by D C Young
“Because, unless you are a familiar face, you’ll be singled out and questioned. Even more so if you’re hanging around near the daughter of a senator in a private school. I’m assuming she goes to a private school.”
“Yes,” he replied, sliding a folder across the table toward me.
Evidently, I had passed his first test and I was being made privy to more details of the case. I opened the folder and got my first glimpse of Justine Edwards. She was exactly what I expected, having seen the senator and his wife though I was not acquainted with them any further than what I’d seen of them in the media. Justine had the narrow facial features of her mother, but favored her father in the eyes and nose. Her complexion was a buttery chocolate and she had pearly white teeth, which were being straightened into perfection by braces, behind full lips. Being a mother, I could see the little bit of hesitation behind the smile. Bet she’s fifteen, I told myself as I moved the photo out of the way and started reading the personal data sheet at the front of the case file. Bingo. Fifteen years old. 5’ 8”, approximately 110 pounds, black hair, brown eyes. African American.
“I’m assuming this is being kept hush-hush?” I asked as I continued reading. We mothers can do that sort of thing.
“What leads do you have?”
There was no response, so I looked up from reading.
Benson shifted in his chair uncomfortably and avoided my eyes.
“We got nothing, Sam,” Sledge finally admitted. “We’ve looked in the usual places, but because this is being kept quiet, it’s kind of hard for either of our organizations to be digging around and asking questions without tipping off some suspicions.”
“And the school?” I asked. “Surely they know the reason behind why Justine hasn’t been attending her classes lately.”
“They have been informed that Justine is on an extended hiatus and is being tutored privately,” Benson responded.
“So, since your organizations can’t be digging around, you need me to do it, huh?”
They both nodded.
“And keep it quiet so that the media doesn’t get tipped off?”
They nodded again.
I glanced from one to the other. Neither one of them could be inconspicuous, even if they wore disguises. That thought brought some of the antics of Sherlock Holmes into my mind and I chuckled softly.
It was Sledge’s turn to raise an eyebrow as he asked the unspoken question concerning my glee. He waited for a moment, hoping for an explanation, which I didn’t feel like giving, and then made his appeal.
“Sam, I wouldn’t have gotten you into this, but this is the sort of case that only someone like you can handle. You know, someone with your special skills.”
I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t often that I was able to make someone squirm, so I egged him on a bit.
“What skills are you talking about, Sledge?”
“Your investigative skills, your stealth skills, your…” His eyes narrowed me as he realized what I was doing, so I let him off the hook.
“You’re making me sound like a ninja.”
Benson sighed and started drumming his fingers on the table. Evidently, he wasn’t impressed with the tiniest bit of friendly banter. A part of me wanted to continue with it and dig deeper under his skin, but I decided that there was really no point in it.
“Okay. I’ll take the case,” I responded. I looked at Sledge. “He knows my terms?”
“He does,” Sledge answered. “Our organizations will be splitting the costs.”
“To make things simple, everything will be directed through Sledge, and then the two of you can work out the rest.”
Sledge glanced at Benson with an “I told you so,” expression on his face and Benson nodded.
“That’s fine,” he replied as he rose up from his chair and extended his hand toward me.
“It was a pleasure to meet you,” I said, not touching his extended hand. Vampires don’t do that sort of thing. Sledge came to my rescue again.
“Sam doesn’t do that sort of thing,” he said, giving no further explanation.
Benson accepted what he said without question. My bet was that he didn’t particularly care for the custom either, but it was sort of automatic when terminating a business agreement.
I changed the subject as I followed the two of them to the door.
“Tammy is going to be pissed that she missed you, Sledge.”
“Tell her I’ll make it up to her on Saturday,” he responded. “A few of us are going to take a ride to Elsinore. Just a day trip, if you’re okay with that.”
Even though Sledge was the closest thing to a big brother Tammy had, I still hesitated. Tammy had been through a lot recently, we all had. “I’ll ask her when she gets home.”
“Fair enough,” he replied, turning and following Benson down the sidewalk.
I watched from the door as Benson went straight to his car and Sledge mounted his bike. As near as I could tell they didn’t even speak to each other, though given their mannerisms, it was likely that they had grunted something as they parted.
And they think we vampires are strange.
Chapter Three
I had laid the file aside a few hours later and was considering the fact that Justine had vanished almost as rapidly as had Taylor. I sat back in my chair, closed my eyes and went back through that case. Taylor had been abducted in connection with a ring that was snatching children out of the Golden Bear amusement park. The promise of a career in modeling and acting had been the lure. Those who had been abducted had been placed with new families who were a part of the exploitation operation and made use of to help recruit additional victims.
It had been a perfect setup. The organization they had busted had gotten away with snatching a large number of children which had been exploited in various manners. The connection to that trafficking ring had been made through a psychic child who had been able to provide a small break in the case and set them on the right track, and then it had been Tammy who had really given them the break they’d needed. Through Tammy’s gift, they’d come in contact with Jasmine Bain, an actress who had been abducted, exploited and was eventually able to break free. From her, they had been able to locate the leaders of the ring and shut it down.
