EPISODE EIGHTEEN
'the haunting of thomas caleb weir'
"THOMAS WEIR?" I repeated, hollow and shock.
"Thomas Caleb Weir," Quinn corrected. "Before all the glamour and lies, all the smirks and the vivacious, plumped remarks. He was an ordinary man, a boy no less. He was from America. A state called Colorado if I can recall. Now, finding his old, actual self was a bitch. But it's a definitive line though."
"It doesn't... it doesn't look like him at all," I said, turning to Leon for confirmation but he was staring, mouth slightly agape, eyes pained. "Leon. Leon."
Leon swallowed, blinking. "It doesn't look like him."
"Right?" Quinn pulled out pictures of Dominic Prince to how Leon knew him. Shoulders back, arrogant smile, that puffed up, egoistic look in his eyes. She mirrored the pictures back to back with one weeks before his death to the blurry, dim photograph of Dominic smoking. Staring, no haunting the camera with an indecipherable look in his eyes that chilled my core.
I've seen that look before.
Mum had the exact same one in the days I visited her at the asylum.
The memory was a bile in my throat.
"Scary, huh? But here's the thing." Quinn buried the photographs in series of words and news printings. "Thomas Caleb Weir from Colorado, America is the fourth son of a really normal, suburban family in a really normal, suburban town. He had decent grades, he played footy - soccer for our friends in the West - and he was buck tooth, scrawny, and a normal little shit."
Quinn pulled more photographs, this time of younger Thomas. Normal photographs. One of a scrawny kid in footy uniform. Another of a baby, blond and blue-eyed, mouth agape in a frozen wail. Another of a family of seven. Two blond parents and liter of blond children - two young girls surrounded by five older brothers. I couldn't even find Dominic - Thomas, at first. He blended well into the normality of the pictures.
"How'd you find this?" Leon breathed, his eyes touching every photograph, every detail, drinking in every sight of familiar and unfamiliar blond. "He never looked like this. There's - it's something it different. It doesn't look like him."
"We figured that one out, mate," James said, standing up, face severe. "We thought so too, looking at photos. It doesn't feel like him, right?"
"Because he looked happy here," I answered, my mind reeling back in all the times I saw Dominic's face and compared him to this boy. Not the one in the balcony, that one... That one looked like ghosts had found possession of his soul and emptied everything out.
James' grim face was a yes. "He was smiling, sure. But in these photographs, this was a carefree boy who knew no problems, no secrets."
Leon stared at James, jaw clenched. He was blinking back tears, overwhelmed. I moved towards him and took his hand in my own. He was shaking so I squeezed as hard as I could so he would look at me.
His eyes were glittering and it hurt me. It squeezed at my chest, but I kept my expression firm. He couldn't fall now. We were so close to the truth. He was so close.
So he gasped an inhale, nodding. I brushed at his eyes just to keep them dry. "Carry on." When no one moved, sympathetic, his voice hardened. "We don't have time. We have to interview the doctor and get back to the party altogether, how, I don't even know, but we need to get a move on."
"... Right." Quinn cleared her throat, eyebrows knotting. "So here's the stitch. You would think all of this information about Thomas Caleb Weir would be hard as hell, right? Wrong. Well, not really. It was still hard but it wasn't as buried as the rest of these bullshit." She motioned at another screen where I noted several names of some of the suspect. "In fact, when I think about it, it wasn't even buried at all. It was just... gone."
"Gone?" I echoed.
"Let me rephrase. See this?" Quinn pulled up a photo of Thomas, a younger one again but older than the rest of his kid photos. "This was the last ever photo of Thomas Caleb Weir."
I frowned. "But he looks about, what? Fifteen?"
"Close. Fourteen. Awkward limbs, still growing into them. Now, see this." Another photo - no, it was the same photograph but cropped. The bold word on top proclaimed it enough that you didn't need to read the rest of the smaller ones.
MISSING
"Thomas Caleb Weir went missing when he was fourteen years old. There was a full police report, a nationwide search and nothing. A fourteen year old little kid from normal town Colorado went missing. His family mourned, the police couldn't do anything because they had nothing." Quinn pulled up the haunting photo of Dominic again, out on the balcony, staring at the soul of the one who took the picture.
She jutted a pointer at the very same photo, nearly tilting the desktop backwards. "This photo was taken precisely three years after. Seventeen year old Thomas - before that, nothing. No report, not even a single photo until this one. But according to information about this very face, he wasn't Thomas."
