‘‘Recognize the area? The location?’’
‘‘You kidding? Those doors were open for maybe five seconds,’’ LaMoia complained.
‘‘Rewind,’’ Boldt instructed.
Imitating a sports announcer, LaMoia said, ‘‘Our bus-cam will now perform instant replay as the star of our show descends the rear steps.’’ He was as nervous outside as Boldt was on the inside. The missing woman had followed a man-a big man, a laborer perhaps, maybe not Caucasian. She had followed him for the better part of an hour, at night, on two different buses while carrying a briefcase concealing a camera.
They made three successive attempts to identify any landmark or piece of skyline when the bus doors opened, but to no avail.
The next cut was equally as abrupt as the others.
‘‘We’re a day later,’’ Boldt observed. ‘‘That last shot. Rewind. . Yes. See?’’
The camera panned left to right. Small white lights glowed in the darkness. As the aperture adjusted, both men rocked forward at the same moment. Dozens of Chinese women-all with shaved heads, all wearing jeans and T-shirts-sat behind large industrial sewing machines, frantic with work. Others manned cutting tables, busy with razor knives and scissors chained to the tables. Melissa’s rapid breathing mixed with the roar of machinery and played loudly from the television’s stereo speakers.
‘‘Jesus,’’ LaMoia muttered.
The screen zoomed and the lighting improved as a few of the women seamstresses were captured in close- up. They appeared bruised and beaten. ‘‘Oh my God,’’ Melissa remarked in a dry whisper. The next shot was of a chained ankle, blood raw. She gasped as the camera focused. Then another shackled ankle, and another. ‘‘The graveyard,’’ the woman’s voice whispered hoarsely.
‘‘Hilltop?’’ LaMoia asked.
Boldt shot him a look. Had Melissa made a connection to their Jane Doe? How? When?
Another edit jump. The screen stole his attention.
The ominous groan of machinery continued throughout, grating and annoying. The camera closed in on a black surface, where there suddenly appeared a small hole the size of a silver dollar. The lens approached that hole and then focused automatically. It was a small room, poorly lit by a construction light. The sound of running water. Naked women-their heads and genitals shaved-hose water running down over them. They whispered amongst themselves. It sounded Chinese.
For once, LaMoia knew to keep his quick-witted adolescent comments to himself.
Another edit. A woman-Melissa? — stood in a dark bathroom working a razor on her scalp. The scene was only seconds long. She turned to face the camera and smiled. She said in a whisper, ‘‘This is Melissa Chow for KSTV News. I’m going undercover now. I will join the sweatshop’s general population. This is where I become one of them.’’
‘‘Oh, shit,’’ LaMoia said.
The woman reached out and turned off the camera. The screen flashed black.
‘‘The sound is so hollow,’’ Boldt remarked, his musician’s ears ever sensitive.
The sounds were of women’s voices speaking Chinese. The camera faded in from black to an extreme close- up of a woman’s face. She was bald. She spoke in whispered Chinese. The interview lasted close to a minute, the camera cropped at the crown of her head and the peak of her chin, the close-up dramatizing her words. Even without a translator, her message was of horrid conditions and fear; the tears told that much. Another fade to black, and then faded back in at yet another close-up of a different woman. There were three interviews in all. All done in whisper. All in Chinese, not a word of English spoken. The third was interrupted by a woman’s voice speaking harshly. A warning perhaps. The camera aimed down to show a dormitory of woven mats and polarfleece blankets. Several women slept. Most of the mats went empty. The screen went black and then fuzzy.
LaMoia and Boldt sat watching a gray sparkled screen. LaMoia turned down the sound. He fast-forwarded the tape, making sure they missed nothing. ‘‘You feel sick to your stomach?’’ he asked.
‘‘Did you ever play with Chinese handcuffs when you were a kid?’’ Boldt asked. ‘‘The woven tubes? You stuck your fingers inside?’’
‘‘Sure. I remember those. What about them?’’
‘‘The tube constricted. You could slip your fingers in, but you couldn’t pull them back out.’’
‘‘Those were chains on those ankles, Sarge.’’
‘‘It’s what happened to her,’’ Boldt said. ‘‘She got herself inside, but she couldn’t get back out.’’
‘‘Like Chinese handcuffs.’’
Boldt nodded. He felt better than he had in days. ‘‘The good news is, she can speak the language, and with her head shaved, she looks like everyone else.’’
‘‘You’re thinking she’s still alive,’’ LaMoia said, his troubled voice barely rising above a whisper. The tape had set a mood, had captured them.
‘‘I think she is, yes,’’ Boldt said, equally softly. ‘‘The camera surfacing challenges that, I know. But the reason we haven’t found her?’’ he asked rhetorically. ‘‘Is because they haven’t found her, either.’’ He turned to LaMoia in the dark, his silhouette captured by the light from the sparkling gray screen, making him look sickly and pallid. ‘‘Who knows?’’ Boldt said. ‘‘They may not even know she’s in there.’’
CHAPTER 35
'Can get you nice suit cheap,’’ Mama Lu told Boldt. She occupied most of the doorway of a building marked only in Chinese characters. She wore a red cotton tent dress, and leather sandals and she carried a rubber-tipped bamboo cane that didn’t look right on her. In the daylight, out of her dim lair, Boldt saw her as much younger, mid- fifties perhaps.
‘‘You don’t like this one?’’ Boldt complained.
‘‘It okay. A little big on you I think. Bad color. Too dark for skin tone. I have cousin.’’
‘‘Skin tone?’’ He had bought the suit on sale too many years ago to remember. Her comments made him self-conscious. He worried about how his suit might play in his later appointment.
She struck Boldt as something of a Chinese Winston Churchill the way she held the cane and faintly bowed to him as he spoke.
Boldt had sandwiched the stop between the conclusion of the video session with LaMoia and his upcoming job interview, intending to work the woman for information on the location of sweatshops. But she had other ideas.
Sensing his impatience and urgency, Mama Lu demanded they meet at a location of her choosing: a nondescript building on a busy street in the heart of the International District.
‘‘I have an appointment,’’ he continued.
‘‘This not take long,’’ she told him. Mama Lu set her own pace, her own tempo. In the world of jazz, she was a ballad, not bebop. ‘‘You will be so kind,’’ she said, indicating the door.
Boldt opened the door for her, stepping close enough to smell a faint trace of jasmine and was reminded of her gender, something easily forgotten when enveloped by her commanding presence. As she passed, he said softly, ‘‘Another woman was found dead. Another Chinese. Head shaved. Bad shape.’’ He caught himself slipping into her clipped mode of speech.
‘‘Chinese, or Chinese-American? You see, to us there is much difference, Mr. Both. I show you.’’ She led Boldt down a short red hallway and through a bright pink door into a large, open room filled with fifty or more Asian children. They sat at low tables in groups of five or six. Finger paintings hung from the fabric-covered walls; a hand-drawn English alphabet was draped above the blackboard like a banner. There were beanbags, dollhouses, plastic forts and a wall of books. It was busy but not loud. Xylophones hammered out halftone Chinese melodies.
Boldt read a modest plastic sign mounted to the wall and understood immediately that she was playing politics. Beneath the prominent Chinese characters on the sign were the words Hongyang Lu Child Center and Woman’s Shelter. Mama Lu was sole proprietor.
As if on cue-and he had to wonder about that-several adorable children ran to greet the great lady, clutching
