Behind the counter near the front door was a young man in his mid-twenties. His uniform was immaculate, his upper body defined with well-conditioned muscles. His left arm was in a sling.
“Help you, ma’am?”
“I’d like to see Captain Ramos, please.”
The young officer stretched and looked mildly annoyed. “Captain’s busy. If you’ll tell me what this is about, then maybe I can help you.”
I considered holding out until I was able to speak with the captain but I ruled that out. They could stall me all day. “My daughter was kidnapped two years ago. Someone at your precinct picked her up while she was still a minor, and instead of getting her help, or calling her parents, or calling the FBI, you put her in lockup and then let her go. I need to speak with Captain Ramos, please.”
The officer sat there for a full ten seconds, absorbing what I had said. Then he picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Captain … woman here to see you. I know, sir … I know … I think you’ll want to see this lady. Yes, sir.”
He hung up the phone.
“The captain says he’s in a meeting right now, but he can see you as soon as it’s over. Someone’s on the way down to escort you there.”
I felt a stab of anxiety. I didn’t know what I was going to learn from this meeting. I didn’t know if they were going to be willing to offer any genuine help. Part of me was terrified that I would find Brenna and it would be too late.
Five minutes later I was sitting in a hard plastic chair outside the captain’s office. The office was to the side of a wide open room with a dozen or so desks. About a third of the desks were occupied, but as I sat watching, the officers in the room left in singles and pairs until there were only two people left.
A moment later the office door opened. A young female cop left the office and walked quickly down the hall.
“I’m Ed Ramos. I understand you asked to see me?”
I stood up and faced the man in the doorway. He looked like he was in his early forties, with close-cropped tight curly black hair and bushy eyebrows. His nose was crooked; it looked as if it had been broken at one time.
“I’m Erin Roberts. I’m here to talk with you about my daughter Brenna.”
His eyes widened for just a second. “Come in. Have a seat, Mrs. Roberts. What can I do for you?”
“I need to know everything you can tell me about my daughter. Where and how was she arrested? What kind of health was she in? And what are you doing to find her now?”
He nodded. “Of course I’ll help. Understand, this is an ongoing investigation, and there are some things—”
I refused to deal with any stalling. “I’ve been looking for my daughter for two years,” I interrupted. “She was kidnapped. She was on the National Missing Persons registries; her fingerprints were on file. She was a minor when your people arrested her instead of rescuing her. I don’t want to hear your ongoing investigation bullshit. I want help finding my daughter now.”
My heart was thumping wildly. I didn’t know those words were going to come out of my mouth until they did. But rage was beginning to boil over that she’d finally been in the hands of someone who could help her, and instead, they treated her like a criminal.
He nodded. “I understand, ma’am. Give me just a minute.” He picked up a microphone and spoke into it. “Sgt. Mackey, Detective Michelson. Still in the building?” After muffled affirmative answers, he spoke into the microphone again. “Need both of you in my office, ASAP.”
He stood and opened the office door. “Sergeant Mackey was the arresting officer, and Detective Michelson is in charge of the investigation. Understand, Michelson won’t have much yet. Until we got the flag from NCIC yesterday, this was a simple prostitution bust. We’re now treating it as a trafficking investigation.”
I winced a little—I don’t know why. I already knew those things. But hearing them in such blunt terms was akin to being punched in the face.
A moment later, two officers entered the room. One was in uniform, a man in his thirties. He looked fit, but blotches marred his face, the burst blood vessels of a heavy drinker. His name tag read Mackey.
The other officer was an Asian woman. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt; I couldn’t tell her age, maybe early thirties, or younger.
The captain spoke. “Mrs. Roberts, this is Sergeant Mackey and Detective Michelson. Mrs. Roberts is the mother of the girl who came up as a NCIC match yesterday. I’d like you to tell her everything you reasonably can.”
Sergeant Mackey looked distinctly uncomfortable. He shifted on his feet and said, “Well, Ms. Roberts, some details are police procedure—”
“You can tell her everything.” The captain’s voice was firm. I felt a sense of relief in response. I’d been half expecting to get the runaround.
The sergeant twitched, and his eyebrows scrunched together. “Captain, are you sure? Some of the details…”
“Everything.”
The sergeant shook his head. Then he said, “Ma’am, I don’t work vice. I’m a supervisor, and I was out on a routine patrol. This stretch of Portland, some people call it the track. It’s where the … the whores and johns hook up.”
I flinched. The detective rolled her eyes and tapped the sergeant on the shoulder. “Please don’t use that word, Mackey.”
“What word?” He looked genuinely confused.
Ramos shook his head. “What the sergeant’s trying to explain is that this is an area with a significant level of street prostitution.”
Mackey gave the captain a look that I read as, Isn’t that what I just said? I wanted them to get on with it. He did.
“Anyway … one of the spots they go to is behind the First Baptist Church. Every morning there’s a bunch of condoms out there. Behind a church, if you can believe it. So around three a.m. I swung through the back parking lot, and there they were. A big Cadillac Escalade, and…” He looked suddenly uncomfortable again. “The subject was in the vehicle with … a john. They were having sexual intercourse.”
