Death's Echoes

by Penny Mickelbury

  “I take it you explained to them that you weren’t advocating armed guards all over the place,” the Chief said.

  “Of course I did,” Gianna snapped at her boss. Then she apologized and sat down and was surprised at how relieved she was to be off her feet. She calmly told him all about her not always polite conversation with the co-executive directors of Metro GALCO . . . not always polite because Gianna could not refute any of their arguments against heightened security, and that made her angry with herself. No, she’d had to admit, heightened security would not have prevented the slaughter of forty-nine people at the Pulse nightclub or the slaughter of five Muslim women walking to evening prayers at their mosque. And who would have thought that a baseball team composed of Republican members of Congress would not be safe on a ball field within eyesight of the Capitol? And the terror attacks around the world—terrorists using trucks and busses to mow down people like bowling pins, shooting people at cafes and theaters—what could have prevented those murders? The honest answer was what pissed Gianna off. It was her job to try, dammit! That’s what she was trying in vain to convey to the other people tasked with keeping Metro GALCO safe.

  “Why are you so afraid that something ugly is going to happen there, Maglione?”

  Gianna closed her eyes and rubbed them. She certainly couldn’t tell him it was because Cassie Ali had told her so, but that was why. You have to keep our people safe! They know where to find us, and they’re coming for us! Instead, she told him a version of the truth: “Tim says there’s been an increase in visits by the leather, chaps and chains fellows, and he’s noticed them giving what he called hard, ugly, menacing looks to some of the transgender people.” If looks could kill was what Tim had said.

  “But nothing verbal or physical?”

  Gianna shook her head. “Just the dirty looks.”

  The Chief shook his head. “Nothing illegal about giving dirty looks, even if they are directed at a target population of hate crimes. We just have to wait—”

  “I know. Until they act on their hate. And speaking of which—”

  “And I know what you’re going to say, Maglione, and the answer is the pieces are falling into place.”

  “Two girls have been sold, Chief, and another one dumped in the trash!”

  “And Jim Dudley is getting his takedown team in place. By the way, he wants McCreedy—”

  “McCreedy’s busy!”

  The Chief gave her a hard look, then stood up and began to pace, taking his turn. She watched him, her face a mask of carefully controlled non-expression. He knew she was mad as hell. She didn’t need to show or tell him that. As if to further irritate her, he jiggled the coins in his pockets as he paced up and down his spacious office, his black patent shoes reflecting the royal blue of the carpet. “I don’t have the budget to give you more bodies, Maglione. I wish I did but I don’t.” He stopped pacing, went to his desk, picked up the report she’d brought, and waved it at her. “This is why I’m making you a Captain, and goddammit, you don’t get to tell me no!”

  She ignored the promotion talk as she always did. “We know we’ve got more hate coming our way, Chief—”

  “And every patrol sector knows that if they get a 911 from you they’re to roll every possible car your way. Immediately! That’s the best I can do, Maglione. I’m sorry.”

  And she knew he was. “We’re going to be spread thin trying to cover all the bases, which means that I’ll have to be out in the field some of the time.”

  “I don’t want you out in the field, Maglione, as you very well know!” He was pissed off and, unlike her, he didn’t try to hide it. “I want you inside, managing and coordinating and organizing and keeping me informed!”

  She knew better than to cross him when he’d delivered an order from a place of anger, which was why she was buried up to her tired red eyeballs in matters related to the covert surveillance of the sex-trafficking warehouse. She was also experiencing and learning a lot about things she’d previously only heard about. The sophistication of the surveillance equipment and techniques rivaled anything she’d seen in police thrillers and spy movies. Cameras now captured every movement into and out of the warehouse. The windows had been boarded up and layered with black paint, but infrared imaging could and did detect movement inside, which gave them some idea of how many people were in there, but not an exact count. That’s where the drones came in. Those stealthy little critters with their infrared, heat-seeking camera mounts hovered and circled and recorded practically at will. It was amazing that, despite the fact people knew drones existed, knew that the military and law enforcement used them routinely, nobody looked up.

