Forgive Me

by Daniel Palmer

  Easy niña, Ricardo said. You fine. You fine. All is good. I take off the blindfold in a minute. You gotta work now for your food. You ready to go to work. That’s what I remember him saying. I heard footsteps shuffling toward me. Voices whispering. Laughs. Giggles. Get back, putas! Ricardo yelled. A girl’s voice said look at the freshie. New meat. I like it. Someone grabbed my ass. Nice and firm, a girl said, then laughed.

  Ricardo dug his fingers into my arm. His nails pinched my skin and it hurt. This was a warning, a reminder to me that he was love and suffering, pain and relief all rolled into one. I heard the sound of shuffling feet. People scurried away. Where were we? What dark world had he brought me to? Ricardo pulled me to a stop like I was the mule he once called me. At last, he took off my blindfold. I blinked though I didn’t have to adjust my eyes too much because there wasn’t much light.

  I was in a room about the size of my bedroom, but the walls were made of wood—cheap stuff, different types of wood all pressed together. What else was in this room? A twin bed on a metal frame, a wastebasket, and nothing else. No other furniture. No windows. A small lamp plugged into an extension chord pulled through a hole in the wall gave off the room’s only light. I heard a man grunting. I know those noises because Ricardo made them with me and because he made me watch a lot of videos. It sounded like it was coming from close by.

  Where am I? I asked Ricardo. Your new home he said. I don’t like it here, I said. He threw me onto the thin mattress and started to choke me. My eyes bugged wide. He let go of my throat so I could breathe again, but then he took out a lighter. He grabbed my arm hard and held the flame to my skin until the searing pain got so bad I began to scream. He covered my mouth with his hand and burned me again.

  That’s when Stephen Macan entered the room. He was dressed in a suit. He still looked distinguished and handsome, but there was something very cold about him. A darkness I hadn’t seen in him before. He sat on the bed. The springs creaked and groaned under his weight. He told Ricardo to leave. He still had that accent I couldn’t figure out. I was crying and Stephen Macan gave me some tissues. He was drinking a Coke with ice and he offered me a drink. He rubbed an ice cube over the burn on my arm. He said anytime I did something wrong from this point forward I would be burned. I started to cry harder. What do you want from me?

  He told me that I worked for him now and that Ricardo wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. I can’t have a boyfriend. Not here. He said he tried to make something happen with the pictures, but I’m not going to be JBar. Not now, not ever. I don’t have what it takes. But I still have to pay him back for all the time and energy he invested in me. I have to earn my keep, he said. I asked how I’m supposed to do that? I’ve never had a real job before and I don’t have any skills.

  The grunting sounds I heard became louder, more intense, and they distracted me. Stephen Macan grabbed my chin and turned my head to make me look him in the eyes. The coldness I saw made me shiver. He said my job was to make his clients happy.

  I told him I didn’t know how to do that, but he said I was lying. He said I took care of Ricardo just fine. That was my training period. Now I have to take care of others for real. My arm was throbbing. I couldn’t stop crying. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to puke. Stephen Macan took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I shrank away from the flame, but he grabbed me and pulled me close to it. Close so my face could feel the heat and my eyes stung from the brightness. He put the cigarette to the flame and took a drag. Then he gave me the smoke. I inhaled and coughed because I took a big drag. He told me not to take such a deep breath. He wanted me to smoke it all because the cigarette would calm me. It wasn’t just tobacco in there, he said. He wouldn’t say what else it was, but I smoked it down anyway and felt extremely lightheaded. Calmer. The pain in my arm didn’t go away, but it didn’t hurt as badly anymore.

  Stephen Macan said it was time for me to go to work. He said I belonged to him now. He called me a piece of property he owns and said it was time to, “earn your keep little girl.”

  How? I asked.

  But I knew. I knew.