I tried to maintain a stone face, even as I wanted to scream or throw up. This was beginning to turn into confirmation of my worst terrors. “What happened then?” I asked.
The sergeant shrugged. “Got them both out of the vehicle, questioned them. She didn’t tell me her name. So I took her in and booked her.”
“What about the man?”
He shrugged. “I gave him a warning and sent him home.”
Rage flashed through me. “You’re telling me that you came upon an adult male who was sexually exploiting a child, and you let the guy go? And arrested her? What the hell is wrong with you?”
A flash of anger swept across the sergeant’s face. “There’s no call for that kind of talk, and she weren’t no child either.”
Ramos said in an angry tone, “That will be enough editorializing, Sergeant. Had you seen the girl before?”
He shook his head. “No. She wasn’t a regular on the track. Dressed better, and not quite as run-down.”
My mind flashed back to the woman in the diner, Jasmine. Was that how this cop saw things? He classified Jasmine as a “run-down whore?”
Some of this must have passed across my face, because the detective put her hand over mine. She didn’t say any words, but the touch reassured me.
“You questioned her?” the captain asked.
“Sure. She wouldn’t tell me her name, or who her pimp was, or where she was from or anything else. I don’t know what else to tell you, ma’am. It seemed like a routine prostitution bust.”
I closed my eyes and silently prayed for patience. I opened them and looked him in the eye. “Sergeant Mackey, for just one minute can you imagine yourself in my position? And put the same kind of concern into this that you would if it were your own daughter?”
The sergeant shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t. I raised my daughter better than that.”
I came to my feet without consciously willing it, my hands balling into fists. I wasn’t the o
nly one. Detective Michelson nearly shouted, “Mackey, get out of here. How dare you speak to this woman that way!”
Ramos shook his head. “Mackey, come see me later. We need to discuss how to talk to the public, understand? For now, you can go.”
Looking angry—as if he had anything to be angry about—Mackey stood and left without another word to me.
I closed my eyes. I needed their cooperation. I needed their cooperation.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry about that.” The words came from the young detective.
“Me too,” Ramos said. “Please … accept my apology. Mackey’s very rough around the edges. But he means well, he’s a good cop.”
Bullshit. A good cop doesn’t arrest a child who is being sexually assaulted. But I didn’t say it.
“Anyway,” Ramos said. “I assigned the case to Detective Michelson because she’s on the Portland Human Trafficking Task Force. If anyone can help locate your daughter, it’s her.”
I swallowed. “Okay. Tell me … what do you know?”
Michelson sighed. “Not much so far,” she said. “As the captain said, he assigned the case to me yesterday afternoon. I’ve done an initial assessment of the case and requested her file from the FBI and Fairfax County police.”
“Have you gotten an answer yet? I can give you the number of the FBI agent in charge. Stan Wilcox.”
Michelson smiled. “Thanks. I’ve met Wilcox, actually. I expect to get whatever they’re willing to share this afternoon.”
“What else?” I asked.
She took a deep breath. “Mrs. Roberts, I don’t know how much you know about sex trafficking…”
“More than I ever wanted to. I’ve read a lot.”
“Okay. Well … we don’t know anything yet. But what I suspect is that Mackey is correct, that she doesn’t normally work the streets. From her mugshot, I would speculate that she was being trafficked on the Internet—Backpage or some of the discussion boards. I’m guessing she hadn’t made her quota that night and that her pimp dropped her down here to make it up.”
I winced. “Her quota…”
Michelson nodded. “Most of the women and girls I’ve encountered since I took this on, their pimps expect them to earn … hundreds of dollars, or more, per night. They can be pretty brutal if they don’t get their money.”
I sighed. Then I whispered, “You said … you have pictures.”
Captain Ramos opened a file and passed over a color printout. A mug shot.
I took it in my hand, and for the first time in two years, I laid eyes on a current photo of my daughter. Immediately her face blurred, and I blinked to bring her back into focus. I held the mug shot in my right hand, but my left hand gripped the arm of the chair so hard it hurt.
Brenna looked tired. Exhausted. And … she looked hard. Her hair hung shoulder-length, her natural brown color, but lifeless. Eyes which once glowed with joy on Christmas morning looked dead. Tiny crow’s feet beside her eyes aged her by ten years or more: in the photo she looked like she might be twenty-five or even thirty years old. She wore a grey sweatshirt that left one shoulder exposed. She looked like a caricature, not my daughter at all. Like a dead person wearing a Brenna costume.
A stylized tattoo marked the left side of her neck, it looked like a dragon. An ugly round white spot marred her collar bone. I couldn’t make out what it was at first. A scar?
A cigarette burn.
It was Brenna. It was my daughter.
Against my will, a series of images flashed through my mind.
Brenna sitting on the floor in our first house, wearing a pink onesie with tiny pigs and angels, her arms wide out beside her, a translucent yellow cloth tenting over her head as she giggled.
Brenna stumbling through her first ballet recital when she was four, as she went twirling in circles away from the other girls, totally uninterested in what the rest of them were doing, laughing and smiling as if she were the only girl on the stage.
