by Kathy Reichs
To his credit, Slidell asked no questions.
I locked Birdie in the bedroom then returned to the kitchen. Slidell was at the door in less than twenty minutes. He looked anxious, concerned.
I let him in and showed him what I’d placed on the counter.
“It was on my doorstep this morning.” Sounding much calmer than I felt. “I may have caught a glimpse of an intruder around two thirty A.M.”
“Did you open it?”
I nodded. Raised my gloved hands.
“What is it?”
Without answering, I removed the lid and stepped aside.
Slidell bellied up to the counter and peered into the box.
“What the fuck?”
Slidell looked away, then quickly back. After a few seconds his brows drew together. “That what I think it is?”
“A tongue.”
“Human?” His tone told me he knew the answer.
“Yes. Note the papillae.”
“The little bumps that look like nipples.”
“Yes.”
Slidell ran a hand over his jaw. “Cut looks pretty clean.”
“Yes. Though there are abrasions and lacerations probably caused by scraping against the dentition.”
“Marks tell you anything?”
“I see curvature. Multiple arcs, so multiple attempts to cut through the flesh. I’m guessing small handheld pruning sheers with curved blades.”
Slidell straightened and took a deep breath.
“Vic alive when this happened?”
“Staining on the box suggests significant hemorrhage.”
Slidell raised both brows.
“Once the heart stops pumping blood to the vessels, bleeding stops.” Greatly oversimplified, but sufficient for Slidell.
“You piss anyone off lately? I mean, more than usual.” Slidell was coming back into character.
I shrugged. Who knows? “Do you think it’s a threat? A warning.”
Slidell pulled out his mobile and punched some keys.
“Get CSS over here.” He provided my address, then frowned at the information he was given. “As quick as you can, then.”
Jamming the phone on his belt, he looked at me glumly. “What makes you think this is a threat and not just a windup?”
“Come into the study.”
He did, head swiveling left and right.
I booted my laptop and opened the e-mail from mailto:[email protected].
“When did this land?”
“A few days ago.”
“And you didn’t mention it because …?” There it was. That annoying paternalistic edge.
“I didn’t see it until yesterday.”
I told him what had happened in the wee hours of the morning. Maybe happened.
“It might have been nothing.”
“Or it might have been the asshole delivering your door prize. I’m putting eyes on this place.”
“Is surveillance really necessary?”
“Yeah,” Slidell snapped. “It’s really necessary. In the meantime, don’t touch the box. Or the door. Or the mat. Or the stoop.”
“I know how CSS works.” Snippy. But Slidell’s attitude was tripping that switch.
“Whoever did this was either angry or nuts. Which door you want, doc?”
“How about we go talk to Creach?”
Skinny gave me one of his Dirty Harry looks.
“Look, I have to submit a statement.” I gestured at the box. “I might as well do it at headquarters.”
Slidell pooched out his lips, then sighed.
“I talk to Creach.” Jabbing at his phone. “You listen.”
WHEN I FIRST started working for the MCME, the charlotte Police Department had not yet merged with its Mecklenburg County counterpart. CPD headquarters was an unremarkable beige building at the corner of Fourth and McDowell.
Today the CMPD is located in a four-story Dixie neoclassic at the intersection of East Trade and Davidson. Ten minutes after leaving my town house, Slidell and I were walking through the doors.
After presented ID, we rode an elevator to the second floor. He led me past a row of interrogation rooms to one marked A.
“Creach is in C.” Slidell popped the door. “You watch from here.”
The small cubicle held the usual table and chairs, AV setup, and wall phone. As I sat, the small screen came to life in grainy black-and-white. Metallic sounds sputtered through the speakers.
CC Creach sat on a metal and gray plastic chair similar to the one I occupied, elbows on the table, chin resting on his fists. His long dark hair was pulled into a braid bound by elastic bands spaced inches apart.
I heard a door open. Creach’s head jerked up and spun toward the sound.
Footsteps, then Slidell came into view. Creach followed his progress, lower arms upright like long skinny poles, eyes wide and skittish.
Slidell tossed a file onto the table. It landed with a sharp click.
Creach’s hands dropped, allowing a better view of his face. The harsh fluorescent lighting turned the white patch on his cheek a pallid blue.
“Hey, man.” Creach flicked a nervous grin. “What’s happening?”
Slidell stared down at his subject, silent and unsmiling.
“Guess I got a little worked up.” Creach made an odd giggling sound.
Slidell pulled out a chair.
“Dude has no sense of humor. I’ll apologize. No harm no foul, right?”
Slidell sat. Opened the file. Slowly sorted and organized the contents.
Creach sat back. Sat forward.
Slidell checked that the AV equipment was on and working.
“This interview will be recorded. For your protection and for mine. Do you have any objection to that?”
Creach shook his head.
Slidell hit a button. “Present at this interview are Detective Erskine Slidell, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Felony Investigative Bureau/Homicide Unit, and Cecil Converse Creach.” Slidell provided the date and time.
