“Did you get your E-ZPass yet?” Angie asked.
“Um, I’m going to file an application. Definitely on the to-do list.”
Angie made a tsk-tsk sound. “Well, do you at least have your change handy?”
“You trained me, didn’t you?”
“And if I did it properly, you would have an E-ZPass.” Angie didn’t know if Mr. Markovich was going to take a toll road or not.
Toll roads were pretty far out of the city, mostly on the Virginia side. Either way, Angie had her E-ZPass and plenty of quarters on hand for either situation. She also had a full frame digital SLR camera from Nikon and a digital video camera from Sony. The Polaroid CUBE, which took stills and video was mounted to the dashboard of her car and recording the tail. One day, it could be evidence in a trial. Notes were fine, but for flawless recall, nothing beat a video recording.
When Markovich turned onto New York Avenue, heading uptown, the setting sun became a problem. The strong glare would wash out her video, and it made it difficult to keep him in sight. Things got a little better when he took a right onto 15th Street. A left would have taken her to the White House.
“I’m three cars behind him. How are you doing, Mike?”
“I got you in sight.”
“Hey, you’re getting better at this.”
“Once I was the pupil, now I am the master.”
Angie hesitated. “You really want me to say ‘only a master of evil,’ don’t you?”
“It would be nice.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Dang.”
Markovich crossed K Street and pulled to the curb in front of a building hidden by scaffolding. The black painted doors to a place called Solyanka opened, releasing a bear of a man in a paisley shirt unbuttoned far enough to reveal what could have been a fur rug glued to his ample chest and enough gold chains to function as armor. He waddled toward Markovich’s car.
“Mike, are you seeing this?”
“Seeing this. I can tell you Solyanka is hipster heaven for the Euro set and very Russian.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Yelp.”
“Good work.”
Mr. Gold Chains climbed into the Escalade and drove it around the block. Markovich went into the club.
Angie didn’t follow. Her guy was inside, so she found a nearby spot designated for fifteen-minute parking. A minute later, Mike drove up and honked.
Angie hung up the phone and rolled down her window. “Wait for me on the next block.”
The wait lasted two hours, but since she stayed with her car, the meter maids didn’t give her any hassle.
A little after seven, the sun was making its final retreat and had dappled the sky with a sundry of glorious colors. There hadn’t been any sign of Markovich, and aside from Mr. Gold Chains who returned on foot, nobody else had entered the club.
Angie’s phone rang. “What’s up, Mike?”
“I have a good parking space if you have to stretch or something.”
“I’m all right for now.”
“I got something else for you about our mystery girl.”
“Yeah, let’s have it.” Angie was watching the door to the club in her rearview in case Markovich came out.
“My gal at NCMEC did an age progression on your mystery girl. She apologized for the delay getting this done. I guess there’s a backlog and since yours wasn’t an active missing persons case it went to the bottom of the pile. Anyway, she just sent me the results. Want to see?”
“Do I? Of course.”
That was a huge development. Facial recognition might help Angie identify the girl, or perhaps social media could get the job done. Either way, knowing what the girl looked like today would satisfy a curiosity and could provide a vital clue in the search.
Angie got as far as opening the e-mail from Mike when Mr. Gold Chains emerged from the club.
Mike texted to make sure she saw Gold Chains leaving. She replied that she did. She couldn’t look at the girl’s picture since her focus had to be on Markovich.
Soon enough, the Escalade came into view. Seconds after that, Markovich exited the club. Gold Chains held the car door for Markovich. No money was exchanged, no tip offered, and Angie suspected Markovich was a person held in high regard. He was on the move once more.
Angie got Mike back on the line. “I’m following.”
“Right behind you.”
She used the same techniques to follow Markovich out of DC that she had used to track him to Solyanka. He drove north, out of the District via the Baltimore-Washington parkway. From there, it was a series of highways until they got off at the Russell Street exit in Baltimore.
