by Madyson Grey
Signe hurried in to her daughter’s bedside. On her way in, she passed Victoria in Lena’s living room.
“Sorry, Grandma, I can’t do vomit,” she said helplessly.
“No problem, child. I can handle it,” Signe said, bustling on by.
“I told you shrimp was no good,” she told Lena by way of greeting.
“Hi to you, too, Mom,” Lena said with a weak smile.
Signe put her hand on Lena’s forehead.
“About a hundred and four or so,” she said.
“That’s what the thermometer read,” the doctor said.
“This hand is as good as any thermometer,” Signe asserted.
“Apparently so,” he agreed.
“What have you done for her so far?”
“A few sips of Coke and half of a saltine.”
“Good. Just what I’d have done.”
It was quickly obvious that Signe carried the double authority of a mother and a nurse with nearly fifty years of experience. Dr. Stevens knew when he was outranked, so he patted Lena on the arm and told her that she was in good hands now, and he’d check on her later.
On his way out, he also told Victoria to call him if Lena got worse, but he thought she would be fine. Victoria thanked him profusely for coming on such short notice and on a Saturday morning.
“No problem, Victoria,” he said, patting her shoulder. “We didn’t have anything planned for today anyway, so you didn’t interrupt anything. Besides, doctors are used to being interrupted.”
After checking in again with Signe, who assured her that she had everything under control, Victoria and Rafael went back upstairs.
“I guess I’ll work on the RV website this morning,” she told him.
“I’ve got some computer work to do, too,” he replied.
So they each busied themselves at their own computers for the rest of the morning. When Victoria got the website for ThornRiver RV Park the way she wanted it, she took her laptop into Rafael’s office to show him.
“Hey, that looks great!” he exclaimed. “So much better than the old one. Did you get the customer feedback page done?”
“Yep, it’s right here,” she said, clicking on the word “Comments” on the menu bar.
“Looks perfect,” he said. “I’m hungry. What’s for lunch?”
“What do you want?”
“I dunno. I think I’m turkeyed out. What else do we have?”
“Let’s go out to the kitchen and find out. I’ll go downstairs and ask Grandma if she wants something, too.”
They both walked out to the kitchen and pulled open pantry, fridge, and freezer doors, poking into plastic containers, picking up cans and packages, and rejecting everything they looked at.
“How about grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup?” Victoria finally suggested.
“That works,” Rafael said. “You start them, and I’ll go ask Grandma if she wants some, too.
When he got down to Lena’s apartment, he found Signe reading a book in the living room and Lena sleeping.
“Her fever is slowly going down,” she reported.
“That’s good. Do you want some tomato soup and a grilled cheese?”
“Sure, that would taste good,” Signe replied. “Do you mind bringing it down to me? I want to stay here in case she wakes up and needs me.”
“No problem. By the way, what will Grandpa do for lunch with you up here? Shall I go get him on the quad and bring him up here to eat with us?”
“I’ll call him and ask him what he wants to do,” Signe said.
After a brief phone conversation, she told Rafael that he would appreciate coming up for lunch.
He took the report back up to Victoria who was glad for the slight improvement, and glad that he had thought of her grandpa. Then he went outside, hopped on the quad, and went down to pick up Grandpa. Erik was just walking out to meet him when he pulled into their driveway.
All afternoon Victoria was loathe to leave the house in case Lena should take a turn for the worse. Periodically, she went downstairs to check in on her. Each time, Lena seemed to be feeling a little better. Late in the afternoon, she ate a banana yogurt along with several saltines. She had drank a couple of glasses of Coke and was keeping everything down.
Rafael went down to the park just for general principles to have a look around. After the Hallowe’en incident, he half expected more trouble. He was not to be disappointed.
Chapter Eight
For some reason, Rafael decided to walk the woods path from home to the front of the park. It was a beautiful autumn day, clear and crisp. Most of the colored leaves had fallen by now. He made a mental note to have one of the men get out the lawn sweeper and pick up the leaves within the next couple of days.
As he rounded a bend in the path, straight ahead he saw someone lying on the path. That’s really strange, he thought to himself. How did anyone get in here while we’re closed? Then he realized that people could walk into the park relatively easily, even when they were closed.
He approached the person and saw that it was a young woman. A young Asian woman. As he looked down at her, he realized that she was dead. Not only was she dead, but also she was holding a note in her hand. Not wanting to touch anything until the police arrived, he backed away and reached for his phone to call 911.
“What’s your emergency?” the operator intoned.
“I have found a dead woman in Thornton Park in Westlake Village,” Rafael reported.
“Are you certain that she is dead?”
“Pretty sure. She had a bullet hole in her forehead. But I haven’t touched her.”
“An officer is on his way. Please stay there until he arrives.”
“You can be sure of it.”
After he disconnected that call, he called Mickey, then Ted, and then Jim. Last of all, he called Victoria. His message to each was brief.
“There’s a dead woman on the woods path. Meet me at the ticket booth. The police are on their way.”
