The Lullaby Girl (Angie Pallorino Book 2)

by Loreth Anne White

  Jenny’s lips flattened, and she nodded. “While we were working on the child, others apparently heard gunshots and screams outside the church, around the same time as the bells started. Someone said they’d heard a woman scream. Some witnesses heard tires screeching. Police interviewed everyone who’d come out of Midnight Mass and some people from the restaurants across Front Street. One of our orderlies who had been taking a smoke break out on a balcony upstairs reported seeing a dark van racing down the street, but he didn’t know it had been the cause of the squealing tires. Apart from that, no one seems to have witnessed anything else. Back in the eighties, the streets in this area of the city were pretty empty at that time of night.”

  “What evidence, specifically, did the VPD investigators ask you to keep quiet about?”

  Jenny hesitated as she cast her mind back. “There was a sweater, left in the cradle with the child.” She wiped her hand across her mouth as if to obliterate something that suddenly tasted bad. “A purple woman’s cardigan—buttons down the front. Size medium. Common Sears brand at the time. We figured it had been put inside the cradle to keep the girl warm.” A pause. “There were some really long dark-brown hairs caught in the fabric and some short dark-blonde ones. There was also what looked and felt like small amounts of drying semen.”

  A sickness stirred in Angie’s gut. “What made you think it was semen?”

  “It fluoresced under UV light, which would have been due to the presence of molecules such as flavin and choline-conjugated proteins, indicative of seminal fluid.”

  “They bagged this sweater and took it into evidence?”

  “Along with photos of everything, plus the girl’s dress, underwear, the teddy bear, and the rape kit. They took samples from the blood smeared on the outside of the cradle door, and they found two bullets, one they dug out of the wall, and there were some shell casings. None of which we could talk to the press about.”

  Which meant there would have been a ballistics report, lab serology results, ABO blood type analysis, microscopic hair analysis—evidence now gone forever thanks to outdated police policy. Angie swore softly. “That old evidence could be retested today using modern DNA technology not available in the mideighties.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Angie sucked in a deep breath. “And the child didn’t utter a word, not once? The whole time she was here?”

  “No. And we didn’t know whether that was because of shock or a lifetime of neglect—under those circumstances delayed speech is not uncommon. When no one came forward, and she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell us her name, the cops started calling her Janie, as in little Jane Doe. She stayed at the hospital a few weeks before being released to the system. While she remained here in our care, social workers and a psychologist visited regularly. Police tried many times to question her with their assistance, but Janie Doe just stared at them. A forensic artist also came to do a sketch. She drew Janie without the wound across her mouth, and that illustration was published in all the papers, put up in posters around town, and run on the television news—all asking if anyone knew this child.”

  “I saw that sketch in one of the digitized articles,” Angie said quietly. “So they did all that and still no clues?”

  “It ate at me, Angie,” Jenny said. “It consumed all of us who’d worked ER that night and who’d helped nurse our little Jane Doe back to health.” A strange look crept into the old nurse’s features. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. But I did.” Quickly, she dug into her tote and removed an unsealed envelope. She held it out to Angie.

  “It’s yours. If you want it.”

  A feeling of trepidation unfurled through Angie. She stared at the envelope. “What is it?”

  “Open it.”

  She took the envelope, lifted the flap, and removed an old Kodak print. In fading colors it showed a skinny little girl in a hospital bed wearing pj’s too big for her. She clutched a teddy bear similar to the stuffy in the bassinet. The girl’s complexion was so pale she looked almost translucent, a blue vein showing at her temple. Hair, deep red, hung lank about her bony shoulders. Unsmiling, she stared directly at the photographer with pale-gray eyes that were empty of all emotion. Her mouth was brutally swollen, bruised. Blackened by a line of stitches like some bad Halloween makeup.