Sitting across the table from her when she was nine as she held a handful of UNO cards, a sly look on her face. She always got that look on her face when we played cards, a look of playful competition.
Brenna and Cole leaving for the fifth grade father-daughter dance. He’d rented a tuxedo for the dance, and she’d worn a silver princess dress and sparkling one-inch heels. Both of them had looked so happy.
I couldn’t hold the tears back anymore. I choked back a sob, setting the photo down and balling my other hand into a fist. But then more tears came, and I sobbed again.
Michelson knelt next to me and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Roberts. I know. It hurts.”
That was all it took. A moan escaped me, as I hid my face in my hands and sobbed. Two years of grief and terror poured out of me in a torrent of tears. I struggled to hold back but couldn’t. For five minutes or an hour, I don’t know which, I wept.
Finally, I was able to pull myself together. Barely. I looked at Detective Michelson, studying her compassionate brown eyes.
“Will you help me find my daughter?”
Seventeen
Sam
Mrs. Mullins came to a stop on the track and said, “Sam, what is wrong with you today?”
I slowed down and stopped beside her. I’d been dragging behind through the whole run. It was a beautiful morning, the first time since the school year started when the heat wasn’t so oppressive I wanted to crawl under anything I could just to get some shade.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Why not? Something going on at home? You want to talk about it?”
I hadn’t told anyone yet except Hayley. But Mrs. Mullins was different than any teacher I’d ever had. She understood in ways no other adult I knew was able to. I took a breath and said, “Please don’t say anything to … well, anyone? But, my sister—she turned up alive in Portland. Three weeks ago. We don’t know where she is now, but Mom flew out there yesterday to look for her.”
Mrs. Mullins’ eyes widened and a broad smile spread across her face. “Oh, Sam, that’s wonderful!”
I said in a quiet voice, “I hope so. She … see … she was picked up by the police,” my voice dropped even quieter, to a whisper, “for prostitution.”
Understanding swept across her face. “I see. Well, Sam. She’s alive. That’s the important thing. We’ll pray for her. I’ll ask my church to pray for her.”
I gave Mrs. Mullins a half smile. She was the sweetest lady I’d ever met, but I couldn’t imagine her church would have anything nice to say about Brenna, and even less so about me. But that wasn’t important. Right now what mattered was her kindness.
“Well,” she said. “I’m not in the best shape either. Let’s head back to the office and call it a day.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
We turned and began walking back toward the main building.
Across the field, the class I would have been in was doing calisthenics. Ashley was in that class. I could see her standing near the other students, one hip extended to the side, her hand resting on it, doing nothing while the rest of the class worked out. Was it because she was a cheerleader? Or because she was a walking stereotype? I’d heard her dad was a city councilman or the mayor or something, and she dated the biggest dickhead—I mean football player—in the school. I hated her.
And, to be honest, I wanted to be her.
As we walked, Mrs. Mullins said, “Did you give any thought to my suggestion about the clinic in Anniston?”
I had. A week earlier, she’d asked again if I was in any kind of therapy. When I told her no, she’d given me the contact information for St. Michael’s Medical Clinic in Anniston, a sliding scale clinic which she thought might be willing to see me for free. I just couldn’t see doing it. “I really appreciate it, Mrs. Mullins. But I don’t think I need therapy.”
She chuckled. “Everyone could use a little therapy.”
I smiled. “I know. But really, it’s okay.”
I tried to p
icture the reaction I’d get. I’d be labeled. A transvestite. A freak. And what if they told my parents? I couldn’t risk anything like that.
“Well, Sam, I’m not going to push. But you know I’ll need some kind of good explanation to keep you out of PE next semester. And you still haven’t told me what the problem is.”
“I can’t,” I whispered.
She stopped in her tracks and put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Sam. I won’t push. I just care about you and want you to be okay. You must be going out of your skin knowing she’s alive but not being able to do anything.”
We started walking again, and I said, “I am. I’d do anything to be able to go to Portland with Mom and look. But Dad says I have to stay here and go to school. And … well, Dad can’t travel. He’s on probation.”
She nodded. “I’m so sorry you can’t go. But your parents are right. You need to stay in school.”
Like Brenna had a chance to stay in school? The bitter thought ran through my mind before I could think of anything to say. But I wasn’t going to say that to her.
Back in Mrs. Mullins’ office, I tapped out a quick text message to Mom. Did you find out anything? An alert popped up from Snapchat, a message from Hayley. I opened it. She was in first period history, and the picture showed her with her eyes crossed and her tongue sticking out of the right side of her mouth. The caption said, SO BORED I DIED.
I laughed. Mrs. Mullins raised an eyebrow, and I showed her the picture. She chuckled. “You and Hayley are pretty good friends, right?”
I nodded. “We’re BFFs.” Best friends forever.
“Can I ask you a question? The other day, Hayley had a pretty good bruise on her wrist. Did you see that?”
Jesus. Guilt flashed through me, even though I hadn’t done anything. Or maybe because I hadn’t done anything, and I knew I should.
“She said she fell. On the steps at her house.”
“She lives alone with her dad, right?”
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