The Ones Who Never Came Home

Vanya's POV

The next morning, she couldn't lie still in the empty room anymore. The file on the 14 missing workers sat on the table like a debt that kept demanding payment.

To find out who Victor Blackwood was and why he was tied to these disappearances, Vanya decided to leave Queens and go find the victims' families herself.

She went as a caseworker from a legal aid nonprofit that existed only on a laminated badge and a single-page website Jonah had built for her two years ago. People opened their doors to caseworkers. They opened them even wider when the caseworker looked tired and wore flat shoes.

Her first stop was a cramped two-bedroom apartment in the Bronx.

The elevator had an OUT OF ORDER sign taped to it that had faded almost white. Vanya climbed five flights through a stairwell that smelled of cumin, bleach, and wet dog, past doors hung with plastic wreaths and saints' pictures and one hand-lettered sign that read NO SOLICITING, THIS MEANS YOU, EDDIE.

A photo of Mateo Morales was stuck to the refrigerator door with a strip of yellowed tape. In the picture, the 19-year-old was grinning in the sunlight on a beach, holding a battered old guitar.

It was the only picture of him left in the cramped two-bedroom apartment.

"He said he was working nights for a staffing company," his mother—Rosa Morales, a woman in her forties with dark circles under her eyes and brittle, frizzy hair—said, her voice breaking.

She reached out a thin hand, crisscrossed with blue veins, and stroked the photo.

"He said the job paid twice what the bakery did. He wanted to save up to start community college next year. But that night... he left, and he never came home."

"Who hired him?" Vanya asked. "Did he ever mention a name?"

Rosa shook her head, then stopped. "A woman came to the bakery. Tall, very pale, beautiful like a movie, you know?"

She looked at the photo on the refrigerator. "She bought nothing. She just talked to Mateo by the door for a long time, and when she left, the whole shop smelled like flowers."

"What kind of flowers?"

"White lilies." Rosa's mouth twisted. "Like a funeral. I told him, mijo, that woman smells like a funeral, and he laughed at me."

Vanya sat still on a chipped plastic chair with a small notebook open on her thigh.

Mateo's room had been kept exactly as it was for 18 months. The single bed was made with the sheet pulled smooth, his work clothes were folded neatly at the foot of the bed, and a die-cast model car sat quietly on the bookshelf. His mother still cleaned her son's room every day, as if at the first sound at the door, Mateo would walk in and say he'd just gotten off work late.

A mason jar on the windowsill held dozens of guitar picks in every color, and a poster of a band Vanya didn't know was taped above the bed, its corners curling. On the desk, a community college brochure lay open to a page about music production. Someone had circled the tuition in blue pen, twice.

"The police said he ran off on his own," Rosa said, sniffling as she wiped her tears with the hem of her shirt.

"But Mateo would never leave me. He knew I had arthritis and needed money for medicine every month. Somebody took him... Somebody swallowed my boy whole!"

Rosa reached across the little table and caught Vanya's hand before she could pull it away.

The cold needles bit at once, a bright, stinging spray of them under the skin. Vanya's whole arm went rigid. It took everything she had to keep her face still, and to turn her wrist slowly, so that the woman's fingers closed around the cuff of her sleeve instead.

Rosa held on to the fabric as if it were a rope. Vanya let her. She sat there and let her hold it until the crying slowed down, and neither of them said a word about it.

The thick despair in the little room pressed hard against Vanya's chest.

The 14 missing people in the Blackwood file were no longer dry lines of names, lifeless numbers, or black-and-white ID photos. They were flesh-and-blood human beings, with dreams, with families, and with people who loved them and were wearing themselves out waiting for them with no hope.

She thought, without wanting to, of the people she had killed. Most of them had deserved it by any measure she knew. She wondered anyway whether any of them had mothers who still made their beds every morning, and she couldn't make the thought go away.

After she left Mateo's home, Vanya went to the second address in Flushing: the home of Chen Wei, a 32-year-old electrical engineer who had recently immigrated to America.

At the door of the cramped, musty apartment, Vanya was met by a little girl of about six. Her round black eyes opened wide as she peered at Vanya through the crack of the door.

"Are you the police, ma'am?"

The little girl's voice was clear, but it had worry in it.

"My daddy went to work a long, long time ago and he hasn't come home. Mommy says Daddy went far away to make money to buy me a doll, but I don't need a doll... Can you find my daddy and bring him home?"

Vanya went down on one knee on the cold floor and looked into the child's innocent eyes.

Her throat locked up. A bitter lump rose from somewhere deep inside her. She couldn't promise, and she couldn't lie. She only gave a small, silent nod, put a chocolate bar in the child's tiny hand, and walked quickly back to the stairs.

She had made it to the third step when a small voice said, "Wait."

The girl held out a sheet of paper torn from a coloring book. On the back, in thick purple crayon, was a tall stick figure holding a lunch box, a sun with a face, and four uneven capital letters: DADY.

"So you know what he looks like," the girl said.

Vanya took it. She folded it once, very carefully, and slid it inside the cover of her notebook, where it would stay for a long time.

A woman appeared in the doorway behind the girl, drying her hands on a dish towel, and said something sharp and quick in Mandarin. The child ran back inside.

The woman looked down the stairs at Vanya, at the badge, and back again. "He is engineer," she said in careful English. "Good engineer. In Shanghai, he build bridges. Here, he wash dishes."

She disappeared and came back with a single pay stub, folded into quarters and soft with handling, and held it out over the railing. East Asia Employment Agency. Placement fee deducted.

The fee was more than half his first month's pay.

Cross-checking the data from both visits confirmed what Vanya suspected.

The agency's old address in Chinatown turned out to be a narrow storefront squeezed between a herbalist and a shop that sold paper lanterns. The windows had been papered over from the inside, and a FOR LEASE sign hung crooked on the door.

Through a torn corner of the paper, Vanya could see a bare room, a single metal desk, and a calendar still pinned to the far wall. There was a small white lily printed in the corner of it, very fine, like a watermark.

She took a photo through the gap. When she stepped back, the old woman in the herbalist's doorway was watching her, and she said something in Cantonese that Vanya didn't understand and then spat, precisely, onto the sidewalk in front of the agency door.

Mateo Morales and Chen Wei—and the other 12 victims too—had all applied through the East Asia Employment Agency.

Following the money transfers and the canceled powers of attorney, Vanya broke deep into New York State's locked commercial databases.

A matrix of shell companies came up on the screen.

The East Asia Employment Agency was funded directly by a private investment group called Apex Capital. And the entire controlling stake in Apex Capital belonged to a very private trust: Dumont Holdings.

She sat back from the screen. It was 4:00 a.m., and the laptop fan was whining like a mosquito, and the three layers of shell companies lay open in front of her like a set of nesting dolls. The smallest doll at the center had a name.

Dumont Holdings.

Vanya wrote the name down in her notebook.

She had never come across the name Dumont in any criminal file or among New York's mob families. Victor Blackwood ruled the territory of Manhattan, but the ones who had rounded up these 14 people were a power called Dumont.

Was this a hidden war between rival powers, or was Victor Blackwood just the front for a darker plot?

She didn't call Jonah about it. She didn't call anyone. Some instinct she couldn't name told her that a name like that should be carried quietly for a while, like a round in the chamber, until she understood exactly what it was for.