  Stephen Macan got up from the bed and opened the door to my makeshift room. Buggy was standing there smiling a big toothy grin. He strutted in, unbuttoning his bowling shirt. He took off his fedora hat and Stephen Macan took money from him. I saw this exchange. Nobody tried to hide it from me. Ricardo came back into the room. I was sitting on the bed and he leaned down and whispered into my ear to make Buggy smile or Stephen Macan will burn my face so badly my mom won’t recognize me. Then he’d put me down into the hole.

  What’s the hole?

  He wouldn’t tell me. He just said, you don’t ever want to go into the hole, Jessica. For a second I forgot my name wasn’t Jessica. I forgot I was Nadine. Ricardo said he would wait outside for me to finish then he would take me out for lunch and take me to my new apartment. Don’t I live here now? I asked. He laughed. Nah, he said, this place is for the work. Upstairs is for sleeping.

  His voice sounded far away because my head was buzzing from whatever I’d just smoked. Thank God I was high. Thank God because I knew what was coming. Buggy came toward me with a giant smile on his face that put no sparkle into his black eyes.

  CHAPTER 20

  Day two of Angie’s stakeout and already she was sick of the salads they sold in the food court. She was also sick of the lighting, the pumped-in music, the filtered air, and the echo from the din of constant chatter and footsteps. She felt like a vampire wandering the halls of the Union Station mall, going from floor to floor, store to store, looking for a tall, balding man with a handsome face and good taste in suits.

  When she saw them, she tailed young, single girls because that was the bait that attracted this shark. The girls came in all shapes, sizes, and colors, but shared one common attribute—they came, and in great numbers, too. It was a Saturday, and Angie was having a hard time keeping up with the endless flow of bodies that came in and out of Union Station. Everyone there had a story and she couldn’t help but wonder if some of the girls she followed were just like Nadine—naïve girls from troubled homes who fled their sad circumstances thinking they would be safer, happier on their own. Angie had been in business long enough to know they were almost always mistaken.

  Mike checked in a couple times from his bouncy house party. In the background, Angie could hear what sounded like a bazillion kids making enough noise to drown out a fleet of jet airliners.

  “So any luck?” Mike shouted into the phone.

  Angie scrunched up her face as she struggled to make out what he said. “How do you stand all that racket?”

  “What?”

  Angie sighed. “I’m fine. No luck yet!” She startled a young couple walking by, who shot her an aggrieved look.

  “Did you say he’s in a truck?”

  “Good-bye, Mike.” Angie ended the call.

  The only news she had to share was that she wasn’t alone on the assignment. Vincent had circulated the man’s photograph to everyone in mall security, as well as Amtrak police and the TSA and DHS security teams assigned to the station. He also sent a group e-mail to all the merchants to be on the lookout for the man in the attached photograph. He said only that the man was a suspect in an ongoing shoplifting investigation. Vincent believed that would get as much attention as the truth, and wouldn’t start a panic about a possible predator running loose.

  Angie trailed a willowy girl in a strappy dress into The Body Shop, and then into Papyrus, then over to Nine West. She remembered how much she hated shopping. The joy of trying on a pair of jeans just for fun was utterly lost on her. She got her high from making a break in a case, not saving 10 percent by opening a new J.Crew credit card account. Shopping to her was long lines, annoying environments, and clothes that didn’t fit quite right.

  By four o’clock, she was feeling low on energy so she got a green drink at Jamba Juice and sat in an Amtrak waiting area to recharge. She called Bao to check in.

  “What’
s going on?”

  “Just home working on that code.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve tried everything. Got some crypto guys who are better at this than me to take a few swings. There are all sorts of ciphers and codes terrorists use that we’re trying.”

  “Bao, my mom was not a terrorist.”

  He gave a little chuckle. “Yeah, yeah, for sure. But the tricks are still good, so we’re trying ’em all on for size.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Slowly. It could be a substitution pattern. That’s a pretty basic technique. Since we’ve established your mom was not a terrorist, it makes sense the code wouldn’t be too sophisticated.”

  “What’s substitution?”

