THE FOLLOWING EVENING Max watched Eloise being picked up outside Noah’s Ark by the silver SUV. It had just turned six p.m. He tailed the car to Pétionville, where it pulled into the driveway of a two-story house on a tree-lined residential street near the town center.
Max drove down the road, trained his sights on the house, and parked at the end.
After an hour, he took a walk to check the place out. It was pitch-black outside. Not only was the street completely deserted, but no one seemed to be living in any of the other houses either. There wasn’t a single light coming from any of them. And neither did he pick up a single sound, other than the song of the cicadas and the branches creaking above his head. It was eerily quiet. He didn’t even hear the mountain drums.
He inspected the house from the opposite side of the road. A TV was on in an upstairs room. He wondered if Eloise was watching a video like the one he’d found.
He returned to the Land Cruiser.
The SUV pulled out of the house just after seven a.m. They were almost immediately held up in traffic. Pétionville was already teeming with people milling around the indoor market—a wide, mustard-colored building with a rusted brown tin roof. The streets were already open for business, men and women of all ages selling fish, eggs, live chickens, dead chickens—plucked and unplucked—mounds of questionable-looking red meat, homemade sweets, potato chips, soft drinks, cigarettes, and booze. The country might have been limping and crawling through the ages, but there was a vibrancy about the people in the early morning Max hadn’t ever felt in any American city.
It took them twenty minutes to get on the road to Port-au-Prince and another fifty to make it to the capital. Eloise got out in front of Noah’s Ark and waved to the SUV as it drove away to the Boulevard Harry Truman with a honk of the horn.
Max followed the vehicle along the coastal road. As the Banque Populaire came into view, the SUV indicated that it was turning right into the entrance reserved for staff and VIPs.
Max sped past as the SUV entered through the gates, then he did a U-turn and headed back toward the bank. He drove around the building until he found the customer entrance.
As he was rolling into the public parking lot, he saw someone he recognized walking toward the main doors. The person stopped in midstep, turned around, and started heading back in the direction they’d come from.
There was only a medium-sized hedge separating the two parking lots, staff, and general public. Max could clearly see the SUV and the figure hurrying toward it.
It all made so much sense.
He suddenly understood why Claudette had drawn her kidnapper orange.
It was his hair—that ginger afro.
The Orange Man.
Maurice Codada, the head of security.
That evening Max called Vincent Paul and told him everything he’d found out. Paul listened in silence.
“We’ll go get them in a few hours’ time—early tomorrow morning,” Paul said quietly. “I want you to interrogate them. Get everything you can out of them. Do whatever you have to, to get them to talk.”