by Willow Rose
That was the one thing I couldn’t promise him.
THE END
NEVER EVER
Eva Rae Thomas Mystery, Book 3
Prologue
Miami, Florida
Earlington Heights Metrorail Station
Orange Line
Southbound
Chapter 1
He got in through the third door after the train pulled in at 7:58 a.m. as usual. Ryan Scott was holding his Starbucks coffee in one hand and had his backpack slung over his shoulder. Once inside, he spotted a free seat and moved toward it, then sat down. The train departed and rattled along while Ryan sipped his coffee and went through the news headlines on his phone.
Ryan had just landed a summer internship at The Miami Times and had to make sure he was updated before today’s editorial meeting. The dream was to become a reporter, but the road was long. As a part of his Master of Journalism program at the University of Washington, he was required to do a six-week-long internship. He was still going through training but needed ideas to pitch so he could one day do his own story. Ryan knew he needed to stand out from the crowd, and he had learned that, in order to do so, he needed a good story. The newsroom was always on the hunt for the next big breaking news story, and he needed to pitch some original ideas and demonstrate initiative. He desperately wanted to see his name in the paper.
Of course, he did.
The train came to a stop at Allapattah and some of the passengers left while new ones boarded. A black woman sat next to Ryan, and he moved his backpack to make room for her. The train was getting more crowded now, as usual, as they headed south toward downtown Miami.
Ryan smiled politely at the woman who sat down next to him with a heavy sigh. A poster on the wall across from them asked if they suffered from schizophrenia in both English and Spanish. The woman wore striped pants and sat with her big green purse in her lap. Across from them sat an old man, and next to him, a young teenage girl, holding a bag. Ryan smiled at her as their eyes met, but she didn’t smile back.
Santa Clara station came and went, and more people came onboard wearing light clothes and sunglasses. The AC on the train wasn’t very good, and it was hot. Ryan felt his hands getting clammy as more people came on board. The train moved along next to the road below, and Ryan looked down at the rows of cars that were stuck in a jam, while the train shot through town nice and smoothly. A man about Ryan’s age was reading a book in the corner, while another man was holding his briefcase close like he was afraid that someone might steal it. A Hispanic-looking teenage girl at the other end of the train seemed lost in her own thoughts. The window behind the old man had been tagged with graffiti, blocking the view.
Ryan looked at his phone again when the train approached the Civic Center. Ryan stared at the old texts from Susan and wondered if he would ever see her again. She had been ignoring him for days now, and he feared she was moving on. Ryan had liked Susan and wanted there to be more. But she wasn’t answering any of his texts anymore, and the last time he took her for dinner at the Olive Garden, she had been distant and continuously on her phone.
Ryan closed the phone with a deep sigh and looked up as the train’s brakes screeched loudly, and they came to a halt. At the Civic Center, a lot of people got up, including the young girl in front of him. Ryan still had two stops left, and he leaned his head back when his eyes landed on something underneath one of the seats. Some liquid of some sort was slowly seeping across the floor. Ryan felt his eyes stinging and rubbed them, then felt an unease in the pit of his stomach.
In a sudden attack of inexplicable panic, he rose to his feet and elbowed his way out through the crowd. The doors were about to close as he jumped out at the last second and into the car behind him, heart beating fast in his chest as the train took off once again.
Chapter 2
As the Orange Line southbound arrived at Government Station and opened the doors, the crowd waiting to get on board didn’t realize at first what was going on. As usual, they approached the doors, waiting for them to open, so people could get out and then they could get in.
Evelyn Edwards was one of those waiting for the train. As always, she took the train from Government to Douglas Road, where she worked at Nordstrom in Merrick Park. Evelyn had her driver’s license revoked after a DUI and had found that taking the train was actually a lot easier than being stuck in traffic every day.
On this particular day, Evelyn was lost in her own thoughts, thinking about her grown daughter, who she hadn’t seen in four months. She had called her the night before to apologize once again, but she hadn’t picked up. Evelyn felt shameful and wanted to tell her just how sorry she was for the things she had said. She also wanted to tell her daughter that the drinking had stopped now and she was doing AA, this time really doing the program with all the steps and not just sitting there because she had to. She wanted to tell her that she was better and that things had changed. Really changed this time. She wanted to tell her all those things, but her daughter wouldn’t even answer her darn phone.
Don’t you know you’re all I’ve got?
Evelyn was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice the passengers behind the doors. She didn’t see their crying and strained faces as they were pressed against the glass, nor did she hear the hammering on the doors or the desperate cries for them to open.
When the doors did slide open simultaneously, and the passengers inside, screaming and gasping for air, tumbled out, Evelyn didn’t even look up from her phone. She was looking at her background photo, a picture of her daughter taken on the beach when she was only five, the day she remembered as one of the best in her life.
Before everything turned bad. Before she started to drink. Before Juan died. Before she lost Pablo while eight months pregnant. Before the clouds darkened above them. Before she cried in bed all day. Before the fog of grief made her a prisoner in her own mind and destroyed everything.