It was hard for Angie to focus for the hour and thirty minutes the drive took. She kept battling the urge to look at the image from NCMEC. She didn’t want to give it a cursory glance. It needed to be studied, valued.
What would that little girl look like now? Where was she living? Who was she? But the biggest question loomed largest in Angie’s mind. Why had her mother asked for forgiveness?
Even with Mike following, Angie refused to lose her concentration even for a moment. To do otherwise would be unprofessional and undisciplined . . . and uncharacteristic.
They followed Markovich down Martin Luther King Boulevard and onto Cathedral Street. There were some nice shops there, a little gentrified—not a hood, not that intense—but they were on the outskirts of Middle East, Baltimore, a neighborhood patrolled by the Baltimore Police Department’s eastern district, and the place most responsible for the high per capita murder rate.
The Wire and Homicide had filmed there—which Angie wouldn’t have known if Mike hadn’t told her.
On Markovich’s tail, Angie and Mike drove past a Zumba studio, a flower shop, and an art supply store. The sparse pedestrian traffic showed a blend of races, though white was in the minority.
Markovich pulled into the parking lot of an auto repair place adjacent to a three-story brick apartment building that had no fire escape, but all of windows had bars.
Angie wondered if the top floor tenants worried about a rock climber breaking in. Those bars aren’t for keeping people out, she thought.
She came to a stop in front of a commercial printer over on the next block. It would be too conspicuous to park in front of the auto repair place where Markovich had gotten out. Using her binoculars, she watched Markovich make his way down an alley between the parking lot of the repair place and the apartment building.
She got Mike on the phone and wondered if he shared her gut feeling. “Do you think there’s a rear entrance to that apartment building?”
“I was asking myself that very question. Let’s watch this place for a while.” He was parked on the other side of the two-way street, a few cars behind her, facing the opposite direction.
“You watch for me for a bit. I want to take a look at this girl.”
From her PI work, Angie knew a great deal about age progression. It was especially tricky to do with very young children from a single photograph. Face shapes change dramatically by adulthood, making it hard to predict the changes. Variables in lighting, shadows, and expression compounded the challenge.
NCMEC was good at solving that complex problem. Its age-progressions had, over the years, been instrumental in the recovery of hundreds of missing children. It was part art and part science, and the folks at NCMEC were kind to apply their expertise to Angie’s case.
NCMEC could also help her with identification, since they regularly shared age-progressed images with the FBI and with thousands of police departments across the nation. But this photo came with no parent for NCMEC progression experts to consult. Nobody could say anything about the girl’s personal tastes—how she maybe loved bangs or preferred her hair short. They didn’t have photos of the parents as children or of other siblings to better predict how the skull and face would lengthen. Age progression of the single photograph amounted to little more than a shot in the dark.
/> Angie held a breath, waiting for the image to display on her phone. And there she was.
The older version of Jane Doe had fuller lips than the original photograph. Her eyes were round and wide, but a bit more deeply set, which perhaps was why her smile still seemed a little sad. The forensic artists gave her dark brunette hair and made it long and layered. The face shape they selected was more oval than the young girl’s and the nose had grown prominently.
Angie got a sense this girl was from some distinct ethnicity. Italian, she thought. The darker complexion seemed to go with her darker hair. She had flawless skin, which was nice to imagine, but probably inaccurate.
She was, however, very pretty, heads-turning pretty. And if anybody did give her a look, they would see a beautiful woman with one perfectly formed ear.
Angie could not take her eyes off the image. This girl was connected to some secret part of her mother’s life.
Angie called Mike again. “Did you look at the rendering?”
“Of course,” Mike said. “How could I not? Beautiful girl.”
“It’s driving me crazy not knowing.”
“NCMEC will send it around. They’re going to see about running it through the FBI’s face recognition database.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“We’re going to get an answer, Ange. It’s just going to take time.”
“Between that picture from New York City in 1988 to this one, I can’t stop wondering about our girl’s journey. What do you think her name is?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Just tell me the first name that comes to you.”
