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I snort. “You know it’s been so long since I’ve been on a date my vagina sent me a forwarding address.”
“Um, ok, TMI, Rocky.” Tasha giggles.
“Whatever, you asked. How’s your mom doing? How’s everyone?” I genuinely like her family. Her mom may try to set me up with everyone she meets and her brothers tease me as much as they do Tasha, but they are family. Before my sister died, our family was a lot like that. A sharp pain shoots through my chest. I shake my head until my thoughts come back to the present.
“Mom is doing good, better than expected. My brother is a pain in the butt, what else is new. It’s been really nice being home for a while.” She sounds happy.
“Woman, you better not be thinking about moving home and leaving me,” I grumble.
“OMG, never, babe. What have you been doing?” I hear the soft racket of pots and pans in the background. She must be cooking.
“Reading shitty romance novels and working on a new story, you know, my usual.” I set up the coffeepot.
“What’s the story?” More banging in the background. I can hear her brothers arguing in Russian.
“I think there is a human trafficking ring in New York.”
She gasps. I proceed to tell her about my conversation with Maggie and fill her in on my port authority shenanigans.
“So how are you going to prove it?” she asks.
“Hell if I know. I’ve got a rough idea of when they came into the city, but there are tons of ships in and out of that port every day. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to figure out which ones they are on.”
“What about customs?” Tasha asks.
“What do you mean?”
“So, say I have a ship of girls I want to smuggle into the country. I send them from wherever we started to the port and then what? Hope customs doesn’t look?”
I shrug, not like she can see it anyway. “I assume they pay people off.”
“Ok,” she continues, “but who? How do you guarantee that you can buy off whatever customs person happens to be working that day? Just about everyone has a price, but do you just carry massive sums of money to buy them off? It seems like a large risk to ship the girls here and just hope you can snag an amiable customs official.”
I damn near drop my coffee. “You’re a genius, Tasha.”
“I know.” She sighs. “But why, specifically, am I a genius?”
“Customs. They have someone on the payroll.”
She pauses. “Ok, yes. And?”
Holy shit. I can search backwards. Sort by who clears them through customs, then look for patterns corresponding to my arrival dates.
“And there probably aren’t too many customs inspectors on the take.” I pause. “Or at least I hope not. I gotta run some numbers down. Talk later?”
“Of course! Be safe, Rocky.”
“I’m always safe,” I assure her. It’s a lie, but if everyone knows it’s a lie, does it still count?
I return to the spreadsheet I made. After a few clicks, I have things sorted by customs inspector. I print it out. I return to the computer and sort it by ship and then by arrival date, printing each of those. Starting with the arrivals that fit my date range, I switch to the sheet showing the customs inspectors. Two ships are signed off by the same customs inspector each time they arrive in those dates. Switching over to my ship log, I see that these two ships are only ever signed off by that same inspector. They come with regularity, including times not associated with the girls’ dates. Each and every time, the same inspector, even on the days where it looks like the ship came in a few days later than expected based on the prior pattern. The same inspector also signs off a few dozen other ships, but I can’t see any real pattern to those.
“I found you.” I say to myself. Both ships are registered under the country of Georgia, with a departure port of Pivdennyi. Where the hell is that? A quick google shows that it’s a busy seaport outside of Odesa, Ukraine.
Why is a Georgian ship moving cargo from Ukraine to New York? The owner is listed as Black Sea Shipping lines. It’s sad how much of my early research defaults to google, but here I go. I’m surprised to see the company address is in Delaware, USA. I’m more surprised to see that there isn’t a phone number associated with the business, a contact person listed, or a street address. Just a generic Gmail address and a P.O. Box. The website is a single page so generic it might as well be a template. Maybe it is.
I call Tasha back.
“Why would a company with no real contact information own a shipping line with boats from Georgia sailing from Ukraine?” I ask without preamble.
