This didn’t help me at all. But at least I knew they’d be working the streets at night. I could also look at local motels, if it came to that. Maybe look for men escorting young girls outside the rooms.
“What motel were you at the day you escaped?” Max asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Just that it was close to the bus station. I didn’t know I was going to escape, so I didn’t look. And I sure didn’t look back as I ran for my life.”
Max and I stared at her, silent. Her story made me want to punch something, and I’m usually so even keeled. But I could feel the rage, and I didn’t like it.
I stood. “Alma, you need to rest and relax. You’ve eaten, right?”
She looked at Max, then said, “I ate a little.”
I looked at Max. “Do you have your iPad or your Mac here?”
“My iPad,” he said.
“Why don’t you pull up Netflix and she can watch something to get her mind off of the real world?”
Alma looked up at me. “I’d really rather read a book. Can I read on your iPad?”
I thought this girl seemed smart for a nineteen-year-old. Any teen that prefers books over movies on Netflix is a genius.
“Sure, I have a Kindle app on my iPad or iBooks. Either way, you can go online and decide which books you want to read, and I’ll download them for you.” Max smiled. I think he felt the same way I did. Smart girl.
Alma smiled.
“I’m outta here. I have a lot of things to do. Alma, I will see you later.” To Max I said, “How much longer will you be able to stay with her?”
“Not long. I’ll get her set up with the iPad, then I need to head out.”
Max and I left Alma out on the patio as Max walked me to my car.
“You have a way to monitor her on that iPad, don’t you?” I asked Max.
Max grinned. “I’ll know if she’s reading books, if she’s contacting people, if she’s on Facebook or Twitter. Anything she does on that iPad I can track.”
It wasn’t a lack of trust for Alma, but it was normal for a teenager to check in on social media. If she was checking in, others could see her. It was imperative that we knew what she was doing.
“I’m still trying to figure out how they picked Alma and Yolanda to abduct. They had to know something about their habits, and that they were alone. I mean, please, who goes to El Costa Plaza?”
Max looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. But I’ll run a check to see if there are any other missing girls from Salinas. This can’t be a one-off.”
“And maybe they have kidnapped from the area before.” I was grasping.
“How much do you know about that area of town?” Max asked.
“I don’t know all that much, but I do know it’s in the gang ridden part of town.”
“It is. And that’s what has me so baffled. I could see them being abducted in a parking lot or a mall. Some place public. But in order to have abducted them from such an obscure apartment complex, someone had to have been watching them. What made them go there?”
“We have to find out why they chose these two girls. That might give us a few answers.”
Max leaned against my car, and it took everything in me not to ask him to step away. You’d think he would know how I felt about my car by now, but apparently I liked him more than I realized, because I let it go. “You know there’s a possibility it’s not the Russians. It could be the Crimeans, or any of the Eastern European countries. Many of them are known for their unethical ways and lack of empathy. Nothing means more to them than money. At least to these types of people. And I use the word ‘people’ loosely.”
I knew what he was saying was true. I didn’t care if they were Russian or Crimean; they could be East Indian for all I cared. I was going to take them down, and I was going to take them down hard.
“Figuring out how they zeroed in on Alma and Yolanda should give me a place to start.”
Max pushed off my car, which made me flinch. “I can see what Alma thinks before I take off.”
I put my hand up. “No. Let her rest. Let her escape the real world for a little while.”
Six
Charles
I was happy to see that Lydia had responded promptly to my check-ins throughout the day. She also let me know that absolutely nothing was happening, other than Lola snoring and farting in the back seat.
Cortnie met me at the back door of the kitchen and told me the cell phones were charged. I grabbed a bottle of sparkling water from the refrigerator and followed her down the hall to her office.
“Alma said they worked on Sonoma Boulevard as one of the locations. And Max told me that Sonoma Boulevard is in Vallejo.” I shared my newly found information with Cortnie.
“Oh yeah, I heard about Vallejo. They’re like the number one area for prostitution in the state of California. They had a neighborhood watch or something off Sonoma Boulevard. It’s a family kind of neighborhood, you know. Anyway, they put up this Jumbotron and anybody who was convicted of soliciting a prostitute was put up on the screen. Totally embarrassing, right? You would think that that would keep people from trolling the streets.”
I laughed at that. I could only imagine.
“They even started a program where they took down the license plates of these trolling cars, and sent letters to the homes. They told them that soliciting a prostitute was going to get them arrested. Can you imagine if your wife or girlfriend opened that mail?”
I chuckled. “Serves the perverts right. I hope it caused a few divorces. Maybe even…never mind, I’m not going to go there.” My thoughts had gone to a dark place.
Cortnie had the cell phones sitting on her desk, but she picked up a piece of paper instead of the phones.
“Yolanda was definitely a selfie queen. I should’ve known this when I saw all of the makeup. I doubt she looks this cute now.” Cortnie handed me a blown up printout of half a dozen selfies Yolanda took. “Her signature seems to be purple nail polish and purple hair. I wonder what her favorite color is?”
