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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Belmonds’ travel agent knew her stuff. She arranged early check-in at the five-star Higueron Hotel in Fuengirola. Molly gasps when we enter the suite.

“Oh. My. God.”

I smile. “Right?”

I have Henry in one arm. I put my other around Molly as we gaze out the open window. The Mediterranean is laid out in front of us like a shimmering blanket, a gentle breeze blowing through the windows. Molly closes her eyes and soaks it in. We smell the salt air. For my part, I am experiencing no déjà vu to my previous visit to Spain because the difference between crowding into a youth hostel with the Lax Bros clogging the shared toilet and this opulent luxury suite overlooking the sea with my wife and child is, to put it mildly, transformative.

“Maybe we should move here,” Molly says.

“To Spain?”

“To this hotel suite.”

“We’d get bored.”

Molly tilts her head. “Would we?”

I follow her gaze back out the window. “Yeah,” I say. “But not for a while.”

“When do you have to leave for your appointment?”

I check my watch. I was able to set up a meeting with Carlos Osorio, the young police inspector I reported to twenty-two years ago, under the guise (honest guise, if you will) of being a private investigator working for the Belmond family. Osorio is still with the same police department, having risen to the rank of comisario, which you don’t have to be a major linguist or top-notch crime fighter to deduce means “commissioner.”

“I have an hour,” I say.

She comes closer to me. “Do you know what I hear is good for jet lag?”

“Uh, your son is awake.”

“A walk in the sun, silly.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t look so crestfallen. It’ll be fun.”

And it was. An hour later, I leave my wife and son by a gorgeous infinity pool, lying on something called a Balinese bed. Forget the suite—I think Molly could live on that bed and never be bored.

When the taxi drops me off at the El Puerto Hotel, the déjà vu doesn’t just come back—it rises in a rush and slaps me across the face. Some things have changed, sure, but not a lot. I glance toward the more crowded beach, and I swear I can see a couple of kids who look just like Anna and me on a blanket right where we used to lie. The memories are charging at me so fast I almost duck. It’s a harsh blast, a strobing kaleidoscope of a slideshow, and I can’t tell whether the memories are good or bad. I am trying to maintain my composure, focus on the job, remember that perhaps Anna too was a victim. But when I think of what came after, how it derailed me, I can’t help feeling rage at her too.

Twenty-two years ago, when I reported the “murder” to Carlos Osorio, I was a cleanly shaven scrawny lad. Now I’m weathered and bearded and look completely different. Osorio does not, though even in his youth, he had looked like an old soul. The years have been kind to Comisario Osorio. Other than some graying at the temples, there is zero change.

We shake hands and move into his office. He offers me an espresso, promising me that it will help with the jet lag. I don’t know if that’s true, but I can say that whatever he serves me hits like jet fuel. It’s also spectacular. He gets to the point fast.

“So what is the Belmonds’ interest in Fuengirola?” he asks. “I would think Marbella would be more their speed.”

The No Shit Elites had discovered that before joining the academy Osorio had spent three years studying in Cambridge. That explained the perfect British accent.

“Do you recognize me?” I ask.

He studies my face. “Should I?”

“We met,” I say. “Over twenty years ago. My name is Sami Kierce.”

He sits back, folds his hands, rests them on his stomach. “I thought you were here on behalf of the Belmonds.”

“I am. Twenty-two years ago, I was another young tourist staying at a hostel. I came to you because I thought a girl I was kinda seeing had been murdered. You dismissed it as my being high or drunk, but you did go back with me to her apartment.”

“And there was no body,” he finished for me.

“You remember?”

“Not really, no. But I would remember if there had been one, wouldn’t I?”

“I guess that’s true.”

Osorio possesses the kind of world-weary face only we cops seem to cultivate. His skin has a leathered tan that can only be derived from years of sun exposure. “What do you want from me, Mr. Kierce?”

“None of this surprises you, does it?”

Osorio rubs his chin. “You came to Spain as an American college student, correct?”

“I’d just graduated.”

“Backpacking with friends through Europe?”

“Something like that.”

“And when you reported this to me, did you tell me the whole story? Or did you leave out some key details?”

“I left out some key details,” I say.

Osorio strokes his chin. “Do you still think you saw a murdered woman that day?”

“No.” Then I add, “So you do remember me?”

Osorio chooses not to answer. “You probably figured out by now that you were scammed.”

“And you knew right away,” I say.

“Yes. It wasn’t an uncommon crime, but your case was somewhat unusual.”

“In what way?”

“Various forms of that con were common in those days. A girl would seduce a young tourist. The mark, if you will. She would wait until the mark was comfortable and then she’d rob him. The problem was, the mark would often report it to the police. He would be able to identify her. She would have to move on or at least change locations. So some con artists became, shall we say, more creative. They’d fake an illness or something worse and convince the mark it was his fault. The mark would run in a panic and never report it. Because if he did, he feared he’d end up in jail. Sound familiar?”

“It does.”

Osorio grins. “That’s why you didn’t tell me everything. You’d have implicated yourself, wouldn’t you have?”

“I would, yes,” I admit.

