“I didn’t.”
“It’s just… I don’t know. It’s like my brain doesn’t believe it. But I’ve seen what you can do. It makes me…”
“Feel crazy.”
“Kind of, I guess. Like everything I know is wrong.”
“Maybe everything you know is wrong. But maybe everything I know is wrong, too. I think the universe is much more complex than anybody thinks it is. Maybe we’re not meant to understand how everything works.”
Once at the FBI building, Gio parked in someone else’s parking space and led her inside. Metal detectors and a police officer stood guard, and he flashed the badge and walked through with her so confidently that the officer didn’t say anything when the metal detectors went off because of her purse.
Stefan’s office wasn’t far from the main entrance, and the number of agents sitting in cubicles surprised Sarah. Many of them had their sleeves rolled up and sweat stains under their arms. She had always had this image of the FBI as the elite of the elite, and to some extent that was true, but it was also true that they were human beings—prone to corruption, degradation, and rage, like everyone else.
Stefan’s office walls were covered with photos, posters, comic strips, and even a neon sign for the Los Angeles Dodgers, while his desk was barely visible underneath the mountains of papers, files and books. Stefan looked up from his computer and smiled.
“Back so soon?”
“Eager to get to work,” Gio said.
Stefan leaned back in his chair. “Well, you’ve got the rank, where do you wanna start? Sir.”
It wasn’t lost on Sarah that the “Sir” came as an afterthought. In some way it seemed almost sarcastic, and she could tell by Gio’s face that he picked up on it, too.
“The video. What’ve the techs found?”
Stefan reached into one of his piles and came up with two sheets of paper stapled together. “Filmed on a cell phone. It looks too stable to me to be a second perp. He probably set it up on something. Date stamped exactly eight months and four days ago. No other information. One of the techs told me they can sometimes get the location the video was filmed at, but that information was removed.”
Gio sat down in one of the chairs and studied the two pages. “I’m interested in this adult store.”
“Me, too. But there’s nothing there. No one will talk.”
Gio tossed the report on the desk. “Well, let’s give them some encouragement.”
14
Naughty Nancy’s looked like the kind of place found in Times Square in the 1980s, before New York’s clean-up effort moved the pimps and prostitutes out. Litter fluttered on the sidewalk in front, the windows were blacked out, and the only indication that it wasn’t an empty building was a red neon sign above the door that said, “Keep Your Hope, Just Bring Your Money.”
Sarah was the last one out of the car. Stefan and Gio went inside, but she hesitated. How did it get new customers when no one could guess from the outside what type of store this was?
She walked inside. A man in a black T-shirt and black leather vest stood behind a counter. His skin was such a pasty white that it almost looked green under the harsh lights. Stefan approached the man and grinned. The man shook his head and said, “We already went through this, Agent Miles.”
“This is Gio Adami. He’s taken over the case and wanted a few words.”
Gio began asking the man questions. The man’s name was Jay Aud, and he was one of the owners. Sarah, rather than listening, wandered around. She couldn’t tell who was lying and who was not, what things added up and what didn’t. That wasn’t why she was here. She was here to give Gio impressions, images, sounds… nothing more.
The store was split down the middle. One side consisted of nothing but pornography. DVDs, magazines, even VHS tapes. The other consisted of sex toys, games, and various gels and lotions. She wandered through the first half.
Every deviant form of pornography was represented. From midgets and fecal play to simulated rape and eighteen-year-olds who had been Photoshopped to look twelve. Sarah stopped in the violent porn section. She felt compelled to search the bottom row and knelt down.
Two videos caught her eye. Both of them proclaimed themselves “The Sickest Shit in Porn.” They were both made by the same company: Cardinal Perverts. She picked one up and looked at the back cover. It showed a woman tied down and screaming as at least a dozen men gang-raped her. The other video wasn’t much different, showing an object rape with what appeared to be a real gun. The girls didn’t look as though they were acting.
She brought the two videos up and waited until Gio was done questioning Jay. He joined her as Stefan followed up with a few questions of his own.
“What are those?” Gio said.
“These girls don’t look like they’re acting.”
He looked at the video covers and read the descriptions before turning to Jay and saying, “What do you know about Cardinal Perverts?”
He shrugged. “Nothin’.”
“You’ve got two of their videos.”
“I got a lotta videos. We buy ’em online. I don’t know nothin’ about the companies that make that shit.”
Gio held up the video cases. “I’m confiscating these.”
“Fine.”
He looked at the covers again. “Violent porn isn’t anything new, Sarah.”
“I know. Well, actually, I didn’t know that, but I assumed that. Something about the way these girls are screaming though… I don’t know. It looks too real.”
Gio looked at Stefan. “I thought we went through every video?”
“We did, with SPD.”
Jay said, “Those two videos are new. Fresh out the box. So be careful with ’em.”
When they had returned to the Bureau, Stefan did a search for Cardinal Perverts. It was a company registered in California with an address in San Bernardino. Their website had a banner proclaiming them “The Sickest Company in All of Porn.”