  “Basically it’s two alphabets, and you shift one or more characters to the right or left. But these can be super tricky to crack if the alphabet is scrambled.”

  Angie took out the photograph, spent a moment looking at the girl’s face, and turned the image over to see the words on the back. There was that code—IC12843488. Most of the coded message was numbers, which made Bao’s efforts a little confusing and perhaps misplaced. “There’s hardly any letters here,” she said.

  “Well, what if May God forgive me is in code?”

  That made more sense. “So we think the message says one thing, but it really means something else.”

  “If we can figure out the key, perhaps. But we don’t have a lot of text to count letter usage or help us look for patterns. That kind of makes it uncrackable.”

  “Is there another technique my mom could have used?”

  “If I focus on the numbers, it might tell us a different story.”

  “What kind of story?”

  Bao made a hmmm sound. “Think about a telephone keypad. A keypad has numbers associated with letters, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So then it’s a game of matching. Can we make any words out of the different combinations? There’s also the Caesar Shift cipher.” Bao was in full brain dump mode, but Angie’s focus was too fragmented to let her concentrate.

  She gave him a half listen, keeping her eyes out for any youngish girls traveling alone, apart from their pack. Girls who looked like they were lost among the crowd. Girls who seemed unsure of themselves. The streets were a Darwinian place, and hunters like the handsome bald guy were experts at spotting the weak ones.

  Angie tried to follow Bao’s description of the Caesar Shift, making a drawing on a napkin to keep up. Angie’s big takeaway was that Bao had his work cut out for him.

  “Keep it going, Bao. I appreciate all you’re doing.”

  “Working hard. What’s the story there?”

  “Keeping my eyes open. We sent a picture of the guy from the surveillance tape to the DC police, so that’ll give us extra eyes on our prize.”

  “Good deal. Hang tough, Ange.”

  “You too, Bao.”

  She ended the call and took a big slurp of her green juice made from kiwi, banana, mango, pineapple, green apple, spinach, and kale. She suspected this “healthy” drink had more sugar than an ice cream sundae, and damn if it didn’t taste as good. She stood up and tossed away her drink.

  Back to the hunt. The crowds were as plentiful as locusts. Everywhere Angie looked, she saw targets—young, vulnerable girls—but few roamed alone. Safety in numbers. Smart chicas. She didn’t feel discouraged. She knew this was the place to be. She also knew that before the stakeout was over, she’d run out of clean clothes and have to go shopping after all.

  CHAPTER 21

  Greg Jessup might have been an absentee father, but he was not skimping on the cash when it came to finding his daughter. It was obvious after a few days that the stakeout at Union Station was going to be a long one. Angie had no other leads, and she felt confident the man on the surveillance video would eventually stalk the place again.

  But when?

  Angie, Mike, and Bao took shifts spending day after day at the mall, racking up per diem fees for hotel rooms and meals, without success. It was a waiting game, and she had committed to the strategy. Eventually, she would find her mystery man. It was just a matter of time.

  Things at home were fine, no radical shifts in the landscape. Gabriel DeRose went to work, and Angie continued to get new cases, some of which she assigned to Mike and Bao while she took the brunt of the surveillance duty. The long-term stakeout had been her idea, so she felt obligated to take on the lion’s share of the suffering. Bao continued to try and crack the code on the back of the photograph without success. Angie remained hopeful and checked in with him every day.

  She called Bao after lunch, which she ate in the now dreaded food court. If she never saw another food court again, it would be too soon.

  “How’s it going, Bao? Making progress?” Of course, she was referring to the code.

  “Working on the Flip 5-0 grind as we speak.”

  “Is that a type of cipher?”

  “Um, no. It’s kind of a skateboard move. Flip the board up and then the back truck grinds the edge.”

  “Hmmm. Sounds difficult.”

  “You know I’ve been trying to crack your mom’s code. If I work on it anymore, I think my head is going to explode. I had to get out and skate.”

  Angie understood. If she didn’t catch a break soon, her head might explode, as well.

