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Saint Thomas, United States Virgin Islands

Monday, November 17, 2:30 P.M.

Maggie McCain had gone through the spiral notebooks, then ordered a salad and grilled fish from room service, ate that poolside, and then went through the books again.

She quickly had decided that “meticulous” was not a word that could accurately be used to describe them.

They’re sloppy.

They certainly wouldn’t pass a high school accounting class, forget a college one.

But there’s a lot here—the challenge is making sense of it all.

It wasn’t just that the handwriting bordered on illegible. The entries in the books were at times illiterate—words misspelled or written phonetically in a rudimentary “Spanglish”—and structurally undisciplined.

I don’t think Ricky would recognize a ruled line, much less a spreadsheet.

But there’s no mistaking the numbers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in drugs alone. They’re not selling on street corners. These are retail and wholesale figures.

One of the books tracked the girls, their locations and activity, how much they earned and how much they owed. The other tracked the drugs. It hadn’t been difficult to discern which notebook was which. The first clue was the crude doodles of female anatomy and of marijuana leaves, bongs, crack pipes, and other paraphernalia.

And there were lots of phone numbers. Each of the girls’ names had one—and Maggie figured they were go-phones given to them, just as Krystal had had hers. And the drug book listed pages of phone numbers. Some with names, some without names, and some names with multiple phone numbers, some of which, apparently the older ones, having been crossed through.

With a few exceptions, most of the area codes were local—a lot of 215 and 267 for the Philadelphia area, and 732 and 856 for New Jersey.

There’s got to be a way to use these numbers if I can’t get to Ricky through the dive bar.

But that’s just going to be a nightmare—worse than hunting a needle in a haystack.

She booted up the laptop and powered on the satellite antenna.

Back online, she launched the program that allowed for video and telephone calls. She clicked on the icon that mimicked a ten-digit keypad on a phone, looked in her computer address book under Krystal’s name, and found the number for Players Corner Lounge.

A woman’s harsh voice on the recording answered: “Players. Leave a message . . .”

What do I say?

Maggie clicked END CALL.

She looked at the first page of numbers in the notebook that tracked the girls. Then she clicked REDIAL. Then she clicked to hang up again.

Before I do that . . .

She then typed her personal cell phone number and dialed it.

When she heard her own voice recording say, “Hey, it’s me. Sorry we missed—” she clicked twice on the keypad’s pound sign. That took her past the automated voice-mail recording and to her voice-mail box.

The familiar computer-generated female voice politely but mechanically said, “You have forty new messages. You have ten old messages. Five messages older than seven days have been automatically deleted today.”

Forty? No surprise.

Not as bad as the hundred-something e-mails.

But then, there’s not a fifty-message limit on e-mails.

She clicked on the keypad’s numeral “1” and the female computer voice said, “First message. From Monday, nine P.M. . . .”

Then the voice mail played: “Hi! It’s Krystal. Call me back!”