by Matt Lincoln
I supposed that one of us had to, but I was going to try to stay hopeful now that we had a real, honest to goodness lead. I wanted to believe that Mikey was still out there somewhere, alive and well. I had to if I was going to keep working this thing. Part of me was afraid to interview the surviving goon, should he dash away these hopes and confirm my worst fears about the boy’s wellbeing.
“Do you two need to wash up before heading back to the station?” Hollister asked, looking me up and down again, and I realized that I really must have been a sight to behold. “I can take the guy in if you want.”
“No,” I said quickly, shaking my head. “There’s no time left to waste. We need to talk to this guy, now.”
17
Ethan
When Nina and I walked into the police station, flanking the handcuffed, masked goon on either side, every eye in the room turned straight to us. I got the sense that everyone there had been waiting for us with bated breath, watching the door for our return.
There were gasps when they saw us, however, confirming my suspicion that I looked even worse than I felt, though some of those gasps could’ve been at the sight of the goon who looked like he was pulled straight out of that security footage.
“Agent Grosse, Agent Marston,” Chief Raskin huffed as he moved over to us as quickly as he could manage. “Are you both alright?”
His eyes lingered on my right side, the one that was covered in the dead perp’s blood.
“We’re fine,” I said, waving him away. “We’ll just need an interrogation room.”
“Sure thing,” Raskin said, sounding a little surprised. “Take any one you’d like.”
We settled on the one closest to the front room of the station, not wanting the perp to be too close to where Curt, Annabelle, Jackson, and Dr. Osborne were no doubt still waiting in the lounge area at the end of the hall. Not only were Curt and Annabelle witnesses who may need to pick our perp out of a lineup, even though they barely saw him at the mall, but sticking a suspect in a room with not only two but three parents whose child he was accused of stealing out from under their noses sounded like a recipe for disaster to me.
Once inside the interrogation room, Nina roughly deposited the goon in a chair and handcuffed him to the table as I took a seat across from him. This was an impressive feat, considering how large he was and how petite she was in comparison.
Once he was all locked up, she pulled the ski mask off his face, dragging some of his hair along with it and causing him to cry out in pain. She smirked at this.
“Thanks for finally letting me take that off,” the man grumbled, giving her a sour look, and I realized that the reason she probably hadn’t taken it off before was that she wanted him to stew some in the summer heat.
“No problem,” Nina sneered as she sat down next to me. “Now, how about we have a little chat? As I said when I arrested you, I’m Agent Grosse with the FBI. This is my colleague, Agent Marston with MBLIS. And you are?”
“Embell-a-what?” the man asked, scrunching his face up in confusion as he gazed at me.
“M-B-L-I-S,” I spelled out for him. “It stands for the Military Border Liaison Investigative Services.”
“Ooh,” the man breathed, his eyes widening at this in alarm. “Did—did you say military?”
“Sure did,” I said, giving him a small smile, and I heard Nina huff with a combination of humor and satisfaction at this reaction beside me.
“You still haven’t given us your name,” Nina said simply, staring straight at him.
The man was almost exactly as I’d imagined, bulky and with an almost swollen face. He had a small dent of a scar above his right eye, right near the temple, with a mat of dark brown hair and an indent on his chin. He looked like a typical goon. Or a linebacker. An old linebacker, as he looked to be in his early to mid-forties.
He looked from Nina to me and back again, as if trying to work out a way out of this. I could almost smell the fumes from the gears in his head working on overdrive, though he didn’t seem to find a solution and continued to just sit there, staring at us dumbly.
“You’re not going to find a way out of this one, my friend,” I said coolly, gazing into his eyes.
There was another period of silence. He didn’t seem to be working a way out of this anymore, however, and his broad shoulders slumped in resignation as he stayed silent.
“Alright, let’s start with your friend’s name, then,” Nina suggested. “You called him Rudy before?”
The guy stared at Nina, then nodded weakly before averting his eyes.
“What about a last name?” she asked.
“He’s not my friend,” was all he said in response.
“Colleague, then?” I asked, searching for an answer in his body language.
“I guess that’s one way to put it,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
I glanced over at Nina, and the darkness that was washing over me at that moment was mirrored back at me in her eyes. This was organized, then. An organized crime ring of some kind. Human trafficking, even. Things were not looking good for little Mikey.
“Colleagues in what?” I asked, a little harsher than I’d intended, and the man flinched. I didn’t particularly care.
“I… uh…” he stammered, looking around the room wildly as if searching for an escape, though he found none.
“Look, bub, you’re stuck with us,” Nina said, leaning forward on the table and peering over at him with a piercing expression. “So you might as well cooperate. Let’s be honest, you’re going to have everything in the book thrown at you anyway, but you might as well not hurt yourself anymore in the process.”
The man’s eyes widened again at this, but he still didn’t say anything.
“Look, she’s right, you know,” I said with a shrug as if to say that I would help if I could, but there was nothing to be done. “You can only make things worse for yourself at this point, and who wants that? You’re smarter than that, right? I can tell you are.”
