named Koh Chi from a nearby community college. The four remaining staff/slaves, frightened out of their wits, were haltingly telling their stories in Mandarin, while Koh Chi translated and a tape recorder stood witness. The Chos themselves were at the moment in state holding cells, and would be questioned when their attorney arrived from Boston tomorrow.
This particular job was slow and tedious, but also heartbreaking, and Gwen wasn’t entirely displeased when the cell phone in her shoulder bag vibrated. Seeing it was her office, she murmured to Franny, “I have to take this,” and went out to the hall to answer.
It was Chief Inspector Davies. “Are you very tied up there?”
“Pretty much, sir.”
“They found some of the money,” he said.
It had been too long. She said, “Money, sir?”
“From the armored car.”
“Oh, my gosh! They found it?”
“Some of it. Also a body. We’re working on ID now.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said, and went back to explain to Franny and to make her promise to send a tape after the interviews.
It was the conference room at the state police barracks this time. In addition to Chief Davies at the head of the table, there were a pair of state troopers sitting along one side, a man and a woman, who introduced themselves as Danny Oleski and Louise Rawburton. Both looked very sheepish. It wasn’t a usual thing to see a state trooper look sheepish, so Gwen wondered, as she took a chair across from them, what was going on.
Introductions over, Inspector Davies said, “Let the troopers tell you their story.” He himself was looking grim; “hanging judge” was the phrase that came to Gwen’s mind.
The troopers glanced at each other, and then the woman, Rawburton, said, “I’ll tell it,” and turned to Gwen. “Out on Putnam Road,” she said, “there’s a church called St. Dympna that was shut down some years ago. My family went there when I was a little girl. The week before last, when we were told to forget the roadblocks and concentrate on empty buildings instead, St. Dympna was in our area.”
“When we got there,” the male trooper, Oleski, said, “two men and a woman were unloading boxes of hymnals from the church into an old Econoline van. It had the name Holy Redeemer Choir on the doors.”
“We looked in a couple of the boxes,” Rawburton said, “and they were hymnals. When I said I used to go to that church the woman even gave me one of them.”
Oleski said, “The minister’s house was across the road. Also empty. Upstairs, we found a back window broken out, looked as though it could have been recent. When we went back to our car to report the broken window, the van was gone.”
Gwen said, “I think I know where this story is going. You went back to the church. Why was that?”
“We happened to go by it,” Rawburton said, “and we didn’t go inside last time, and I realized I just wanted to see what it looked like.”
Gwen said, “You didn’t go in last time?”
Oleski said, “The three people were very open. I looked at license and registration, all fine. One of the men was in the basement when we got there, and he came up and said everything was stripped out down there, appliances and all of that.”
“They were happy to have us search,” Rawburton said. “They seemed happy. There just didn’t seem to be any point.”
Gwen said to Oleski, “You looked at his license. Remember the name?”
Oleski twisted his face into agonized thought. “I’ve been going nuts,” he said. “It was Irish or Scottish. Mac Something. I just can’t remember.”
“I Googled Holy Redeemer Choir in Long Island, just now,” Rawburton said. “There is no such thing.”