“He already has. He bought a freighter that’s getting refitted at the spaceport as we speak.”
I got my voice back. “Did the mayor chime in on this?”
“No. He stayed out of it. With all his anticorruption talk, you’d think that he would be all over me, making sure this license got rejected. Instead he was strictly hands off. If it ever comes back to bite him, I’m sure he’ll use me as the fall guy. He’ll say I didn’t keep him properly informed.”
Maggie brought us back to the money. “Is the DHC Corporation another one of Simba’s fronts?”
“No. They’re an offworld company.”
“What did they pay you for?”
He wiped his nose with his sleeve then was immediately disgusted by the red stain running from elbow to cuff. “They wanted me to reject the license. DHC is the parent company that owns TransPort, the biggest offplanet shipper. They didn’t want any local competition.”
“So you decided to take the offworld money and vote against Simba?”
“Yes. My wife and I are getting a divorce anyway. We’ve been cheating on each other for years. I didn’t really care if she saw the vid or not, so I went with the money.”
“Then what happened?”
“He”-pointing to Mdoba’s picture-“visited me the morning after Dmitri was murdered. He showed up at my door and told me Dmitri was dead, and I was next. I didn’t believe him at first. I thought he was just trying to intimidate me, but then we got the call from Chief of Detectives Banks. I didn’t even care that much about the money. Why didn’t he warn me he would do something to my son? If he had threatened to kill Dmitri, I would have done what he said. He didn’t have to kill him!” More pathetic sobbing.
“When’s the vote?”
“We already had it.” He managed between sobs. “We issued the license yesterday.”
TWENTY-FOUR
We found a free bench in the Old Town Square and sat to eat kebabs we’d picked up from a street vendor. I ate leaning far forward so any greasy spillover would fall safely to the ground instead of in my lap.
There were still a fair number of people on the square. A little unusual for this early in the afternoon, but the dark clouds were taking some edge off the heat. Even so, it was intensely hot, but bearable when you sat still.
The walks were blanket covered. Vendors offered jewelry, wood carvings, lizard jaws, rugs, paintings, spices, and anything else that was cheap to produce, displayed in neat rows, small items in the front, larger ones in the back. Tourists crowded the narrow trails between blankets, looking for that special bargain that they could brag to their friends about; “guess how little I paid for this.” Every so often, children approached us, trying to get us to come back to their space: “Good quality, good prices.” A quick dose of ignoring them and they moved on. Never make eye contact.
Maggie finished off the last of her kebab. “What does a crime lord want with a shipping business?”
“I don’t know.” I said.
“It can’t be legit. I mean he bought a freighter. It would take years, maybe decades for him to turn a profit if he was on the up and up. He can’t have that much patience or he wouldn’t be a criminal in the first place.”
“Yeah.”
Maggie was incredulous. “Are guys like Simba and Bandur really that rich? They can just buy spaceships and bully the government? How can you work for somebody like that?”
“I don’t work for Bandur. I just don’t work against him.”
“Right,” she said sarcastically.
“Hey! You wanted to know my history, and I told you.”
She let out a sigh. “You’re right, Juno. Sorry.”
She sounded genuine, so I let it drop.
Maggie wondered aloud, “How much does a freighter cost?”
“A bundle.” My brain raced. Where could he have gotten that kind of money? Loja was tiny compared to Koba and hardly made any tourist money. Even if he took 100 percent of the gambling, prostitution, and drug profits, I couldn’t believe he would have enough to buy a freighter. Not even the government could afford to buy one.
Maggie called Abdul. His hologram stood straight, without his real-life stoop. Maggie set the coroner to tracking down the sale of that ship.
I returned to the last few bites of my lunch.
Maggie kept her eyes on her pad. When the data came in, she told the pad to sort through the docs and highlight the relevant portions. The regular-looking paper shifted from one document to another. I couldn’t keep up with her. I just watched the people on the square and waited for her synopsis.
“The freighter cost over thirty billion pesos.”
“Thirty billion?”
“Yeah. Can you believe that? That translates to almost fifty million Earth dollars.”
“How did he pay for it?”
“He put up fifty-one percent of the money. It took loans from four separate offworld banks to front his share. The other forty-nine percent came from two minority investors, both offworlders. Fernando Mendietta, who is the vice president of Universal Mining, and Mai Nguyen, who you already know.”
My stomach seized. I looked at my hand.
Maggie continued. “She had to take out two loans to come up with her twenty percent. Mendietta paid cash for the rest.”
Mai Nguyen. It had been twenty-five years since I’d tried to strangle her…I still wanted to.
Maggie put her notes away. “It’s opium, isn’t it? Simba’ll use the shipping company to smuggle opium up to Nguyen, and she’ll distribute it to the orbital station and the mines.”
I couldn’t answer; my thoughts were swimming. I got up without saying a word and tried to walk it off. Nguyen. Anger welled up from my gut, spilling into my head. My face felt flushed. I wanted to smash something.
I held on until the tide of blood slowly receded from my head and my locomotive breathing chugged out of steam. Some deep breaths soothed me back toward level. I rubbed my face with my hands. My forehead was running sweat.
Maggie looked concerned. “You okay?”
I nodded.
She hurried over to a street vendor, returning with a cold soda.
I chugged down half the bottle.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
Simba, Nguyen, and Universal Mining. Simba: known O dealer. Nguyen: known smuggler and dealer. Vice president of Universal Mining:???
It made no sense that the VP of a mining company would invest in an opium-smuggling scheme. The last thing he’d want to do is turn his employees into junkies-bad for productivity. He had to be going solo on this one, putting up his own money-screw the company.
How big was the mines’ opium market that they needed a freighter to keep up with demand? It couldn’t be that big…but what else could it be but opium? Everything else on Lagarto was worthless…
A thought popped. Clarity overwhelmed. My nerves fired in a surge of understanding. We had missing people at every turn: six POWs, Kapasi’s sister, Brenda Redfoot’s list of suspected Zorno victims, Josephs and Kim busy investigating MPs…
Pieces snapped together-not all of them, but enough.
I called Abdul immediately. “I want the name of a missing persons case in Tenttown that Josephs and Kim have been working.”
“Sure, Juno. Hang on.”
Maggie looked at me strangely.
