The Quiet Ones

by Brandon Massey

  The woman’s medical history indicated she may have been in the early stages of pregnancy and needed to wait for confirmatory testing. Pregnant women are unsuitable for liposuction due to the high risk.

  The second patient was a 39-year-old mother of two from Alabama who died in December 2016 from blood clots in her lungs, according to an autopsy report from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office.

  Faustin performed both procedures at an independent surgery center in Miami associated with multiple patient injuries and deaths and misleading business practices.

  A general surgeon who once worked as a kidney transplant surgeon in Haiti, Faustin told the board he has performed over 3,000 Brazilian butt lifts and more than 4,000 liposuction procedures.

  “He’s a freakin’ quack,” Mallory said. “What the heck is he doing at Sanctuary?”

  “Plying his trade.” Ben had risen from his chair. He leaned against a nearby wall, arms crossed. He tapped his chin with his index finger. “Since he’s banned from official practice, he’s gone underground, I think, working with Father. Doc’s gotta eat, right?”

  “The stable terrified Rachel,” Mallory said, remembering the young woman’s fear. “It scared her so much she refused to go any closer once she showed me the way. Whatever Faustin’s doing in there—almost certainly to young women—I don’t think his patients are signing consent forms, to say the least.”

  “All the girls I’ve seen in town,” Ben said, “the ones who behave like Brides, never speaking, look like they’ve been worked on. Modified, if you will.”

  Mallory thought about the girl they had seen cleaning at the police station, and the two nubile women lounging at the pool at Grey’s property.

  “Big boobs,” she said. “Tiny waists. High, round behinds. Bodies straight out of a teenage boy’s wet dream.”

  “Maid4U.” Ben snapped his fingers. “Made for you. Double entendre.”

  Mallory nodded. “So Faustin is working on these women for customers, maybe. Who are the customers?”

  “Some of the men of Ratliff, for starters,” Ben said. “The motel owner, Earl. The barber I met. The lawyer, Grey. Probably Norwood.”

  “I think they’re only the tip of the iceberg,” Mallory said.

  “Definitely.” Ben bobbed his head. “There aren’t enough customers in Ratliff to support Father’s extravagant estate.”

  “Not by half,” Mallory agreed. “What we really need to figure out is where he’s getting these girls. In Rachel’s case, Father admitted that she had used to live on the streets in Atlanta before he found her.”

  “Have the Brides been modified, except for being muted?” Ben asked. “They haven’t, have they?”

  “From what I could see? No. They’ve got normal bodies.”

  “We’ve got the Brides on one hand, and these other, cosmetically modified women on the other.” Ben held up both hands as if mimicking a scale. “But it would make sense that Father sources them, his product, from the same place.”

  “Human trafficking has exploded in the digital age,” Mallory said. “Black girls are, disproportionately, the victims of it, by a huge margin. It’s not usually some privileged American kid on a vacation in Paris, like that movie Taken. It’s young Black women who get sucked into the state child welfare system—foster homes, group homes, and so on. Girls without a family to look out for them, adoptive or otherwise. Girls like Liz.”

  Ben went silent, head lowered, hands on his waist. Mallory returned her attention to the tablet’s screen, but she was really seeing the faces of those Brides who had attended the morning’s expulsion ceremony. Sifting through her memory like a prospector panning through sand for gold nuggets. She was searching for something familiar: a telling tilt of the head, a curve of the lips, a cast to the eyes. A distinctive marker for Liz.

  Think.

  But her memory returned only a jumbled mass of indistinguishable faces, like a crowd seen through a rain-spotted window.

  She changed her focus, used an online reverse phone number lookup tool to find out the owner of the number from which she had received the threatening text message: Leave town before you get hurt. She didn’t get any hits.

  “The phone was a burner,” she said to Ben. “Dead end.”

  “Of course, it was.” He slumped into an upholstered chair, glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s almost dinner time. Time is flying.”

  “I’m not hungry, but I could use some fresh air,” she said.

