Chapter 8

"Before I drop you off at the hotel, there is something I need to do," I told Renata as we were leaving the restaurant.

"What?"

"Something you said yesterday has been bugging me. You mentioned a conversation between the dead lady Marshal, and who I am guessing was Robles about something 'happening again, ' and her 'not wanting to lose another one, '" I said.

"Ok?" she said in a questioning tone.

"Well, it occurred to me that if the Marshal's service did have a mole in it for the Bratva, then this might not have been the first time they went after a witness. That would explain the conversation you heard, anyway. I'm not sure if knowing this will be helpful, or where it might lead, but it's a thread I think we need to follow."

"So how are we to be finding out?" she asked.

"Well, I'm going to start with getting a computer," I said as we pulled up to a big box electronics place that was just opening.

I walked through the fairly open store to a row of computers they had for sale, and started checking until I found one that had Internet access and wasn't locked into one of the sales videos. I had just opened the browser up when an employee came over.

"Can I help you, sir?" he asked.

"No, I'm just looking."

"I'd be happy to tell you all about this model."

"I am fine," I said again, turning to glower at him.

Even with the shower and breakfast, I was still looking a little rough. Couple that with the irritation I was still getting from Renata, and I wasn't in the mood to deal with anyone.

After a moment the sales clerk took the hint and went away.

I kept my searches narrowed down to Florida for the moment, since if there was a mole in the Marshal's office, it would be in the area of where they were stationed and probably not have a national reach. I started looking for cases that were dropped because of dead witnesses, articles on the Marshal Service, anything to do with the Bratva, or anything to do with the girls being brought into the country through Florida.

It took a while to find what I was looking for, but in my searching I did see something that seemed related but unhelpful. There were several articles that talked about a noticeable upswing in the number of women being brought into the country from Europe and South America. ICE and other federal agencies, along with local police in the larger cities, had been stepping up their raids lately into some of the places where these girls were put to work.

From interviews with the girls, many of whom had been more or less leaked to the press, the authorities had begun putting together a picture. A lot of girls were being taken from their homes, smuggled into the US, and forced into the sex trade. The police admitted there was some kind of major pipeline of girls into the US; but they'd had, as of yet, little success in finding it. One agent who wanted to be quoted anonymously said that most of the agents in the field were convinced that there was more than one pipeline, and there was evidence the girls were being fed into some kind of clearing system that was selling these girls. He suggested it was all very organized, but so far they had made little headway into figuring it out, let alone stopping it.

While that was interesting ... and, from what Renata had told me, it was very likely Yuri was involved in this somehow ... it didn't help me at the moment.

After a few more minutes searching, I did find information that did help.

"That's weird," I said, more to myself than anything, after reading a few of the articles.

"What is weird?" Renata asked.

"There is this guy with the Miami Herald. He wrote a lot of articles that kind of touch on what we are looking for, but it doesn't make sense. He wrote up a piece a few months ago, that tied together three trials that were thrown out when the star witness failed to appear over the course of fourteen months. Each was under federal jurisdiction and he found some information that the three witnesses were under Marshal protection at the time. The Marshals wouldn't make any comment on the trials or the missing witnesses, but the writer later found three bodies that he claims were the missing witnesses in the city morgue. He gets a little sketchy in the details of how he knows they are the same people, and why this wasn't able to be confirmed by the Marshal's service or the court."

"I do not see why it so strange. It look much like what you say we are trying and find."

I didn't mention it, but what also seemed strange was how I was getting used to the almost correct grammar she used. At first it threw me a little, but I was barely noticing it by this point.

"That isn't the weird part. The weird part is who the trials were of. One was of a mid-level guy in the Hernandez cartel. The second one was the trial of a member of the Bratva. The third was a guy who belonged to the Brotherhood of White Pride, which apparently is a local white supremacy group with a lot of ties to low level crime in Central and Southern Florida."

