Chapter 9
Back on the road again, Alina studied the boxes. They were dusty, old, and she couldn’t imagine what was inside. She understood the theory that everything was important and any detail could lead to another, but it was hard to imagine these dirty, busted boxes held anything of value to the case. “Are we going back to the hotel now?”
“Yes.” Logan added, “We’re about fifteen minutes away.”
“Can we pick up some lunch to take back with us first? Or do you want to eat at the hotel?”
“I saw a deli around the corner from the hotel on the same block. How about we try that?”
“It sounds good to me.” She settled back, happy to know they hadn’t forgotten about food.
At the hotel a few minutes later, the men got out with the boxes and carried them upstairs. Once inside the room, they put everything down on the floor.
“I’ll get the food,” Harrison said, “and we can go through all this stuff while we eat.”
“Okay.”
While Harrison was gone, Logan and Alina picked up the first box and opened it, carefully laying the contents across the bed. With the empty box on the floor, Logan went through every item of clothing, checking all pockets to see if anything was in them. He also made note of the sizes for each article.
She felt useless as she watched. “Is there anything I can do?”
He nodded. “Sure. Go through the clothing, check the pockets, see if anything’s of interest.”
She walked to the far side of the bed and stared at what appeared to be a sack of socks. She was sure it wouldn’t have anything of interest. As she looked closer, the socks looked more dirty than clean. She said, “You might want to use a pair of gloves.”
He laughed and threw her a pair of gloves from his pocket.
She was surprised, shook her head, and said, “If you’d seen all the things I’ve seen …” She put on the gloves and went through all the dirty socks, finding a few pairs of underwear, also not looking extremely clean. “Where do we put the stuff that has nothing in it?”
“Back in the box,” he said.
Methodically they went through everything. When they came to the last shirt, he picked it up, checked it out and then put it in the box. Before they could open a second box, a rap was at the door as Harrison called from the outside.
“Logan, my hands are full.”
Logan opened the door and let Harrison in. He carried a tray of paper coffee cups and two bags of food.
Placing the food down on the small dresser, he handed out the coffee. Then he opened the bags and handed Alina a large sandwich. They didn’t make very much conversation while they ate. She settled back with her coffee as the men rose to start again.
Logan opened the second box, repeating the process with everything. This box was also full of clothing, including shoes. But nothing else of interest was found.
When they opened the third box and repeated the process, she wondered if this was worth the trouble or if it was all junk.
By the time Harrison opened the fourth box, she could see from his face that he wondered about it too.
He glanced over at Logan and smiled. “We’ll have a ton of garbage to get rid of. Hope they have a bin downstairs.”
“Me too,” Logan said. “I don’t know why Lingam didn’t do that in the first place.”
Alina put down her coffee and said, “Let’s do a trip now. It will give us more space.”
The men looked at each other, glanced at the two boxes on the floor, and Logan asked, “Do you think you can lift it?”
She laughed as she stood. “Well, only one way to find out.” She picked up a box and nodded. “This one’s light enough.”
Logan picked up the other. “I’ll come with you.”
She shot him a look. “I am pretty sure it’s safe to walk to the garbage area.”
He grinned. “But what if it’s not?”
Together they walked downstairs and outside to find the dumpsters to get rid of their loads.
Motioning back to the hotel room, he said, “Let’s go. After this, I really want a shower.”
“Yeah, you and me both,” she said. “Sitting in the shed for a year. It’s gross.”
“More than that, it’s probably the way the man lived.”
She winced. “That doesn’t sound like fun either.”
Back in the hotel room they found Harrison had filled the fourth box back up again. Making a sudden decision, they picked up the two newly searched boxes and headed back out for another trip.
Afterward, Logan grabbed his coffee and sat for a moment. Harrison was laying out everything from the fifth box on the bed.
She really appreciated the methodical way they handled this, although it was frustrating. But still, she likely would’ve dumped this box upside down, gone through each piece and tossed it as useless.
However, this box appeared to have more knickknacks, books, notebooks, and the odd pair of shoes. She grabbed what looked like a small journal, flipping through it. Every page was blank. She set it off to one side and reached for a stack of papers, pulling it toward her, studying the scribbles on each. She didn’t know if the men would throw this out because it was almost impossible to make heads or tails of any of it. She went through a dozen pages and found nothing legible. She placed them with the journal.
Logan was helping Harrison again. They went through the easy stuff—the rest of the shoes, the ties, and towels—until they only had what could be the most interesting of all of it so far. They each reached for a book, carefully checked out the spine, the front and back covers, held the book upside down to see if anything floated out free. One book was a paperback novel. The other a hardback. Neither yielded anything. After close examination, both ended up back in the box. Another twenty minutes, and they finally came to the end of that box’s contents. The only thing she’d found were the odd pages with crisscrosses over them, as if they’d been grabbed to jot down notes at odd times, reusing the paper over and over. She held them out. “I don’t know if anything is useable in this.”
Harrison took the papers from her and sat, slowly studying the notes. He picked up the last pages and handed them to Logan.
Logan snatched them up and said, “Okay.”
She lifted her head and studied him. “What?”
He held up the four pages so she could see them. Some of them had stains, like coffee had been sloshed over them. But the last entry was clearly legible, easily recognizable. And why wouldn’t it be. It was her name.
*
Logan watched her face as she read her name on the sheet. Curiosity became horror.
She glanced back at all the stuff on the bed and the boxes on the floor. “He knew me?” She shook her head. “I can tell you that I didn’t know him.”
“And the question now is, why was your name on a piece of paper in his room a year ago?”
She slumped back in position. “I don’t know,” she cried in horror. She raised a trembling hand to her temple. “Unless he knows Colin, and they predetermined I was on the list of possible people to get kidnapped.” She shuddered. “How horrible is that? To think people were plotting to kidnap me for over a year.”