  “I shot that photo shortly before child protection services took her. At that point she’d been here under observation for almost four weeks, and although she still hadn’t spoken a word … I … she looked at me differently that morning. I felt she was trying to communicate. So I held her hand, and I squeezed and said, ‘Honey, if you’re listening to me, if you can understand me, squeeze my hand.’” Emotion hitched Jenny’s voice. She fell silent for a moment, blew her nose again. “And then … then I told her that she was going to be safe …” Once more, Jenny’s voice wavered. “I … I just wanted to make some connection, to have her show me some sign that she was aware—not of what was happening to her, or had happened, but that there were people in this world who cared, really cared, and who were kind, and that the folks working in the system would find her a loving home, that one day she’d really know love.” Jenny blew her nose again, her tissue going ragged. “And she did—Janie squeezed my hand.”

  Emotion closed Angie’s throat. Quickly she turned her head away. The little bassinet blurred as tears swam into her eyes.

  “Do you have children?” Jenny said.

  Angie shook her head, not trusting herself to look at the nurse.

  “I don’t, either. I can’t. But I always wanted them. I believe children validate our reason for being—they are what makes us eternal. And when I was given the news of my infertility, I felt that life for me had ended in some way.” The nurse fell silent. Still, Angie was unable to meet the woman’s eyes, to see in the woman’s face the rawness that laced her voice.

  Jenny continued, her words growing gravelly. “I’d been struggling emotionally with this news, but that day, when the angel’s child squeezed my hand, I … I felt I’d made a fundamental contribution in this one little girl’s life. I felt validated. Maybe I missed out not having kids, but on that day Janie Doe showed me I did make a difference in the lives of others, and that alone was a life worth living.”

  “You did,” Angie whispered. “You did make a difference.”

  “Is she happy—your friend? Did her life go okay after she was adopted?”

  Angie wiped her eyes with the base of her thumb and finally turned to face the nurse.

  Jenny’s kind brown eyes locked fast and sincerely onto Angie’s gaze. “I need to know.” She made a small fist and knocked it against her sternum. “It affected me—my heart, right here. I never stopped wondering. It’s why I kept that photo. And when you phoned out of the blue just after Christmas, asking to meet with me, it was like a sign.” She swallowed hard. “I thought, yes, she’s okay, the angel’s girl is out there somewhere, and … in trying to find the truth, she’s finally coming home. All the way back to the beginning, as things must be. I know it sounds strange, but … that’s what I thought. My cradle girl is coming home. Full circle.”

  Angie took a moment to marshal herself. “Yes,” she said very quietly. “Her life went okay. She grew up in a safe and privileged home. Her adoptive parents loved—still love—her in every way they know how. She never wanted for material possessions. They sent her to the best schools and took her on wonderful vacations. And all the while, she never remembered or knew for a moment what had happened to her that Christmas Eve. Nor did she ever recall anything about her past. Until recently when she started to … see things. Hear things. That’s when she sought the help of a therapist and when she pushed her father for the truth. He finally told her how she was found in a cradle. And now she wants to learn the whole story—the before. She wants to find her biological parents.”

  A kind of knowing and peace entered Jenny’s face, and she nodded. It was a look Angie associated with holy peo
ple.

  “Thank God,” the old nurse whispered. She raised her hand to touch Angie’s arm, and Angie braced—her usual response to unsolicited physical contact. The nurse noticed and lowered her hand, instead channeling it back into her coat pocket. She dug out another Kleenex and once more blew her nose. “Sometimes paths cross for a reason, Angie. I’m glad you came. So glad.”

  A surge of warmth filled Angie, along with a bittersweet poignancy and a sense of deep kinship. This woman was a physical link to that little girl from before—that little girl in pink who’d been haunting Angie from the murky depths of her own subconscious. The girl Angie had come to find. Herself.

  “Going public—speaking about it—could help, you know,” said the nurse. “People, relationships change. After all these years, someone might be ready to come forward.”

  “I know,” Angie said softly. “But I’m not ready. Not yet. If … if you could please keep my visit to yourself for now, I’d really appreciate it.”

