Unleashed

by Jami Alden

  Curtis joined them then and suggested they move to the coffee shop across the street.

  They took their coffees to a small round table. Curtis took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “I was hoping to keep all this on the lowdown, you know?”

  “You were on national television. You didn’t think someone might recognize you?” Caroline asked.

  Curtis shrugged. “Fighter didn’t have huge ratings, and besides, the lighting is so bad in those movies…” He looked up to meet Caroline’s stare and his face went bright red. “Look, I’m not proud of it, or anything, but they pay good money, and I needed a little extra to cover some medical bills over the past couple of years.”

  “How many movies have you been in?”

  “You get paid by the scene, not the movie,” Curtis said.

  Danny rolled his eyes. He didn’t need a primer on the inner workings of the porn industry. “Fine. How many scenes then?”

  Curtis stared at the ceiling and his lips moved silently. “Fifty? Give or take a few?” Caroline’s expression went from disgusted to horrified.

  “Always with different girls?” Danny asked.

  “Not always. Sometimes they put me with the same girl two, three times in a row.”

  Caroline looked like she was having trouble keeping her latte down. “What about the girl in Mutiny?”

  “Remind me again which one she is.”

  Caroline’s lips pressed together in a tight line. “Dark hair. Very pretty.”

  “Spoke with a Russian or Eastern European accent,” Danny added. “Her name in the credits was listed as Lanie Deep.”

  A smile of recognition spread across Curtis’s face. “Oh yeah, now I remember her. She was one of my first scenes.” He stared off in the distance like he was actually getting nostalgic. He pulled back to reality with a look of concern. “Did something happen to her?”

  “We’re not sure,” Danny replied. “But we were hoping to track her down and ask her some questions. Is there anything you can remember that might help us?”

  “All I remember is that she seemed kind of nervous. Not as nervous as I was. I almost ruined the scene and was afraid I wouldn’t get paid.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know, but how?”

  “I uh messed up the, you know,” Curtis’s gaze flicked uncomfortably to Caroline, “the money shot.”

  “The what shot?” Caroline asked.

  “I’ll tell you later. Better yet, I’ll show you later,” Danny said.

  “It’s the, uh, climax shot,” Curtis supplied helpfully.

  Danny met Caroline’s glare with a smirk.

  “Anyway,” Curtis said with a laugh, getting over his embarrassment for the moment, “I did what I thought they’d want and did it all over her tits. But the director got all pissed and told me I was supposed to finish inside her. Like how was I supposed to know that?”

  “I sure wouldn’t,” Caroline said in a high strained voice. “What can you tell us about the girl?”

  “Nothing much. She barely spoke English. A lot of them don’t.”

  “What about the girls who do? Do they ever talk about where they came from, how they ended up in the movies?”

  Curtis shook his head. “I know it sounds weird, but we don’t really get personal on set. We show up, do our thing, and take off. And to be honest, a lot of times the girls were kind of out of it.”

  “Like they’d been drugged?”

  “I think some of them took something to take the edge off, but I never saw anyone force anyone to take anything.”

  Not that he saw anyway. Danny rolled his neck in frustration. This was going nowhere. “Okay. What about the producers, the directors? Would they know anything? How do we get in touch with them?”

  “No clue.”

  “Wait, you’ve had sex in front of these people at least fifty times,” Caroline bit out, “but you don’t know how to get in touch with them?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t ask, they don’t tell. Everyone’s on a first name basis.”

  “So how did you ever get involved in this anyway?”

  Curtis looked around, as though checking for eavesdroppers. “A buddy of mine—I’m not going to say who—gave me a call. He knew I needed the money and said I had the right look, whatever that meant. I met with some people, they made me take a blood test and I shot my first scene six weeks later. They paid me in cash. A few weeks later, a new girl, a new scene. All I have to do is turn in clean labs every six weeks.”

  “But you don’t know anything about the company or the producers, anything?” Caroline asked.