  Ben found a chain steakhouse within a mile of their hotel. They lingered over dinner and drinks, not speaking much, each of them immersed deep in their own thoughts and worries. Twice, Mallory spotted women that she initially thought were dead ringers for Liz, but of course, it was only her imagination, seeing what she hoped to see.

  43

  When the young woman finally awoke, she had no idea where they had brought her.

  She blinked; her right eye was still swollen and painful. Faint light filtered from somewhere above her, but most of her surroundings lay in shadows.

  From what she could see: she lay curled in fetal position on a mattress. The room—actually, it was more like a cell—had stone walls. The chamber contained only the bed with a wafer-thin pillow, and a toilet.

  The side of the room opposite the bed had a closed door with a big circle-shaped window set in the middle like a porthole on a ship. It was the only window in the cell.

  She sat up. She moved slowly; it took a prolonged moment for her body to follow her wishes.

  Her joints felt brittle as dry twigs, and she ached in a hundred different places from the beating she had endured at the family’s hands. Cold air raised goosepimples on her skin. She wore an open-back gown like a patient in a hospital.

  She swung her legs to the edge of the bed. The floor was like a sheet of ice beneath her bare feet. She looked up and saw an overhead light, dimly lit and resting within a metal cage.

  She tried to remember how she had wound up there. But it was tough to think in a straight line without her mind rolling off the tracks like a runaway rail car.

  Someone gave me a shot.

  She remembered, vaguely, a man with a bald head shiny as a bowling ball, who wore glasses and a bow tie. He wielded a syringe that he’d jabbed into her arm. But whatever he’d injected into her hadn’t made her feel better. She was certain it had put her to sleep and was responsible for her disorganized state of consciousness and the fragile connection between her brain and her body.

  That was when it struck her.

  She knew exactly where she had been brought.

  The other girls had warned her about this place; although none of them could speak, they communicated with one another via carefully passed notes and secret signals, as they had learned to do in the house. Everyone who passed through the house eventually came here. Some of the girls vanished in the middle of the night, without warning. Others were disfellowshipped from the family for violating some weird house law and tossed into the white van. Still others tried to escape the house—she had tried that once, too—but they never came back, and while the girls wanted to believe their friends had gotten away, no one really believed it, because Father monitored everything.

  And everyone knew that once you came here, to this place where she now found herself, no one ever saw you again.

  The overhead light suddenly brightened.

  She raised her arm to her eyes to block the stinging glare. Her heart leaped.

  She wanted to scream, but she had no voice. The scream she ached to release was trapped in her brain.

  Someone, help me, please!

  But no one would help her; real help never came for someone like her. She and her sister had learned that harsh lesson as young girls, many years ago. They were the abandoned, the forgotten ones living on the margins of society. Assistance always came with strings attached, a price to pay, a theft of the spirit.

  Across the room, the door opened with a click and a whoosh of escaping air. Foo
tsteps approached.

  Trembling, she lowered her arm. The man with the polished bald head and the bow tie had arrived. He wore a white jacket like a doctor.

  He smiled at her, his teeth as white as his coat. Behind the spectacles, his eyes danced.

  “Ah, you are awake now, pretty one.” He spoke with the accent of one from the islands; Haiti, perhaps. “Let me take a look at you.”

  He came closer and reached for her. He had long, slender fingers that reminded her of spider’s legs, with fussily tended nails. The kind of moneyed man who got manicures but still liked to get dirty.

  She tried to lash out at him with her arm, but her arm moved slowly, as if she were trying to move while submerged underwater. He batted away her blow and chuckled.

  “Feisty, are you?”

  With a grin, he snapped a metal handcuff on her wrist. The restraint was attached to the bed frame by a chain. She hadn’t noticed it before.

  She tried to hit him with her other hand, but he grabbed that one, too. Another handcuff snapped on.

  He pressed her onto the bed, on her back. She tried to kick him, but her legs merely wiggled uselessly. He clicked cuffs onto both her ankles.

  She was completely tethered to the bed. She squirmed, digging her heels into the mattress.