Before all that.
We can go back, can’t we? Can we find ourselves again?
Evelyn lifted her gaze and realized that the crowd in front of her had dispersed and an entire flock of passengers staggered toward her. Several of them collapsed in front of her feet. One woman came toward her, and Evelyn didn’t notice her before it was too late, and she collapsed in Evelyn’s arms. Blood was gushing from her nose and eyes, and she was gasping for air, choking and wheezing.
Evelyn shrieked fearfully and pushed her away, just as a man sank to the ground in front of her, his rag-doll-limp body falling to the platform with a thud. Evelyn stood, paralyzed, and watched this, blood smeared on her clothes and hands, while hundreds of people lay gasping on the ground, reminding her of the fish on her father’s boat when she was a child.
A man in front of her lifted his head and looked her straight in the eyes, then breathed his last breath with a deep sigh. Seeing this, Evelyn whimpered, then turned around, wanting to get away from there, fast, when she suddenly stood face to face with a soldier. He, and the rest of his troop coming up behind him were wearing gas masks and clothes that to Evelyn looked like spacesuits.
ONE MONTH LATER
Chapter 3
“We’re here for your annual inspection.”
I showed the small woman behind the front desk my identification card from Florida Department of Health, moving it very quickly to make sure she didn’t get a proper look at it and realize it wasn’t me on the picture, but someone who looked remotely like me. The woman had told me she was the manager of the spa.
“We need full access to the premises, please,” I said.
We were me and my sister, Sydney. I called her that even though it wasn’t the name she went by these days, and no one had called her that since she was seven years old. She was known publicly as Kelly Stone, the Hollywood actress. Still, I insisted on calling her Sydney, which was her birth name before our biological father stole her in a Wal-Mart and kidnapped her to London, where she grew up apart from me. I, on the other hand, grew up on the Space Coas
t in Florida with our mother, believing my sister was dead and gone. We had recently found one another after thirty-six years apart. It wasn’t easy to reconnect after all this time, especially not after her scumbag of a boyfriend had kidnapped my daughter, Olivia, and sold her to an even worse scumbag on the Internet. Sydney, naturally, felt terrible about it, and that was why she had insisted on helping me find her again. As a former FBI agent, I had told her I was capable of doing this myself, but still, she had shown up at my house, ready to go on the day I had decided to leave. There wasn’t anything I could say to talk her out of coming.
So, here we were — two sisters on a road trip through Hell.
We had been on the road for three months now, following my daughter’s tracks, searching for the man they call the Iron Fist. Our search had led us to this place, The Orient Spa in Leisure City. The badge, I had stolen from a real health inspector in Palm Bay. It granted me access to places like these, where I could do my search. It wasn’t exactly legal, any of it, but I was way beyond playing by the rules. My daughter was missing, and I was getting her back. No matter what it took. There was no way I was going to give up on finding her.
Never. Ever.
Sydney stood behind me, still wearing sunglasses so no one would recognize her. She had dyed her hair black and wore fake colored contacts whenever we went anywhere. I was naturally terrified that she would end up drawing attention to us, but I had to admit, she was doing pretty well at hiding her identity. I guess it came in handy that she was an actress. She even spoke completely different, hiding her British accent with a heavy American one.
The small Asian woman in front of me nodded. I saw her eyes grow weary.
“Yes, yes, of course. Go ahead.”
We were pretending to be looking for roaches and rats in a routine inspection, so Sydney and I walked around the lobby and soon spotted a door leading to the back.
“What’s behind that door?” I asked.
“Just the office in the back,” the woman said, shifting on her feet, clearly feeling uneasy.
I smiled. “We’re going to need to check that as well.”
Her eyes grew big. “Oh, really? It’s messy back there. There’s nothing there. Costumer never come there.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It can still pose a health hazard. We need to check everything.”
“But old health inspector never went in there,” she said. “He says it not necessary.”
I smiled again. “Well, that’s probably why he isn’t here, but I am. Open the door, ma’am.”
Chapter 4
The manager fumbled with the keys as she opened the door. The two other women who were introduced as massage therapists stayed behind, while Sydney stayed with them.
“We are up to date on all licenses,” the manager said.
“That’s good,” I said indifferently and rushed in as soon as she had pulled the door open. The small woman hurried ahead of me. She ran into a room to our right, and I went in after her. As we entered and I spotted the mattresses on the floor, she tried to cover them up with a blanket. I still managed to see clothing and personal hygiene items before she covered it all up. Seeing this made me feel uneasy. The manager was visibly nervous while trying to cover up the items.
I continued down the hall and found another room — same thing. Mattresses spread on the floor, bedding, clothes, stuff for personal hygiene. There was a small refrigerator in the corner. I opened it and found it filled with food and drinks. A trash can had empty personal care items in it, mouthwash and shampoo.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on here.
I rushed out the door back into the hallway, the small woman getting nervous now.