This couldn’t be further than the truth, but he seemed to relax a little at this, thinking that I may not hate him quite as much as Nina did.
“I… I… my name’s Justin Harper,” he stammered at long last.
“Hi, Justin,” I said, nodding to him in thanks. “Thank you. Now, why don’t you tell us what happened today down at the bay?”
The man hesitated one last time but then launched into a retelling, having worked out that the only way out of this thing was through.
“Well, Rudy and I were waiting for you guys,” he explained. “Looking around to see what you knew, if anything. Then, when we found out that you knew about the boat, well… well, Rudy kind of panicked, you see, and then you heard us, and then he shot at you. I didn’t shoot at you, I swear…”
He looked between us again, appearing to be rather panicked himself. It wasn’t lost on me that he blamed pretty much everything that had gone wrong on his dead companion, who could no longer defend himself. I knew it wasn’t lost on Nina either.
Sure enough, she said, “You sure shot at me a few times. Bad shot, though, if I do say so myself. Didn’t leave a scratch on me, even scared yourself when you did it.”
I realized that this must’ve been the screaming I’d heard as I chased the other goon, Rudy. Nina and I hadn’t had much time to debrief about what had happened away from Justin’s earshot.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Justin muttered, starting down at the table and not even attempting to get himself out of this one. “But I didn’t start it. You get that I didn’t start it, right?”
“Sure,” I relented with a curt nod. “We’ll make sure that the record reflects that.”
Not that it would make much of a difference. This guy was going away for a long, long time, and probably for a good while after that.
“Good, good,” Justin murmured, more to himself than anyone else by my estimation, staring back down at the table after glancing briefly up at me.
“So how
about we talk about what happened at the mall?” Nina suggested. “Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? Why’d you take the kid?”
“It—it wasn’t my idea,” Justin said quickly, looking wildly between us yet again. “It was Charlie’s. It was all Charlie’s, I swear. You have to believe me.”
“Charlie?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “Was that the other man at the mall?”
“Yes, yes, that was him,” Justin said eagerly. “In the brown jacket. His name’s Charlie Black. You can look him up. He’s got a long record in Durham.”
“Durham?” Nina repeated. “You’re from Durham?”
“Yes, all three of us,” Justin said, nodding anxiously. “Charlie’s the only one with a record, though. Well, Rudy was arrested for petty theft a couple of times, and I was in a bar fight once, but other than that.”
“What’s in Durham?” I asked. “What do you three do there? You said before that you’re colleagues.”
“I… uh…” Justin stammered, clamming up at this question and shifting uncomfortably some more, which proved difficult because of the handcuffs.
“What is it?” Nina asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at him. “Whatever it is, it’s going to come out. You can minimize the damage by coming clean now.”
Justin groaned audibly and threw his head back, staring straight up at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling as if he hoped they would sear his eyes away. But they didn’t, and he finally returned his attention to the tabletop, blinking as if he saw dark spots where his vision should be.
Whatever it was, it had to be bad. And he knew it, too.
Finally, he took a deep breath and looked back up at me, though he continued to avoid Nina’s piercing, no doubt intimidating, gaze.
“Well, the thing is, we, uh… work for this… I guess you could call it a gang,” he said, wincing as he said the words.
Dread was filling me from my toes to my forehead again, even worse than before. It sounded like our worst fears were being realized.
“A human trafficking organization,” I said simply, my tone as flat as my stomach. “You work for a human trafficking organization.”
Justin nodded, and I could hear him gulp all the way across the table.
“You have to understand, we never really dealt with kids until recently,” he said quickly. “Not until the boss man realized there was a market for it.”
“Just women then,” Nina said dryly, her eyes filled with fire now. “You just ‘dealt’ with women.”
Justin hung his head, though I couldn’t tell whether it was in shame or because he was mad he’d been caught. I didn’t particularly care. Clearly, he wasn’t ashamed enough to stop him from doing it in the first place.
I practically had to swallow my lunch to keep from losing it.
“When did they start taking kids?” Nina growled when Justin offered up no more explanation.
“About a year ago, I’d say,” he sighed. “I never took one, though, I swear. I didn’t have any part in it until now.”
“You just didn’t say anything and let it go on,” I said flatly, and the man hung his head again.
“Look, you don’t know what it’s like,” he muttered.
“No, you’re right,” I told him, abandoning all pretense of being the good cop in this scenario. “I wouldn’t know what it’s like to make my way in the world exploiting innocent women and children.”
There was a period of silence so tense that you could cut it with a knife before Nina stepped in to try to get some more of the facts straight.
“So this organization in Durham, what are they doing stealing tourist kids from little towns like this?” she asked him.
“We’re not,” Justin said, heaving a long sigh. “Or at least we weren’t supposed to, anyway. Well, we’ve been—or rather, they’ve been. Like I said, I had nothing to do with this part of the business till yesterday—well, we’ve been taking street kids in Durham. Nobody really misses them much, you see.”
