He shrugged. “She used to work here. We had to let her go about three months ago. She started coming in in pretty rough shape.”
“Define ‘rough shape’ for me?” I asked.
“Meth,” he said.
“Anything else?” Tom asked. “Know where she went prior to leaving here?”
“Don’t know. We don’t keep tabs on the women when they leave. If they get themselves cleaned up, well, we might bring them back to be masseurs, but that rarely happens. I just have to say, again, we run a legal operation here. There is zero prostitution on these premises.”
“Yeah, you’ve made that real clear,” I said. “What can you tell us about girls going missing? Ever hear anything like that?”
“Girls come and go,” he said. “No one sticks around forever. Most of our masseurs here have been in our employment for a while.”
“Nothing as far as multiple girls leaving with a John and not being heard from after?” Tom asked.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Spieth said. “That’s not what we do here.”
I nodded. The guy wasn’t going to give us anything.
“Did you guys need anything else? Otherwise, I’m going to need to get back to doing the books.”
“No. We’ll be out of here as soon as Agent Harper and the woman here are finished,” I said.
He pursed his lips, nodded quickly, and disappeared into the back. I looked over to see Beth handing a business card to the woman named Roxy, who took it and walked past us, looking down. We left through the front doors with Beth. The three of us rounded the corner and stopped at our cars along the curb.
“She tell you anything, Beth?” I asked.
“A bit. Her sister, Annie, was younger by three years, making her twenty-three. She had a drug problem and worked the streets down on Murfreesboro Pike.”
“Second time we’ve heard about that area,” Tom said. “Could be our guy’s hunting ground. Should we go check it out?”
I glanced at the time—right around three o’clock. The chances of finding girls walking the street that early in the day was slim, and I still wanted to get over to the other massage parlor and the Medical Science building. I looked at Beth. “Did you want to try to do that later tonight? Ten or eleven or so? Probably our best chance of getting girls on the street to talk to.”
“That’s fine,” Beth said.
“Did you guys want me with?” Tom asked.
“Up to you. I know we’re an hour or so away from you. I’m sure the two of us can handle it. I guess I don’t really know what you have for a home life. Wife and kids probably wouldn’t be too jazzed with you spending all night walking the street, looking to talk to hookers.”
“Just a girlfriend and a pair of dogs. They won’t mind if you need me. I can shoot home for a bit and meet you guys somewhere later.”
“We’ll let you make the call,” I said.
“Sure,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll make a couple of calls and get what we can on this Annie Darden while we’re driving to this next parlor here.” I looked at Beth. “How far is the next one?”
“Hold on. I’m bringing it up on my phone.” Beth paused for a minute. “Nine miles north. From there, it’s just a quick ride over to the Medical Science building,” she said.
“All right, I’ll follow you guys,” Tom said.
The three of us got in our cars and headed out—the navigation said our drive was going to take us just under twenty minutes, cutting through the city.
I dialed Ball back in Manassas. He answered on the second ring.
“Ball,” he said.
“Hey, it’s Hank.”
“We’re still working on finding anything here on your Owen Matheson’s family. Looks kind of like they fell off the face of the earth. The twins are on it, though. Hopefully they get something.”
“Well, keep me updated. I need you to grab a sheet plus anything else you guys can come up with on a name and e-mail it over to my phone.”
“Sure, what’s the name?”
“Annie Darden,” I said.
“Is Annie short for something?” Ball asked. “Roseanne, Annebelle?”
“One second.” I cupped the mouthpiece of the phone and asked Beth, who said the name was just Annie. “I guess it’s just Annie,” I said.
“Address, DL number, social, anything else?” Ball asked.
“Hold on.” I cupped the mouthpiece again. “Beth, you get anything else from her? Address, DOB, social, anything?”
Beth pulled her notepad from her pocket, held the steering wheel with one knee, and flipped to the page. She handed me the notepad.
I brought the phone back to my mouth. “Okay, ready?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ball said.
I rattled off the girl’s DOB and last-known address—Beth had gotten a street but not a house number. Ball said he would get everything e-mailed over as soon as he could. I thanked him, clicked off from the call, and handed Beth her notepad back. “He’s going to e-mail over whatever he finds.”
Beth nodded and continued driving north.
We pulled onto the street that The Geisha was located on and then into the parking lot of the strip mall where Beth’s navigation told us the business resided. We found the white sign for The Geisha at the end unit of the long, single-story complex. Beth parked our rental, and we stepped out. Tom pulled in beside us, parked, and got out.
“This is the place, huh?” he asked.
I looked over at the single-story tan building. It had a peaked red roof with faux dormer windows above the businesses. Each business’s sign had the same style, brown with white lettering in the same font though each sign advertised that individual business. I looked left to right—a pizza place, a laundromat, a liquor store with bars on the windows, and The Geisha taking up the end. The Geisha had two large glass windows with what looked like soap lettering advertising full-body massages, foot massages, Asian massages, and the like. Beth, Tom, and I walked across the parking lot to the front doors. The neon Open sign hanging above the door wasn’t lit. The lights inside were off. I pulled the front door’s handle—locked. Their hours, listed on several stickers, were noon to nine o’clock, every day of the week.