Underneath the banner were video stills of women being raped, beaten, urinated on, and defecated on, and another section with men being subjected to the same humiliations. No contact numbers or emails were listed.
“It’d be easy to get the phone number,” Stefan said.
“No,” Gio said. “Go to Google Maps and look at that address.”
Stefan brought up Maps and punched in the address. It was an apartment building.
“Could be in an apartment, but this seems like it’d be a studio to me. That’s a fake address,” Gio said.
“What does that mean?” Sarah asked.
“It means they’re doing things they’d rather not have us look into. Stefan, pull up the registered agents for the company. We’re gonna go pay them a visit.”
“In person?”
“What’re budgets for?”
Cardinal Perverts was registered to a man named California Bill. That was the actual name listed in the Articles of Incorporation, but of course no such name existed in the California DMV database.
Gio made some calls, and they were on the next flight out to LAX. The flight to Los Angeles seemed like a pit stop compared to the one out to Arizona: just over an hour. Sarah decided that maybe this time some medication wouldn’t be a bad idea. But instead of taking Valium or Xanax, she opted for kava root, a natural relaxer. This time, she didn’t have to close her eyes.
As they stepped off the plane, she told Gio, “It’s true: I am getting used to flying.”
The cab ride to San Bernardino took much longer than she thought it would. Gio told her it would’ve taken two hours to get a car there, and it was much quicker to get a cab.
For so long, her dream had been to come to California, and once there, she didn’t know what to make of it. The streets were lined with palm trees, the sky fading from blue to the dim orange of dusk, and the streets crowded. She didn’t know what exactly she had expected California to be, but it didn’t look that much different from Arizona.
She hoped to stop at
the beach, but she didn’t want to bring it up right now. Gio had the intense look of concentration that he got sometimes when he was on the hunt. The videos might’ve had nothing to do with the case whatsoever, but something seemed off about the girls on the covers. Sarah got a sinking feeling every time she looked at the photos.
Stefan had chosen to come with them, and he sat in the passenger seat and chatted with the cabbie about various things the cabbie had seen in his time driving. He told them that it was all going to shit because Uber was putting them out of business.
“Damn technology’s putting the workin’ man out on his ass,” he kept saying.
“Sorry to drag you around,” Gio said to her.
“It’s fine. I’ve always wanted to come to California.”
“We probably can’t even stay the night. I just want to talk to someone from this company. You’re right—those photos look too real.”
The first place they stopped was the apartment building that Cardinal Perverts used as their corporate headquarters. Gio told the cabbie to wait and got out. Stefan and Sarah followed.
Stefan looked up at the building. “I love LA. I grew up here.”
Gio ignored him and entered the apartment building. They took the stairs to the third floor, and Gio found the apartment number the business used. He pounded on the door with the back of his fist and said, “FBI, open up.”
Sarah looked out of a window in the hallway. Outside, she had a view of some palm trees. Behind her, the door opened, and a male voice asked, “Who are you?”
“Agent Gio Adami with the FBI. Do you work for Cardinal Perverts?”
“Oh, that. No, man. No, they just use this address for mail.”
“You live here?”
“Yeah, they pay me five hundred bucks a month and I just collect their mail.”
Stefan leaned into him so far that the man had to take a step back into his apartment. “We need to talk to someone from the company. Someone that would know about the videos they make.”
He shrugged. “I got a phone number. That’s it.”
“We’ll take the number. I’d like a look around the apartment, too.”
“Be my guest.”
As they entered the apartment, Gio whispered to Stefan, “Run his name.”
Stefan nodded and began collecting information from the man. Sarah brushed past them and peered into the apartment—hardwood floors and bare white walls with a futon and flatscreen television showing a reality program about teenagers living on the beach. It was so loud she couldn’t think. She reached down to the remote and muted the TV.
The living room connected to a small kitchen and the only bedroom. Gio was busy going through the man’s drawers and checking his medicine cabinets. Sarah stood there, looking around.
“Where’s their mail?” Gio shouted.
The man shouted back, “Under the bed.”
Gio pulled out a steel-mesh bin filled with envelopes and packages from underneath the bed. It held at least fifty pieces of mail, which they’d have to take, Sarah guessed. Gio lifted the bin and put it on the bed. The bed looked new, much newer than anything else in the apartment. Gently, Sarah reached down, and brushed the comforter with her fingers.
The agony was instantaneous, as if she’d been hit in the head with a baseball bat. A white flash and pain.
Sarah saw the room brightly lit, darkness outside the windows. A woman was tied down on the bed, and two men did things to her, ranting about all the horrific things she was going to go through that night. Behind them stood a man with a camera and another man with a boom mic. There were several other people in the room as well. The man that had let them into the apartment was in the kitchen, and he watched what the men did to the woman.
Sarah crumpled over. She felt Gio’s soft touch as he lifted her.
“He’s lying,” she gasped, out of breath. “He’s lying.”
“Easy,” Gio said, laying her down on the bed.