We’d shut down the ring and rescued Taylor, who had been so badly brainwashed that she was extremely confused and had begun to believe that the parents with whom she had been placed were her real parents. I wondered how her recovery was progressing. Had she been able to reintegrate back into her family? I sighed heavily, wondering what sort of struggle Taylor’s family was enduring. I considered my own family and the struggles we had gone through; on a very different level, mind you, but it had been difficult. I had hovered over my children, hoping to provide the stability they needed to recover from what we’d been through. I forced my thoughts back onto the case in front of me.
There really were no leads in the folder I’d been handed. It included copies of notes, documents relating to last known locations, connections to particular individuals of interest and some photographs from an ATM camera, which were the last photos of Justine Edwards before she went missing. About all that those photos were worth was to confirm what she’d been wearing before she disappeared. I passed through them, considering the fact that I would never have put an ATM card in the hands of my daughter at the age of fifteen. She still didn’t have one at age sixteen and I wasn’t planning on giving her one any time soon.
I guess the well to do, I chuckled softly, the PTB, have a different perspective on things.
I closed the file and tossed it on the desk when a new thought hit me. Why are they keeping it quiet? Wouldn’t the rescue of their daughter be better accomplished if the case was out in the open where numerous pairs of eyes could be involved? Was a little bit of bad publicity that valuable?
There was something else going on and I could smell it. The secrecy didn’t make sense. My mind skipped back to Taylor’s case. The involvement of Se
nator Antonio de Armas came right back into focus. We’d never been able to connect him directly into the trafficking ring, but we had gotten a major break in the case through a former aid, William Forrest. The thought of him made my stomach churn, not because he was scum, but because of the moment of weakness which had come over me; a moment of weakness when the dark spirit had surged up in me and I had fed on human blood, something I had sworn I would never do. Forcing the image and the accompanying guilt out of my head wasn’t easy and I was in the middle of battling those two things when I heard the front door open and the sound of my children returning from school.
“Hey mom,” Anthony called out. “What we got to eat?”
That’s a surprise, I smiled. He certainly seemed to be normal.
I was rising up out of my chair to go to the kitchen when Tammy came into my office.
“Hey Mom,” she said. Her eyes looked at the file folder on the desk beside me. “New case?”
The drawback of your daughter being a telepath is that regardless of whether or not you wanted to share something with her, she could read your mind and know what you were holding back. It was a blessing and a curse.
“Yes,” I replied. “Another missing person, a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“Yeah, I know, I caught you thinking about Taylor’s case. Are you going to talk to Jasmine Bain again?”
“I hadn’t considered that yet,” I replied.
“No, but you were going to,” she laughed. “And you were about to tell me that I missed Sledge.”
“You know, I wish you would use your blocking a little bit more often.”
“You’re just jealous that you can’t do it,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “Anyway, you should talk to Jasmine.”
“Why?”
“Because I had a dream about her last night and she was talking to you and Rennie…” she paused for a moment and then added one more person, like she had just remembered her. “… and me.”
“Nice try,” I laughed.
“Mom. I want to meet her,” she protested.
“You can already read her mind, why do you need to meet her?”
“I just want to. It would be so cool. She’s like my favorite actress, you know?”
“I don’t know,” I hesitated. “If I meet with her, it will be for reasons related to the case and I don’t know if Rennie can get that set up.”
“He says he can,” she responded.
“How do you know?” It was a stupid question and I realized that it was the second she responded.
“Duh, Mom, we can connect our minds any time we like,” she mocked.
Chapter Four
Jasmine Bain welcomed Rennie and I, and Tammy, into the spacious living room of her Beverly Hills home. It was a little strange that Tammy was so star-struck given that she had spent time inside Jasmine’s brain, but I suppose even psychic teens were still normal teens.
“Please sit,” she said, waving a hand at several plush leather sofas and chairs in a rather large area in front of a massive fireplace cased in marble. “Sofia will bring some tea, or maybe you would prefer a soda?”
She looked toward Tammy as she asked the question and she responded nervously.
“I’m glad that Rennie invited you to come along,” she said, taking Tammy’s hands in hers in an attempt to put her more at ease. “Rennie has talked about you quite a bit.”
I saw Tammy’s eyes quickly glance in Rennie’s direction and she smiled. No doubt a thank you was passed along to him through their mental connection, which I was not privy to at the moment because my daughter was blocking my thoughts out of her mind; something I wasn’t able to do. Jasmine was a great deal different than she had been the last time I had talked to her. We had been on set, during the previous interview, so maybe that had something to do with it, but it was also possible that her therapy, and the fact that we had taken down the trafficking ring which had exploited her, had probably made some breakthroughs.
“So, you’re a Junior in high school this year?” she asked, drawing Tammy to sit beside her.
“Yes,” Tammy responded, still not quite over being star-struck.