  Gianna had wanted a monitor screen in the Hate Crimes office but the Chief had nixed that. He wanted the operation near his office so he could monitor it and control it. This was his operation in case anyone had any doubts, and it was housed in a space about twice the size of her Hate Crimes Unit, on a back corridor she hadn’t known existed. It was one of the many upside/downside effects of being housed in an old but substantially renovated and remodeled building: There was more space, and more interesting space, than anyone, especially a cash-strapped city government, could afford to construct from the ground up. One of the downsides was the possibility of getting lost where one worked every day.

  Gianna stood, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. She had watched the previous night’s feed and had been repulsed and sickened by the number of men who’d entered the warehouse, and that was just one night! Those poor girls. It would bring them no comfort to know that the police had recorded the license plate numbers of each of the men and that they’d all be arrested and charged with crimes related to pedophilia. But Gianna found that she didn’t care about the legalities of the situation. She wanted those girls—those children—out of that warehouse, and she wanted those men punished in ways that had nothing to do with the criminal justice system. She didn’t want or need to watch days or weeks of surveillance videos of hate-filled depravity—because it was hatred of women that led men to rape little girls, and she wanted those girls out now!

  “I’ve got an updated stats report for you, Lieutenant.”

  Gianna hadn’t heard the young officer enter. She gratefully swung her mind away from imagining the horror occurring inside the warehouse to focus on the room, and accepted the sheaf of papers extended to her by the officer whose name tag said he was C.A. JENNINGS. But she didn’t know why she was receiving them since she’d neither requested nor expected them. “What exactly is all this?” she asked, looking from the papers to him and back to the papers.

  “We think we know exactly how many men are connected to the warehouse, and we have a pretty good idea how many women, give or take a few,” he said.

  “Why not exactly, Officer Jennings, since you know ‘exactly’ how many men?” Don’t blame the messenger, some voice of rational wisdom murmured in her brain.

  His face changed from the open, friendly look it had worn to a dark scowl. “It looks like a couple of the girls have been sold—”

  “How the hell do you know that?” Gianna demanded.

  Jennings didn’t flinch at the fury of Gianna’s demand. He met her gaze honestly if not eagerly. “Do you recall seeing old-looking cars drive into the warehouse? Twice that happened.”

  Gianna was nodding. She remembered seeing two old-fashioned hatchbacks drive into the wide door of the warehouse—the door like the one on Dee’s warehouse—and she remembered wondering why.

  “We think that a girl was in the back of the car each time. Drugged for sure and maybe tied up, but that wouldn’t be necessary if she was unconscious.”

  Rage and disgust made speech for Gianna almost impossible. “How did you conclude they were sold?”

  “We counted each time a car drove in and when it drove out. We knew it had to mean something.”

  Gianna nodded wearily as the rage drained away. “That’s good police work, Officer Jennings.”

  “Thank you, ma’am . . .
ah . . . I mean Boss,” he stammered.

  She gave him a quizzical look. Clearly he’d been told that she didn’t like being called ma’am, but why was he calling her Boss? She wasn’t his boss. You are his boss, Boss. She almost jumped, she heard Cassie so clearly inside her head.

  “Ah . . . Lieutenant? There’s one more thing.” Jennings looked almost frightened and he backed up half a step. Gianna did, too. Jennings feared the words he was about to speak. Gianna feared them, too, though she didn’t know why until he spoke them. “One of the girls died,” he said, and before Gianna could react he explained that the garbage collected from the warehouse was delivered directly to a vacant lot adjacent to the police training academy and thoroughly searched.

  “They put her in the trash,” Gianna said, bile rising up in her throat.

  Jennings nodded.

  “How old was she?”

  “About twelve, maybe, thirteen at the most.”

  “How many more children have to be sold or, worse, die, before we shut the goddamn thing down?”

