She nods, but I can see she’s eager to get back to work and follow up the lead I just gave her. So I take out a rupee note to pay the bill for the tea—but Riya covers my hand with hers, pushing me gently away.
“You’re in my city. You can’t pay.”
She passes some money of her own to the café owner, talking all the while.
“To be honest, it wasn’t easy at times. Joining the police. But Sunil has always stood up for me, given me responsibility, pushed me to do more than I was assigned. Especially on this case.”
“Why this case?”
“It means a lot to me and he knows that.”
We walk to the door together and she holds it open for me. The street is raucous and bright after the cool quiet of the café. Before she can cross over to the station again, I stop her with a brief hand on her arm.
“Why does it mean a lot to you?”
She turns to face me. “Because I think we need many more of these schools, and we need to protect the few that we have. Nearly half the girls in India are married before the age of eighteen. And almost twenty percent are married by the time they are fifteen.”
“Is that legal?”
“No, but it’s culturally accepted . . . maybe a little less here in Mumbai. Some poorer states, like Bihar, run at seventy percent. Those girls have to stop school—if they were ever in school to begin with—marry a man they don’t know, often much older than them, have kids, and be confined to the home. Kit’s schools save at least some of these girls from that fate.”
There’s an impassioned note in her voice that I haven’t heard before. I navigate the road with her, and when we are both outside her workplace, she starts up the short flight of stairs that leads into the police station, but then stops suddenly. From the bottom step she watches me for a moment, hesitating.
“What is it?” I say. “You can tell me.”
“I was one of those girls, once,” she says, biting at her lip. With the toe of her shoe she stabs at the edge of the step. “I never knew my birth parents. I lived in a crowded orphanage until I was eight. It would have been my destiny to marry someone as soon as I reached puberty, just to make room for another child to take my place at the orphanage.”
“What happened?”
“I was adopted. Very few kids are, in India. There are not even a few thousand adoptions each year, but there are maybe thirty million abandoned children.”
She looks down, as if she might have shared too much. But I’m glad she said something.
“Riya?” I say, and I wait for her to look up. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Thank you for this,” she says, holding up the paper with the warehouse address. She runs lightly up the stairs and turns at the door. Below her, on the street, I still stand watching her.
“I appreciate it, Jessie,” she calls, before she disappears into the building. “But, just so we’re clear—you’re still a big pain in the ass.”
11
ON MY WAY BACK TO the hotel, I keep replaying the conversation with Riya, especially the last part, where she talked about herself. I liked glimpsing even small fragments of who she really is. It gave me a sense of the passion that seems to make her police work a calling. Also, after circling each other like boxers in a ring in our first couple of meetings, it’s good to feel that we don’t have to compete all the time—that there are ways we might work together to find out who is behind this terrible crime.
Riya stays on my mind all the way through a full-blown Athena conference call, held through our secure virtual server. Kit has her feet up on the sofa in her hotel room, hugging her knees, and Peggy perches beside her. Caitlin and I are sprawled on the floor below them, and Hala sits cross-legged beside us, like a morose yogi. All of us are loosely grouped around Kit’s tablet, where Li, Amber, and Thomas are on a secure video stream from London, bringing us up to speed on their findings.
“We’ve unearthed more info on this Family First mob,” Thomas tells us. “Along the way, we found a distressingly high number of similarly themed organizations, but Family First definitely stood out.”
“How come?” asks Hala.
“Good question,” comments Thomas, apparently failing to notice that Hala actually just asked the most obvious question possible. Instead, he gazes at her like she just came up with the solution to climate change. I sneak a sideways glance at Caitlin, who’s clearly trying not to smirk at Thomas’s lovestruck demeanor.
Thankfully, Amber chips in: “Well, apart from the obvious attack on the school and Family First’s subsequent statement, they seem to be linked to a whole web of offshore companies and bank accounts, which is rarely a sign that someone means well. The accounts they file in the UK are public domain,” she continues, “but they contain more fiction than the New York Times bestseller list. There are obvious markers in their balance sheet and P and L—”
“That’s okay,” Kit interrupts gently, to spare all of us any more of this fascinating insight into spotting financial skullduggery. “The question is, what do we do next?”
Li jumps into the conversation.
“We’ve booked Jessie and Caitlin a flight home tonight,” she tells us. “Hala will stay behind and make sure Peggy’s SEAL guys secure the other school before the girls are moved back in.”
“Why are we coming home?” Caitlin asks.
“It’s just for a couple of days at the outside,” Li says. “That company that Hassan gave you, AAB Enterprises, has a link to the Cypriot Private Bank here in London. That is also one of the banks that Amber has tied to large payments received by Imran over the past year. These are very promising leads, but we’ve hit a
