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“It’s not looking like there’s going to be a happy ending. Maggie runs a place for kids in Child Protective Services. I just found out two other women from another CPS place went missing last week. Anyway, if I can, I’ll go with Kerry this afternoon and check out the flophouse.”

Byrth was quiet for a moment, then said, “I haven’t had one of those cheesesteak sandwiches in a while. I’ll meet you there.”

[TWO]

Over the Leeward Islands, Lesser Antilles

Monday, November 17, 6:50 A.M.

“Then Ricky, he showed up at the Sanctuary,” Krystal Gonzalez was saying as Maggie McCain watched her pacing the living room of Maggie’s Society Hill town house.

She stopped and began crying again.

“And then he grabbed Brandi, said she still owed him money, so that meant he owned her. Ms. Quan yelled for Ms. Spencer to call the cops. And Ricky, he said that that would be their last mistake ever.”

The curvy, petite nineteen-year-old anxiously ran her fingers through her black hair. A very slender doe-eyed twenty-six-year-old woman of Asian descent, who stood about as tall as Krystal, appeared. She stroked Krystal’s head and said meekly, “Brandi begged us not to call.”

A tall, sad-faced twenty-seven-year-old black woman walked up, nodding. “Said he’d kill us all. Burn down the Sanctuary.”

“Lizzi and Brandi were afraid of the cops, that they’d arrest them, too,” Krystal said. She pointed across the room. “All they wanted was out.”

Maggie looked to where Krystal pointed. The two attractive twenty-year-old blondes were standing there.

“That’s why Lizzi said they went along with leaving town. She and Brandi thought they could get away on the road. But that didn’t work. And then Lizzi and Brandi told Ricky again that they wanted out, that if he didn’t let them out, they’d go to the cops. Tell them how he started giving them drugs and working them when they were underage. But then I never heard from them again”—she glanced across the room, and when Maggie looked, too, the blondes were gone—“so I told Ms. Quan and Ms. Spencer all that. And I told them about the notebooks he kept in the office and what was in them. They didn’t believe me. ‘All you girls do is lie.’ So I stole two when Ricky passed out drunk in the office.”

She held up the thick, well-worn spiral notebooks.

Maggie looked at them, then looked back at Krystal.

Now Quan and Spencer were no longer in the living room.

“I texted Ricky, said I was done doing that shit. Told him to leave me alone or he’d never get his books back.”

Krystal, motioning with the books for Maggie to take them, said, “It’s here. Now we can be safe.”

Then she softly repeated it, “Now we can be safe.”

Then Krystal was gone, and the notebooks sat in a pool of blood in Maggie’s burning kitchen. . . .

—

“Excuse me,” an insistent female voice said, causing Maggie McCain to slowly open her eyes. She felt someone shaking her, then realized that it was her seatback being pushed and that the nasal voice was that of a flight attendant, who added, “You’re going to need to put this upright for landing.”

As American Airlines flight 504 banked over the Caribbean Sea on final to land at Cyril E. King International, Maggie wiped tears from her cheek.

So, how long are the bad dreams going to go on?

She slid open the window shade and stared out.

Monsters like Ricky can’t get away with this.

The sun was coming up, casting dramatic light across the verdant hills of the islands rising from the vast blue ocean. Bright colorful houses dotted the hillsides down to where the larger resort hotels spread out along the white sand beaches.

Normally, the beauty stirred a sense of excitement and adventure in Maggie. Now she felt neither, only a surreal numbness.

First thing I am going to do, she thought, is get that bastard where it matters most to him—in the wallet. Let him worry and squirm.

I know what money he’s making, and the outrageous, disgusting way he’s making it.