The place was nothing but dirt and piles of rock, sand, and gravel in various gauges. There is a science to making golf courses; I’d stumbled upon an abandoned experiment. Which was perfect for my purpose. I parked the van deep into the development. Sandwiched between a bulldozer and a container half filled with pipes that looked to have been ripped out of the earth. Heavy clotted mud stuck to the galvanized steel. I wiped the Renault down using a rag. Then I locked it and walked away. Buried the keys in a dirt pile on the way out.

Nazari was sitting on the picnic table looking at the view. I joined her. Two couples dressed in white were playing tennis down below, early birds, retirees. She said, “Old rich people living a life of leisure.”

“What do you mean leisure? That looks like hard work.” It didn’t, the tennis players barely moved. She laughed, and I sat down next to her and looked out over the tennis club. I said, “Let’s talk about caverns.”

She leaned an arm on my shoulder and said, “Ok, talk to me about the caverns.”

I had already told her about what I’d found in Gilles Vaugeois’ library, the way he had mapped out the system of caverns under Alencourt. On paper the underground map looked like a bunch of cartoon speech bubbles. Tunnels from the surface, opening up to bigger spaces, all over the place, underground. Tunnels connecting caverns and linking up, and so on.

So, I told her what I thought, that Gilles Vaugeois had become a target because of what he knew about the caverns. Which led to a hypothesis, the caper was related to two things. First it was clearly related to migrant trafficking. Second, there were the caverns. Either migrants were being held in caverns or housed in caverns.

Which led us to segue into a discussion of the pale dust from the migrant’s feet and clothes. She thought it was because they were being made to work digging the caves. I processed that and added in the dead guy with the Iraqi Ba’ath party tattoo and his SIM card. I said, “There’s a third thing.”

“What’s the third thing?”

“It’s gender. Tell me about the gender aspect of the caper.”

She thought for a second. “The migrants you spotted up near Calais were all male.”

“Correct.”

“And the list on the Iraqi’s SIM card were all female names.”

“Correct again.”

“And we haven’t seen any female migrants.” She looked at me then, hurt in her eyes. Because what we were processing was coming out bad. Nazari had the kind of eyes that change color. More hazel, or more green. Her face was blooming darkly and her eyes were getting real green. She said, “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“It’s about girls, in the end.” She looked away and cursed under her breath.