Winter Flower

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  I was trying to figure out how to say some of what I was thinking, how to put some of this into words.

  The thing was, at least for the last couple of years, neither of my parents had been there for me. Not just the big stuff, like being a girl or losing Brenna, but the small stuff too. They just checked out.

  What if we found Brenna? What if we brought her home and Mom and Dad still hated each other? What if we brought her home and all they could do was fight in front of her? I sighed.

  Well, if they couldn’t get it together then at the very least I would be there for my sister, no matter what happened.

  “What is it?” Dad asked.

  Could I even say what I was thinking? How could I?

  “Sam. You can talk with me.”

  “I’m afraid…” I felt my chin began to tremble and I stopped. I closed my eyes and said to myself, say it. I opened my eyes and looked at Dad. “I’m afraid we’ll find her and bring her home and nothing will be any different, because you two will be fighting or hiding from each other all the time and Brenna won’t be able to … be able to…”

  I closed my eyes, struggling to hold back tears.

  Dad said in a quiet voice, “You are afraid that Brenna won’t heal if me and your mom are still at odds.”

  I nodded. But I whispered, “Yeah.”

  Dad exhaled, his shoulders visibly sinking. “I’m afraid of the same thing, Sam. But I promise I’ll do my best.”

  There wasn’t much more I could ask than that.

  The waitress dropped our check off at the table, but for the moment we were stuck until the police let us go. So we waited and finished our coffee. A couple of minutes later both officers came back into the restaurant and approached the table.

  The older officer said, “Y’all are free to go. Sorry about the trouble.”

  Dad shook his head. “No problem. I’m glad you’re looking out for folks.”

  Five minutes later we were on the road again headed northwest.

  Brenna

  Nialla said, “We’ve got to talk, Strawberry.”

  I looked at her wordlessly. The room was heavy with the pungent smell of marijuana smoke from my pipe. I took a deep drag as I listened to her.

  “Baby, if we’re going to get away, you’re going to have to lay off of that stuff for a while.”

  If we were going to get away. That was never going to happen. Rick would come right after us and that would be the end.

  For three days the flyer had been burning in my mind. I’d memorized every word. I’d thought about it constantly.

  But I couldn’t call. It wouldn’t just be me that Rick killed. I wasn’t going to put Mom or Dad or Sam in that kind of danger. He would come after me, and he would hurt them.

  I took another deep drag. I was still in a considerable amount of pain from a client who had gotten too rough the night before.

  At least the bleeding had stopped.

  Nialla looked distressed. “Strawberry, come on. Please? Just listen?”

  I shrugged. She leaned close. “We can do this. I figured it out. When we run, we can head south, to San Francisco. I figure if we work a week or two we can raise enough money to fly to Hawaii. Rick won’t have a clue. He’ll never come after us that far away. Besides, he’ll be happy here with Kaylee.”

  The thought of Kaylee made me shudder. Was she less of a fool than I had been or more? I had, at least, been older. Thirteen was too young.

  “It’s a fantasy. Don’t waste your time.” I felt immense weight on me as I said the words. I just wanted to curl up and be left alone.

  Nialla shook her head. “We can do this. We can.” Tears were running down her face as she said it. “I want out.”

  Bitterness was all I could taste. “What’s your name? Not the name he gave you. What’s your real name?”

  She whispered, “You know my name.”

  “You don’t want to say it? You can’t? Because I can’t remember. All I know is the name he gave us. All I know is to fuck who he says to fuck and to go to the bathroom when he says to go to the bathroom and to sleep when he says sleep and eat when he says to eat. I don’t know anything else.” My voice raised higher and higher as the words spilled out of me.

  Her face was bleak. “Laura,” she whispered. “My name is Laura.”

  I desperately wanted to hear my own name spoken. But it was too late. I heard a loud click, the hotel room lock, and the door opened.

  It was Rick. He leered at us as he came in. Was he drunk? He looked at both of us with an amused expression. “Turn out, hoes.”

