Bones of the Lost

though he’d scored a point.
    “Ara must have been at the warehouse the night she died,” I continued. “As Majerick tried to force her into his truck, she probably struggled and her head and shoulder struck the piano.”
    My mind flashed an image of the Huma-Majerick silhouette wrestling in the dark. Another of a hatted corpse.
    “Rockett was never part of the trafficking, was he?” I asked.
    “Dew’s getting the whole story, but it looks that way.”
    “Why did he lie about knowing John-Henry?”
    “The guy was a dick, but he probably suspected something. He was a customer at the Passion Fruit, must have noticed that the girls didn’t speak English. He had to wonder where they came from.”
    Slidell slipped the faux Ray-Bans onto his nose.
    “We’re gonna need you to write all this up.” He gestured at my cast. “When you’re good.”
    I smiled and lifted both hands. “No problem. I’m amphibious.”
    Either Slidell missed the reference to the Charles Shackelford amphibious-ambidextrous gaffe, or he didn’t get the humor. I let him out with a promise to e-mail a statement.
    When Slidell had gone, a shocking realization struck.
    Dirty Harry hadn’t once chastised, ridiculed, or laughed at me.
    An hour later, Dew showed up. He was wearing a black suit, blue tie, and eye-blistering white shirt. Still no fedora.
    Dew and I assumed the same chair and sofa positions as duringmy visit with Slidell. Unlike Skinny, Dew sat ramrod straight with heels together, enormous hands cupping enormous knees. He declined my offer of coffee or tea.
    Dew had the following to report.
    Early in his second deployment, John-Henry Gross hooked up with a French private security contract worker named Jean Pruet. Pruet had spent six years in Afghanistan, and, over that period, deposited almost $2 million in a Swiss account. Pruet was returning to Europe, and, for a fee, rolled his network over to Gross.
    The scheme was far from original. But it was lucrative.
    Central to the operation was an Afghan national named Maroof Hayel, the man I’d seen reprimanding Khandan the day she approached me at the Bagram shops. Hayel was Khandan’s father and Ara’s uncle.
    Hayel recruited young girls by promising them, or their parents, jobs in the United States. He drew mostly from the slums of Kabul, Charikar, and Jalalabad, but also from villages in the surrounding provinces.
    Hayel was paid $200 for each girl he delivered. A Photoshop whiz kid in Kabul supplied false passports and visas at $40 a pop. The girls were escorted from Khwaja Rawash Airport in Kabul to Washington Dulles by an Afghan woman named Reja Hamidi. Each ticket cost around $1,600.
    The girls were met by Mrs. Tarzec or one of her counterparts and driven to various locations in North Carolina. John-Henry Story paid his nephew $50,000 for each “employee” supplied, no questions asked.
    “Counting round-trip tickets for Hamidi, Gross’s outlay was less than five thousand dollars per girl.” I couldn’t keep the loathing from my voice. “Placing his profit at roughly forty-five thousand dollars per transaction.”
    “Yes. Pruet had made approximately the same sending them to France.”
    “Sweet Jesus. How could someone sell his own flesh and blood?”
    “In Ara’s case, it was ‘her.’ ”
    “Sorry?” I didn’t get Dew’s meaning.
    “Ara’s mother turned her over to Hayel.”
    “She sold her own daughter?”
    The snowy cotton stretched, eased as Dew inhaled then exhaled slowly.
    “Ara’s mother is a woman named Gulpari. At age seven Gulpari saw her mother raped by Taliban fighters. When Gulpari’s father tried to intervene, the men shot him.
    “Following the rape, the dishonored widow was shunned. With no prospects for remarriage, she kept her daughters, Gulpari and Noushin, clothed and fed by begging and performing menial tasks.
    “At fourteen, Noushin was sent to marry a man in a neighboring village. The man’s family worked the girl sixteen hours per day and forced her to sleep in their unheated barn. When Noushin was caught trying to escape, her husband and father-in-law held her down and doused her with acid. Two days later, Noushin managed to return to her mother’s house. She died of infection resulting from her burns. Gulpari was twelve.”
    Dew stared at his hands as he continued.
    “Gulpari was raped by the Taliban at age fifteen. Like her mother, she was spurned by the village and treated with scorn. Ara was born on Gulpari’s