  The seventeenth day of the stakeout occurred on a Sunday, and it was going to be the last day of her surveillance effort. Angie was ready to try a new approach, though she had no definite plan for what that might be. Days had stretched into weeks, and the end of April became mid-May. After a dreadful night’s sleep at the new Hilton Garden Inn, a block’s walk from Union Station and her home away from home, she arrived at the mall before the stores opened. Nightmares had plagued her, the kind she hadn’t had since childhood.

  As a young girl of four or five, she had experienced night terrors. It wasn’t something people talked openly about. She’d learned of her bloodcurdling screams, intense fear, and flailing limbs only by picking up snippets of conversation from her exhausted parents.

  Later, when the episodes finally stopped, her parents were more forthcoming about her sleep disorder. “Remember when . . .” they’d say.

  With time, they could even laugh about it.

  It wasn’t funny now. Angie couldn’t recall a single image from her dream, but she believed the girl with the deformed ear had been a gloomy presence throughout. Perhaps Nadine had been there, as well. What stuck in Angie’s mind was a feeling of suffocation. A darkness pressing down on her, something pliable and heavy she could claw at but could not clear away. Dirt, perhaps. She felt things creeping over her body, burrowing underneath her skin. It could have been bugs, it could have been fingers, because they were just feelings.

  She had screamed, only without a voice. Nothing had come out, not even a hiss of air. The need to scream, to be heard, had felt as imperative as the need to breathe. Her silent yowl was the most helpless feeling she had ever known. She’d awoken with a start in a sterile hotel room and couldn’t stand the thought of falling back asleep.

  She’d returned to her stakeout woozy and out of sorts. Her head felt fuzzy, her body ached, and the Advil wasn’t doing nearly enough. She went to the Jamba Juice to suck down an energy boost.

  And she saw him. He was in line at the Starbucks, two or three storefronts down from the Jamba Juice. She recognized him by the shape of his head and his build. All of his physical characteristics were etched into her consciousness.

  Angie’s malaise fell away with a snap. She was wildly alert, pulse hammering. She placed her order, careful to keep watch on her mark without looking too obvious.

  It made sense to her that he’d show up at this hour, when the crowds were thin. It was easier to spot the loners, the vulnerable ones. Maybe he would see a young girl traveling alone, taking an early morning train to some destination, anywhere but where she had been.

  Angie’s target ordered a coffee
and a bagel. He stood at a counter just inside the Starbucks, leafing through the carcass of a Sunday newspaper someone had left behind. He was there for something other than reading the morning paper.

  She found a seat at an Amtrak departure gate with good sight lines and watched him lazily sip from his coffee. Eventually he moved away from the counter, depositing the remains of his breakfast in the trash. Angie let him walk past her before she got up to follow.

  He took the escalator up to the main shopping area and ambled along galleries just beginning to bustle with activity. He browsed store windows.

  Was he looking for merchandise or searching for something else? Angie made a note of his attire in case she lost him in the growing crowd. He was dressed professionally in a gray suit jacket, white shirt, black pants, and black shoes. It was similar to what he’d worn the day he’d met Nadine.

  Angie knew to avoid distractions. A turn of the head at an inopportune moment and he might be gone. Who knew when he’d return? She kept at least thirty feet back at all times, using people as shields whenever possible. Even though she was behind her target, she paced her footsteps to keep from being in sync with his. On the marble floors, the symmetry of the echo might attract his attention.

  She did her best to appear like any other shopper—unhurried, browsing merchandise in store windows. She wore a drab green crew neck sweatshirt and gray pants. The clothes she kept in her car were plain, not colorful, never revealing. She never wore popular brands or anything with logos or graphics on them. Those could make people notice her. Dark, muted colors with a timeless look worked best.

  She didn’t bother with disguises, though she had several in the trunk of her car. Her target did not know her and wouldn’t recognize her. but he would know if a stranger always seemed to be near. Angie did what others were doing, glancing at her phone as she walked and shopped, not making eye contact.