by Amy Waeschle
Inside the hallway, everything felt muted and closed in. She could hear muffled conversations coming from behind a few of the doors, but if there had been a party here the night before, it had long since ended. She walked to the end of the L-shaped hall and turned right to find four more doors. No names on the doors, just numbers.
A feeling of deja-vu surged through her bones—Reeve. With the help of her three Tico escorts, she had visited his apartment and found it turned upside-down. She had also met Reeve’s neighbor, who had given her the first indication that her stepbrother’s disappearance was more than just some drug-induced binge. A twinge of emotion tangled her insides. Even if I had answered his call, I couldn’t have saved him, she told herself. There’s still time to save Izzy.
Returning to the first door near the top of the stairs, Cassidy took a deep breath, prepared her mind, and knocked.
Twenty-Two
“Are you sure?” Cassidy asked the young woman holding her cat. Pink fuzzy slippers poked from her baggy blue pajama pants adorned with what looked like llamas. Her gray sweatshirt said “Oh My Cosmos” in white lettering.
After leaning in again to look at the picture of Izzy, the young woman at the door shook her head vigorously, her big eyes wide behind large glasses. The ginger-haired cat in her arms purred so loudly it sounded like a machine humming rhythmically. The young woman scratched the cat’s head and he arched his neck for more, his eyes closing in bliss.
“Have there been parties here before?” Cassidy asked.
The woman’s mouth turned down into a frown. “Sure.” Her big eyes took on an impish look. “That’s what college kids do, right?”
Cassidy put her phone away, feeling increasingly desperate. “Which apartments have had parties recently?”
“Oh, uh,” the woman said, blinking fast. Then, she pointed to the corner unit. “That one. She plays soccer. I think the team comes over a lot.”
Cassidy frowned. Izzy wouldn’t have hitchhiked across two states to attend a soccer team party. “Anyone else?” she asked.
“There’s Kyle,” the young woman said, stepping into the hall. “He’s in the business school. He threw one for the solstice. I had to use earplugs.” She pointed at the door in the middle of the hall, unit six. Cassidy had knocked, but Kyle hadn’t answered the door.
“Do you know Kyle’s last name?” Cassidy asked, her disappointment like a black cloud mushrooming over the apartment. Izzy wasn’t here—she could even feel it.
But maybe Kyle was important. An idea surfaced: she could call Bruce again. She could give him Kyle’s name in the hopes that he could find out more about him.
The young woman shook her head and the two of them stared down the brightly lit hallway, the cat’s purr filling the empty space.
After saying goodbye to the woman, Cassidy tried Kyle’s door one more time with no luck. She passed through the hall again, trying to get a sense that Izzy might have walked these same steps just hours ago, but there was nothing.
Descending the stairs to the street, she entered the building across, a Victorian-style with what looked like grand apartments on the second floor, and repeated her search, knocking on doors, showing Izzy’s picture. Half the residents weren’t home, and the ones who were just shook their heads.
After visiting one more building, this one a block behind the first apartment, she returned to the place Saxon had left Izzy and looked around, hoping for inspiration. When that failed, she called Bruce’s number.
“Have you found your wayward college student?” he asked after answering on the third ring.
“She’s in San Francisco,” Cassidy replied, plugging her other ear to block out the noisy cars passing on the street.
“You’ve been busy,” he replied.
“Tell me about it,” she said, deciding to continue her search on foot. There had to be other apartments. Maybe Saxon had the wrong intersection. “Where are you, anyways?” she asked, suddenly curious.
“D.C.,” he replied.
“Oh,” Cassidy said, cringing. “Did I wake you up?” she asked, calculating the time difference.
“No,” he replied, then yawned. “But I was just about to quit.”
“Are you working on the Costa Rica case?”
“Yes,” he replied. When he didn’t elaborate, Cassidy dropped it, knowing he probably had all kinds of things he couldn’t tell her. “Has the media stopped hounding you?” he asked.
