“If I remember correctly, you were gone for months.” I wished I could take the words back, because…
“Like I was on a cushy vacation or something. I worked harder in those months than I’ve worked in years at the agency. Please, don’t bother being condescending, it’s unbecoming.”
And there you go. A war of words with Charles in a losing proposition.
I walked into the kitchen and flipped on the light. I swear it had actually gotten darker outside while I was talking to Jeb.
I dumped out the old coffee and rinsed the pot, then I put it under the spout of the water cooler we had, and measured fresh coffee grounds into a filter. I grabbed the old filter and tossed it into the garbage, then snagged the coffee pot just before it overflowed with water. I placed the new filter in the machine and poured the water as Charles grabbed two mugs from the cabinet.
I hit the button to brew. “There, coffee is started. But I need your help first.”
He gave me his look. That “what now” look.
I hooked my arm in his and led him to the bedroom. “Sit on that, please.” I pointed to my suitcase.
He looked at the suitcase, then at me. “You’re not very bright, are you?”
Coming from anyone else, I’d have been insulted, but with Charles I knew he was being endearing. Not!
“Don’t look at me like that. I over packed. Sit on the damn thing, so I can zip it up.” I shoved down on the top, but it barely budged.
He walked to the suitcase and opened it up, pulling everything out and separating it in piles. “Nope.” He tossed items on the left side of the luggage and repeated this too many times to count. He gestured to the clothing on the right side and said, “Start rolling.”
I frowned at him. “Rolling?”
He picked up a white silk blouse, folded it with the long sleeves laying nicely against the body of the blouse, then placed it back on the bed and rolled it starting from the bottom. When he was done, he placed it in the bottom of the suitcase. “Like that. Roll from the bottom, so you don’t wrinkle the collar. You’ll be able to fit more in the bag, and you won’t have to iron as much once you get there. And we all know how much you love to iron.”
I grabbed a pair of jeans. I started to fold them when he snatched them from my hands. “What now?”
“All of the tops first, then all pants, dresses if you have them. Make it orderly. That way you aren’t digging for things and making a mess when you’re getting dressed on vacation.” He grabbed a handful of panties and tucked them in the far corner of the suitcase. “Then tuck your bras against the panties, and you won’t crush them.”
His system was good. “Thanks.”
I picked up a shirt, and folded and rolled while Charles looked on. After a few items were rolled, he went to Nick’s luggage. He opened it. “What is this?”
I looked across the bed at Nick’s stuff. “Nick and I had a bit of a thing this morning.”
Charles looked at me without raising his head. “An argument?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think you could call it an argument. But I got a little snappy when he hadn’t packed yet and was headed into the office.”
“The office? Is that man crazy?” Charles asked.
“I know, right? He went into the office on the first day of our vacation. How crazy do you think he’s going to be when we are in Italy?”
Charles removed everything from Nick’s bag, and opened drawers and the closet and folded them as he put them away. “Not good.”
I ran around to the other side of the bed and grabbed his arm. “What are you doing? He’ll be furious if he has to pack again.”
Charles shook his arm loose. “Mimi, you aren’t going to Italy. I can tell you this right now.”
Rage bubbled inside me. I could actually feel my blood boiling. “We are going.”
Charles continued to unpack Nick’s suitcase. “I’ll bet you a thousand dollars you don’t go. I hope you have travel insurance.”
I grabbed a pair of boxers from Charles’s hand and tossed them back in the suitcase. “Get out of here. We are going. And I’ll take that bet. Now, go!”
One
Charles
I wasn’t the one who usually interviewed new clients, since I didn’t keep regular hours. Taking appointments would be fruitless. But with Mimi gone (at least for the day), I had to be the person of first contact, after our office assistant Uta, of course.
I’d been sitting in Mimi’s office, trying to get comfortable and figure out what the plan of her desk was when Uta knocked on the door frame. I had an open-door policy, but she knocked anyway.
“Do you have a minute?” She asked.
For Uta, I always had a minute. “Sure, what’s up?”
Uta didn’t respond to my question, she just stepped back and gracefully ushered a small Hispanic girl into my office. Correction, Mimi’s office. “This young lady would like to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes to listen to her?”
I’m not going to pretend I liked being put on the spot. I didn’t. But looking at this bone thin Hispanic girl with dark circles under her eyes and ragged hair, I was curious.
I came around to the front of the desk and stuck my hand out to shake hers. She stepped forward and gave me a limp hand.
“I’m Charles Parks, one of the owners of the Gotcha Detective Agency.”
“I’m Alma Medina, and I need to hire you.” Her voice was almost a whisper, and shaky.
I looked to Uta. “I’ll take care of it from here, thank you.”
Uta left the office, and I pointed at a chair for Alma to sit down.
I went around and sat back down behind Mimi’s desk. I wanted to pump antibacterial gel into my hands, but refrained.
“You want to hire us?”
She didn’t look like she could afford us.
“I don’t have much money.” She leaned back to dig into the pocket of her shorts.
“Let’s not worry about money right now. Tell me what’s going on. You look like a terrified rabbit.” Actually, terrified rabbit was too docile, too cutesy for what she looked like. Maybe a fox?