"Dominic, then?" I said.
But Quinn shook her head. "No. Nothing. Legit nothing. There's no data of this handsome arse face in any airport of Paris - this is Paris, side note - any private hangar, train, or even bloody street camera. So I couldn't trace where his arse even came from before Paris. Not even a drunk pub shot. His face was never registered in any important document like a bleeding ghost. This face doesn't exist! But that's not bloody fucking all."
Quinn zoomed in on the very photo and it made me flinch. The look in his eyes was making my stomach curdle and flip so I looked away, the nausea escaping me. Then she zoomed in on the face of Thomas from the MISSING person's flyer.
Quinn stood up. "Dr. Hamel, if you will."
Dr. Hamel stood up but sighed. "You can point it out yourself, Miss Fong."
"Really, this is your professional road, I insist."
The man sighed, replacing Quinn in the chair. He grimaced, flinching at the haunted look like I did. Then he cleared his throat. With a pen, he pointed out various parts of the faces in both photographs. "Some of the structures of his face is tweaked. Like he went under some mild surgery. It's not just him growing into his adult form but you can see the difference in the chin and in the nose."
"But he's still recognisable," I said. There was no mistaking that the boy was the seventeen year old version of the one on the right. Even in mild surgery and the... devastating look in his eyes.
"Right, so they didn't done up his face because they wanted him unrecognisable, they did it so they could modify him to grow into his good looks, like an assurance that he was going to be devastatingly beautiful." Quinn shooed Dr. Hamel, sitting down again. "They weren't trying to hide him, they wanted him pretty."
The pit in my stomach started deepening, an idea - a pushing, nagging idea - was slowly booming in my head and it wasn't helping with my sudden bout of nausea.
"They," Leon said. "You keep saying they. Like it wasn't him who wanted to disappear."
"Right." Quinn nodded slowly. "First, what fourteen year old who had no history of abuse and fucked up household would disappear this good for straight three years? Fourteen. Not to mention this photo was an utter fucking fluke. There's no other photo of this boy in the years to come like he's actually the Ghost of Christmas Past. So I tell you, it's a boy who didn't disappear out of his own bloody volition."
"Taken," I breathed, stomach well and truly knotted.
"The very same film with the very same bald guy." Quinn shook his head. "But that's not how I found this photograph. When I say it was a fluke, it was. All I had was a fourteen year old kid who disappeared. The existence of Dominic Prince didn't come to light until he was twenty three. Records were suddenly flushed out of nowhere, glitzy photographs overwhelming the public in this trance like existence of this one glorious man that no one cared truly whether his past was real or not. No one had to delve deeper because they liked the story of the rags to riches boy. A dapper angel adopted by a powerful Italian family."
Quinn moistened her lips then clicked another key. This time, several new photographs popped up. Most of them kids, most of them of missing posters. Another click and photos of men and women in random parts.
The faces were blurry, all just half clear face parts.
"Copper and I went through every missing persons database all over the world, cross referencing the exact same details of Thomas' disappearance. We didn't go through the lot of them, just enough to find the same details, to see if I could find evidence of existence by aging some of their photographs and checking every government agency. Just enough of the exact same situation. Enough to not mistake it as coincidence. We found five, apart from Thomas. Three of them from the US, two in other parts of the world. Now sleuths, will you tell me the similarities in these photos? I didn't see it at all, Mr. Brackham did."
Five blurry photographs, most from street cameras, others taken from other people's phones, caught in their backgrounds.
"All of them are around houses," Leon said. "Two inside windows, another two looking like they're either coming in or out of the houses. And one is getting inside a car."
"And their ages," I said. "They hardly look like adults. And those photographed outside is always around one or two people and those inside...they're naked."
I looked for James, his eyes, his expression for confirmation. When I got it, my knotted stomach dropped heavier. "Dear god." I turned to Leon, prickly tears in my eyes as I pressed my mouth from shaking.
No one wanted to say it, but the clues pointed there.
Human trafficking. These kids were victims of human trafficking.
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NEXT
EPISODE 19
THE PRAYER
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Not gonna lie, I really thought I knew the amount of chapters left for this story (ST is planned by the chapters, DOAP is planned by plot points) but now I don't. Anyway, I hope you like it!
Sound off below if you expected that??