by Sean Black
“Andrew. Andre. Something like that,” said the grandfather.
“You get a last name?”
He shook his head.
“She didn’t really talk about him that much,” said Joyce. “But I got the impression that he was older. Maybe like eighteen, nineteen, somewhere in there. Way too old to be taking an interest in a girl her age.”
“That’s usually how it gets worked,” said Angie.
An hour later, Lock and Angie said their goodbyes to Kristin’s mother and grandfather and walked back to Lock’s car. As they were about to get in, Angie stopped, her hand holding the open passenger door.
“You still sure you want to do this?” she said, staring at him.
Lock paused. Even from the brief sit down with Kristin’s anxious family, he knew he was about to enter an evil world. He was hardly naïve. Years of military service, followed by over a decade in high-end private security, had seen to that.
Like most people, when he heard the phrase sex trafficking, it had conjured images of women spirited into America to be exploited. Or perhaps young women in far-flung places kidnapped from the streets, spirited away and set to work.
What he hadn’t been prepared for was a world that was, according to Angie, herself a former victim of trafficking, hidden in plain sight. A world where young girls and women, almost all of them American, were carefully selected and groomed, online and in real life, before being coaxed, coerced or outright forced into selling their bodies.
Just like the first time he’d stepped into a real live war zone, Lock sensed he was stepping through a door into a place that would change him. He was old enough now to know that the change something like this brought wasn’t always a good one.
Yet if people like him didn’t help Angie Garcia to help the Kristin Millers of this world, then who would?
Law enforcement did what it could. But the line between a runaway and a trafficked victim was often a blurry one in the eyes of the law. And often the victims did not see themselves as victims, which made prying them from the pimps, if not impossible, then frequently thankless.
Even when traffickers were caught, Angie had informed him when they’d first met, conviction rates were depressingly low. Victims disappeared or got cold feet or didn’t want to sit in a courtroom and relive the months or years of trauma they were trying to leave behind. Defense attorneys had a bewildering array of delaying tactics.
And, more than anything, the trafficking business was driven by a sick, but almost insatiable demand for product. One pimp was convicted and sent to prison only for two more to step up to take their place. It was a billion-dollar business in a world where money often counted for more than people, especially people deemed by polite society to be disposable.
Lock turned the question over for a second more. If he was in, he was all in. That was how he operated. The only difference with this situation was that he wasn’t taking payment.
“Yes,” he said, finally. “I want to do this.”
4
The refuge/halfway house that Angie Garcia had set up for former victims of trafficking lay on a quiet street in Sun Valley.
For security reasons, there was no sign outside. Nor did the address appear anywhere on the organization’s website. There were no pictures. A street view on Google Maps would only turn up the address, and an image of a nondescript two-story-building that looked like a youth hostel.
The dozen or so girls and women who lived inside were sworn never to reveal the location to anyone, not even a family member or close friend. A breach of the rule led to immediate exclusion.
None of the women who had passed through had ever been excluded. They all knew, often from bitter experience, the consequences of one of their pimps finding out where they were.
Lock had come to the refuge a week before Christmas to review their security. He’d got talking with Angie and she’d mentioned that they also helped families locate trafficked girls and women and always needed additional help.
The more Angie had told him about her story and then the stories of the women she helped, the angrier Lock had become. He’d returned home to the beautiful apartment in the Marina that he shared with his attorney fiancée, Carmen.
It had been Carmen’s suggestion that he do a little pro bono work to keep his mind sharp. Angie’s details had come via one of the investigators that Carmen’s law firm used. He’d agreed to review her security with no idea that it would lead to anything else, never mind tracking down a likely trafficked fourteen-year-old.
Yet here he was.
He watched Angie walk inside and got back in his car. He pulled the tablet computer from the glove compartment and turned it over in his hand, wondering what secrets it contained and whether it would lead him straight to Kristin Miller before anything truly bad happened to her.
One thing he knew from talking to Angie. The time between a girl being handed to a trafficker and being put to work wasn’t long. Sometimes a few days. Sometimes less.
It had seemed almost surreal when she’d told him. She had assured him it was how it worked.
He looked at the time. It was late. He dug out his phone and started to make calls. There had to be at least one tech geek out there who wouldn’t mind making some extra money on Christmas Eve.
5
Lock pulled up outside a storefront on a near-deserted block in Santa Monica. Next to the storefront was a blue door. He rang one of five buzzers. He stood back so that his face was visible to the camera mounted off to one side of the doorway.
Seconds passed before the door clicked open. He walked into a narrow foyer with an unmanned reception desk and a single elevator.