  Curtis drained the last of his coffee and gave Caroline a long look. “I’m a fighter. That means I get hurt. I don’t have insurance. That means I pay a lot. I needed cash. They had it. I didn’t ask questions. I was just happy I got to fuck girls and not take it up the dirt road, if you know what I mean. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

  “Wait,” Danny grabbed him by the arm, tightening his hold when he would have pulled away.

  “You don’t wanna fuck with me, big guy,” Curtis said and moved to strike with his other hand.

  Danny shifted his grip so his thumb dug into a pressure point at the base of Curtis’s palm, which immediately went slack. “Settle down there, junior. We’re not done with our chat. Now how do they contact you?”

  “Phone,” Curtis wheezed. “But it’s a blocked number. They tell me when to be there, and I show up.”

  “Be where?” Danny increased the pressure on Curtis’s wrist.

  “Wherever they shoot,” Curtis said.

  “Which is where?” Caroline bit out.

  “Different places. They rent out different houses or locations depending on the shoot.”

  “You have a shoot coming up?”

  Curtis looked away. “Tomorrow. But they haven’t told me where yet. Please man, don’t fuck this up. I need the money. One last chunk of change and I’m done, I swear.”

  Danny sat back and pasted a smile on his face. “Don’t worry, man. I won’t mess anything up for you. Thanks for your help.”

  Curtis looked a little puzzled at Danny’s sudden change in demeanor. “I better get back to work.”

  They watched Curtis jog across the street. “We need to do something. If what you think is true, that those girls are trafficked here and somehow being forced—”

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’re going to keep an eye on junior, and when it comes time to film his next money shot, we’ll be there. And if James had anything to do with these guys, we’ll find out, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  As they walked back to the car, Danny pulled out his phone to call Toni to see how she was progressing on the data decryption.

  “I don’t know who did this code for him,” Toni said, a combination of awe and frustration in her voice, “but he’s good. They used a code string I’ve never even seen before—”

  “Toni you can have your nerdfest later. How long before you know what’s on that drive?”

  She was silent for several seconds, and he could practically see her chewing her lip in contemplation. “Tomorrow?”

  Not the answer he wanted to hear. “Keep on it, and transfer me to Derek.”

  He quickly filled in his brother on what they’d learned from Curtis. “Fuck if I know what’s going on,” Danny said. He flashed what he hoped was a reassuring look at Caroline, whose face was getting more pinched by the day. “But if there’s a link between James Medford, and bad porn, we’re going to find it.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Put these on.”

  Kaylee winced as the woman’s stinking cigarettes and cabbage breath hit her in the face. Unlike the other women who’d been yanking her around and sticking her with needles for the past week, this woman had a different accent. Something harsher and European sounding. She wasn’t dressed like a nurse, either. Her hair was dyed a dark maroon color, and she wore so much eyeliner that the black color leaked into her crow’
s-feet.

  If she hadn’t been so freaked out, Kaylee would have told her the Amy Winehouse look didn’t work once you hit thirty. This woman was a good twenty hard years past that.

  “Why? What is it?” she asked, even though she knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

  “Is wardrobe,” the woman surprised her by actually answering. “Then we do makeup.”

  Wardrobe and makeup?

  Why the hell did she need wardrobe and makeup for what was going to happen if she didn’t find some way to escape in the next few hours? After the horrible, invasive, humiliating exam, the big doctor guy had done another test, with an ultrasound. Whatever he saw among the smudges of white and black had made everyone happy, even as Kaylee felt the growing horror threaten to choke her.

  “Perfect. Just what we want to see,” he’d said. “Three more days and she’ll be totally ready.”

  That had been three days ago, and Kaylee hadn’t figured out how to get out of there. They guarded all the girls heavily, but after the exam she’d been kept confined to the bedroom, her arm cuffed to the bed. She was back in a room with girls who didn’t speak any English and didn’t seem inclined to help her even if they could understand her. She wasn’t allowed downstairs for meals, and was only uncuffed from the bed long enough to use the bathroom.

