fund-raiser, you saw it in Nairobi. Puts a tear in your eye and a lump in your throat.”
“You’re reaching for your checkbook and your credit card at the same time,” Wells said.
“Exactly. But I always thought the idea was to raise money to do good work. I fear Jimmy has that equation reversed.”
Wells nodded.
“I’ve done all right, too. He started me at three hundred thousand. Now I’m at three-fifty and he’s offered to bump me to four ’cause he’s worried I’m serious about quitting. Which is a lot for these jobs, believe me. Truth is I just put it in the bank anyway. I don’t have kids, I spend eleven months a year here, and you see my fashion sense. But I’m starting to feel like he’s buying me. Which I can’t abide.”
“You’ve told him this.”
“And he tells me fund-raising is part of the game, it takes money to make money. And look, we spend three million dollars a year here, we do some good. My big project for next year, before this happened, was supposed to be getting glasses and dental work to the kids here. Those maybe sound like luxuries, but they’re not. You can’t see, you don’t have much chance in a place like this. Your teeth hurt all the time, it’s misery. That’s the upside of working with a guy like Jimmy. Places like the Red Cross, they’re in love with their own bureaucracies. Anything new takes years to approve. Jimmy lets me do what I want, long as I send back pictures he can use for fund- raising.”
“Were you surprised when he came over for so long?”
Moss sipped her water. “Smart boy. Yes. I thought it was for the reporter from Houston. His hometown paper and he wanted to look hands-on, and if that meant putting in a few weeks here, he would.”
“Now you’re not so sure.”
She shook her head. “I can’t figure it. I know I mentioned the insurance. But the fact is I can’t see Jimmy risking those kids. He may be greedy but I’ve never seen him as a psychopath. And I can’t believe the four of them, or five if you count Suggs, are hiding in a hut somewhere, watching the world go crazy. Maybe Scott would think it was a lark, but not the others. Gwen wouldn’t put her family through that worry for all the money in the world. I’m sure. Beyond that, anything’s possible.”
Anything’s possible. The world’s epitaph. “I come up with anything else—”
“I’m here. Not much to do right now. I wasn’t sure about you, thought you might be a cowboy, but now I see you’re serious, I’m happy to give you the run of the place. You can stay in Hailey and Gwen’s trailer. It’s empty. Not counting the beauty products Gwen left behind.”
“Further proof she was planning to come back.”
Moss laughed, the sound surprisingly sweet. “That is the truth.”
—
The trailer was cluttered with what Wells would always think of as girl stuff, nail files, shampoo bottles, and panties. He assumed the Kenyan police had left the mess. Still, he found himself glad to be in his forties, too old even to imagine being with women so certain that their looks would carry them through life. He poked around halfheartedly, but the search depressed him. He hoped he didn’t find anything too intimate, not just topless photos or love letters, but the private stumblings that everyone had at home, expired vitamins and half-finished doodles and unread Christmas cards.
After a few minutes he felt foolish for his modesty. The girls would trade loss of privacy for freedom in a heartbeat. So he stripped the beds and looked under the mattresses. He turned out Gwen’s backpack and the twin chests of drawers and even looked through her magazines, hoping for a scrawled phone number or email address.
By the time he finished, the sun was down and Wells could hear the compound’s electric lights droning outside. He straightened up the place and walked over to Owen and Scott’s trailer to repeat the search. Wilfred intercepted him.
“Bossman. Superbossman. Great mzungu. A guard, Ashon, he told me, two, three weeks ago, he saw Suggs with all these papers, brochures for houses in Johannesburg. Like he wanted to jet”—Wilfred raised his hand like a plane taking off—“out of Kenya.”
“People have fantasies.”
“Suggs hid the papers when Ashon saw them.”
“People don’t always want to share their fantasies. Did Ashon tell the GSU?”
“He tried, but they told him to shut up. Like you, man. They don’t listen. Ashon said Shabaab, Shabaab, Shabaab is all they talk about.”
The fact that Suggs had been checking out real estate didn’t interest Wells nearly as much as the fact that the police didn’t care. They seemed intent on ignoring any lead that didn’t point to Somalia.
“Nice job, Wilfred. You get anything else, you tell me.”
Wells spent the next couple hours searching Owen and Scott’s trailer, which was littered with brochures for safari camps in the Tsavo game parks. Those were two hundred miles southwest of Dadaab, nearly as close to Dadaab as Lamu. The parks would have been a natural choice for a vacation, one that Owen and Scott seemed to have considered. Then they’d decided to go to Lamu instead, with Suggs encouraging them. Suggs. Wells wondered if he shouldn’t have stayed in Nairobi, tried to find Suggs’s wife.
He was leaving the trailer when his phone buzzed. Shafer.
“How’s it going?”
“I’m in Dadaab.”
“Finding anything?”
“Bits. Suggs, the fixer, I think he was probably involved, but it’s just my gut so far. And the Kenyan police seem obsessed with proving Shabaab’s behind this. From what I can see, they’ve hardly looked at him. They’re not even here. You get anything from Fort Meade?”
“You think I’m calling just to hear your voice? They ran all three numbers. The international is clean. Incoming calls from the families, press, WorldCares in Houston. One of the locals is the same. Thompson used it for calls to other Kenyan numbers, and we’ve found almost all of them. The police, other aid agencies, other local WorldCares employees.”
“And the third number?”
“That one’s a problem. The problem is it doesn’t exist. It’s not a working number in Kenya or anywhere else. Never has been. You sure you wrote it down right?”
Wells eyed his phone like a baseball player checking out his glove after an error:
“Did you call it when you were in the room with him, hear it ring?”
“No.”
“You know, four years ago the Texas attorney general investigated the charities in the state that spent the most money on fund-raising and the least on programs. WorldCares was high on the list. Thompson wasn’t indicted or anything like that, but the report isn’t pretty.”
“The woman in charge here told me something similar.” Wells explained what Moss had said. “But she also said they’ve come back strong. Tripled fund-raising and spending more on programs. Why blow everything up?”
“Think like a grifter, John. When things are going good, that’s when you press your luck. Double down.”
“If you’re right, why would he let me come here and give me the run of the place? He didn’t have to. Could have said it was too dangerous for me.”
“Maybe he thinks you’re too dumb to find anything.”
“Thank you, Ellis.”
“Another fun fact. You know Thompson’s got that new book coming out. It’s not even being published for two months, but since that press conference it’s number one on Amazon.”
“You think he’d let his nephew get kidnapped for a book?”
“I think you better get that third phone of his so the smart boys can trace it.”
“Unfortunately, he’s in Nairobi.”
“Then get him to Dadaab.” Shafer hung up.
—
“Couldn’t stay away?” Moss said when he walked into her office.