The men all met at the front gate simultaneously. Victoria was several minutes behind them, as she had much farther to go.
“Are you serious?” Mickey exclaimed as he approached Rafael.
“Unfortunately. She’s a young Asian woman. Looks like the girls from Angel’s Retreat that came through here last summer. Can’t be more than twenty or so.”
“How?” This question came from Jim.
“Bullet to the head.”
“Wow,” was all Ted could come up with at the moment.
Before long, a couple of police cruisers pulled into the parking lot and four policemen got out and walked over to where the men and Victoria were waiting.
“More trouble, Mr. Rivera?” one of the officers asked as the four approached.
“Unfortunately, Sergeant Losey,” Rafael answered. “This one is human.”
Sergeant Losey was the same officer who had come out to investigate the animal killings.
“Show us where the body is,” he said.
Rafael led the procession down the path into the woods to where the body of the young woman lay. The policemen surrounded her, examining her from every angle without touching her yet. The one with a camera took a number of photos, also from every angle.
She was dressed in her native clothing, indicating that she had just arrived from her homeland. But her hair was neatly combed and her skin, what of it that was visible, was clean. She was laid out carefully on the ground, not just dumped there. She was lying straight, with her arms laid naturally across her body, hands together. Other than the small bullet hole in her forehead, she looked for all the world like she was just lying there asleep.
Victoria couldn’t hold back the tears as she looked at the innocent young girl who had likely come to America with high hopes of earning enough money to take care of her family back home. Now, it was likely that they would never know what became of her. She had no identification on her, so even the police would never know her name. Not unless someone r
ecognized her photograph and came forward to identify her body.
It was all so senseless. So cruel. To promise a family that their daughter would be taken to America and given a good paying job, and be able to send money to the family to keep them from starving, and then to simply murder her as soon as she steps foot on American soil. But maybe death was a kinder fate than the life she would have been destined to lead. A life of prostitution and virtual slavery, in the land of the free. It was too much for Victoria to deal with and she backed away from the body, turned her back on the men, and sobbed quietly.
Rafael sensed her anguish and came over and took her in his arms, letting her cry it out on his shoulder.
“Why, oh, why?” she sobbed. “Why her? Why us? Why here in this place of peace and happiness?”
“There are no answers for evil,” Rafael said soberly. “No answers at all.”
After the initial exam and photos were taken, Sergeant Losey carefully pulled the folded piece of paper from the dead girl’s hand with gloved fingers. He opened the paper and read aloud.
“Pretty, isn’t she? There’s more where this one came from. You tried to shut me down. I’m going to shut you down.”
“Oh, no,” Rafael groaned, rubbing his hand over his face. “I thought we were through with that mess.”
“Do you understand this message?” Sergeant Losey asked him.
“Oh, yeah, I’m afraid I do,” he sighed.
Then he proceeded to tell the sergeant the whole story with the sex trafficking ring he had helped to break up the previous January, and included Victoria’s kidnapping. The sergeant nodded about half way through the story, remembering having heard something about it.
“Apparently, the men that were arrested were not the top dogs,” Rafael said, shaking his head in despair.
“We are seldom able to get to the very top dog,” the sergeant told him. “That takes a lot of hard work, usually multiple undercover agents, and sometimes years to completely break a ring like this. I fear that he will keep killing until he is caught.”
“These poor innocent girls,” Rafael moaned. “I feel so terrible. We rescued a few, but now more will die because of it.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” the sergeant told him. “These women die one way or another quite regularly. Some we find, some we don’t, I’m sure.”
“Is there anything we can do to stop this, this … killing spree?” Rafael wanted to know.
“Well, I don’t know,” the sergeant answered. “But we can give it our best shot. Is the park fenced off at all?”
“No. The back side, that goes up to my house, and this wooded side is open. There’s a decorative split rail fence across the front and down the east side, but it ends down toward the back. My driveway is gated, and the west side is not easily accessible, so we hadn’t yet found it necessary to completely fence it.
“Would it be possible for you to mount night vision cameras throughout the park that would cover the whole park?”
“I’m sure I could. That would at least capture whomever it is that is dumping the bodies.”
“That’s my thought. I think you can get certain motion sensors, too, that whenever someone crosses one, it will send a signal to the police station.”
“I’ll look into that, too. Any other ideas?”
“I’m considering a stakeout for as many nights as it takes until the next body is dumped. The note doesn’t give any indication of the frequency of the murders, but I can assume that they won’t be far apart. He’s hoping that between the bad press and maybe the authorities’ insistence that you’ll have to shut down the park.
“But don’t cave in to him yet. Not that I want to sacrifice any more young women, but I really want to catch this monster and put him away for good. I know that another will step in to take his place, but we have to keep chipping away at crime or else it will overwhelm us all.”
“I’m sure up for shutting down this sex trafficking for good,” Rafael asserted. “I’ll cooperate one hundred percent with you and your department. Whatever you say, I’ll do.”