  “I see great potential in you.” He gazed down at her. “My pretty one.”

  She spat at him. She was so weak and uncoordinated the saliva didn’t launch past her own chin.

  He chuckled again, like a good-natured uncle. He touched her breast. He squeezed as if testing the quality of a piece of fruit.

  “Good, but we need more, eh?” He fondled her other breast. “Yes, more. You need to be a nice C-cup to bring the highest bids. Nothing less will do for our select clients.”

  He slid his hand along her abdomen. He traced the outline of her waist.

  “Nice.” He pinched her, hard, and a mewl of pain escaped her. “Not much fat here.”

  His hand traveled lower still. She wasn’t wearing any panties.

  Help, please! Someone, help!

  He probed his cold fingers inside her, roughly. She arched her back.

  “Hmm, some tightening will be needed in here.” He clucked his tongue. “You are loose as a worn belt on an old car. Sad for one so young, but typical.”

  He unlatched his gleaming silver belt buckle. He unbuttoned his pants.

  “But we will get to that later.” He winked at her.

  Yes, she knew exactly where she had wound up.

  She was in Hell.

  44

  The next morning, Sunday, Mallory and Ben traveled back to Ratliff. It was a few minutes past seven o’clock. The day was cloudy, hiding the rising sun, and the afternoon forecast predicted heavy rain.

  She and Ben didn’t speak as they breached the town’s city limits. She had to keep reminding herself to breathe.

  Ben looked anxious, too. He clutched the steering wheel and kept the vehicle below the speed limit.

  Like a fugitive who had returned to the scene of the crime, she watched for Chief Norwood—for any Ratliff police officer. If Father had recruited Norwood onto his team, why not the entire department?

  All they needed was to reach Dr. Faustin’s residence on the other side of town. The disgraced surgeon could tell them about his work in the Sanctuary stable. He could give them enough dirt to justify the involvement of law enforcement outside of Ratliff. Outside authorities could force their way into Sanctuary, free Liz, and bring Father to justice.

  She didn’t expect the doctor to share anything willingly with them. She would have to coerce him to come around to her point of view. She hadn’t figured out how she would do that yet, but she was willing to try almost anything.

  “All clear so far,” Ben said as they glided through an intersection. They took a route that avoided the town’s main artery, bypassing the police station and other hot spots such as the motel.

  “Not far now.” Mallory checked the navigation app on her phone. “The good doctor’s place is about a mile away.”

  “Have you figured out how we’ll get him to talk?” Ben asked.

  “I’ll think of something. If he won’t be reasonable, we can beat it out of him.”

  “Beat it out of him?” He glanced at her, eyebrow cocked. “Is that a new reporter’s tactic I haven’t heard about?”

  “Like I’ve said before, I’m not here as a reporter, this isn’t for a story. This is my sister’s life.”

  “Let’s not forget about all those other young women, Mal. There’s more at stake here.”

  “Clearly. Now, will I blast this guy in the face with pepper spray to get him to cooperate? I don’t want to do that. But I’m not ruling out anything, not anymore, not considering the kind of people we’re dealing with.”

  “Flexible ethics.” Ben dragged his hand down his face. He looked as if he had aged ten years in the past two days.

  “Call it whatever you want. We need to take care of business. Yesterday, you were outraged, said you wanted to jam the lawyer’s fishing rod up his ass. Don’t go all soft on me now.”

  “Hey, I’m on your side, Mal. A hundred and ten percent. But I’m hoping things don’t get to that point.”

  A couple of minutes later, when they turned onto the road where the doctor’s house was located, Mallory groaned and said, “Well, shit.”

  A Ratliff police cruiser was parked in front of the driveway that led to Faustin’s rambling home.

  Immediately, Ben braked. He made a sharp U-turn and rolled in the opposite direction.

  “Is he following us?” Ben asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it.” She had turned around in her seat. “They’re one step ahead of us, dammit. After our run-in with the lawyer, they guessed we might go for the doctor. They’re all on high alert.”