The stack of papers was set off to the side. Harrison, after determining nothing else of value was on the bed, removed everything else, putting it back in the box and opened the last one. And this appeared to be all notes, papers, journals, and books.
Logan said to Alina, “Hopefully this one will yield a little more information.”
Once again, with everything spread out on the bed, the three stood and stared at the stack.
She shook her head. “Is this all that remains of a man’s life?”
“That and sixty thousand dollars,” Logan said. “Let’s start with the books, and then we’ll go through those loose pages.”
Each took a book, and following the same procedure as before, carefully checked for notes or paper stuffed inside, something used as a bookmark that might be of interest, and if it had a jacket flap, anything that might be tucked underneath. Logan picked up a dog-eared journal.
He flipped through several pages; the beginning had been ripped out. Handwriting appeared on the next few pages, but it was very difficult to read. The rest of the book was empty. He checked the very last page, as he had a habit of doing so to write notes sometimes if he had nothing else handy. But it too was empty. He looked at the notes in the front again, not able to determine if they were of value or not. He set it off to one side and reached for another notebook. By the time they’d gone through everything, they found nothing else of value. Now they had all the loose pages they’d set aside.
Harrison picked up a stack. “Looks like a set of accounts scratched onto loose leaf pages but stapled together.” He glanced through them. “Not a lot of accounting here. Whether that’s him trying to keep a budget for himself or for the kidnapped women, who knows?”
“Do we know when these women were kidnapped?” Alina asked.
“No,” Logan said. “So after all that, his address and your name is the connection. I wish we’d found more.”
“But that connection is damn strong,” she snapped. “I can’t say I like seeing my name on any of these sheets.”
Harrison was still flipping through lines of accounting entries.
Logan glanced around to see what else there was and found several crumpled-up pages. He opened each and spread them flat on top of the bed. Several contained numbers but had nothing to identify what they were. It looked like somebody doing simple accounting. He set them off to one side and kept going.
At the end of the stack he found another set of stapled sheets. He pulled it up and studied the entries. “And here’s a connection to Colin.” He tapped the paper and read out loud, “‘Colin’s asking for more money. He’s getting paid enough.’ And the word ‘enough’ has been heavily underlined.” He glanced up to see Harrison studying him and said, “Since Joe is in cahoots with Colin, we have to assume he was part of this trafficking ring. Likely one of the minions below the four ringleaders. Joe either was paying Colin or negotiating, so he was caught in the middle between what Colin wanted and what the buyers wanted. Joe was not happy, but he’s the one who ends up dead.”
“Why would that be?” Alina asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does if Colin cut out the middleman.”
Looking ill, Alina sat on the chair, hugging her empty coffee cup. Logan glanced at Harrison and motioned toward her.
Harrison nodded. “Let’s finish the rest of this,” he said. “We’ll have a box of whatever that we’ll keep track of. The rest can go.”
Although they went through the rest of the pages, they didn’t find anything of value aside from the stack they put aside. This time Harrison grabbed the boxes to toss in the dumpster.
Logan nodded. “I’ll take this comforter outside. It’s your bed, and we didn’t consider all the dirt in those boxes.” He rolled up the top cover so the dirt and dust would be contained. Then he stepped outside into the hallway, tossing the comforter into a laundry hamper. He returned and asked, “Do you think you need a cover? I can go find another one.”
She looked up at him, confused, then looked at the blankets on the bed. “I’ll be fine with what’s here, thanks.” She smiled. “Truly, I wasn’t too impressed with the idea of having all that happening on the bed I was sleeping in.”
“We should have had put a protective cover over it first.”
He laid all the pages out on the bed again, and with his phone carefully took close-up images of everything. He did the same with the accounting sheets Harrison had. When he was done, he sat and sent the whole lot to Levi, quickly dialing and waiting for him to answer.
“A hell of lot of paperwork you sent us,” Levi said.
“Yeah, but it also has Colin’s name in there and Alina’s.”
He heard a low whistle on the other end. “Nice work. That certainly connects the three of them.”
“Plus to a couple of the addresses you were sent,” he said. “We didn’t find anything at the house where we found the dead man.” Logan cast a quick glance to Alina, but she didn’t appear to be listening. “You have any update from the property?”
“He’s one of the four men we were looking for. It’s not evident yet why or who he might’ve known living at the property or even why he was there. The police are on it. They suspect that the address was a holding property where the kidnapped women were kept and is now too ‘hot’ to be used again.”
“You’ve told Jackson, I presume?”
“Yes. He’s also very interested in the information you found. I’m waiting to hear further instructions from him.”
Logan nodded. “Are we to stay here on location?”
“For the moment. I’ll call back when I know something more. Still hoping to hear the police have something.” Levi hesitated, then asked, “Where’s Alina?”
“Right here,” Logan said. “I have to admit that my instincts told me not to leave her alone.”
“Right,” Levi said, concern lacing his tone. “Am I to arrange for a spare bed here for her?”
Logan’s eyebrows shot up. He glanced over at Alina. “That would be a long commute. She has a job here and is expected back at work in a couple days.”
“Right,” Levi said in a brisk tone. “Did you leave anything behind at her apartment?”
“I set the doors to trip so we’d know if anybody went in, and I left a bug in the living room.” At that Alina glanced at him. He turned and smiled at her reassuringly. “So far nothing’s been triggered on the bug.”
“Okay, keep me posted.”
Logan hung up, pocketed the phone and turned to face her. “It’s the only way we could know if your apartment had been accessed.” He crouched down in front of her and grabbed her hand. “Trust us. We know what we’re doing and keeping you safe.”