Nikki made short work of talking to the respective dock masters. While I was confident a fake ID, clipboard, and tablet with a spreadsheet might do the trick, it always took some fast talking to keep them from calling a boss. With Nikki using her will on them, it was instant cooperation.
Now that I thought of it, the idea should have been making my skin crawl. When did I reach the point that I was okay with a vampire clamping down on the will of others in order to get answers?
I wanted to believe it was for a good cause, but that was the kind of "ends justifies the means" thinking that almost always led down a certain path of good intentions.
"Here's the info you're looking for, ma'am," Parker, the fourth dock master we had come to pointed to a line on the screen, indicating the truck number we had given. I followed the line across to the container number, and the ship it had come from, The Heaven's Barge, which was the translation of the Chinese name which preceded it.
China made sense; it would be rife with artifacts that could be smuggled. Though the government was communist, many of its citizens had thoroughly embraced corrupt capitalism. Hong Kong and Macau made for two of the biggest smuggling ports in the world. Singapore probably beat them out, and. . . . Well, what do you know, the row of the spreadsheet listed Singapore and Hong Kong as ports.
"Is the ship still here?" I asked.
Parker clicked the mouse a few times, then nodded.
"What about the container that the truck was loaded from?
More clicks. A nod.
"Is that container alone or part of a group?"
Click, click. “Hmm, yes. Looks like 4 containers.”
“Any more deliveries to this address?”
I supplied him the address of the Fairhaven Club’s loading docks.
He opened another window in the software and searched. A list of scheduled deliveries popped up over the course of a few weeks.
I looked over to Nikki standing in the doorway. I nodded.
She nodded.