  I felt a chill even through the weed haze. “Turn out” meant to turn out our pockets, our purses. It meant to give him any money we had—which most of the time was nothing—and it was often a precursor to violence if he believed we were hiding something.

  Nialla rolled her eyes, but I wasn’t taking any chances with him. I grabbed my purse and dumped it out on the bed. The contents made a pathetic little pile. I had a pack and a half of cigarettes. A bag of weed, and another bag of assorted pills—Xanax, Valium, and Oxy. A box of condoms. A fake ID from Maryland identifying me as Miranda Harrison. I had a prepaid cell phone designed for children, which allowed me to dial two numbers only—Rick’s and Nialla’s. Hair ties, makeup, lipstick, lubricant.

  The contents of my purse were a reflection of my entire life—they were the things he allowed me to have, when he allowed me to have them. I had toyed the other day with keeping the flyer; after all, it was rare that Rick searched our things. But in the end, I had decided it was best to tear it up and throw it in the garbage. Safest.

  Rick made a show of going through our things. He picked up Nialla’s bag and made a point of sticking his fingers through the seam into the body of the purse and feeling around. He raised an eyebrow at her when he discovered nothing then shrugged and dropped the purse.

  His heart didn’t seem to be in the search. He looked at me. “You won’t believe who I just met, Strawberry.”

  I stared at him and didn’t answer. Was he expecting me to guess? Had he run into some celebrity pimp that only he would care about?

  “Not even curious?” He raised an eyebrow. He slipped a hand into his back pocket and took out a sheet of paper and began to unfold it. I forced myself to keep my expression impassive, because I recognized the paper he was unfolding. It was another copy of the flyer I had seen.

  “It looks to me like they finally put together who you were after you got yourself arrested, you dumb bitch. Look here … it’s you! Kind of a before and after. Which one do you like better?”

  I began to shake with loathing.

  Nialla muttered, “Asshole.”

  “You seen this flyer before, Strawberry?”

  I shook my head.

  He grinned. “Too bad you weren’t with me. I was at The Knights Club getting a blowjob from one of the strippers. When I came out, I met your mom. She’s kind of a senior citizen, so she wouldn’t make any money at this business, but she might be fun to fuck for novelty. You’re not thinking of calling her, are you? Because things would get pretty ugly for her, if you know what I mean.”

  I shuddered. “I’m not calling anybody, Rick.”

  His smile was cold. “You sure? We know Nialla is planning on running, what about you?”

  Nialla said, “Rick, I’m not—”

  “Shut up! Stupid bitch. Did I ask you to open your fucking mouth?”

  My mind was still focused on his words. He’d seen my mother? She was here, in Portland, looking for me. I whispered, “How did she look?”

  He shrugged. “Fuckable.”

  “I hate you,” I whispered.

  He half snorted, an amused look on his face. He walked over and pinched my chin between his thumb and index finger. “Hate me all you want. But don’t even think about calling her or anyone. You know how bad things can get, don’t you? Or you think you do. You’ve got it pretty good really. Did you know there are people out there on the Internet with rape
fetishes? I could make pretty good money from a video of your mom being gangbanged by a dozen or so guys.”

  I tried to look away, as my stomach started to turn. But he forced my face toward his. His voice took on a rough tone as he said, “Can you just imagine her cries of pain? The jiz running down her face? I bet she’s never had it up the ass, she’d probably bleed—”

  I screamed as loud as I could, “Stop it! Shut up! Leave her alone! I’ll do anything, don’t hurt her!”

  The horror was that I could see everything he described. I couldn’t block it out of my mind. I jerked away from him and put my face in my hands and tried to block it out, but the images wouldn’t stop. When I couldn’t clear the vision I slammed my fist against my head, over and over, screaming, “Stop it!”

  He chuckled. “Don’t think I won’t do it. You don’t want to do that to your mother. Make sure you behave. We’re leaving town in a couple of days. Hold it together until then.”