As Creach watched nervously, Slidell drew a paper from his stack and pretended to read. I knew what he was doing. And why he’d left Creach waiting so long. He wanted Creach anxious, vulnerable. More likely to make mistakes.
Slidell laid down the paper. “Class is now in session.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You ever go to school, CC? Maybe ride the special bus?”
“School of hard knocks.” Creach giggled in a way that made me think of Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider.
“You think this is funny?”
“I thought you was joking. You know, that shit about going to school.”
Slidell just stared.
Creach’s right foot started pumping, sending one bony knee bouncing like a piston.
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“That’s what we call a double negative, CC. If you didn’t do nothing, then you done something. Which is why you’re sitting here stinking up my interrogation room.”
Some interviewers like to put their subjects at ease, gain their trust, then take advantage. Not Slidell. He believes in going straight for the kill.
“You’re on parole, ain’t that right?”
Creach nodded.
“A drunk and disorderly violates. Am I right again?”
No reaction.
“You don’t cooperate, CC, your skinny black ass is back in the joint. I hear you’re a popular guy inside.”
Creach’s eyes began jumping around the room.
“Look at me, dipshit. You lose focus, I lose patience. You don’t want that.”
“You got it wrong, man.”
“Do I? Let’s try this. Passion Fruit Club.”
Creach looked genuinely confused.
“Ever get your pipe cleaned at the Passion Fruit?”
“What?”
“You need I should spell it out real slow?”
Creach opened his lips, but said nothing.
“I asked a question, asshole. You
get your joystick tuned up at the”—Slidell hooked quotation marks—“massage parlor?”
Creach couldn’t sit still. His fingers picked at the table edge. His sneaker went rat-tat-tat on the tile.
Slidell sighed and began gathering his papers.
Creach’s hands flew up. “Fine, then. Yeah. I been there.”
“When?”
“Couple times. Maybe three.”
“When?”
“Like, a date?”
“Yeah, dipshit. Like a date.”
“I’m not so good with dates.”
“Dig real deep, CC.”
Creach’s eyes stilled as he thought about his recent timetable.
“A few weeks ago, maybe.”
Slidell tipped his head.
“A Monday? Yeah. I remember. Two weeks ago Monday. I was with this guy Zeno. Zeno said they got fresh stuff dancing at the Bronco Club.”
I grabbed my iPhone and opened the calendar. Two Mondays back. The day our Jane Doe died.
“What do you mean, ’fresh stuff?”
“The owner brings new dancers in the first Monday of every month. When we’re flush, Zeno and me go to check out the titties.”
“How old are these titties?”
“I don’t know.”
Slidell drilled Creach with a look.
“The ones come those special Mondays, they’re young.”
“Kids?”
“Look, man. I don’t ask their IDs.”
“And sometimes these young ladies rock your world.”
“No way.” Creach’s head wagged too fast and too many times. “One of them complained about something, it wasn’t me. Or if they’s underage or something.”
“Uh-huh. Let me guess. You can’t afford poontang at the Bronco, so you go down market to the Passion Fruit. What, the chicks a little older there? Maybe got all their molars?”
“No. They’s young, too.” Creach was too thick to catch Slidell’s sarcasm. “I don’t like old pussy.”
“You’re a real discriminating guy, CC.”
Slidell sounded as revolted as I felt. After pausing a moment, he pulled a photo of Jane Doe from his assortment and whipped it across the table.
“You know her?”
Creach scratched an ear as he eyed the image. “Yeah.”
Slidell’s eyes rolled up to the camera.
I held my breath.
“What’s her name?”
“Candy.”
“Tell me about her.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Dead serious.”
“The Passion Fruit’s not a place for shooting the shit.”
Slidell crossed his arms.
Creach shrugged. “She didn’t speak no English, man. None of them did. They talked Spanish or some shit.”
Slidell slid Ray Majerick’s mug shot across the table.
Creach studied the face but said nothing.
“I’m gonna say something here maybe I shouldn’t.” Slidell inhaled deeply, exhaled through his nose. “I think you’re trying, CC. But so far, it ain’t enough. You give me something to work with, I’ll do what I can to make the drunk-and-disorderly beef disappear.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Creach tapped the photo. “This guy was always there.”
“At the Passion Fruit.”
“Yeah.”
“He work there?”
“I don’t know. Honest to fuck, I don’t. The girls called him Magic. Acted scared of the dude.”
“Why?”
“No fucking clue.”
I hadn’t noticed the pumping foot go quiet. Until it started again.
“This shit’s all confidential, right? It gets out I talked to you, it’s my balls to the wall.”
Slidell flipped a pen and tablet across the table. “Write it down.”
“I gave it up. Come on. We’re talking my ass!”
Slidell was already heading for the door. He turned.
“Do yourself a favor. Calm the fuck down.”
“Hey! Wait! What happens to me?”
I met Slidell in the hall.
“What do you think, doc?”
“His story seems to track.”
“So we got Candy for our Jane Doe’s street name. Maybe Majerick for her pimp.”
“You figure Majerick works alone, or as a handler for someone else?”
“Magic’s too mean and too crazy to run a string. If that’s what we’re looking at.”