“That seems a bit silly, don’t you think?”
“Humor me.”
“Um, all right. How about—Angie?”
“Ha-ha. Very funny,” she said without a laugh.
“Well, that’s the first name that came to me.”
“Do it for real.”
“Okay, okay. Um—Stella.”
“Stella? Really. That’s about as WASPY as it gets. Did you even look at the picture? This girl is Italian, or Greek, or something. I’m thinking Lydia or Carissa.”
“Where the hell did you get those names from?”
“Greek girls I went to middle school with.”
“Hey, hold off on naming that girl a second. You see what I see?”
Angie peered out the windshield at a thin man in a bowling shirt with a fedora hat on his head, strolling down the street with two white guys in business suits close on his heels. Street lamps illuminated details in their faces and bodies. These three didn’t look like bosom buddies to Angie. Fedora Hat made no eye contact and initiated no conversation with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as he escorted them down the same alley that had swallowed Markovich.
This wasn’t Angie’s first rodeo. She had a pretty good sense what might be going on inside that apartment building.
“If those three are pals, I’m the Pope,” Mike said.
“I was just thinking the same thing.”
“You thought if those three are pals, I’m the Pope? What are the chances of that?”
“Mike, please. Not now.”
“What do we do?” he asked.
“Do? We watch and wait. See if Nadine comes out.”
“What about trying to get inside that building?”
“What about we might get shot.”
“Good point. Police?”
“Not until I see Nadine. If this place is what I think it is, these guys could have a direct line to someone on the force.”
“Ah, the Thin Blue Discount.”
“I’ve seen it before. If this is some sort of brothel, and we’re too hasty, Markovich could make the girls disappear in a heartbeat. No, this is a wait and see game.”
“Katie’s got the kids, and my next rental gig isn’t until the weekend. I’m all yours until then.”
“Good. ’Cause this might take awhile. Nothing like a wet wipe shower to make a girl feel beautiful.”
“Hey, I don’t care how badly you stink, Ange. You’ll always be beautiful to me.”
Angie made a smile Mike couldn’t see. “You sure do know how to charm ’em. I’ll give you that, Mike Webb.”
An hour passed and nothing happened. Fedora Hat and Markovich hadn’t reappeared. Neither had the two Tweedles in business suits.
Angie was getting restless. She called Mike. “I need to stretch my legs.”
“I need to learn how to aim better when peeing into a travel mug.”
“TMI, Mike. TMI.”
“What does stretch really mean?”
Angie knew that Mike knew what she was really about to do. “I’ll be careful.”
“I’m going with you.”
“No, you watch the front of the apartment in case Nadine comes out.”
“You know what I’ve watched? A lot of cop shows, that’s what. And the partner-separating thing is never a good idea. You know what else? Forget cop shows. You might as well have a red shirt on.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a Star Trek thing, from the original series. The Red Shirts always get killed. It’s kind of a running joke throughout the series.”
Angie frowned. “A, I’m not laughing. B, I’m a lot younger than you and I’ve never watched any old Star Trek episodes, sorry to offend your inner geek again. And C, I’m just going to do some poking around. I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, sure. That’s what every Red Shirt says.”
CHAPTER 25
Exhibit D: Excerpts from the journal of Nadine Jessup, pages 39-43
Here’s what I know about this life of mine. It’s big business. There’s no supply and demand problem. None at all. I learned about supply and demand in my economics class. It’s funny to think about economics while I’m here, doing this, this effed-up life of mine. School seems like something that happened to me a million years ago. This journal is my classroom now. It’s where I can be Nadine again. You can learn by observation. Mrs. Lockard taught me that in eighth grade science. So I’m observing myself, learning about me. But deep down I know Nadine is dead. Jessie Barlow took her place and went from being a future starlet to a present day slut. Harsh words, but I am what I am. I do what I do. I screw guys for money. I don’t think this business (yeah, it is what it is) could exist without the Internet. The guys answer ads in places like Craigslist and Backpage and there are ways to make sure they aren’t cops. I don’t know what Buggy, Casper, and Ricardo do to make certain, but the only cops I’ve seen here are paying customers.