  She stood uncuffed before the woman waving a piece of fabric no bigger than a handkerchief in front of her. A gang-banger looking thug stood guard at the door as always, ready to catch her if she made a break for it.

  Could she get past him?

  She thought about the Thai girl, of the “many men” who used her. She thought of the pretty brunette girl, sobbing incoherently as she wrapped her hands around her waist.

  If she didn’t get out of there, she’d end up like them.

  The woman heaved herself up from her metal folding chair and advanced on her. “If you no take off your clothes yourself, I do it for you. Maybe I let him help,” she said, giving a meaningful look to the guard at the door.

  Feigning cooperation, Kaylee took a step toward the woman and held her hand out as though to take the clothes. At the last minute she lunged for the chair, picked it up and swung.

  It landed with a satisfying clang against the woman’s head. She hit the ground like a felled tree, flat on her ass, groaning as she brought her hand up to the deep gash across her forehead.

  “Drop it, bitch,” the thug said. The bottom dropped out of Kaylee’s stomach as she saw the gun pointed straight at her.

  They want me pregnant, not dead, she reminded herself and charged straight ahead, the metal chair held high over her head. But unlike the woman, the thug was prepared for her charge. He ducked down and took her out at the knees.

  A desperate “No!” exploded from her lungs as she was knocked to the floor and the chair was kicked out of the way. Her ears rang as he slammed her head into the floor, a warning blow meant to stun. She heard him yelling something in Spanish, felt his heavy weight settle on her torso as he pinned her arms above her head.

  Her head was spinning but she bucked and twisted, thrashing as hard as she could to get out of his hold. Footsteps thundered across the hard linoleum floor and the plain, stern face of one of the Spanish speaking nurse types swam into her line of vision.

  A sharp sting bit into the crook of her arm, and almost immediately her body went all weak and floaty.

  Oh, God, she’d failed.

  Caroline swallowed back a wave of nausea as Danny guided the car through the streets of an upscale suburban development about an hour east of San Francisco. It was the kind of development where all of the homes were huge, sprawling variations on a Mediterranean theme. Each stuccoed and terra cottaed mcmansion perched squarely in the middle of its own picture-perfect square of grass.

  As shiny new and beautiful as the houses were, the multiple FOR SALE—PRICE REDUCED, signs and the one foreclosure sign she saw indicated it was a neighborhood hit hard by the recent housing crash. It was so easy to imagine the streets and cul de sacs filled with kids riding bikes and scooters in the neighborhood.

  It was not where you expected to find a porn movie being shot. But it was where Curtis Thomson had led them.

  “There’s his car,” Danny said, spotting Curtis’s small truck. Another vehicle was already in the driveway, a utility van which Caroline imagined had transported all of the equipment. Although from what she’d seen of the DVD the production values hadn’t gone much past a hand held video camera and a poorly positioned microphone.

  There were no other cars on the street or in front of any of the other houses, giving the street the feel of a ghost town. If nothing else, Caroline supposed it offered lots of privacy for whatever was about to go on in there.

  Danny parked around the block where their car wouldn’t be seen. “You stay put while I go take a look around.” He’d already unclipped his seatbelt and was halfway out the door, expecting her to blindly obey.

  “Oh, right, like I’m really going to wait here twiddling my thumbs.” She opened her door to get out, only to have her way blocked by a very large male body.

  “We don’t know what we’re going to find in there, Caroline.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I may not be well versed in porn, but I think I can handle what we’re going to see.” She tried to push him out of the way. Which of course didn’t work, and of course she got distracted by the hard ripple of his ab muscles under his shirt and remembering how they’d flexed tight as he’d held himself over her the night before.

  “If we’re dealing with the kind of people I think we are, they could be armed. They could be willing to do anything to protect this little enterprise.”

  Any hazy memories of last night’s indulgence fled in the face of cold, harsh reality. Still, Curtis hadn’t mentioned anything about guns or feeling threatened, which she pointed out to Danny.