“Where you going, huh?”
Not answering her, I walked down the hall and tried to open a third door. It was locked.
“Open this,” I said, my pulse quickening.
The woman stared at me. “I can’t. No key.”
I didn’t think about it twice. I gave the door a violent kick, and it slammed open.
Just as I thought. Behind it, staring back at me sat eight young girls. Their eyes glared at me anxiously; their arms were wrapped around each other. Some were crying. All were dressed in barely any clothes.
The sight made me sick to my stomach. I turned on my heel, walked back in the hallway, and spotted the manager. She was backing up toward the exit when I pulled my gun from the holster and pointed it at her.
“You’re not going anywhere. Get back here, now.”
Sydney came up behind her, blocking her way out. The manager stared at the gun, then up at me.
“We’re going to have a little chat,” Sydney said and grabbed her by the neck. “In your office.”
Sydney pushed her into the office, and I came in, then grabbed her and pressed my gun to the back of her head, pressing her down onto her desk. My hands were shaking when imagining one of these girls being Olivia. This was the fifth of these types of joints we had hit just in the past month, and everywhere it was the same — girls dressed in nothing, malnourished, confused, and scared. They would tell us stories of being taken and of many men coming to them at night, of being raped by hundreds of them a day, and of being shipped from one spa parlor to another during the day, entertaining more men than you’d want to think about.
It was beyond disgusting.
And one of them, somewhere out there, could be my daughter.
I couldn’t finish the thought.
“I have money,” the manager began. “I pay, you…”
“Shut up, lady. Shut up and listen to me. The way I see it, this can go two ways. Either I call the cops right now, and all of you end up in jail for many, many years.”
“Or...?” the woman asked, her voice filling with hope.
“Or you give me what I want.”
Chapter 5
Just like the rest of them, she opted for the second solution. Of course, she did. I let go of her neck and let her sit down in a chair. Her hair was a mess as it had come out of her tight bun, and her eyes were anxious. She was broken. Just the way I needed her to be.
“What you want?” she asked.
I sat down in front of her; the gun still lingering in my hand.
“There’s a man they call the Iron Fist,” I said. “I need to get to him. I need to know where to find him. The last place we busted told us you might know.”
The woman’s eyes went from anxious to terrified as she looked up at me. She shook her head.
“I don’t know no Iron Fist.”
“And we’re back to lying again,” I said with a deep sigh. “You have a tell, do you know that? I’m sort of an expert in people and profiling them, and I can see straight through you. You wanna know how? You roll your lips back when you tell a lie, and you gesture with both hands after you have given me your answer. Both are ‘tells.’ So, do you want to tell me the truth, or should I call my friends at the sheriff’s office?”
The woman’s nostrils flared a couple of times, and her eyes lingered on me. I placed a picture of Olivia in front of her.
“I am looking for this girl,” I said. “Have you seen her?”
The woman looked at it, then shook her head. “No.”
I studied her. There were no signs that she was lying this time.
Dang it!
“All right, back to the Iron Fist. What do you know about him?”
The woman’s lips quivered as she opened them to speak. “He buy girls,” she said.
I nodded. “And where does he get those girls?”
She shrugged. “Wherever he can. Internet mostly.”
“Has he bought any girls from you?”
The woman looked at me, then swallowed. She answered with nearly a whisper.
“Yes.”
“And where does he take those girls?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You’re doing it again, the lip thing,” I said and looked at Sydney.
“She’s doing it again.”
Sydney nodded. “I saw it.”
The woman exhaled. “Okay, he take them to Miami. That’s all I know.”
“Miami, huh? Where in Miami?” I asked, feeling relieved that we were finally getting somewhere.
“I don’t know.”
I could see no sign that she was lying, unfortunately. Miami was a big city to look for one man. But it was better than nothing. I was closing in, and that, at least, was something. I just hoped the guy still had my girl and hadn’t sold her to someone else. With the stories I had heard from most of these girls, I wasn’t too confident that she had remained in the same place for all this time. But it was the only lead I had, and I knew from experience that if you kept digging in the same place, at some point, you’d find something.
I rose to my feet and looked at my sister. “I guess we’re going to Miami, then.”
The Asian woman nodded, probably just happy at the prospect of us leaving. I glared at her, anger rising inside of me as I thought about her and people like her who lived by keeping these girls in slavery. What I had seen in the past three months had broken my heart to pieces.
The woman got up too. “So… no police?”
I stopped in my tracks, then leaned over and slammed my fist into her face so hard I heard her nose break.
“Yeah, about that. Turns out I have a tell too. When I knock out scumbags like you right after telling you that I won’t report you to the police, then I’m actually lying. Guess you should have known that.”
Chapter 6
We left the three women in the back office, tied up with strips. As soon as we were in the parking lot, in the mini-van that Sydney had bought for us when we decided to leave my old car because we knew it would be tracked after our first bust, I tapped the number of the local police enforcement.
