by Matt Lincoln
“It’s alright,” I told her as I knelt down to look her in the eyes. “You don’t have to listen to them anymore. So how about you sit right there, and I’ll turn the tv on for you? Are you hungry?” She nodded, and I made a mental note to make as much of a mess of the Bradshaws’ refrigerator and kitchen as I could. It was incredibly petty, but short of physically harming them, which would definitely land me in trouble, it was the best I could do.
Before I did that, though, I needed to go check on Charlie and Junior. I put on some kids’ show for Fatima and was happy to see the overjoyed look that came over her face. I walked to the open doorway just as Finch was putting Mrs. Bradshaw into the back of his police car. I could see several of the neighbors milling about and filming the scene, and I was glad that I’d chosen to stay inside with Fatima. The last thing she needed was people gawking at her for taking videos of her.
“Hey, is the kid okay?” Junior asked as he and Charlie walked back into the house.
“She’s fine,” I responded quietly, nodding at Fatima, who was completely absorbed in the program.
“Good,” Junior nodded. “It’s amazing how resilient kids can be.”
“That’s very true,” I agreed. “I think this discovery confirms what we feared about the possibility of more people in the neighborhood having child slaves in their homes.”
“Two out of two,” Charlie remarked. “Sure seems that way.”
“We need to tell Finch to send more backup,” I replied. “A lot more. By now, any of the other neighbors who are participating will have heard about what happened to the Weavers and now what’s happened to Mrs. Bradshaw. They may try to escape. We need to stop that before it happens. Charlie, can you go park the van so it will block the main entrance of the street until the police arrive? I’ll go tell Finch about our suspicions, and Junior can stay here to watch Fatima until child services arrives.”
“Alright,” Junior agreed.
“Okay,” Charlie nodded. “Time is of the essence now. We need to move fast.” He took off out of the house and down the street to the Weavers where we’d parked the car. In the meantime, I headed over to Finch’s car. Mrs. Bradshaw was screaming again, and he looked as though he was trying his best to block out the noise.
“Officer Finch,” I greeted as I made my way up to him. “We’re going to need a lot more manpower here. We have reason to believe that this may not be the only other child being held captive in this area.”
“Are you serious?” Finch asked, his eyes wide with shock.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. I kept my voice low and glanced around surreptitiously to ensure that none of the nosy neighbors were listening in. “The neighbor across the street that I spoke to earlier, Emily, told me that there was something unusual about the behavior of several of the people in the neighborhood the last time they were all gathered for a dinner party. She indicated that she suspected something was off about the Bradshaw house, and her suspicion turned out to be correct. I’m going to go speak to her again to see if she noticed any of the other neighbors acting peculiar, but in the meantime, we need to ensure that no one can leave.”
“I understand,” Finch said as he pulled his radio off of his uniform to call for backup. With that settled, I made my way back across the street to Emily’s house. I was only halfway there before I was cut off by a hulking, imposing man in a blue gingham shirt.
“Who do you think you are?” the man sneered. I wasn’t sure what the man was getting at or what it was he wanted me to say, so I simply raised my eyebrow at him. That evidently wasn’t the reaction he’d been looking for, as his face turned a shade more purple as he bared his teeth at me menacingly. “You think you can just stroll into a nice neighborhood and treat people like criminals? I already got your little buddy on camera assaulting Mrs. Bradshaw. I’m going to make sure the video goes viral, and your entire agency goes out of business!”
There was a lot wrong with what this oaf was saying, but I really didn’t have time to educate him, so I just threw him a blank look before stepping around him and continuing on my way. He reached out and grabbed me by the arm, and I reacted immediately. I twisted my arm around underneath his hand and then reached around to grab his wrist before using my other arm to press against the hard part of his elbow. I applied a little pressure, knowing that it would only take a few pounds of force in this position to break his arm.
“Touch me again,” I hissed at him. “And you’ll be wearing a cast for a month.” I pushed the man aside, and he scampered away, gingerly massaging his arm.
“I’ll sue you!” he snarled. “This is brutality!” His words were threatening, but his hunched posture and quivering voice belied how weak the threat was. I just rolled my eyes and turned around to continue on my way to Emily’s house. To my surprise, she was leaning against the open door frame, grinning.
“Wow,” she said as I made my way up the porch steps. “I think you might have made Trent wet himself there.”
“Men like him are always all bark and no bite,” I scoffed. “He talks a lot, but I could tell he’d run off with his tail between his legs the moment he saw what a real threat felt like.”
“Well, he deserved it,” Emily said. “Guy’s a total creep. Always walking around acting like he’s the boss of everyone.”
“Was he one of the ones acting suspiciously at the dinner party?” I asked.
“Trent? Nah,” Emily said. “He’s a jerk and a moron, but it doesn’t go any deeper than that. That’s what was so weird during the party. It felt like everyone was just putting up a front, and there was something deeper going on that everyone was aware of, but no one was bringing up. Like an elephant in the room kind of situation.”