  “Just let me come with you to see what’s going on. If you decide it’s too risky, we’ll come back to the car and call for help.” Like she would let him face a bunch of gun toting bad guys alone while she went scurrying back to the car.

  His grunt wasn’t exactly an agreement but he moved a little bit out of her way. As they walked to the house, he took her arm in a firm grip and bent to speak quietly in her ear. “You follow my lead completely, got it? Don’t talk unless I talk first. Don’t move unless I tell you. Hell, don’t breathe unless I say it’s okay. Got it?”

  “Sir yes sir,” she nodded.

  His eyes narrowed and his mouth pulled into a rueful half smile. His hand came up to cup her cheek and his lips came down to cover hers in a deep kiss that was somehow as calming as it was arousing. He lifted his head, shaking it as he looked at her with unreadable gray eyes. “I should have left you at home today.”

  She couldn’t argue the point because he lifted his finger to his lips, signaling the demand for silence. She obliged and followed after him, doing her best to follow his lead and make sure her running shoes didn’t make any sound as they cut through the neighboring yard up to the side of the house. Danny motioned for her to stop as he looked in a window.

  After several seconds, he motioned for her to join him. Caroline peered through a crack in the wooden blinds. From the window she had a view of a small dining room that led into a larger great room. A bed had been moved into the room, she imagined to take advantage of the natural light coming in from sliding glass doors and skylights in the ceiling. A lone male figure sat on the bed. Curtis, she supposed, but the blinds blocked the view of his face. A man was setting up a tripod while another moved around the bed holding a boom microphone. Crew members, probably. Their voices were nothing but low murmurs through the glass.

  “Doesn’t look too menacing,” Caroline whispered, earning her a glare and a “zip it” signal from Danny.

  He pulled her back, away from the window, and spoke in a whisper so low she had to strain to hear. “We’re going to go around to the front. You let me do all the talking, okay?”

>   Caroline nodded and followed him around the side of the house. Just as they rounded the corner a black SUV screeched to a stop in front of the driveway.

  Panic pulled her chest tight as she saw that it was identical to the car driven by Rachael Weller’s killers. She wanted to believe it was a coincidence, that those people had nothing to do with whoever had killed her defense attorney, but she’d learned the hard way the past year that coincidences were seldom what they seemed.

  Danny grabbed her and pressed them both against the side of the house as they watched the occupants of the car get out. Three men, decidedly tougher and scarier looking than the guys working inside. Two of them scanned the empty street while the third went around to the rear passenger door.

  A few seconds later a female form half stumbled and was half pulled onto the sidewalk. A fierce gust of winter wind blew her coat open. She didn’t seem to notice, even though all she had on underneath was a short, belly baring halter top and a pair of shorts so tiny they may as well have been a pair of denim underpants. She had long, straight, golden blond hair. Her body was tall and almost coltishly thin.

  The guy helping her jostled her and her head fell back, revealing her face. She was beautiful, with classic, delicate features.

  Startlingly beautiful, just like the girl in the movie.

  Curtis hadn’t seemed to think that the girls were being forced into it. Nevertheless, Derek and Danny’s talk about human trafficking and forced prostitution rang in her head.

  The girl took a clumsy step forward and staggered, then tried to pull away from the man’s grip. He gave her arm a rough yank and pulled her partway up the walk. “Bitch, if you don’t get your ass inside this house…” the threat trailed off and the girl made another clumsy attempt to pull away.

  “Don’ wanna do this,” the girl said, her meaning clear even if her words were slurred. “Don’ make me—” the girl cried out as the man’s hand caught her openhanded on the side of the head.

  “You do whatever we say you do, else you’ll get turned out on some street corner somewhere, got it?”

  Despite Danny’s order of silence, Caroline couldn’t hold back her protest any longer. She clawed frantically at Danny’s arm. “We have to help her. You heard her. She doesn’t want this. They drugged her. They’re going to rape her and film it. We have to—”