My blood boiled. I wanted to beat this guy to a pulp right then and there, and with all the rage that was flowing inside me, I probably could’ve despite his size. Even so, I had to contain my anger. Where would our case be if I did that? So I just clenched my fists beneath the table so hard that it hurt.
Nina’s face was ashen white, and I could tell she was feeling similarly. In all her career, in all the things she’d seen and been through, all the cases she’d worked, even this must be a lot for her to handle. Usually, these cases were a one-off, a lone wolf. Horrible, to be sure, but isolated. This? This was a whole other level of sickness. And that was what it was—sickness.
Justin seemed to notice that his words hadn’t gone over well.
“I mean… it’s just… I mean…” he stammered, trying to find a way to recover from this and failing because there was no way to recover.
“It’s alright,” Nina said coolly, glaring at him. “We appreciate your honesty. Now, why didn’t you take those kids in Durham?”
“Well, we realized the police were starting to get onto us,” Justin said, fidgeting in his handcuffs and avoiding both of our gazes now. “We were taking too many kids too often, and they were starting to notice, even though… Well, I won’t say it again, I guess.”
We knew what he was going to say, anyway. That those kids weren’t worth much, so they never expected the police to notice that they were gone or even care if they did.
But it was our job to protect everyone, no matter who they were or where they came from. Especially kids.
“So, uh, anyway…” Justin continued when we both just continued to glare at him. “On our last grab—that’s, uh, what Charlie calls it.”
Nina let out a low growling sound because this angered her so much, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if I drew blood by how hard I was clenching my fists then under the table. Justin just carried on when we didn’t say anything, not knowing what else to do.
“So, uh, anyway…” he repeated, looking at us each warily in turn. “The police showed up, tried to catch us, and we ran. Just hopped right on the interstate and panicked, Charlie did. He didn’t get off ‘till we got here, and the mall was the first thing we saw. Charlie’s going on and on about how we need a kid, and if we don’t get one, the boss is gonna have our heads. But we can’t take one from Durham ‘cause the police are onto us there. So the next thing I know, he’s running into the mall and grabbing that kid, telling Rudy to wait outside this game store place for us since it didn’t look like anybody was in there and we could go in through the back. Some employee must’ve left it open the night before, so no one noticed, I don’t think. Turned the cameras off while we were in there.”
There was a flicker of realization in Nina’s eyes then, and I realized that this information filled in some gaps that had been eating at her, surrounding the incidents at the mall. This explained how easily the kidnappers had gotten away both times, without being seen by any cameras other than the one from the shoe store or by any witnesses on the other side of the mall from the food court, where the second public exit was. We’d have to confirm with this game store, but the whole thing did line up.
“So you just… took Mikey,” I said flatly, not quite sure what to do with this information. “You just grabbed him in a panic in broad daylight because you didn’t want to piss off your boss and because you were afraid the police would find you.”
Justin bit his lip and nodded weakly.
“Not me, though. I was just an accessory,” he added quickly. “Same with Rudy. This was all Charlie’s idea, remember?”
“And this all… made sense to you?” Nina asked, shaking her head in wonder. “Seriously?”
“Hey, I never said it was a good plan, just that it was a plan,” Justin shrugged. “Well, sort of a plan. More of an impulse after the first plan fell apart, anyway.”
Nina and I stared at each other. This was an insane story, though it did explain some eccentricities of the case: why it seemed both
planned and unplanned, organized and lone-wolf, spur of the moment yet in some way professional.
“You must’ve realized what you’d done,” I said, still trying to wrap my head around all this. “You must’ve realized that we would find you eventually, that the whole country would latch onto this case.”
“Well, I don’t know about the whole country,” Justin said defensively. “I don’t know if anyone could’ve predicted that. And, well, to be honest, we weren’t really thinking much at all when we did it.”
“That much is clear,” Nina said, her voice dripping with her customary sarcasm.
“Tell me this, why were you and Rudy in this getup?” I asked, gesturing at Justin’s heavy clothing and the ski cap that Nina had discarded atop the table. “While Charlie was just in regular old street clothes?”
“Well, that was from the Durham operation,” Justin mumbled as if he was afraid to answer the question. “We had to be disguised to avoid detection, but, uh… one of us had to look normal to, uh, you know…”
He didn’t finish his sentence, but Nina did it for him.
“To lure the children in,” she said curtly, her mouth set in a thin line. “One of you needed to look normal to get them to come with you without making a fuss.”
My stomach churned again as the image of the man in the brown jacket from the security footage luring innocent children into a parked van, away from where they played in the streets and into a life of unspeakable violence and exploitation, seared itself into my brain.
“Alright, so you go into the mall, and you take Mikey, stupid as that was,” Nina continued. “What’s next? You know I ran back into your friend at the mall again later, I’m sure, so what happened in the meantime?”
“He’s not my friend,” Justin protested again, and Nina rolled her eyes.
“Your colleague, then,” she corrected, lingering on the word with some disdain, as if she thought of this man as anything but Justin’s colleague, because that would insinuate that they were in some kind of legitimate business venture together, instead of trafficking women and children.