  Jennings knew she didn’t expect an answer from him. He saluted and turned toward the door, then turned back. “I’ll be back in a little while to finish the computer installation.” Then he left the room, leaving her to fully—and finally—scrutinize the space she’d come to think of as “Trafficking Central.” There were five computer stations. Or there would be when they were set up and operational. There were half a dozen desks with computers and telephones, all waiting to be made operational. There were two long tables with chairs on either side, like the ones in the Hate Crimes Unit. Chalkboards covered two walls; display boards and a wall-mounted video screen shared the third. This room was ready to go operational and house a unit, but it was too large a space for something as targeted as Trafficking Central. So what was it?

  “I know that look!”

  Gianna turned to see Detective Jim Dudley grinning at her. They exchanged a warm hug. She hadn’t seen him since Cassie’s funeral two weeks ago. “What are you doing here?”

  “Why do you look like you’re ready to nuke somebody?”

  “Because I am. What are you doing here, Jim?”

  “I’m assigned to this thing you’ve got going,” he said, then looked totally confused at the puzzlement that crossed her face. “You don’t know that the Chief is putting together a unit to bust this child sex-trafficking thing wide open?”

  “I’m not surprised, but the Chief is running it himself,” she said, but Dudley was shaking his head back and forth. “Sure he is,” Gianna started to say, but stopped at the look on Dudley’s face. “Give it up, Jim,” she said. “Talk to me.”

  He glanced toward the door, then leaned toward her. “Here’s what I know: He sent for me, asked if I thought I’d like working with you. Hell yeah, I told him! I’d work with you anytime, anywhere. So, he told me to report here.”

  “But you do drugs and gangs, Jim.”

  “I do takedowns, Maglione. That’s my strong suit and that’s my job in this operation: When the order is given to take down the sons of bitches selling those little girls, I’ll be leading the charge. And just so you know, I’m bringing Tony Watkins with me. I know you remember Tony.”

  Gianna looked at him in total amazement and could think of nothing to say. Of course she remembered Tony Watkins. He’d been temporarily assigned to her and Hate Crimes, along with Alice Long, when they were investigating the serial murders of prostitutes. It’s when she’d first met Baby Doll. God, that felt like a lifetime ago! But what did any of that have to do with now? Then she remembered Officer Jennings reporting to her and calling her Boss. She felt a headache starting. She was saved by the Chief himself. He came barreling into the room at full speed, as always, hands in his pockets jiggling the change. “Glad you could make it, Dudley,” he said—as if Jim Dudley or any other cop would disobey an order of the chief of police to report. “You ever hear how Maglione took down that Irish gun dealer in the New York Avenue tunnel? Freezing rain and ice covered the road, making it slick as an ice hockey rink, but Maglione here ran him down, tackled him, cuffed him, head-butted him—”

  “He head-butted me, Chief, and I had a headache for a week afterward.”

  “Those bastards in that warehouse are gonna hurt longer than that! I know you two will see to it,” he said, and sailed out as quickly as he’d entered.

  “What the hell is going on, Jim?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say the Chief is setting you up to run a unit.”

  “I already run a unit!” Something was going on that Gianna didn’t know about but apparently other people did. “What don’t I know, Jim?”

  He raised his hands, palms out, and gave an elaborate shrug. “I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, Maglione, and that’s the truth. I heard that he asked a couple of other people about working with you, the same way he asked me—”

  “What other people?”

  “I don’t know. Honest I don’t! But can I tell you what I think, what I feel?”

  “I wish you would!” she exclaimed.

  “When he asked how I felt about working with you? What he meant was working for you. You’re about to be a big dog, Maglione, and I gotta tell you, you’re definitely looking the part!”