“I’ll bet it’s fun,” she responded with a tone of regret. “I missed out on all of that. You’ll have to fill me in on it, when we’re not hanging around Rennie and your mom.”
“Sure,” Tammy answered beaming.
“Ah, here’s Sofia,” she said.
Sofia delivered Rennie’s bourbon, fixed just the way he liked it, a glass of red wine to me and a soda to Tammy. Rennie had, without a doubt, been a frequent guest, but I was pretty sure he had made some mental suggestions to Sofia concerning what Tammy and I would drink because the drinks were a perfect fit all the way around.
Though I wasn’t sure of the purpose of interviewing Jasmine concerning the new case I was working on, I felt compelled to begin the interview anyway.
“Jasmine,” I began. “I’m working on another child abduction case and there simply aren’t any leads. The girl was taken from her private school in Corona Del Mar. There are no connections to Golden Bear that we are aware of or any connections to any of the acting or modeling agencies that were involved in the ring that we took down. We have no leads and frankly have no idea if this might be a private job or if we are looking at another ring.”
“I doubt they’ve all been stopped,” Jasmine responded. “You stop one ring and another will pop up. It’s the sort of thing that happens where there is money and influence to be had.”
It was a pretty sharp observation, not something I had expected from the actress, but there it was, so, I pursued it.
“Do you know of other rings out there?” I asked.
“Specifically, no,” she responded. “I just don’t believe that there was only one.”
I needed something a little bit more solid than the fact that Jasmine Bain suspected that there were more. I was forming my next question when Jasmine continued.
“Golden Bear wasn’t the only place where children were targeted,” she said. I could tell that she was drawing upon some internal memory as she spoke because she hesitated and frowned.
She’s trying to remember some of the other kids who were abducted along with her, Tammy broke into my head.
Can you help her remember better? I responded.
I think so, Tammy answered.
Just be careful not to input thoughts into her head, I warned.
“There were two who I know came from upper class homes,” Jasmine said. “They were twins; maybe thirteen at the time. They came after I was already working at Golden Bear. They weren’t some that we had recruited from there.”
After Jasmine had been abducted and made to believe that her new parents were her new home and her new “school” was her new school, she had been made use of by the trafficking ring to work at Golden Bear and recruit other children. I remembered the whole story from our first interview together.
“Are you saying that she might have been recruited out of the school by one of the other kids?” I asked.
“No. They wouldn’t allow us to go to school outside. We would have been too far outside their control, but we weren’t the only ones recruiting… I shouldn’t say recruiting, it was abduction, plain and simple.”
“So, an adult did this?”
“It really couldn’t be any other way,” she responded. “Assuming that this is connected to some sort of trafficking ring, and assuming that they all function somewhat the same.”
My initial hunch that the abduction was an inside job was starting to seem like a greater possibility. Someone on the staff, someone the girl and school administrators trusted, and/or someone who could come and go without notice must have been involved. No doubt, whoever it was, if it was at all similar to Taylor and Jasmine’s abductions, was one of the “parents” with whom the children were placed as they became more acclimated to their new existence. I would need to interview some of the people who worked in the school in order to get any
where with that angle. Because the case was being kept secret, that was going to be another challenge. Why were they keeping it secret? I need to talk to the parents and try to get them to drop the secrecy.
Maybe I can help? Tammy suggested, having heard my thoughts.
We’ll talk about it later, I responded.
“This is unsettling,” Jasmine announced, interrupting our thoughts. Her face had paled and her discomfort was painfully evident. “I know they can’t hurt me anymore and I know that the ring which you busted took care of a lot of this. Knowing those two things has been huge in my recovery, but knowing that this is still going on…”
Let’s end this, Mom, Tammy said, reaching over and placing her hand on top of Jasmine’s.
I could hardly believe the change that had come over her during the few minutes we had been in the home of one of her idols. She was growing up fast, but I was floored by what she did next.
“So, what do you want to know about regular school life,” Tammy said.
“Wow,” Jasmine beamed. “I don’t even know where to begin. The idea of it is so unreal to me.”
Chapter Five
“Benson says, ‘absolutely not’,” Sledge growled over the phone. I called him after leaving Jasmine’s house and had made a request to speak to the parents about lifting their insistence on secrecy. “He says that even the fact that he had contacted a private investigator would have Senator Edwards going through the roof.”
“I need to interview some people in that school and I can’t do it. This is absolutely crazy, Sledge. Why would you do such a thing? What’s their motivation behind it? I mean, seriously…” I ran out of steam before I finished my rant.
“You’ll have to find another way, Sam,” he responded.
“Mom,” Tammy broke in. “I said that I could help.”
“And I told you that we would talk about that later.”
“But I can help by getting you into the school another way,” Tammy protested.
“What’s she got?” Sledge asked, having overheard our conversation, because I was using the hands-free option on my mini-van. It allowed me to pair my cell phone with the radio and utilized the speakers and a built-in microphone on the radio.