I thought about Creach’s words. Young girls arriving every month.
Arriving from where? Small towns? Middle-class burbs? Big-city ghettos? By buses? Trains? Vehicles in which they’ve thumbed free rides?
A revolving carousel of women, moving in young and naïve, then sliding down the ladder to places like the Passion Fruit, addicted, broken, youthful optimism gone forever. It was a dispiriting vision.
Suddenly one of Creach’s comments clicked with something D’Ostillo had said.
“Show him Dom Rockett’s photo.”
“Why?”
“Will you just do it?”
“Why the hell not.”
On-screen, I watched the third photo slide across the table, not sure myself what reaction I hoped for.
“Yeah. He was there.”
“At the Passion Fruit Club.”
“Yeah. Totally freaked the chicks out.”
“They were afraid of him?”
“Scared shitless.”
“Who is he?”
“Hell if I know.”
Slidell placed Rockett’s picture beside Majerick’s. “Did these men know each other?”
“Same answer.”
Slidell flicked impatient fingers.
“Hell if I know,” Creach repeated himself.
“Did you ever see them talking to each other?”
Creach shook his head.
The monitor receded. The room around me. Facts were clicking together fast.
Dominick Rockett frequented the Passion Fruit Club. Our Jane Doe worked at the Passion Fruit using the street name Candy. Rosalie D’Ostillo saw Candy and other girls in the Taquería Mixcoatl. The taquería was near the intersection where Candy died. D’Ostillo and Creach thought Candy and the other girls spoke Spanish. Dom Rockett was an importer, probably a smuggler, who made frequent trips to South America.
I heard Slidell’s footsteps click the tile in Interrogation Room C. The door open, close.
Creach began whining about his rights. His deal with Slidell. His safety.
The video and sound cut off.
I stood in the musty little space, a cold hollowness filling my chest.
Dear God.
Could that be it?
“SUPPOSE THESE GIRLS are being trafficked.”
Slidell’s expression was beyond dubious.
“Human trafficking. Think about it.”
We stood outside the homicide unit squad room. Behind us, through a doorway, stretched a labyrinth of dividers, file cabinets, and desks. A few were occupied.
“Creach says the Bronco Club features special dancers every month. Very young girls. You think they’re all hitching rides from Iowa and Nebraska?”
“They’re strippers. They make a few bucks, they move on.”
“And enroll in PhD programs at Yale,” I snapped.
“That ain’t what I meant.”
“Consider this. Who would be well positioned to meet the demand for a constant supply of young women?”
Slidell gave me a skeptical look.
“Dom Rockett,” I said.
“Just ’cause the guy smuggles dead dogs don’t mean he’d smuggle live people.”
I listed the points that had just toggled in my brain. Candy. The Passion Fruit. Spanish. Frequent buying trips to South America.
“And Rockett had cash to invest in S&S Enterprises. Where’d he get it?”
“You’re saying he greases his pockets trafficking child sex slaves?”
>
Easy, Brennan.
“I’m saying we need to consider the possibility that girls are being brought here illegally then forced to work in the sex trade.”
“And that Rockett’s the doer.”
“A number of factors point to him.”
“Smuggling dead dogs is one thing. Smuggling kids is a mighty big leap.”
“I understand that.”
Slidell looked down at the file in his hand. Shifted his feet.
“Majerick I could see, but that kind of operation is above his skill set. Rockett, eh?” He scrunched one side of his face and shook his head.
I had to agree. My impression of Dom Rockett was conflicted. A scarred war hero. A man with no interest in helping ID a hit-and-run victim. I felt pity. I felt revulsion.
“Rockett has the skill set, as you put it. And the infrastructure. The trucks, the supply routes,” I said. “Does he have the coldhearted ruthlessness to traffic helpless kids? I don’t know.”
The callousness to kill if they rebelled? That thought was too terrible to voice.
Two more neurons reached out.
A plastic vial. An antique tusk.
“Holy crap, Slidell. I just thought of something else. Larabee found a sliver of ivory in Candy’s scalp.”
“What’s ivory doing in a hooker’s hair?”
“Will you let me finish?”
Slidell looked at his watch.
“When we were in Rockett’s house I saw a carved tusk in his living room. The thing looked old.”
“And?”
“What do you mean, and?” Sharp. “The worldwide ban on ivory has been in effect for over twenty years. Who has the stuff just lying around?”
“I got an ivory marble my granddaddy give me.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Calm down, doc.”
“I am calm. Did you know that, other than drugs and guns, human beings are the most smuggled commodity on earth?”
Slidell rubbed his chin.
A phone rang in the squad room behind us.
“I’ll write up a warrant. Not saying I’ll get one, but we’ve got Creach’s admission the Passion Fruit is a rub and tug. I’ll go with that. Once inside, we see what we see.”
While Slidell tried to convince a judge to issue a search warrant, I headed back to the MCME to do some research. I learned the following.
A United Nations study put the estimated annual global profit from human trafficking at $31.6 billion. And that figure was a few years out of date. Given the industry’s steep growth curve, some were placing the total closer to forty billion.