  Gianna was wearing what she called her cowboy cop ward-robe: black jeans, starched white shirt, black cowboy boots, and a shoulder holster. She’d adopted the quasi-uniform when the Chief moved her Hate Crimes Unit away from the command of the Intelligence Unit and into the Office of the Chief. There were at least three other units that she knew of that operated with virtual autonomy and which answered only to the Chief. They were not the cowboy cops of TV and movies—they weren’t renegades or outlaws who broke the laws they were sworn to uphold. On the other hand, Gianna had been known to twist or bend a law or a regulation in service to the greater good. So would Jim Dudley, now that she thought about it. Who else had the Chief asked about working with her? Or for her? She needed more time with Mimi. What, she wondered, would her journalistic mind make of this situation? And as suddenly as they’d manifested, thoughts of Mimi receded into the background as Gianna switched gears and turned her focus, and her body, toward the Hate Crimes Unit and how they were going to manage to be five places at once with only five bodies. Then her brain switched focus again and her feet followed. She was headed back to the Chief’s office before she could talk herself out of it.

  Sunset View Apartments were perched at the top of a small hill and Mimi suspected that it could, indeed, enjoy a very nice view of the sunset. It reminded her a bit of the garden apartment complexes that filled block after block, street after street, of her native Los Angeles: three or four two-level buildings built at right angles to each other and surrounding a central courtyard that almost always contained a swimming pool. However, as this wasn’t Los Angeles, there was no pool, but there was a courtyard patio that instead of being lush and pretty was brick-and-concrete sterile, though it was neat and clean. Mimi and Joe had made several visits, day and night, to get a complete picture of what they were investigating. They had driven around to the back of the buildings so they knew that’s where the garages were, and the trash bins and the storage cupboards. Each unit also had a back door equipped with a security gate and high-wattage spotlights above each door and above the garages and the other outbuildings. Mimi and Joe gave the owners points both for proper, if not luxurious, maintenance of the property, and for security.

  They also had cruised the neighborhood so they’d be totally familiar with the lay of the land. There were two other apartment buildings at the opposite end of the street from Sunset View, both of them four-story elevator buildings, and small to medium-sized houses lined the adjacent streets, all of them neat and well-kept without the trappings of luxury—like Sunset View and the other apartment buildings. They had driven around the neighborhood on several days and watched dozens of people—men and women—head off to work and their children off to school. The whole area screamed nor
mal. This morning, Mimi and Joe had arrived early and staked out a position opposite Sunset View to watch the women and children leave for work and school, and they were not surprised to see that by 8:30, a woman and her children had exited every back door and had gotten into a car and left. Four older children had walked across the parking lot to the street, to the bus stop at the corner; the mothers drove the younger ones to the elementary school three block away.

  “So normal,” Joe said. “I wonder if any of the people on the adjacent streets have any idea what’s going on at Sunset View?”

  “I had the same thought,” Mimi said. “Wouldn’t you think that at least one of the women at Sunset View would be friends with one of the women in one of these other buildings or in one of the houses? After all, their kids go to the same schools. . . . Hey! Look at this kid! What is he doing?” Mimi had the high-powered binoculars glued to her eyes and was watching a boy walk up the hill to the Sunset View apartments, and with the key that was on a lanyard around his neck, open the front door to one of the units.

  “Going back home is what he’s doing. He waited for his mom to leave and he doubled back,” Zemekis replied, his own eyes not missing a single detail of the boy’s entrance into his home. “A day of wild fun ahead, I’d guess.”

  “He’s too young to be holding an orgy,” Mimi said.

  “Kids these days are pretty advanced.”

  “Come on! He’s no more than ten, eleven at the most.”

  “What unit did he go in?”

  “That’s . . . oh hell! That’s Sonia Alvarez’s place. The woman who got raped. What’s the kid doing?” Mimi passed the binoculars to Joe. She now was both worried and, inexplicably, frightened.

  “Looks like he’s going to bed, Patterson. Holy shit! Whadda you want to bet this kid sits up all night guarding his mom? Trying to protect her? And then is too sleepy to stay awake and pay attention in school.”