“I haven’t had a call since this morning,” she said, then updated Bruce on the Izzy search, starting with the interview of Cody and William in Eugene and ending with her interaction with Saxon Pike. She passed the noodle house that smelled of frying food, and a late-night coffee shop with students hunkered over textbooks inside.
“Saxon said he dropped Izzy at an apartment. That she wanted to go to a party here.”
“Did you find it?”
“No. But half of the residents didn’t answer their doors.”
The line hummed with silence for a moment. “Hold on,” he said. “That name rings a bell.”
Cassidy heard the tapping of keys.
“What name?” Cassidy said.
“Saxon Pike’s,” he replied. “What’s the name of the club?”
“Silver’s. And there’s a second one.” Cassidy paused, digging through her memories. “The Pony Club,” she added as it came to her.
“That’s right.” More key tapping. “I remember hearing about this guy from the domestic team.” He sucked in his breath. “Cassidy, are you still with him?” he asked in a subdued tone.
“No,” Cassidy said slowly. Crossing to the opposite street, she spied a red-brick apartment building and decided to head there next. “Why?”
Bruce exhaled. “Because I remember why this guy stuck out for me. Looks like he’s clean but dirty, if you know what I mean.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” she said as the hairs on the back of her neck went erect.
“The club is legit, but he’s been under suspicion for illegal activity. We’re seeing it with massage parlors too. There was a big bust in Portland last month—we took out a scumbag forcing Thai women to have sex with the customers. I work on the international side of these cases, but the local feds are slowly closing in on guys like Saxon. It’s tough. Their network runs deep.”
“So, Saxon’s clubs are really a front for prostitution?” she asked, thinking of the hallway in the club and how the stripper was leading a man to the V.I.P. room—Dutch had been similarly engaged. Had he paid the woman for sex in that room? Or did they agree to meet up later?
“Clubs like that are basically advertising. No deeds take place inside the walls, but customers who want more can get it. The problem is that some of those customers want certain things and are willing to pay for it.”
“What do you mean, ‘certain things?” Cassidy asked slowly, though she was pretty sure she knew what he was going to say.
“You name it and some sicko has asked for it. Sex with children, for example.”
Cassidy’s insides went cold. “Saxon does . . . that?” she asked, hugging herself tight with her free arm.
“We don’t know for sure.”
Cassidy felt the city air press on her. “Okay,” she said more to herself than to Bruce. Her brain tried to examine this new information, but it was as if she refused to unpack it.
But Bruce continued, as if he hadn’t heard her. “ . . . smuggled into the country, or coerce teen runaways into working for them. We busted a private club a few months ago in Texas that set up an auction for girls who are still virgins.”
Cassidy tried to keep up, but a rising panic was pressing on the walls of her mind.
“ . . . looks Pike has also been indicated in several assaults, but he’s never been convicted,” Bruce was saying, pulling her back to the present.
“Why don’t the girls just run away?” Cassidy managed, feeling like a pit of doom was slowly opening below her. An unknown force pulled her closer
to the edge. “It’s not like in foreign countries, like your cases, where they hold onto their passports then move them across borders. This is America.”
“Sometimes they do,” Bruce said, his voice hardening. “But most of these girls have nowhere else to go.”
Cassidy hugged herself, feeling wretched. “God, that’s awful,” she said.
“Sometimes the men beat the girls if they try to escape. Or they get them hooked on drugs, so even if they do leave, they come back because they know they’ll get their fix.”
“Ugh! Stop!” Cassidy cried. She tried to take a full breath but her chest felt too tight. Then, a horrible thought soared to the surface. “What if Saxon has done something like this with Izzy?” she said. “What if he’s got her somewhere?” Cassidy imagined Izzy riding placidly on the back of Saxon’s motorcycle to some private lair where he did horrible things to her. The pit below her gave a yank.
“Anything’s possible with a guy like that,” Bruce said. “But from what you’ve told me about Izzy, she’s not exactly their target . . . she’s not the right age, for example. He may well have just given her a ride like he said. Have you checked all the apartments nearby?”
