So, Alexia thought, Billy wasn’t the only one who was worried about Milo. His family also reported him missing. I wonder why Chief Dublowski never mentioned that.
Hamlin claimed Mr. Bates had been abducted by person(s) unknown, and that he (Hamlin) had also been abducted and forced to watch a home movie of Bates being tortured. Agents Yeoman and Riley (FBI) investigated, found no substantiating evidence. Bates divorced in absentia by his wife, January 1996, on grounds of abandonment. No further contact with family.
Alexia read between the few, simple lines. A man who by all accounts had been happily married and a devoted father suddenly disappears without a trace. Did Milo Bates panic over his debts? Was that reason enough to walk away from an entire life? Not just his wife and business partner, but his children too? Or had something more sinister happened to him?
The second page of Edward’s report was even briefer.
. . . 4,587 unidentified human remains were discovered in the United States in the year that Milo Bates went missing. Of these, 986 were still unidentified a year later. 192 of these still-unclaimed corpses were from the New York region. 111 were adult males.
Alexia paused to absorb this depressing information. In one year alone, in one city, over a hundred men had died or been killed that nobody cared about. All of them had been someone’s son. Just like Michael. She forced herself to read on.
. . . 17 corpses bore evidence of torture. All but 3 of them were of Caribbean descent.
Gangs. Drug wars. Alexia felt the beginnings of excitement. Ever thorough, Edward had listed the causes of death for the three white males.
Shooting.
Shooting.
And the third, the very last word of Edward Manning’s report, lurking at the bottom of the page as quiet and deadly as a cancerous mole:
Drowning.
Alexia heard Chief Harry Dublowski’s voice in her head. “We’d expect to see more cases with the same MO. More girls washing up with similar injuries. More deaths by drowning.” This body wasn’t a girl’s. But was that lone white male Milo Bates? Had he been tortured, just like Billy said? And tossed into the Hudson alive, drowned, like poor Jennifer? After all, there was no reason Jennifer’s killer should have targeted only women. Jenny hadn’t been sexually abused. Perhaps her sex was irrelevant. Perhaps it was her connection to Billy that had sealed her fate, just as it had sealed Milo Bates’s. Billy, the poor, confused, schizophrenic ex-con. Billy, whom nobody had believed, nobody had listened to. Not even Alexia herself.
“Are you done?”
A sullen barista removed Alexia’s empty coffee mug. Alexia looked at her watch, pushing her wild speculations about Milo Bates to one side for now. Because that’s all they are, she reminded herself firmly. Speculations. That body could have been anybody’s. Milo could be alive and well and living in Miami, for all you know.
Today was her last full day in New York, and she had to make it count. Tomorrow night she’d be in a plane to London, to attend Teddy’s sentencing. She only had twenty-four hours to get through the last four names on her list.
Sally Hamlin had given her a bunch of papers relating to the time when Billy’s business had gone into free fall. Not only was this when Milo Bates had disappeared, but it was also the time when “the voice” had first made itself heard in Billy’s life. This was the crucial period, the start of it all. Searching through the files, Alexia had carefully pulled out the names of all the creditors, clients, and suppliers who’d had dealings with Hamlin Motors during that time. It was a long shot. But there was a chance one of them might remember something significant.
Jeff Wilkes ran a hauling company in Queens that had been one of Billy’s biggest and most consistent customers until things started to go wrong. A hugely fat man in his midfifties who smelled of garlic and body odor and had sweat patches the size of dinner plates under each arm, Jeff Wilkes seemed neither pleased nor impressed to be meeting Britain’s former home secretary.
“Look, lady, I don’t care who you are,” he informed Alexia rudely, scratching his balls under the Formica desk of his filthy office above his truck garage. “I don’t discuss my business dealings with nobody except my accountant and my bank manager. And then only if I can’t help it.”
“Billy Hamlin was a friend of yours,” Alexia said frostily. “Both he and his daughter were found murdered. If you had information that could help solve those crimes, wouldn’t you want to share it?”
“With the cops, maybe. Not with some woman I’ve never seen before in my life. I don’t know you.”
“I’ve told you who I am.”
Jeff Wilkes shrugged. “So? I don’t have information, okay? I don’t know shit about no murders. And Billy Hamlin was a business contact, an acquaintance. We weren’t friends.”
Clearly appealing to Wilkes’s better nature was going to get her nowhere. Alexia reverted to a trick she’d learned in politics—repeating the question again and again and again until the other person broke down and answered despite themselves.
“Why did you terminate your contract with Hamlin’s?”
“Look, I told you—”
“Why did you cut Billy off?”
“Are you deaf?”
“Was the quality of his work unsatisfactory?”
“No. It had nothing to do with that.”
“Did the two of you have a falling-out?”
“No! I told you already. We weren’t friends. You know, I got a business to run here.”
“Why did you terminate your contract with Hamlin’s?”
Within a minute, Jeff Wilkes had caved. Alexia thought: He wouldn’t last a day in the House of Commons.
“I got squeezed, okay?” Jeff blurted out. “In my business, it happens. The Mafia, the protection rackets. You don’t mess with that if you’re a hauling company in New York City.”
“Someone pressured you to stop doing business with Billy? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Were you threatened?”
“I’m not naming names, I’m not making accusations, okay? I’m just a small businessman doing the best I can.”
“But your relationship with Billy Hamlin became a problem?”
“It came to my attention,” the fat man said, “that it would be better for my business if Hamlin’s business didn’t work on my trucks no more. Okay? I didn’t owe the guy anything. I paid him in full and on time for all the work he did. But”—he opened his arms wide—“we went our separate ways. That’s it. End of story.”
It wasn’t the end of the story, of course. But it was as much as Alexia was going to get out of the odious Jeff Wilkes today.
Her next stop was an automotive-parts distributor, also in Queens. To her surprise, this time the boss was a woman.
“Yeah, I remember Billy Hamlin. Sure. Kind of a quirky guy. But I liked him.”
The woman hadn’t heard about Billy’s murder, or his daughter’s, and was shocked when Alexia told her the details. “My God. I did read something about that body being washed up. But I didn’t put two and two together with the name. To be honest with you, I never knew Billy had a daughter. That’s terrible.”
Her reasons for ceasing to do business with Hamlin’s were more prosaic than Jeff Wilkes’s. “Those were tough times in the automotive sector generally. A lot of firms were going under. Truth is, we were lucky enough to get a huge contract with one of the big boys, De Sallis. We dropped ninety percent of our smaller clients after that. We were stretched to the limit. I do remember hearing rumors about Hamlin’s, though, now that you mention it.”
“Oh?” Alexia’s ears pricked up.
“Some people were saying Billy and Milo’d been blacklisted. I don’t know whether they had trouble with one of the gangs, or it was something else. But everything those guys touched seemed to turn to shit, if you’ll pardon my French.”
Alexia knew the feeling. Her last year in politics had felt the same.
“Do you know who took over supplying Hamlin’s, after you quit?”
The woman scrawled down a name. “You think any of this has a bearing on him and his kid getting killed?”
“Probably not,” said Alexia. “I’ll see myself out.”
Alexia made four more stops that day, three to former clients and one to another supplier. The stories were the same everywhere. It was either, We were threatened. We got calls warning us off. Or, We got a better offer. Hamlin’s was undercut by rival mechanic shops. Billy’s two closest local competitors, Queens Cars and MacAdams Auto Services, both received large injections of cash from white knight buyers that enabled them to slash their prices—bizarrely, given that the auto business generally was in a severe recession at the time.
Alexia got back to the hotel at five, took a power nap and a shower, and was about to go out and grab an early bite to eat when her phone rang.