  Jenny Marsden gave her a long, searching look. “Sometimes we think we’re keeping secrets,” the old nurse said softly. “But really, those secrets are keeping us. Be careful, Angie. Don’t let this secret keep you.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Detective James Maddocks watched the six young women through the hospital ward observation window. Just teenagers by all appearances. All dark-haired save for one blonde. All emaciated. Vacant eyes. Expressionless features. All had barcodes tattooed onto the backs of their necks.

  The girls had been discovered two weeks ago when police had swarmed the Amanda Rose, a Caymans-registered high-end luxury yacht moored in one of the city’s quaint harbors.

  It was Maddocks and Angie’s investigation as part of a team tasked to hunt the Baptist that had led law enforcement to the Amanda Rose. Aboard the now-impounded vessel, they’d discovered the Bacchanalian sex club—a top-dollar international floating brothel. And in the bowels of the boat they’d found these six underage women being forcibly confined for sexual exploitation. All were foreign. Apart from this, little else was known about them—not one had uttered a word since their rescue.

  Standing beside Maddocks was Detective Kjel Holgersen, along with the girls’ victim services counselor and their psychiatrist.

  “How long do you think before they might talk?” Maddocks asked the doctor as his gaze went from one teen to the next. The young females sat at a table with trays of hospital food in front of them. Only one poked listlessly at her meal using a fork. The others remained motionless, all clearly cognizant of the fact that they were being watched from behind the one-way observation glass. Under police custody, they were being housed in a ward that included beds and a living room area. It was here that they were being slowly nursed back to health and weaned off the opioids to which they’d been addicted. The MVPD had not disclosed their location to the press.

  “No way of telling yet,” said the doctor. “It could be months before they speak. Possibly years, even with therapy. They’re exhibiting symptoms that include severe catatonia, or catatonic depression—they’re immobile most of the time. Have trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating and making small decisions, are fearful of sudden movements and loud sounds, show no appetite, are constantly fatigued. Just the simple act of sitting up in bed took them hours during the first few days after they were admitted.”

  “No communication between them?” Maddocks said.

  “Primarily nonverbal interaction has been observed, and it’s been limited to eye contact and the occasional hand gesture. One of our nursing staff did hear a whispered exchange between the dark-haired patient, the one pushing her food around, and the blonde,” the doctor said. “But it was terminated the minute they became aware of the nurse’s presence.”

  “Did your nurse get a gist of the language they spoke?” Maddocks said.

  The doctor shook his head. “Our nurse thinks it could have been a Slavic language.”

  “Well that sure as hell is going to narrow things down,” Holgersen said quietly. The lanky detective stood uncharacteristically still at Maddocks’s side, his gaze fixated on the girls. “They’s a complete enigma. Whoda thunk the Baptist would lead us here—to some fucking international sex trafficking mystery?”

  “They have no trust,” their victim services counselor added. “They’ve been tortured, drugged, psychologically abused, and are apparently terrified of communicating anything about themselves to the hospital staff or to myself, likely in fear of recrimination.”

  Maddocks returned his attention to the girl poking at her tray of institution food. High, angular cheekbones. Strong nose. Wide-set almond-shaped eyes the color of coal. Her thick dark hair was scraped back into a severe ponytail. She had to be younger than his daughter, Ginny. A sick oiliness slicked through his stomach at this thought, at the memory of almost losing Ginn to the Baptist. At everything that had happened over the past month—how he’d fallen in lust and then some kind of love with his partner, Angie. How she’d disobeyed a superior officer and breached protocol in order to save both his and Ginny’s lives, how Angie might yet lose her job because of it. The fact weighed heavy on his shoulders. He also knew it was crushing Angie to be sidelined on this barcode girls investigation now. This should have been her baby, in part. Sex crimes—special victims—was her wheelhouse. And he needed a female detective with her experience on his team now.