Cassidy looked around, realizing that she was on Turk street, the same that paralleled the back of the club. “A few.”
“Okay, well, maybe you could do a little more door-knocking. She might still be with that friend she was supposed to meet for the party.”
Cassidy’s gaze swept from the units across the street to the other buildings. “That’ll take all night,” she said, continuing toward the red building’s entrance.
She replayed the conversation with Saxon in her mind, hoping to snag a detail she missed, when a sudden realization struck her. “How did he know I was a professor?”
“Huh?” Bruce asked.
Her feet stopped moving as she replayed the conversation again, her mind attacking the puzzle. Had she told him about her profession? “Saxon called me ‘professor,’ but I don’t remember talking about my job,” she added, thinking of her U.W. Geology t-shirt. “I think I told him that Izzy was a student, but I didn’t say she was my student.”
“Maybe he guessed,” Bruce said.
“Maybe,” Cassidy replied as her fingers began to shake. She clenched her eyes shut as the sharp smell of the jungle and fried shrimp hit her nostrils. The phone slipped from her fingers.
“Cassidy?” Bruce’s voice called from far away.
Twenty-Three
Mel was dragging her down the stairs of the treehouse. Her breaths felt ragged in her ears as she tried to work the knife free from the multitool in her hands. She could feel Mel’s burning grip on her arm, feel her leg muscles straining, resisting against him. Her arm swung around with the knife glinting in the moonlight. She struck something and Mel cried out. Then she was on her back with Mel slamming her hand into the platform until she let go. She screamed and fought, her body arching off the planks while he pulled the kit from his pocket. I was going to wait, but I can see we’re going to have to do this right now.
Cassidy gasped, feeling locked down, unable to break free. She tried to pull herself back, telling herself that Mel was in jail, that he couldn’t hurt her again, but her heart raced, she was sweating, the smell of the hardwood and Mel’s skin made it so real. It made her think of the stairway to Saxon’s office and how the walls had seemed to press on her. Another wave of panic flooded through her, this time accompanied by pops of color flooding her vision. She squeezed them shut but it amplified the sound of her gasping.
Desperate, she scooped up her phone and hurried away from the horrible sounds and smells flooding her senses. She had the vague sense of watching herself from above as she raced wildly down the street, crossing the busy road without waiting for the light—causing cars to honk at her. With no direction, she ran until her lungs ached and her legs burned. She ran as if Mel was on her heels, a knife raised like a warrior.
Rounding a corner, her toe caught a crack in the pavement and she went down, landing hard on her hands and knees. The sting brought her sharply back from her panic, and she started to cry.
Why is this happening?
She hurried to her feet and brushed off her scraped knees and palms, wincing at the pain. Her shaking fingers dug out her phone to dial the one person she knew could help her. But Jay didn’t answer. She tried to speak into his voicemail, but all she could manage was a wail from the back of her throat.
Breathe deep, she told herself. It’s not real. I’m just overloaded. She looked around, noticing the details of the buildings, the cars parked on the street, the hushed and dark storefronts. But her mind kept replaying her escape from Mel’s. She and Jay had worked through her emotions so that her fear had finally faded, but her lingering conviction that the world was a frightening place had not. She sometimes imagined that the needle mark in her arm had left a scar that people could see. But only she could see it.
Her phone rang and she shoved it against her ear.
“Cassidy, it’s Jay.” Just the sound of his calm voice loosened her terror. “Are you in a safe place right now?”
Cassidy looked around. “I think so,” she said, her voice high and unsteady. “I’m in San Francisco.”
“Are you in danger?”
“No,” Cassidy said, again scanning the street for threats.
“Okay,” he said calmly. “Talk to me about what’s happening.”
Cassidy let out a whimper and tried to form sentences but everything came rushing out and her words blended with sounds she couldn’t control. She broke down completely, her body bucking with sobs.