I studied the pictures. All too close up to see the background. Most seemed to be taken while she was in a car.
“The thing is, unless they made her dye it, that purple hair is going to be so easy to pick out. Do you think they would’ve spent money to dye her hair?”
I thought about it for a minute. There were cheaper ways to get rid of that purple than to dye it another color. “They could easily cut her hair off.”
Cortnie shrugged. “I don’t think they’d do that. Longer hair is more attractive to men. To get that purple out, they’d have to cut it awfully short.”
I had to admit Cortnie was probably right. These men were looking for little girls with long wavy hair or long straight hair, not little girls that look like little boys.
“What about the text messages?” I asked.
Cortnie handed me another sheet of paper. “This is from Yolanda’s phone. First, let me tell you, there were messages I didn’t print out. In general, they were friends calling to say, ‘Hey, call me.’ And there were at least fifteen, maybe twenty, from her mom. The first one casually telling her about her dad’s surgery, then asking why she hadn’t returned the call. The later messages are more and more frantic, telling her to please check in and asking if she lost her phone. She even says she’s going to be calling Alma to check up on her.”
“Seriously, if she lost her phone, she wasn’t getting the messages. Some people just don’t think.” Then I relaxed my tone, imagining the stress this mother was going through. “Never mind, she probably wasn’t thinking. But we have the mother’s number now, so we can call her.”
Cortnie put a piece of paper down on her desk and looked at me. “If you’re in a foreign country, is that a phone call you’d want to get? Why don’t we wait a day, and see if we can find this girl first?”
“You’re right. We wait one more day. I’m going up to Oakland tonight to poke around. If I don’t see that girl, I might
head down to Vallejo for a little bit and see what kind of traffic they have there. It might be easier for me to snatch her in Vallejo if I see her.”
Cortnie sat up in her chair. “Hold on a minute. If you snatch her, they’re going to know someone is on to them and close up shop.”
“I have a two hour drive. I’ll figure out what’s going to happen when I get there. But I can tell you this, if I see that girl, I’m not leaving her there.” I just could not imagine driving away, knowing that a child was going to be having sex with a dozen men that night.
The more I let the whole sex trafficking ruminate in my brain, I realized that both Alma and Yolanda were going to need extensive psychological help. This wasn’t something you got over by forgetting about it, or going day-to-day trying to forget, or at least hope it will fade. I needed to contact friends who would take these cases pro bono. The average trafficker runs at least ten girls. I knew a couple of people who would take on these girls as patients and help them readjust back to normal lives.
“The text messages don’t seem all that telling, either. ‘Did you lose your phone?’ ‘No school? You okay?’ The texts from her mother are mixed with the phone messages. And then her mailbox must’ve been full, because there were no more messages and no more texts.”
“I don’t think a text message box can get full. They probably just got annoyed that she wasn’t responding. That, and the phone probably went dead.”
“Yeah, but even with the phone dead, she’d still get the text messages.”
“What about Alma’s phone?”
Cortnie switched to another piece of paper. “The first voice message was from her aunt, calling to see why she missed church. Then there was a message from work, asking if she intended to come back. After that, there were several messages from friends, asking if she was okay, and asking if she was sick. But here’s the weird one the same night as the abduction: a text message from an unknown number. It’s not a number that’s listed. It’s like it was blocked. And the message said, Are you home? Alma responded back with, Who is this? The unknown number just repeats the question, Are you home? This goes on a couple of more times before Alma stops responding so the last question is from the unknown number, Are you home?”
I looked at the piece of paper that Cortnie had handed me. This conversation seemed a little strange. It wasn’t something that Alma had brought up. It made me wonder if this guy had been watching Alma. And how did he have her number? It had to be someone she knew. Otherwise, how would he have her number? But he didn’t say her name, did he?
“Are you ready for the real kicker?” Cortnie asked as she handed me another piece of paper.
“Give me the dirty details.”
“There’s a call from an unknown number, too. I haven’t traced it yet to find out what the blocked number is, but the message said, ‘You didn’t answer my text, call me.’ Has to be the same guy, right?”
“All right, you find out who that number belongs to. It may be nothing, but maybe not.” Wow, that was deep. “I’m headed to Oakland first. I’ll get a good look at both locations and see what we can find out.”
“That sounds good. And I have the energy bills. It looks like the house we might want to stake out is on Somo Road.”
“Highest electric bill?” I asked.
Cortnie flipped through her paperwork once again, and said, “Not by much, but enough that I think I should take a look. I’ll find out about the blocked number and take a look at that house.”
I got up to leave, but stopped before walking out the door. “If you go to that house, you take backup. This is a very dangerous situation. Do you understand me?”
Cortnie’s grim expression, told me everything. She understood just exactly how dangerous these men could be.