“I see,” I said. “Are there any other couples that you can specifically remember acting strangely?”
“I don’t know,” Emily shrugged. “Aside from me and that new couple, everyone was acting super weird. I do remember the Jeffersons made some comment about how they save so much time now that they’re not cleaning their house anymore. I thought it was a weird thing to say, but a few of the other people started laughing. I remember being really confused about what was so funny, but as I said earlier, I figured they were all in on some inside joke I didn’t get.”
“It appears you were,” I said. “Only the ‘joke’ happened to involve the systemic trafficking of children.”
“What!?” Emily gasped, looking past me at the scene unfolding on the lawn of the house opposite hers. I could see horror bloom across her face as she slowly connected the pieces. “I can’t believe that. I mean, I knew they were all weirdos, but I just thought they were in some new-age cult or doing drugs or something. I never imagined something like that.”
“No one ever does,” I said. “That’s what makes these criminals so prolific and successful. The best ones know how to blend in so that their friends and family never even suspect anything was going in.”
“Gives me chills,” Emily said with a shudder.
“Good, that means you’re a decent person,” I said. “Do you think you could provide me with a list of all the names and addresses of the people who were at the party?
“Sure,” Emily said. “I remember everyone who was there, but I’m not sure where all their houses are. Is that okay?”
“Were they all from this same neighborhood?” I asked, suddenly worried we might be dealing with an even bigger problem.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “I just don’t socialize with them much, so I’m not sure whose house is whose.”
“The names will be perfectly fine, then,” I said as I turned to look out across the neighborhood.
Emily was right when she said that the very thought that people would joke about keeping children prisoner was chilling. As I looked around at all the houses and wondered how many more children might be suffering behind closed doors, I had to fight to keep from shuddering myself.
8
Charlie
I trudged through the
office doors slowly, feeling angry, disgusted, and depressed all at once. It had been a long and trying day, and I had reached my emotional capacity limit around two hours ago. When everything was said and done, four other couples had been discovered to be hiding illegally trafficked children inside of their homes. The fallout had been catastrophic. Neighbors who’d had no idea about what was going on and who had at first been angry at us for disrupting the peace of their neighborhood had quickly turned against the guilty couples, and an angry mob had formed. The police had to deal with arresting the guilty parties, working with social services to get aid for all the children, and keeping the perpetrators from being torn apart by their own furious neighbors. The entire time, Patel, Junior, and I had been in the middle of it all.
The arrested suspects were currently being booked and processed into the local jail, and they’d be transferred over to MBLIS’s custody tomorrow. It was already past five when everything had finally been settled, so we’d decided to push the interrogations until the next day, as it was likely to take a fairly long time to interrogate six couples. By the time we’d gotten back to the office, it was already six, and I was ready to go home.
“There you are!” Fiona said as she walked through the door. “Wallace has been keeping us updated on everything that’s been going on. You were all gone for so long I was getting worried.”
“It was quite a day,” Junior answered. He sounded as exhausted as I felt.
“Oh my goodness, your face,” she said as she approached Junior and lifted her hand to run it gently over the angry red scratch marks across his cheek.
I raised my eyebrows in surprise over how forward the action was, and I wondered if maybe Miranda and I weren’t the only ones fraternizing. Fiona froze as she realized what she was doing and suddenly yanked her hand back in a way that wasn’t subtle at all.
“It’s fine,” Junior said. “One of the suspects came at me with her keys. Anyway, I brought you the Weavers’ phones and laptops. There has to be something on here that will point us in the direction of how they got their hands on Kamya. I asked the police to collect the personal devices of all the other couples as well, but I figured this was a good start.”
“It is,” Fiona nodded. “I’ll get to work right away.”
“I’m gonna go give Wallace a rundown of everything that happened,” I said. I really wanted to just collapse into my chair, but I knew if I did, I wouldn’t want to get back up again.
“I’ll come with you,” Patel said, and we headed into Wallace’s office together. We went through the events of the day in as much detail as we could, and Wallace’s face grew more serious as we spoke.
“This is bigger than I thought it would be,” he admitted when we were finally done speaking. “The best we can hope for is that this was an isolated incident and that the only people involved were the ones arrested today in that neighborhood. However, I think we can all agree that thinking that would be naïve and unrealistic. It’s much more likely that this is a massive operation and that we have only uncovered a small part of it. For now, I’d like you both to go home and get some rest. You’ve done a lot today, but there’s still more we need to learn before we move forward. Tomorrow, we’ll conduct the interrogations and proceed from there. Good work today, agents.”
We said our goodbyes before leaving the office, and I walked back into the bullpen. My desk was still mostly empty, as it had been in our last office. This time, though, I had put up a few pictures of Harry, Eliza, and Amber. As I looked at a picture of her, I couldn’t help but remember the little girl that Patel had pulled out of the cabinet under the sink. She looked like she was around Amber’s age. I felt a renewed jolt of anger course through me, but even more than that, I felt a deep sadness. The thought of Amber being put through what those children had been subjected to was too awful to imagine.