“Most scams were simpler. The woman would fake a drug overdose. The accomplice would say something like, ‘You bought the drugs’ or ‘When we take her to the hospital, they’ll arrest you for possession, just go.’ So the mark would take the out. They never really cared about the girl. She was just fun or sex to them. Your con—a dead woman with a knife in her chest or whatever—those were rare. Or who knows, maybe a lot of people got conned that way, but to your credit, you were one of the few, maybe the only one, who still felt morally obligated to report it.”

“Yeah, I’m great,” I say, flashing back to the last time I was in the station. “You could have told me. You could have let me off the hook.”

“I planned to,” he replies. “I left a message at your hostel. But you ran home, remember?”

“You still could have called.”

“I didn’t have your phone number. You also didn’t come fully clean with me. I had no obligation to follow up.”

“Or maybe someone in the police department was getting a kickback.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. But beach towns like this, we survive on tourism. Amplifying news about crimes does little to enhance our business model.”

“So you look the other way.”

“You’re being melodramatic, Mr. Kierce. But let’s also be realistic. If you had stayed, perhaps we would have tracked down the two people who committed this petty crime. That’s all it was. She wasn’t really dead, remember? Maybe they’d have been charged if you testified against them—but then you’d have to admit possessing illegal drugs in a foreign country. Do you see my point?”

“Clear as the Mediterranean Sea,” I say.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“What does this have to do with the Belmonds?” Osorio asks. “Or was using their name just a ruse to get a meeting with me?”

“It was no ruse,” I say.

Osorio spreads his hands. “Then?”

“The girl who ran that con on me—the one I thought had been murdered.”

“What about her?”

“She was Victoria Belmond.”

Osorio blinks, absorbs the words. “The kidnapped daughter?”

“The very,” I say. “The FBI has had no clue where she was for the eleven years she was missing. Now we know that she was in Fuengirola three years after she vanished, running scams on at least one na?ve, young tourist.”

Osorio sits back. “I don’t even know what to say. Are you sure it’s the same girl?”

“Yes.”

“Have you met her?”

“Just recently for the first time.”

“I assume you asked her about robbing you?”

“She claims no memory of those eleven years.”

Osorio rubs his chin again. “I remember reading that,” he says. “But come on. Amnesia? That has to be a lie, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But I need your help.”

“How?”

“She didn’t run that con on her own. She had an accomplice. He went by the name Buzz.”

Osorio arches a skeptical eyebrow. “Buzz?”

“Yes. He was also her drug dealer.”

“More likely, her handler,” Osorio says.

“Meaning?”

“Look, twenty-two years ago—that was before we fully understood about trafficking and all that. But this is how it worked: You know, I’m sure, that a lot of young women—and men too—were forced into sex slavery.”

“Yes.”

“These were often run by organized crime families. They were into a lot of illicit things, of course. Not just sex. They exploited other avenues for revenue.”

“For example?”

“For example, a destitute, desperate young woman looking for work could be told there’s a job waiting for her at a tourist destination, something like waitressing or being a club hostess. Once she arrives, her handler takes her passport away and forces her into other lines of work—sex work being the most obvious. But some of the girls would be put out on the streets to beg. Some would be taught to pickpocket or shoplift or roll men. And some would run more elaborate cons.”

“Like the one on me.”

“Precisely.”

I try to put it together. Did Victoria get kidnapped and then forced into a life of petty crime? It seems a stretch. She certainly wasn’t destitute or desperate. And what do I make of her memory loss? Is that for real? Is it a cover? I try to rewind to the beginning, to that New Year’s Eve party above McCabe’s Pub.

Something made Victoria call her brother that night.

Something made her leave the party.

What?

What could have led a seemingly well-adjusted girl from a well-to-do family from celebrating the new millennium with rich high school friends to running low-rent cons on na?ve tourists in the Costa del Sol?

“I remember when the Belmond girl was found,” Osorio says to me. “It was in a restaurant or something?”

“Yes, a diner.”

“So how can I help?”

“We need to find Buzz.”

“Twenty-two years later?”

“A guy like that,” I say. “I probably wasn’t his first mark or his last.”

Osorio sees it now. “You think he’s in the system.”

“I think there’s a good chance. We start back at that summer. I can give you a general description. White guy. I’d say one meter eighty, maybe ninety-five kilograms. I’m guessing around forty years old then. He had a Dutch accent, and I remember Anna telling me he was from Amsterdam. Don’t know if that’s true or not. When I met him, he had purple spiked hair and a nose ring. He said he worked as a DJ.”

Osorio writes this all down. “Did this Buzz say where he worked?”

“No.”

“Twenty-two years ago,” Osorio says. “That won’t be in the computer. We didn’t start digital storage until 2008, so they’ll be in physical form.”

“Like mug shot books?”

“Yes.”

“Can we access them?”

“They’re in a warehouse in Málaga.”

“How long will that take?”

“Can you come back in two hours?”

“Sure.”

I rise to leave.

“It was cruel,” Osorio says. “That con. You were just a kid, and you thought you’d done something terrible. It’s haunted you.”

I say nothing.

“That’s what I should have seen, but I wasn’t much more than a kid either. Like I said, I didn’t have your phone number. But I could have found it. I should have. I should have called you and told you the truth. I’m sorry about that.”

I don’t trust my voice, so I nod what I hope is a thanks and head outside.