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"Hypothetically, they know what would happen to them if they spoke, so they would never think about talking. I figure the same goes in this situation, except if you don't talk. So talk. Save us both a long day."
"And me a lot of pain," she half-asked, half stated, holding fierce eye contact.
"Let's not let it come to that. Why are you at the docks? Who do you work for?"
"I think you are having memory issues. I've told you who I work for like three times."
"Right. The state of California. I mean who else are you working for? Who sent you here to New Jersey, to my docks?"
"My aunt," she told me, nothing about her tone or delivery making me think she was lying.
"And who is your aunt?"
"A child care worker in Venezuela," she told me. And, again, there seemed to be only truth there.
"Why would a child care worker from Venezuela send you to Navesink Bank?"
I was getting the feeling she was deliberately trying to tell me only part of the truth, only a small sliver of the whole picture.
To what end?
To buy more time?
Did she have partners out there?
Had she called in reinforcements when she thought she was in trouble?
Could they have possibly followed us here?
"Romy, I am going to need some straighter answers from you."
"A week or so ago, I got a call from my aunt who told me that she hadn't seen my sister in a while. In a long while. And since they live in the same house, it was cause enough to worry. I flew down there, only to find she was right. My sister was gone. And no one seemed to know where she'd gone to."
"I'm sorry to hear that, sweetheart, I really am, but this has nothing to do with me."
"I'm giving you context," she snapped, wounds raw. Understandably. I might not have known where Matteo was the vast majority of the time, but I couldn't imagine the fear and anxiety of him bein
g truly missing.
"Alright. How'd you get from there to here?"
"By asking around town, finding some people who claimed that trafficking had picked up recently. That young women and girls around town had been going missing at alarming rates. I did some more digging, and it seems they are being trafficked out of the country. To the States. On shipping boats. In containers."
"Romy, no one could survive in a shipping container," I told her, shaking my head.
"They can if they cut breathing holes up near the top corners, hidden just well enough that no one would notice, giving enough air to keep the women inside alive for the trip."
I wouldn't claim it never happened. It happened. With trafficking on the rise in damn near every country in the world, traffickers found innovative ways of moving live bodies without tipping off the police all the time. Even, yes, in shipping containers.
That said, we didn't deal with human cargo. We might not have been moral men in the most traditional sense. We allowed numerous different sorts of contraband—for a fee, of course—come through our pier unchecked. That included guns and stolen goods and even some drugs since New York needed the supply, but my father had drawn a line in the sand when it came to people. Even when the local skin trader in the area offered him an exorbitant amount of money to look the other way.
Some things are a matter of humanity, Luca, he'd said to me about the issue once.
And I happened to agree.
"Okay, let's suppose they do drill the holes and get these people on a ship unseen. They are not bringing them into Navesink Bank."
"Yes, they are. I was specifically told this pier. Not the one in Miami or Georgia or South Carolina or Virginia—all of which would have been closer. None of those. This is the one. This is where I was told she would show up."