  As he regarded the dark-haired teen, a visceral image seeped through him—his dark-haired Ginny. Eighteen. Her body tightly bound in a plastic tarp, swinging by a rope strung down from a crumbling old trestle bridge in the misty darkness. Angie trying to crawl along the top of the bridge to free his daughter …

  He rubbed his brow, forcing his focus back to the six females, effectively all Jane Does until his team could learn more.

  What are your names? How were you brought into the country? Where did you originate? Where are your families, friends, homes? You must have loved ones looking for you.

  Maddocks had recently been hired for the MVPD’s homicide division, where his first assignment had been to spearhead the hunt for the Baptist. He’d subsequently been asked to form a new task force designed to investigate these six barcoded survivors. To assist on his investigation, Maddocks had brought in officers from the MVPD’s sex crimes unit, counterexploitations, the drugs section, and the criminal intelligence unit. The case was expected to grow exponentially—these girls had likely entered the country through a sophisticated international human trafficking network. The passports found for them aboard the Amanda Rose had likely been forged. The documents had not been stamped or used at any Canadian point of entry, either. This made Maddocks think the passports had possibly been intended for future use as the Amanda Rose sailed with the girls out of Canadian waters and crossed into US and South American waters—a historic pattern of travel already established by the floating brothel.

  Also still unknown were the identities of the Bacchanalian Club’s owner-manager-pimp and her transgender bodyguard-assistant. The pimp was a female who looked to be in her sixties. She went by the name Madame Vee. Her assistant was known only as Zina. No identity documents had been found aboard the yacht for those two.

  “How much of their catatonia might be attributed to opiate withdrawal?” Maddocks asked the doc, ignoring his phone as it began to vibrate in his pocket.

  “Again, hard to say,” said the psychiatrist. “Withdrawal symptoms do include anxiety, low energy, insomnia, hot-cold sweats, abdominal cramps, and vomiting, but in my assessment this is probably more a sign of prolonged trauma and abuse, both physical and mental.”

  “It’s consistent with what we see in survivors of human trafficking,” the victim services counselor said. “The control tactics employed by traffickers to retain victims in exploitative situations usually include some form of social isolation, forcible confinement, the withholding of identification documents, imposing strict rules, limitation of movement, as well as physical violence and threats of violence. Many v
ictims believe that if they do not comply with exploitation, their employers have the ability to inflict harm on family members both locally and overseas. Some are simply terrified that their families might learn they are—or have been—engaged in sex work.” She inhaled deeply. “I believe these girls were threatened with their lives and the lives of their families if they talked to authorities.”

  Anger, hatred coalesced like cold jelly in Maddocks’s gut as he listened to the victim services counselor, who was also a highly respected therapist.

  “Trust will obviously take time,” he said quietly.

  “For them to feel safe will take even longer.”

  Maddocks met the woman’s eyes. “They don’t realize they’re free yet.”

  She shook her head. “They might never feel free again in their lives.”

  Determination, cold and hard, steeled his jaw. He looked from the counselor to the doc. “Will you call the minute there is any change?”

  The doc nodded. “If any information does come forth, it will likely come from her.” He nodded to the dark-haired female who’d now set down her fork. “She’s the oldest, we think. And she’s definitely the strongest mentally. Possibly she was procured more recently, had less brainwashing and torture, or is just more resilient. More of a survivor. You get them sometimes—the ones who just defy all odds.”

  As Maddocks strode toward the hospital exit with Holgersen, his phone vibrated again in his pocket. He slowed his pace and took out his phone, recalling suddenly that someone had tried to reach him earlier while he was talking to the doc.

  “Maddocks,” he snapped as he pressed his cell to his ear. Seeing those girls catatonic like that had snuffed his last vestiges of patience. He burned to find and nail whoever had done this to them. So far Madame Vee and Zina were squarely in his sights. They were both being held on remand in a prison up the island peninsula, but neither had spoken a single word during interrogations so far. They needed someone to crack. Needed a break.