You can’t let yourself go. You can’t get fat, or too ugly, or too sick. That’s what happened to Jade. Sure she was a little on the heavy side, but not fat, not by a long shot. She was older than us, too. A lot older I think. Maybe her metabolism slowed down or something. Whatever. They cut her food rations anyway. She seemed so weak all the time. Once she fainted in front of me. I begged Ricardo to give her more to eat and he slapped me hard across the face, pinned me to the floor, and put his knees on my chest. I felt like my ribs were going to snap. He told me never to speak to him like that again. I don’t tell him what to do, he tells me, he tells me, HE TELLS ME!! And then he gave me one more slap just to make sure I got the message. Jade got even sicker after that. She was hungry all the time. But when they finally started feeding her again, she started to purge. Imagine that. They gave her an eating disorder. Nobody would sleep with her anymore because she was so weak and her breath stank. They tried to fix it. Tried to get her to eat and stop purging. They put her in the hole, thinking that would do it. Scare her into compliance. It got so hot down there she passed out. I saw them drag her body out. She was limp and drooling, shaking like she was having a seizure or something. They dragged her to another room. I heard Casper call her worthless. I heard Ricardo tell Buggy to deal with it.
I never saw Jade again.
I now know something I didn’t know before. Stephen Macan isn’t Stephen Macan. He’s an asshole and a
liar. It was all a lie. Everything, and that includes Ricardo. Without her being there, Tasha described in perfect detail everything about my first encounter with Stephen Macan. She knew he asked me about a scarf for his daughter, and that he got a phone call from his wife while I was talking to him. Tasha told me he’s done it before. That’s his thing and it was Ricardo who made the call after Stephen signaled him and not his wife. The scarf and the phony wife were made up to make me feel more comfortable. It was all a ploy. I wouldn’t have fallen for a puppy in the back of a van or somebody offering me candy, but I sure fell for that.
Tasha told me Stephen’s real name is Ivan Markovich. He’s a Russian and his nickname is Stinger. We’re his business. He uses guys from the neighborhood, guys like Ricardo, Casper, and Buggy to run his operation. A bunch of Russians coming in and out of this building would attract the wrong kind of attention, Tasha said. I asked Tasha why they call him Stinger and she said, “Isn’t it obvious?” Then I laughed because his nickname suddenly made perfect sense to me. Nothing in my life had ever stung as hard as Ivan Markovich.
I get drugs to numb the pain—weed, booze (booze counts as a drug), cigarettes (those count too) and Oxy (that’s my favorite. Hell, it’s everyone’s favorite). The high is almost indescribable. It’s like you’re in agony every moment of the day and then suddenly no more pain. The drug wears off and then pain comes back, but multiplied, way more intense than before. It’s not a normal kind of physical pain. It’s more like the pain of wanting the drug so badly it physically hurts. It’s like the drug woke up a pain that was always inside me. It was a pain I could feel only when I wasn’t high. I wanted the Oxy to make it go away. Does that make sense? I’m desperate for it and they know it.
It sure makes it easier to do what they want me to do. Rat follows maze, rat pushes lever, rat gets reward. Rat doesn’t follow maze, rat gets shocked, rat disappears like Jade. Me? I stay out of the hole because I follow the maze. I do everything I’m told. Since Jade vanished I’ve seen a few other girls go down into the hole for one violation or another. All I know is I don’t want to go back in the hole ever again. When they come out, the girls are always different. They don’t talk as much. They stop looking you in the eyes. They become invisible. That’s what the hole does to you. It makes you disappear. But I don’t need the hole to become invisible. I just have to go outside where nobody looks at me. Maybe that’s because they’re afraid of Buggy and Casper who are always my escorts.
Forgive Me Page 15