The Italian Mafia had nothing on the Russian mafia. The Italian mafia may have committed some horrible crimes, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the nastiness of the Russian mafia. And it wasn’t just the Russians. All over the Eastern Bloc, they had infiltrated the United States with their influence and arrogance.
“Keep me posted. I want to know everything that’s going on.”
I started down the hall, then turned around and went back to Cortnie’s office. “You need to find a way to not be conspicuous. Maybe you can drive up one of the access roads in the produce fields, then walk to the address on Somo Road.”
“I’d planned to drive up the street and take a look around in one car, maybe even pull in the driveway, and get a closer look. Then I’ll come back here, change cars, and go back and get closer, if I can.”
Cortnie was a smart girl. Surveillance was her forte, so I knew she’d have a good plan. “Are you going to stick around and watch? Or are you going to put up surveillance equipment and then get out of there?”
Cortnie walked across the room to her closet. She opened the door and started pulling out large black cases. “You said these people are dangerous. I’m not sticking around any longer than I have to. My plan is to go in and set up wireless surveillance, then check it remotely from the car. If I can get close enough to the house, I’m going to put a bug inside. The house will have to be empty, though. I’m not taking any chances.” She hauled out another bag.
“I’m going to pull Lydia off of the apartment. We can go back there later.”
Cortnie unzipped a big square bag, checked on something inside, then she looked at me. “I’ll call Lydia and we’ll drive out there together. I’ve looked at the topical satellite of the location, and there is an eight-foot fence all the way around the house. That’s another thing that makes me positive that this is the right location.”
These farmhouses were built in the 1940s, and many of them had fallout shelters. It made me wonder if some of the girls might be kept in the fallout shelter. Then again, would the captors even know that a fallout shelter existed?
“While you’re there, see if you can find a fallout shelter. Houses from those days, people were terrified of bombing, considering what it happened at Pearl Harbor.”
“Will do. I’ll have the night vision goggles on while I’m looking for places to set up camera surveillance.”
“Thanks, Cortnie. I think your surveillance experience is going to come in very handy on this job.”
Cortnie looked up, her brows high and a wide smile. “I think this is going to work really well, too.”
I finally made it all the way down the hall. I stopped at my office to grab a CD, then headed out to my car. I decided the most dependable car was my Spyder. It would stand out, but there were sure to be other people trolling those streets in Mercedes, BMWs, and Jaguars.
Seven
Mimi
I thought about stopping back by the office to pick Lola up and bring her home, but I needed to unpack. I didn’t even bother to unroll the clothes I’d so neatly rolled to fit into my suitcase. I just put them away as is. Then I went to Nick’s suitcase, unzipped it, got pissed off and just left it on the bed. He could unpack his own damn clothes.
My next order of business was to call on the travel insurance, and get back the money for the tickets to Italy and all-inclusive vacation we paid for. I was disappointed, but since I had expected the worst going into this trip, it wasn’t as devastating as I thought it would be.
I called Charles, but it went to voicemail. So I sent him a text to let him know the trip was canceled. As soon as I hit send, Nick came home.
When he walked into the bedroom, he had a hangdog expression on his face. “Do you hate me?”
I wanted to hate him. I wanted to be furious with him. But knowing me, the shoe could easily have been on the other foot, and I’d have expected him to act like an adult about it. Our jobs were important to us, and the jobs we did affected others.
“I want to be mad, but I can’t. This is just how our lives are. If we were in different careers, this wouldn’t happen. Or maybe it would. Who knows? But it is what it is, and I wouldn’t change my life for anything.” I walked around the si
de of the bed straight over to Nick and wrapped my arms around him. I was so lucky to have found someone so similar and yet so different.
He hugged me back, almost too tight. It felt like a hug of relief. He kissed the top of my head, and said, “We have really messed up lives, don’t we?”
I backed up and looked at him. Granted, he was tall and I had to look up. “Our lives aren’t that bad. We’ve chosen careers that help others, and that means our lives sometimes get put on hold. Never mind that we’ve chosen to help others in a profession that brings us in contact with so much scum.”
Nick sat at the foot of the bed, his legs wide and his hands folded. Now he had to look up at me. “I know I haven’t told you much about what happened and why it’s interfering with our plans.”
I turned around and sat down next to him on the bed. “You don’t need to tell me. You have your job, and I have mine.”
He unfolded his hands and put his hand in mine. Our hands rested on the bed, fingers intertwined.
“I know you needed to get away from all of this ugliness, and as it turns out, this is one of the ugliest cases I’ve ever had,” he said while staring at the floor.
I looked at him, and saw the sadness in his face and the dark circles around his eyes. We really needed to get away, but some things could wait. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“There’s not much I can say right now. But I can tell you this, it was a multiple murder. The scene was a slaughterhouse.”
The way he said it, I wasn’t sure if the scene was at a slaughterhouse or looked like a slaughterhouse. I decided not to ask. I just held his hand and squeezed, and we sat there quietly for a few minutes.
Trespassers Will Be Prostituted. Page 6