“Hey, now Junior and Charlie are twins,” Miranda called from where she was leaning back in her desk chair, balancing on two legs.
Junior and I both looked at her to see what she was talking about, and she pointed to her left cheek. Right, I’d been pretty severely injured during the bombing at our previous office. The injury had healed, and I, fortunately, hadn’t suffered any damage to my eye, but I had been left with a long, thin scar that spanned from right below my eye to my chin.
“Very funny,” I remarked, and Miranda just stuck her tongue out at me and winked.
“It’s not going to scar,” Junior said, though the nervous tone of his voice made it evident that he was worried it would.
Fiona shook her head and murmured something at him that caused him to smile.
“Don’t worry if it does,” Miranda said with a shrug. “Scars are sexy.” She smirked at me, and I shook my head at how brazen she was being. I could tell she was trying to cheer me up, and I had to admit that it was working.
“Well, I think I’m going to head home,” she said as she stood up from her desk. “I will see you all tomorrow.”
“I think I’ll head out too,” I said as I stood up from my own desk to follow her out the door. She turned to look at me and smirked again once we were both on the other side of the office doors. She could be so obnoxious, but I still smiled as I followed her down into the parking lot.
9
Charlie
The next day, I arrived back to work feeling completely refreshed. I’d need to have all of my wits about me if I was going to be conducting interrogations. Interrogations were all about figuring out what your opponent’s weakness was and using it to your advantage to get them to talk. Harry had taught me a long time ago that it wasn’t enough to just use the same tricks and techniques on every suspect. I had to learn what made them tick in order to get what I wanted.
First up for me was Jennifer Bradshaw, the woman whose house we’d found Fatima in and the one who had attacked Junior before attempting to run off. Our new office was equipped with separate cells, which was good because they’d be unable to get their stories straight while they were waiting to be interrogated. Bradshaw was already in the interrogation room, and I could tell by the harried look on her face and the way she was shaking that she probably wouldn’t be that hard to break. She looked like the kind of well-to-do busybody that had probably never even gotten a speeding ticket. Usually, those types were easy to intimidate into talking. It was strange, though, that someone who had probably never committed a single crime in her life would suddenly jump to human trafficking of all things.
“You’re up first,” Junior said. He was sitting in a chair right in front of the two-way mirror and was holding a laptop. “Wallace is having us alternate to prevent any of us from getting fatigued. I’m going to sit outside during your and Naomi’s interrogations to take some notes. We can compare everything later.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. We only had one interrogation room in our office, and at one person at a time, it was possible this could potentially take quite a while depending on how compliant the suspects were. It made sense to stagger the interrogations, so we’d have time to take breaks and recharge.
With that in mind, I stepped into the room. She flinched as I did, and she lifted her chin and tried to stop her lip from quivering in a show of defiance.
“Mrs. Bradshaw, we meet again,” I said as I sat down in the seat across from her. “That was quite a gash you gave my partner yesterday.”
Her eyes widened as she remembered the previous day’s events.
“It was self-defense,” she said haughtily. “Three people barged into my home, and I had no idea what was happening.”
“You had no idea what was happening?” I asked her cynically, and she shrank away from the harsh tone of my voice. “Okay. Let me ask you this, Mrs. Bradshaw. Why did you have a little girl stuffed in a cupboard under your sink?”
“I want a lawyer,” she squeaked, and I kept my expression carefully neutral. That wasn’t good. She could easily afford one, and while having a lawyer wouldn’t save her when we’d caught her re
d-handed, and she’d assaulted a federal agent, it would greatly delay our investigation. I had to think fast.
“Alright, Mrs. Bradshaw,” I said as I pulled my phone out of my pocket and placed it on the table in front of her. “Call one then. Just know that if you insist on a lawyer, I won’t legally be allowed to speak to you anymore. Or help you in any way.”
“What do you mean ‘call one’?” She gaped. “Aren’t you supposed to assign one to me?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “That’s not how this works. And even if I did have the authority to provide you with a lawyer, I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to help you slither out of the consequences of a crime we both know that you committed. You make way above the minimum threshold for being afforded a public attorney, which means that you are on your own.”
“So go ahead, call a lawyer,” I continued, “I can tell you right now, though, that not a single one will be able to help you out of the mess you’re in right now. We found a child hidden under your sink, Mrs. Bradshaw. You are being investigated for international human trafficking right now. Do you understand that? So you can take your chances with a lawyer who might not even want to take your case when he hears about what you’ve done, or you can talk with me, and maybe we can work something out for your benefit.”
Mrs. Bradshaw’s face had gone red and then white as I spoke, and her bottom lip was trembling as she struggled to hold back tears.
“It was all Danny’s idea,” she whimpered, and I realized immediately that she was referring to the Weavers. “He and Patty were the first ones to get a helper. They invited us over one night and let us in on their secret. They’d hold dinner parties and invite a few of the other couples, and if they thought they might be interested, we’d let them in on it. It was like a club. Before long, half the neighborhood had their own helper.”