"I just can't see how those three groups tie together. Sure the member of the Bratva is exactly what we were looking for, but the other two just don't fit. I mean, it's pretty unlikely that a guy from a group that calls themselves the Brotherhood of White Pride would be in any way connected with a South American drug cartel. These two kinds of groups almost never get along. They probably wouldn't work with the Russians either."

"No, it just doesn't seem to make sense. But the articles don't go into enough detail."

I started to delve further into them, when someone walked up next to me, breaking my concentration.

"Excuse me sir," a man in a white shirt and black tie said.

The employee I had gotten rid of was standing slightly behind him.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Our computers are display models for potential customers. This is not an Internet cafe. If you do not plan on shopping here, then I need to ask you to leave."

I glowered at him for a moment, until he took a step back, but I didn't push it. He had every right to kick me out and if I made too big of a deal there was a solid chance he would call the cops.

"Let's go," I said to Renata, and turned around and walked out of the store.

"Now we find new place with computer?" she asked once we were out of the building.

"No, now we go back to the motel."

"We are done with your search?"

"No, I just have enough off the computer. We are going to call the reporter who wrote those articles. There were a lot of assumptions made in them without facts. Reading between the lines, it sounded like he had the facts, just didn't print them for some reason. I want to hear what else he found but didn't print."

We headed back to the hotel. Mostly because pay phones were becoming pretty rare, even those I would be able to find wouldn't have phone books at them. I looked up the paper and found their main number.

"Miami Herald," a pleasant female voice announced when they answered the phone.

"Joseph Lowenstein, please."

"Your name?"

"John Doe. I have some information for him," I told her.

I was hoping she didn't press the issue. I didn't really want my name popping up anywhere yet, just in case. I hadn't really dealt with reporters before, but I was guessing anonymous calls weren't completely out of the norm for these guys.

She didn't say anything else. Instead her voice disappeared, replaced by a series of long beeps. Which were replaced a moment later by the sound of the phone being connected.

"Lowenstein?" a new voice said.

"I have some information on the witnesses who got killed, if you're interested."

"Sure, go ahead," he didn't sound particularly interested.

"No, we have to meet. I would prefer to do this face to face," I told him.

I needed to get an information exchange going. I also wanted to look him in the face while we talked, so I could gauge his responses. He almost certainly had more information to give me than I had for him, so I would have to play it right.

"Look, Mr. Doe," he said, confirming that the secretary had at least told him I was on the line, "If you have something worth talking about, that's fine. But I have a deadline coming up and don't have a lot of time to waste. Give me something to prove you actually have something to talk about."

"The witness from the Bratva, he worked for a guy named Yuri," I said, taking a educated stab in the dark. "They are running girls out of Europe into America through the Port of Miami."

"You can prove this?" he asked.

"Yes, I have proof."

"Ok, where and when do you want to meet."

I thought back to some of the places we drove through the day before.

"A bit less than two hours outside of Miami is a small place called Andytown. It's basically a glorified truck stop just off the highway. Meet us there in say, four hours?"

"Could you come here, to the paper?"

"No, Miami isn't an option. Sorry, but it's gotta be on my terms."

The line was silent for a moment and I could almost hear him calculating the inconvenience of meeting me against the possibility of a worthwhile story.

"Fine, four hours," he eventually said.

I didn't say anything else and hung up.

He was a lot closer than four hours, but the time limit was for us to get there on time. Four hours would be pushing it, for us, but I wanted to get us back here before it was too late. I planned on calling the Marshal in the morning, and setting up the meet for before lunch.

This trip was actually setting my time table back quite a bit, but I really wanted to get as much data as I could on any kind of connection between dead or missing witnesses, and the local Marshal's office. I wanted to be prepared for when I set up the meeting.

Renata passed out shortly after we left. She hadn't slept as long as I had, and I could imagine she was still pretty drained. Thankfully I had plenty of sleep and was fine with the long silence.