“Not on the bed,” she said, forcing herself up. She rose and sat on the floor, her head in her hands until the pounding subsided. “He’s lying, Gio. They’ve filmed here before. He knows exactly who they are.”
Gio rushed into the living room, his face twisting in anger. He grabbed the man and slammed him into a wall. Stefan tried to pull them apart while saying, “Gio, no. Back off, man. Take it easy.”
Gio pulled the man away from the wall and then slammed him into it again. “You think I’m fucking playing with you. I’ll arrest you for obstruction of justice and accomplice to rape, you little shit. You’ll never see the outside of a fucking prison cell again.”
“Hey man,” he shouted, “I ain’t done nothin’, man.”
“You know who they are. They’ve filmed here before.”
The man looked as though he might pass out. His face lost all color, and his eyes widened. “I…”
“Don’t you fucking lie to me.”
“Yeah, they been here. They been here, man. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with those videos. They just pay my rent and five hundred bucks a month to use this place sometimes.”
“Who are they?”
“Just two dudes. Justin and ah…Bill. Justin and Bill, man.”
“California Bill?”
“Yeah, that’s what he goes by.”
Gio eased off him a little. “How do you get in touch with them?”
“They call me. I have their number. That’s it, that’s all I know.”
“If I find out you’re lying to me, I swear I will do everything in my power to put you in prison for as long as I can.”
“No, man. I’m not nothin’. I just let ’em use this place. That’s it.”
“You’re gonna call them and set a meeting. Tell them they got some mail that they need to pick up right now. If they ask what it is, say you don’t want to discuss it over the phone.”
He nodded in quick little movements. “Okay, man. Whatever you say.”
15
Sarah waited outside the apartment building as the call was made. Stefan joined her a minute later, and they stood and watched the traffic.
“I miss the air here,” he said. “The tint of exhaust. I’m sure it’s taken twenty years off my life growing up here, but you love what you know, I guess. The pollution’s different, though. It used to be brown and yellow. Now it’s clear or gray.” He looked at her. “You grow up on the East Coast?”
“Pennsylvania. I grew up in a small Amish community.”
“No shit? You’re an Amish girl?”
“Was.”
“You had your little party when you became a teenager and decided not to go back?”
“I guess.”
The painful memory of youth came back to her then, memories she hadn’t thought about for months. Her “gift,” as Gio insisted on calling it, had gotten her thrown out. The Amish were a simple people and didn’t see the world as gray. Everything was black or white, good or evil, and her gift had been determined to be evil when she had gone to the police about a popular preacher who had been raping young girls. Her father had thrown her out and told her to never come back.
And, last year, at the hands of a man the press had dubbed the Blood Dahlia, her sister and mother had been killed—something she blamed herself for.
“Can I ask you something?” Stefan asked.
“Sure.”
“You didn’t talk to the guy. Or Jay, at the store in Scottsdale. Seems kinda weird that a profiler would even be here. Shouldn’t you be in an office poring through the video and trying to give us a snapshot of the guy’s life?”
She shook her head. “I’m not a profiler.”
“What are you then?”
“You should probably ask Gio. I don’t think it’s my place to say.”
Gio stepped out of the building. “Let’s go. Coffee shop on Hacienda.”
Sarah sat in the cab as Gio, Stefan, and the man from the apartment building went into the coffee shop. The man sat by himself, and Gio and Stefan sa
t at a table away from him. Sarah could see everything through the windows, but after half an hour of staring at people going in and out, she grew bored. Her legs were going numb.
She stepped out of the car. Just as she did so, another car pulled up next to the cab and nearly clipped her. She stared at the two men, one bald and the other with long hair pulled back in a ponytail. Both were wearing thick black sunglasses. They glared at her as they got out, and a chill went down her back. It was them, she knew it.
She ignored them and pretended to be going into the coffee shop. She kept her head low, but noticed the bald one kept staring at her.
“Hey,” he said, his voice gruff, “where you goin’ so fast?”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Where you goin’ so fast?”
“Just grabbing a coffee.”
“Yeah? You ever done any modeling?”
She shook her head.
“We run a talent agency. Maybe you should come by, take some pics. I think you got something.” He took out a business card and gave it to her. International Models Inc. It had the name of Bill Davidson as CEO and President.
“Thanks. Maybe I will.”
She hurried into the coffee shop and stood in line. Glancing back once, she saw the two men sit down across from the man whose apartment she’d just been in. Within five seconds, Stefan and Gio were at the table. Gio sat down and leaned forward in his chair casually, but Stefan stood stiff as a board, his hand on the firearm holstered on his right hip.
The man from the apartment got up and left. Sarah took a seat at a table next to them to listen in. Bill was saying, “It’s all consensual, and they’re over eighteen. You can’t do shit.”
“I wanna talk to the girls in your films.”
He shrugged. “Shit, call ’em all you want. They ain’t my property. They in other porns, too. Call their agents. I’ll give you a list of every bitch we’ve used. We’re on the up and up.”
Stefan said, “That’s an interesting tattoo poking out of your sleeve. Looks like prison work to me. You been inside?”
Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) Page 6