Alma put her index finger in her mouth, and chewed on the ragged fingernail with chipped black polish. She wouldn’t look me in the eyes, but she did look at me. “Mr. Parks, I was kidnapped.”
Well, knock me down with a feather. Those were the last words I expected to hear from this little girl. “How old are you?” I knew it was a strange question to lead with, but I had to know.
“I’m nineteen.” She spoke English well, but a hint of a Hispanic accent still filtered through.
She looked sixteen at the very oldest.
“Okay, you were kidnapped. Tell me your story.” I adjusted the legal pad that Mimi kept on her desk, and picked up a mechanical pencil. I wished I’d brought my iPad with me to work at her desk.
As neat and tidy as I was, my penmanship…I could have been a dentist.
“I haven’t seen a calendar, so I’m not positive, but I think I’ve been gone two weeks. I was babysitting, and we had just gotten home from the movies, and were snatched in the parking lot of my apartment.”
I raise my eyebrows and stared at the young girl. “Your apartment?”
She gave a slight nod.
“Do you think there’s a missing person report?” I jotted down a note to check with the police. “Wouldn’t someone have reported you missing?”
“I don’t know if anybody even realized we were gone. I work in the fields, and it’s not unusual for someone to just stop showing up for work. They get deported, sick, or decide not to work anymore. No one probably even called looking for me.”
“What about your parents?” I asked.
“I don’t live at home. And I don’t visit that often. My dad is sort of a drunk. A mean drunk.”
“Okay, well, what about the girl you were babysitting? Where is she?” This didn’t make sense to me.
“She was taken, too.” A tear rolled down her d
irty cheek.
“What about her parents?” Surely her parents had called the police.
“Maybe I should just start at the beginning, and that way I can go straight through. Then maybe you won’t have so many questions.” Her voice got a little stronger the more she spoke.
I looked at her, in her dirty white T-shirt and cut off jeans. If I saw her from behind, I’d bet her shorts didn’t even cover her butt cheeks. Her tennis shoes had holes in the toes.
“Start from the beginning.”
She took a deep breath. “I was babysitting Yolanda. Her full name is Yolanda Reyes. Yolanda is thirteen years old and she was staying with me because her parents had gone back to Mexico. I was supposed to watch over her and keep her safe until they got back.”
“Have you been in touch with Yolanda’s parents?”
She shook her head. “We’d gone to the movies. But when we got there, it was rated R, and she wasn’t allowed to go in. So we stopped at McDonald’s and grabbed a couple of burgers, and then went home. When we got out of the car, a gray van was right behind us. Two huge men, with their faces covered, snatched Yolanda and me.
“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how much I tell you is true and how much is imagined. I’ve gone over it in my head so many times since I was taken, that I don’t know if I’ve made some of this up.”
I knew people who’d been in situations like hers. Not sex trafficking, but kidnapped or prisoners of war. I knew that your mind made up stories to keep you alive, and did its best to keep you sane. “That’s okay, just tell me what you remember.”
“When I pulled into my parking space, I didn’t even have my door open yet before two men came running out of the van toward us. I yelled at Yolanda to lock her door to get back inside, but they had the doors open and were pulling us out by the hair before I could even blink. I tried to reach for my cell phone, because it was the only thing I could think to do. In the frenzy, I just thought I should have my phone, and I needed to hide it.”
“Were you able to grab your cell phone?”
She shook her head “I didn’t grab mine, but Yolanda got hers. The problem was they took it from her immediately. Threw it back in the car. At least I think it landed in the car.”
“Both cell phones are still in the car?”
Again, she nodded. “I think so. I don’t know. We’ve been gone a long time. They might still be there.”
I braced myself for the rest of her story, because I knew the initial kidnapping and being dumped in the van was probably the least terrorizing part of this story, and the nightmare had only begun.
“Some parts of it are a blur, but we were in the van. They gagged us so we couldn’t scream. Then they put some sort of like paper grocery sack or something over our heads, so we couldn’t see where we were going. That was stupid, because we were sitting in the back on the floor and wouldn’t know where we were going anyway. I tried to remember left turn, right turn, stop sign, stoplight, but after three or four turns and stops, I got confused. Besides, I would never remember it all anyway. But I do remember this, we got on the highway.”
I jotted down the details as she told them to me; which direction she thought they went, which seemed to be south on Highway 101.
“I think we went over some railroad tracks. You know how railroad tracks have that funny rumbling bumpy feeling, not like potholes?”
If they were on the highway and going south, the railroad tracks would run along the west side of the highway. I jotted on the legal pad about the railroad tracks. “Do you remember if it was a right-hand turn before you went over the railroad tracks?”
She nodded eagerly this time. “Yes, yes it was. And then it was smooth for a little bit, and then potholes. You know there’s a difference between railroad tracks and potholes, like I said.”
This excitement in her voice gave me hope. She was remembering some decent details.
“And then after that, they unloaded us. I know that we stopped on gravel because I could hear the tire noise change. The potholes and the smooth road turned bumpy, noisy, and scratchy like gravel. That’s when we stopped and got out of the van.”