  He stepped back and I sank down to the floor. A moment later he said, “Get yourselves together. You’ve got clients.”

  Erin

  A pattering sound broke the silence as tiny raindrops began to sprinkle the windshield of the car. I sat, eyes unfocused as I stared into the distance.

  I was exhausted.

  For almost a week I’d been wandering Portland at all hours of the day and night. I’d been to massage parlors and viewing booths, lingerie modeling businesses and strip clubs. I’d wandered along the track in the middle of the night, searching for my daughter, and instead, I found a wasteland full of pimps and their women and girls; a no man’s land between the police and the ignorant public who had no idea—or didn’t care—that literal slavery was happening in their midst.

  Since that first morning, I’d found no traces of her.

  The girls I’d spoken to on the track had seen nothing, and the waitress at the diner hadn’t seen her either. I’d been to half a dozen strip clubs, where I was met with hostility and anger, and from one heavily tattooed redneck, little more than a smirk as he took the paper.

  “Pretty girl,” he’d said. But he didn’t mean it in a complimentary way. He meant it as lust.

  It was too early to give up. Anytime would be too early to give up. But how long could I go on doing this? It was so much harder than I’d imagined. It wasn’t like canvassing a neighborhood. I felt like I was canvassing a swamp.

  I couldn’t even get up the energy to get out of the car and walk across the parking lot to my hotel room. My plan had been to nap then get up late and revisit the clubs. Just at the moment, I felt like that was going to be impossible.

  Okay. I could do this. I needed to fight the depression, fight the blackness that threatened to overwhelm me; above all, I needed to fight the urge to drown myself in a bottle of wine that would dull the ache.

  I opened the car door. Just as I stood up, the phone rang. My eyes dropped to it.

  It was Stan, who I’d barely heard from in the past two days.

  “Hello?”

  “Erin. Where are you?”

  “I just got back to my hotel.” I felt my eyebrows push together and my back tense.

  “Meet me at Detective Michelson’s office. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ll get you the details when we meet. But we’ve got a lead, an important one.”

  “Stan!” I blurted. “You can’t—”

  “Erin, we got a match on the tattoo to an ad. That led us to phone numbers, more ads, more phone numbers, a street name. She’s here, somewhere in Portland. Right now.”

  I began to hyperventilate. I closed my eyes, trying to force calm. “I’m on my way.”

  Part Three

  Thirty-One

  Erin

  I was shaking by the time I parked and walked into the police station, alternately expectant and terrified of what I might learn. The building itself was no more pleasant than it had been during my last visit. The walls were dingy, and the lobby area smelled faintly of ammonia.

  Once I identified myself, I was whisked into the back of the building and a small conference room. The same officer who greeted me the first day I came here offered me a cup of coffee and informed me that Agent Wilcox and Detective Michelson would arrive at any moment.

  The officer brought me the coffee a couple of minutes later. It was unpleasant tasting, slightly burnt and exactly what I needed at that point. I sat down at the heavily scratched table and waited.

  Agent Wilcox came into the room first. “Good morning, Erin.” He busied himself connecting his laptop to a small projector. By the time he finished and turned the projector on, Melody arrived. She sat down across from me and said, “Stan, it’s your show.”

  He opened his mouth to speak but stopped when the door opened. It was the precinct captain, Ed Ramos. He said, “Go ahead, I’m just going to observe.”

  Wilcox didn’t look precisely annoyed, but he clearly wasn’t thrilled about the new arrival.

  “I want to be up front, Erin, so we have clear expectations. I don’t know if you have read much about the technology we use, but the magnitude of this task is incredible. Something like one million prostitution ads are posted every single day. Most of them on Backpage, but also on a variety of other sites. We work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and several technology companies to archive those ads, get them into databases, and search for faces.”

  I nodded. “I’m familiar with the program.”