The time of day was too late for a company lunch, and I had a hunch that they would still be open, minus a phone call from the other parlor.
“Supposed to be open,” Tom said.
“Yeah, supposed to be,” I said.
“Think the other place called over here and told them to close up shop?” Beth asked.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said.
I cupped my hands over a window and looked in but didn’t see anyone inside. Tom banged his knuckles on the glass door beside me. We waited—no one came.
“Let’s take a quick walk around the back,” Beth said.
I nodded, and the three of us rounded the building. The back of the strip mall came into view as we made a left at the corner. A bunch of cars were parked behind the place—directly behind the massage parlor were two late-nineties economy cars and a shiny new black Lexus. We walked to the green metal back door of the business and banged on it—still, no one came.
“What do you think?” Tom asked.
“I think there are probably ten people or more inside, waiting on us to leave.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Ah, screw it. I think we got about as much as we needed from the first place. I’m not really up for waiting people out, especially people that probably have been strictly informed to not give us anything. What do you think?” I looked at Beth.
“I’m fine with leaving. Like you said, even if we wait them out, I’d say our chances of getting anything out of anyone are slim.”
“Okay, let’s roll,” I said. “On to the Medical Science building.”
I got nods from both Beth and Tom.
We headed back around the building and got into our cars.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
/> The stop at the Medical Science Building was brief. Dave had found multiple samples of blood on each woman. Some of the samples he just described as older. It led him to believe that the women were either being killed or dismembered in the same spot without the location having been cleaned. He said he would need at least a day to sort through what he’d collected. Tom had headed back to his house a few hours prior, but he was going to return and meet Beth and me at our hotel within the hour to head down to Murfreesboro Pike and see if we could get any information from some of the women for hire. The time was pushing ten o’clock. My last four hours had been consumed with Beth and me grabbing a bite to eat, a conversation with Karen, another conversation with Ball, and Beth and me trying to make heads or tails of everything we’d gotten so far on the investigation. The latest body dumps were added to the map we’d been creating—I also added the names of the victims. It still wasn’t telling us much, other than the area south of Clarksville and the town itself were still free of remains. Going to each individual site was still on my list of to-dos.
The sheets I’d gotten from Ball had been printed off from my e-mail a half hour prior. The girl, Annie Darden, had quite a bit of a rap sheet for being only twenty-three—four or five arrests for solicitation and a number of drug-related offenses. Beth had informed me that Roxy, the sister, was to call her the following day and schedule something for a full interview.
Someone knocked on the hotel-room door.
“That’s probably Tom,” Beth said.
I stood from the lounge chair near the window and walked over. After a quick look out the peephole, I opened the door. Tom entered.
I looked over at Beth. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah, one second,” she said. Beth finished putting together a file of photos that she wanted to bring with when we spoke with people. She stood from the lime-green office chair and tucked the folder under her arm. “Ready.”
Beth and I left the hotel and rode with Tom the ten minutes to the area I had written down—Murfreesboro Pike, between Plus Park Boulevard and Wilhagan Road. The street was two lanes in each direction with a grass median. I looked left and right. Most of the businesses took up the right side of the road with just a few scattered on the left—what wasn’t cleared for businesses on our left was mostly trees and underbrush. All the buildings in view looked a bit rough. A few older hotels and motels stood pushed back behind the immediate roadside businesses.
“Do we want to park somewhere, or what?” Tom asked.
We passed a car dealership on our right—the place was small, and every car behind the barbwire fence seemed to be four thousand dollars or less, judging by the neon-green price stickers on the windshields.
“Um, keep going for a mile or so, and then we’ll find someplace to kind of observe for a little bit,” I said.
A car wash passed on the right, just beyond a gas station. I saw a large man standing outside a small blue Datsun pickup truck parked near the air pumps and vacuums. The man seemed to be talking with a female that appeared to be a prostitute, by her outfit—shorter-than-short jean shorts, cowboy boots, and a tiny yellow top.
“Datsun,” I said. “Don’t see those very often. We passed another girl walking down the parking lot toward a bank. Her short skirt and stumbling steps said she might also be in the business. “Let’s go another few blocks up, see what we see, and then loop back around.”
“Got it,” Tom said.
I looked over my shoulder at Beth in the back seat. She was staring out the window, looking for groups of prostitutes.
Tom drove another quarter mile up. A large church came up on our right. To our left was a pizza-chain restaurant. The area was starting to look a little better. “You can probably turn around,” I said.
Tom clicked on his turn signal and made a U-turn at the lights to head back in the other direction. We traveled back toward the area again. The motels sat off to the left, to our right the trees and underbrush. I spotted a woman walking ten feet off the sidewalk’s edge in the weeds, carrying a brown bag that I assumed to be a beer or other booze. I pointed up ahead and to the left side of the street. One of the trashy-looking motels had a bank out front and off to one side. We would be able to get a good view of the passersby on the street as well as anyone who frequented the motel.