“I’m so sorry this is happening, Cassidy,” he said. “Try taking a few deep breaths.”
Cassidy clenched her eyes shut and did as he said, focusing on the movement of air until her breaths calmed. A hard, tight feeling spread from a place deep down in her stomach, as if she was digesting rocks.
“When I was traveling today,” she said, huffing out a gust of air as a way to block another outburst. Her brain must be short-circuited because normally she would never jump into a story this way—she always started at the beginning. But telling Jay about the search for Izzy felt too overwhelming. “I thought about what you’ve been trying to get me to see about Mel. That it wasn’t my fault.” She picked at a fraying thread on the hem of her shorts, her fingers shaking. “But now I’ve realized that I’ve done it again, that I’ve let someone dangerous into my life, and now all that strength I suddenly found is gone and I can’t breathe,” she said, her voice wavery. She pinched her upper lip with her lower canines, the sharp points digging in.
“Cassidy,” he said, his voice still composed but edged with purpose. “This sounds to me like you’re having a flashback, and though it feels real, it is not actually happening.”
“I know,” Cassidy protested, her scalp tingling with emotion.
“Can you describe where you are?” he asked. “Tell me about what you see and smell, what you’re hearing.”
“I’m on a street in San Francisco.” She scuffed the ground with one of her flip flops, noticing a trickle of blood descending her shin. “Near the university.” She had ended up on a street lined with modest homes and trees. “I smell exhaust and someone’s laundry.” The thought of clean laundry made her crave the feel of a soft bed. And Quinn’s company. Nobody could steady her like her brother. But he wouldn’t be home for several hours, if his plane was on time.
“Okay. Where is your physical body?” he asked.
The first time he had used this type of direction on her, she had scoffed. Of course I’m here in your office, she had thought. Where else would I be, space? But now, she was used to it, and hearing it now after not seeing him for months had an almost exponentially calming effect. “I’m on a sidewalk. There’s an apartment building on the corner, with little metal railings in front of the windows.” That would explain the laundry, she thought. There’s a laundry room somewhere and the window must be open.
“Good,” Jay said. “Feel your feet on the ground. Hear the cars passing by on the street.”
He paused and Cassidy allowed her senses to explore these perceptions. Her feet felt tired and the ground gritty beneath the thin soles of her flip flops. I am not in the treehouse, she told herself sternly. Mel is in jail.
“I want you to focus on your breathing with me for a moment,” Jay continued.
Cassidy felt an immediate sense of relief when he said this. They had done this many times together, and it never failed to calm her. By the time he finished the exercise, she felt her anxiety ebbing. Her head tipped back and she gazed into the darkness above the trees. She couldn’t see the stars, but somehow knowing they were there pulled her the rest of the way back.
“I miss you,” she whispered.
There was an awkward pause, and Cassidy felt a quiver of renewed anxiety swirl in her gut.
“Cassidy, when we said goodbye, I told you that I would always be available for you. I have enjoyed working with you very much and the way our relationship developed into one of mutual trust. I know it’s tricky to understand, but when you say you miss me, it makes me think that you’re confused about my role in your life.”
Cassidy felt a stab of disappointment so deep it could have been cut by a knife. “I’m not confused,” she said, starting to cry again. Why didn’t he understand? “I just . . . you made me feel safe.”
“I’m so glad you felt that way,” Jay said.
Cassidy calmed her tears with more breathing, feeling a deep sadness bleed into her body. She massaged her sore stomach with her free hand but it didn’t help.
“Cassidy, I know you spoke of your resistance to continuing therapy in Seattle, but you calling me tonight makes me wonder if it’s worth reconsidering.”
Cassidy didn’t reply because she knew she would only let him down with her answer. The thought of having to go through all those painful moments with someone new was too much. With Jay, she had walked many hurtful roads, crying so hard that she couldn’t stop, hurting so bad that she felt wrecked for days. The only thing that helped was exercise—mostly running, these days, though surfing would be her first choice—and working, though she had come to realize that work was just a diversion.