  “We’ve been obstructed by the fact that as far as we could tell, no ads were ever posted that showed a clear view of Brenna’s face. Without that, it was near impossible to imagine we’d be able to get a hit on a photo in one of the ads. But the mug shot changed things. It’s a very unusual and distinctive tattoo on her neck, and she has what appears to be a scar from a cigarette burn on her collarbone. The center fed those into the computer and we finally got a match.”

  I swiveled my head to look at Melody then back to Stan. He pulled up a series of images on the computer. I put my hand over my heart, as if that could somehow contain the sharp pain I felt. The first ad was clearly Brenna. She stood in profile to the camera with her face mostly turned away. The dragon tattoo was clear on her neck. She wore almost no clothes.

  The headline said: Strawberry, 5’5” young fantasy. $200.

  Stan gave me the compassionate look, but it did nothing to ease the severe pain I felt in my chest as the panic attack began to overwhelm me. I tried to breathe, as slowly and deeply as I could, to combat the feeling that I was suffocating.

  “I’m not going to show you any more pictures of her. But that’s her. Almost certainly.”

  I nodded and squeaked out the word, “Yes.”

  He said, “That particular ad was posted in San Diego about five months after Brenna went missing. Between the picture, the phone number, and the street name, we have a lot more to go on. She goes by Strawberry—we’ve known that since her arrest—and she’s often with another woman using the name Nialla. They’ve been all over the country, usually for a month or two at a time at any given spot.”

  I nodded and listened, struggling to stay calm.

  “You okay?” Melody asked.

  I nodded fervently but said nothing.

  Stan said, “We’re certain that both girls are controlled by a pimp. He’s dangerous. After correlating the phone numbers and the locations over the past two years, we believe it’s possible he murdered two girls: one in Orlando about a year ago, the other in Las Vegas last month. It’s possible that a john committed the murders in both cases, or someone else, but unlikely.”

  Melody leaned forward. “Why do you think it was the same killer?”

  “Both girls were shot in the back of the head with a large caliber pistol. They were executed. I’m waiting for ballistics results, but we should know in another day or so if these two women were killed by the same weapon.”

  I was intentionally breathing as slowly
as I could, trying not to hyperventilate. “What else do we know now?”

  “We’ve been able to plot out their movements over the past couple of years. They’ve switched up their phones a couple of times but have generally used the same photos in different cities.” He paused for a moment, as if reconsidering whether or not he wanted to say what he was about to say. “We know that the scar that appears to be a cigarette burn first appeared in her pictures about nine months ago. She’s been in at least fourteen different cities, possibly more, but that’s all we were able to identify from the ads.”

  I shook my head. “Is that why it’s been so difficult to find her?”

  He shrugged. “Among other things. It’s not unusual for pimps to move trafficked women around from place to place. They’ll do everything they can to keep the women isolated, friendless, rootless.”

  “Okay. What else?” I was getting my breathing under control and was able to get the words out with some semblance of normality.

  Stan said, “Going back through the ads from the same phone numbers, there are matches for ads for the other girl, Nialla.” He typed on his computer for a couple of moments and two more ads appeared on the screen. The face was blurry but somewhat visible. “The first time this ad appeared for her was a little bit less than two years before Brenna disappeared. That timeframe matches up with the disappearance of this girl.”

  He pulled up another picture, this one a yearbook photo of a young woman with light brown hair. She had a warm smile and looked directly at the camera. A gold chain with a tiny cross hung around her neck. “This is Laura Felker. She went to meet some friends at the mall one day about four years ago and was never seen again. The last photo we have of her was taken at the mall by a security camera.”

  He talked again and pulled up a photo I recognized. I felt a chill; I remembered seeing this photo on the news. I looked at it for a moment and felt my chest tighten and my breathing grew shallow again.

  In the photo, the girl was dressed in a miniskirt and tank top. She was walking with a taller man, lean and muscular with tattoos all over his arms. No. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be.