“Was the bag over your head so snug that you couldn’t see your feet?”
She shook her head slightly, as if trying to remember at the same time. “There was one of those big blue lights, you know, like a street lamp. I couldn’t see it, but I could see the gravel on the ground, and I could see my feet. I’d lost a shoe. I don’t know if I lost it at home or in the van, but I was only wearing one shoe. And I remember thinking it was going to hurt to walk across the gravel. It did.”
Narrowing down the location was going to be difficult. South of Salinas, over the railroad tracks, asphalt road with gravel. “Do you remember if you turned right or left off of the paved road onto the gravel?”
“I was mostly out of it by then, panicked. Yolanda was crying beside me, and I lost track. I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”
I scribbled a few more notes. “It’s okay, it’s not that big a deal. What happened next?”
She took a deep breath before continuing. “They shoved me through a fence. Well, I mean they opened the gate and then shove me through. Yolanda was fighting them, so one of them picked her up. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear the struggle.”
“Did they take you into a barn?”
“No, it was a house. Once we were in the house, they took the bag off my head. The bag had already fallen off Yolanda’s head, because she was being carried like a sack of potatoes over the man’s shoulder.”
This was good. They saw their kidnappers. “Okay, I need you to tell me everything you remember physically about the men who kidnapped you.”
“It got really fuzzy, because they stuck something in my arm.”
Two
Charles
While listening to Alma’s story and the description of the people who kidnapped her, I had sent Max a text message. I needed him to get to the office right away. Max Daniels and I have been together for… I don’t know, we’ve been together for a while. Max worked for the FBI, and I was pretty sure I was going to need his help.
Uta had been nice enough to realize the girl might be starving, and brought in a tray with some toast, butter, jam, coffee and bottled water. She placed it on the desk, closer to Alma than to me. Like I didn’t know it was for Alma.
I had gone over the story one more time with Alma just to make sure we had all of the details, and there wasn’t anything that she left out. By the time we finished going over the story the second time, Max had arrived. He stopped at the door to the office. Alma turned around and stared at him.
“It’s okay Alma. This is Max Daniels. He works for the FBI, and he’s here to help.”
Max relaxed his body language and walked into the office without actually approaching Alma. He grabbed a chair from the far end of the room instead of the guest chair next to Alma.
“No police. No police. They’re going to kill me.”
“We are going to go over your story again, Alma,” Max said. “I do need to ask you a few more questions.”
Alma chewed on her bottom lip and nodded.
“We need to get some details of your escape. Are you ready to answer these questions?”
Alma drank from the bottle of water. “They usually made us go to motels on the second floor or higher. Or motels with bars on the windows. That day,” she thought for a moment, “that day, it was just a one-story motel. The man I was with insisted I take a shower before he would have sex with me. I turned on the shower and locked the bathroom door, then escaped through the small window. It was a very small window and I had to squeeze through.”
She was a tiny girl as it was. I could only imagine how small the window must have been if she had to squeeze through it.
“And then I ran. I just ran and ran and ran, and then I found an alley with the dumpster, and I hid behind the dumpster for a few minutes to catch my breath. No one was going to call the cops, s
o I wasn’t worried about them. But I was afraid that the cops would bring me back to look for them. I was afraid that they were smarter than the cops.”
“What did you do next?” Max asked.
“Once I got my breath back, I sat there trying to think of what to do. I was afraid to go out to the street, because I knew that man would be looking for me.”
“The man you were supposed to have sex with?”
“No, the man who took me there. They never left us alone. They brought us to the place to have sex, and waited either outside the door or in the lobby. Usually they stayed in the hallway, or they waited outside the car if we had sex in a car. But not so close to hear, because the men would be weirded out by that.”
“Do you know if the man stayed in the hallway this time?”
She started talking faster. “I don’t know. But I did know that I needed to keep moving, because the man would come to look for me in the shower pretty soon. The other man would be looking for me in the streets. I peeked out from around the corner and finally saw a woman. I asked her where the bus station was. She looked at me like I had lice or something, but she told me the Greyhound bus station was about half a mile and pointed me in the right direction.”
“Weren’t you afraid someone would look for you at the bus station?”
She shivered. “I was terrified, but I thought if I hurried, I could get to the bus station and get a ticket before anybody realized I was gone. How lucky could I be that it was only a few blocks away?”
“Did you have money?”
“The man paid me. I had fifty dollars. I was supposed to give the money to the man outside. But I ran, so I had the fifty dollars with me.”
“What did the men look like that kidnapped you?” Max asked.
I looked at Max and put my hand up. “She’s given me a lot of details that we can go over later. So many details that I think we’ll be able to figure this out and catch these bastards.”
“I got off the bus in Salinas and just started walking. I don’t think any of the men were in Salinas, but I didn’t know. I waited all night at the bus station, hiding, because the bus didn’t leave until late. And it stopped everywhere on the way. I didn’t even know until I got to the bus station that we were in Oakland. I knew the street was International Boulevard, but I never heard of that street before. ”
Trespassers Will Be Prostituted. Page 2