“Park at that bank there,” I said.
Tom drove down the turn-only lane. We pulled into the bank’s parking lot and parked out of the light from the streetlights toward the back.
“Good here?” Tom asked.
“Should be fine, yeah,” I said.
Tom shifted the car into park and shut it off.
Beth pulled herself forward by the front-seat headrests so her face was between Tom and me in the gap between the front seats. She rolled a hair tie off of one wrist and put her brown hair back in a ponytail. “So are we just waiting until we see a girl and approaching her, or what?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
“What’s our pitch?” she asked.
“I guess just ask if they could take a look at a couple of photos for us. We need to maintain the ‘we’re here to help’ angle. As soon as one girl tells another and another that there’s a couple of feds sitting around out here, this area will turn into a ghost town,” I said.
“Maybe I should go walk around a bit without you two?” Beth asked. “The girls might be more open to talking with a female as opposed to three people who are obviously law enforcement.”
“Up to you,” I said. “If you’re going to do that, stay where we can see you.”
“Are you worried about me, Agent Rawlings?” Beth asked.
I gave her a sideways glance over my shoulder to remind her of what had happened on our last investigation—Beth shrugged and looked away.
I looked forward out of the windshield. To the left, up the street past a patch of trees, was a Waffle House, directly across from us was what looked to be an out-of-business nightclub, and a bit to the right of the club was a gas station.
“Looks like we have our first customer,” Tom said. He pointed out the windshield at a woman walking along the sidewalk, waving at passing cars. She was maybe thirty yards away, lit by the streetlights. She wore knee-high black boots, a short blue dress, and a small black jacket. Her hair looked to be dark, and she was small in stature.
“Well, let me go see if she knows anything. You guys stay put.” Beth retreated to the backseat, grabbed her file of photos and opened the rear passenger door. The dome light in the car dimmed after Beth shut the door and started toward the woman on the street. I looked to my right at the motel back over my shoulder—a number of people rummaged around out front. My attention went back to Beth.
She said, “Excuse me, Miss,” as she walked.
The woman stopped and stared at her. Beth continued to talk, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. The woman was making quick movements with her hands, emphasizing whatever she was saying as she shook her head. Beth tried opening the file she held and showing the woman a photo. The woman pushed the file back toward Beth, turned, and continued up the street.
“Damn. This might be a short night,” Tom said.
“Yeah, that girl didn’t look like she was too interested in Beth.”
Beth headed back to the car and got inside. “Well, that didn’t go so hot,” she said.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Well unfortunately, I no hablo español, so I have no idea.”
“Guessing that was probably her way of getting rid of you,” Tom said.
“Probably,” Beth said.
The girl Beth had just approached crossed the street and disappeared behind the gas station. I looked over my shoulder again at the motel, which still looked pretty active. “Maybe we should head over to the motel there. Looks like it’s the hot spot around these parts.”
“Whoever is outside is going to scatter like roaches when we pull up. Maybe we should have taken one of your rental c
ars instead of this.” Tom was referring to his dark-gray, fed-issued cruiser, complete with government license plates.
I shook my head. “Maybe that will give us some leverage.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Well, if anyone runs, we can chase a couple down. You’d have to think running from federal agents and getting caught is going to loosen your lips a little bit,” I said.
“I didn’t really think I’d be running people down this evening, I would have worn some better shoes,” Beth said.
“Let’s just take a quick little roll over there and see what’s shaking. Maybe we get some cooperation,” I said.
“Now?” Tom asked.
I looked at Beth in the backseat. “What do you think?”
“Yeah sure,” she said.
Tom nodded and fired up the car. We pulled away from the bank and made the next right into the motel’s entrance. We drove the short, S-shaped road until it expanded into the businesses’ parking lot. Tom kept the speed to a crawl. The parking lot was divided into two sections by a large curbed grass median. Most of the parking spots were full.
“Park back here for a second. Let’s see what we’re working with,” I said.
Tom pulled into the single free parking spot facing the front of the building.
I stared through the windshield. Beyond the car parked with its nose facing us across the grass median, I could see the two-story motel. The building was a light shade of yellow—the top story had a white railing and walkway. All the room doors faced the parking lot. On the lower level, a couple people sat out front on white plastic chairs that one could acquire from any store for a few bucks a pop. The motel looked to be the kind of place you could rent by the hour, week, or month. I saw a couple of girls walk over to the pair of seated men, hand them something, and then continue on their way. A few girls stood around the pair, appearing to just be hanging around. An empty wooden picnic table sat just a few feet from the group.
“Dealing from there?” Beth asked. She’d once again pulled herself up between the two front seats to get a better look.
“Maybe,” I said. I got a good look at our seated men. The guy on the right was white and wore a red baseball hat, a white T-shirt, and jeans. Tattoos ran down his arms. The man on the left looked Latino, his hair dark and short. He also wore a white T-shirt, long khaki shorts, and a pair of bright-red sneakers.
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