“Because sex trafficking is a national and international crime, I suspect the FBI will be getting involved at some point. Maybe right away. I don’t know.”
“That will just add more manpower, won’t it?”
“Yes, and we’ll need all we can get.”
“I’ll go right out today and see what I can find for surveillance cameras and security systems. I hope I can have at least some of it in place by tomorrow. I wish I would have come down here this morning. But we’ve been closed for the holiday, and I was working up at the house.”
“The only difference it would have made is it would have given you more time to shop for cameras and security systems,” Sergeant Losey told him.
Turning to his men, Rafael said, “I’m sorry, guys, but can I count on you to work extra this week to help me get everything set up?”
“Of course, Rafael,” Mickey exclaimed. “We can’t have these beautiful women being murdered just because of some vendetta against you, when we can do something to stop it. We’re in all the way, aren’t we, men?”
Ted and Jim echoed Mickey’s sentiments wholeheartedly.
“You need any of us to go to town with you this afternoon?”
“Well, I’m not sure. Do any of you know anything about surveillance cameras or security systems?”
All three shook their heads. Being ranchers and farmers, none of them had ever had the need for such.
“Well, I don’t either. Mickey, if you don’t mind, why don’t you come with me and maybe between the two of us, we can find something suitable.”
“Sure thing, Rafe,” Mickey said.
“I can suggest a couple of good places to go for security equipment,” the sergeant told Rafael.
“Great, because I haven’t got a clue.”
While they had been talking, the policemen were still doing their jobs. The sergeant had assigned each of them a direction to scout out, trying to see from which direction the body had been brought it. They needed to look for footprints, drag marks, broken twigs on bushed, or anything that looked out of place.
After several moments, one of the officers came back to report that he had found a spot over on the most densely wooded side that looked as though someone had walked through there. There were a couple of footprints in the soft, damp earth. The sergeant excused himself to go have a look, and called the one with the camera to come, too.
Of course, Rafael, Victoria, and the other men all followed out of curiosity. Rafael and his men all told the officers that as far as they knew, none of them had been over there in quite some time. Rafael had been over there when he first bought the place, because he had walked the entire perimeter of the property, and had also had it surveyed just to verify the boundaries for his own satisfaction.
“What’s beyond here?” the sergeant asked.
“Not sure,” Rafael said. “I think the ground kinda drops away into a bit of a gully, and then you can see a housing development farther over. I don’t know who owns that land. There’s a spot farther back this way where you can see over there pretty good.”
They all walked a hundred yards or so to where there was a clearing. Indeed, the ground did drop off into a gully, and rose again on the other side to where many houses stood.
“Mike, walk down there a ways and see if you can figure out where someone might have come in from,” Sergeant Losey told one of his men.
“Yes, sir.”
All stood and watched as Officer Mike walked down the embankment and back toward the area where it looked as if someone had entered the park property. When he got nearly out of sight, he radioed back to the sergeant.
“I can see where someone went up here and into the woods,” he said. “There’s a road, the one that goes in front of the park entrance, I think, where they could have pulled off and then walked down here and up the slope into the woods.”
“I’ll send Ed down with the cam
era to take pictures. Stay there so you can show him what you’re seeing. Then go on up to the road and look for tire tracks, or anything else you can see.”
“Yes, sir.”
The police officers worked for another half an hour or so on documenting the crime scene. The coroner arrived just before they were finished and picked up the body of the young woman.
“I’d like to pay for her to have a decent burial,” Rafael told the sergeant.
“That’s very kind and generous of you,” he replied. “We’ll hold the body for a while to see if anyone does come looking for her, or responds to our news reports asking if anyone can identify her.”
“Just let me know when,” Rafael said.
A newspaper reporter showed up about that time and talked to the sergeant for a little while, taking notes on what had just happened. A small TV crew had come just before the body was taken away, and also interviewed the sergeant. Rafael and Victoria declined to show their faces to the camera. Rafael did give a brief statement, but requested his name and his face not be publicized.
Chapter Nine
Eventually, everyone had gone, leaving just Rafael, Victoria, and the men there. Rafael wanted to head for town immediately to shop for the necessary security equipment, so he, Victoria, and Mickey walked back up to their house. The two men left in the Chrysler and Victoria went into the house to see how her mom was feeling and to tell her and her grandma what had just taken place.
When she tiptoed into Lena’s living room, she saw her grandma dozing on the sofa, so she went on into the bedroom. Lena was also asleep. She didn’t look nearly as feverish as she had earlier that day. Knowing that sleep was good for both of them, she tiptoed out again and silently closed the door.
She wandered through the house for a few minutes feeling at loose ends. The sight of the dead girl haunted her, but she felt helpless to do anything about it. She looked at the bookshelf, but nothing piqued her interest. She considered turning on the TV, but that didn’t do it for her, either. Finally, she went into the kitchen and decided to try her hand at making a batch of chocolate chip cookies.