  “What next?” Ben kept his gaze fixed on the rearview.

  “Let’s talk to Cecil,” she said. “We need to find out why he lied to you.”

  “Cecil?” Ben scowled. “He’s not obligated to talk to us.”

  “I want to talk to him myself.”

  “You think I don’t know how to talk to people?” He glared at her.

  “It’s not about you, Ben. Stop taking things so personally. I just need to do it my way.”

  “Your way, of course. The Pulitzer nominee’s way.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t look at it like that,” she said. “Do you have Cecil’s home address?”

  “He’s in the phone book, actually. I peeped that out while doing my detective work yesterday.”

  “Good work.”

  “Thanks, coach.”

  He drove into a residential area full of small yards and old, ranch-style homes that were mostly in good condition. She saw few residents outdoors at that early morning hour: someone cutting weeds; another guy working underneath the hood of an old Buick; an older woman clearly dressed for church climbing into a Cadillac sedan.

  “Here we go.” Ben parked at the curb. He pointed to a white ranch home with green trim. It had a neatly cut lawn, the yard bisected by a paved walkway. There were two vehicles parked underneath a carport: a blue Dodge Ram pick-up and a red Honda Accord.

  As they walked to the house, Mallory noticed light glowing at the front window. Someone probably was awake, a good sign, though she had no issues rousing this man out of a peaceful Sunday morning slumber, either. As a former editor had once counseled her: if you want to practice politeness, get a job at a hotel; if you want to practice reporting, get used to pissing folks off.

  She rang the bell and was relieved when the door opened less than a minute later. A pretty, middle-aged Black woman answered. She was already wearing make-up and a white church dress.

  “I’m glad y’all came this morning,” she said. “I was prayin’ you would ‘cause I ‘bout to gave up tryin’ to talk sense to this man.”

  Mallory glanced at Ben. The confusion on his face matched what she felt.

  “Do you kn
ow who we are, ma’am?” Mallory asked.

  “Come on in, come on.” The woman ushered them inside and shut the door behind them.

  They were in a small front room. The television was on, broadcasting a gospel program. The aromas of bacon and coffee flavored the air.

  “I’m Vivian, Cecil’s wife,” she said. “Yes, baby, I know who y’all are. Cecil ain’t been able to stop fussin’ ‘bout it, ‘specially since the chief came last night.”

  Norwood was there? Mallory thought. That couldn’t have been good.

  “I apologize for the early morning visit,” Mallory said. “But it’s important that we talk to your husband.”

  “Is he awake?” Ben asked.

  “Who the hell is that?” Mallory recognized Cecil’s voice, coming from somewhere at the end of the hallway. “Is that them?”

  “Get up here and talk to these folks!” Vivian shouted. “They smart enough to come see you, fool!”

  Cecil wandered down the shadowed hallway. He wore a sleeveless white undershirt and sagging blue jeans.

  He also had a nasty black eye. Mallory cringed.

  “Y’all makin’ my life a livin’ hell!” Cecil yelled. He pointed to the door. “Get outta my goddamn house!”

  “We should go.” Ben put his hand on Mallory’s shoulder.

  Mallory ignored Ben. “Mr. Roberts, please. I’m sorry for the trouble, but my sister’s in danger.”

  “You both gonna be in danger from me if you don’t get the hell out.” Cecil snatched up his jeans. “I’m gonna go in the back and get my piece. Viv, you get them the hell outta here.”

  Vivian herded them back outside onto the front stoop. She was shaking her head. “I’m sorry y’all. Cecil and the chief got into it last night, he’s blamin’ y’all for that.”

  “They got into a fist fight?” Ben asked. “I hope he got a few licks in on Norwood.”

  “I’m truly sorry for all the trouble we’ve stirred up,” Mallory said. “I only want to get my sister out of Sanctuary.”

  Vivian’s eyes were compassionate. “Cecil said he gave y’all Martha Taylor’s address. “Ain’t you been there yet? Over on Shady Oaks Road?”