He rode the elevator to the third floor and made a left. A petite young woman in her early twenties opened a door. She wore thick, black-rimmed glasses and her black hair was tied back into a ponytail. Jenny Chu was an IQ off the charts tech Stanford drop-out hacker used mostly by private investigators. She was popular because she was fast, reliable, and she didn’t ask too many questions about the legality of what some of her hacking missions involved.
“Hey, Mr. Lock, what’s up?”
“You make me sound ancient when you call me Mr. Lock.”
She smiled. “You are.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re very welcome,” she laughed.
He followed her through another door and into an office with a desk and a long workbench that was covered in computers, cell phones and all kinds of other gadgets.
“Thanks for agreeing to take a look at this on Christmas Eve.”
She hopped up onto one of two stools.
“Hey, you know us Chinese people, always ready to make a buck regardless of what day it is,” she said. “What you got?”
He handed over Kristin’s tablet computer. “Belongs to a fourteen-year-old who’s gone missing from her home in the Valley, believed trafficked. We need to access her social media accounts and whatever else is on there.”
“Woah, trafficked, as in?”
“Yeah, as in what you’re thinking.”
“Jeez. Okay, well in that case I’ll get straight to it, but there is a ‘no one else is working right now’ premium of an additional five hundred dollars.”
“Not an issue.”
“I thought you’d quibble.”
“Nope,” said Lock. “I just want to find this girl and get her back to her family.”
Jenny had already propped the tablet on the bench and plugged it into another computer via the USB port. She clicked and tapped at her computer as they talked.
“Hey, so how come the cops aren’t out there looking for her?” she asked him.
“They are, but they get a lot of calls about runaways, especially this time of year. I’m just trying to expedite matters.”
The tablet computer flashed, and she was into the main screen.
“Password protection’s really basic on these things. Now, let me see what she has on this. If we can get into her Instagram o
r Snapchat, then you’re probably home and dry.”
“Great,” said Lock. “Hey, do you mind if I step out to make a call?”
“Of course not.”
He walked back out into the corridor. He’d called Carmen on the way here and left a message, and now he was getting worried that she hadn’t called him back. She should have been home a couple of hours ago.
If Jenny managed to somehow magic up a location, he didn’t plan on waiting until tomorrow to get her. He couldn’t imagine a better Christmas present to Kristin’s family than her safe return. But closing this up tonight, or more likely in the early hours of Christmas Day, would make him even later and he wanted to let Carmen know what his plans were.
Thankfully, this time she picked up.
“Hey, it’s me, everything okay?”
“Yeah, fine. You headed home?”
“Not yet.”
He explained a little about the situation and the time pressure. He could tell Carmen was disappointed that they likely wouldn’t be able to spend Christmas Eve together, but that she didn’t want to guilt him into coming home.
“I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Ryan, it’s fine. But promise me one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Be careful. The people involved in this kind of thing, are,” she said before trailing off.
“Don’t worry. I don’t plan on kicking down any doors. If I find her, I’ll let the LAPD handle that part.”
“Good. Hey, one more thing.”
“You want me to pick up take out on the way home?”
“That would be good too, but that I was going to say I love you.”
“I love you too,” Lock smiled. “I’ll call as soon as I’m finished up.”
He walked back through to find Jenny hunched over the work bench, tapping even more furiously at her keyboard.
“What’s the good word?”
Jenny looked up.
“It’s been wiped. The whole thing. When did you say she split?”
Lock’s heart sank. So much for a Christmas reunion. “Like a week ago. Maybe a little less.”
“Yeah, right around then would be about right.”
“But you can still recover the date?”
“I can try, but I’m not going to get it done tonight.”
Lock looked through the window to the quiet street below.
“If it goes faster than you thought, can you call me?”
“Sure.”
He got back into his car and sat there for a moment, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. There was nothing he could do tonight. He’d pinned most of his hopes on the tablet computer. Who was he kidding? All of his hopes.
Jenny might recover what had been on it, but that wouldn’t be until tomorrow, or later. He told himself he should call it a night. There was no harm in sleeping on it and getting some fresh ideas about how he might find this kid. Plus, he was a fifteen-minute drive from home.
He put the car into Drive and pulled out from the curb. He stopped, pulled back over to the side of the street and grabbed his phone.
Kristin’s mother answered immediately, as he’d known she would. You got little sleep under these circumstances. Not for the first few weeks, anyway. It took exhaustion to overwhelm the parent of a missing child before they could find some rest.
Anticipating the first question, the only question, Lock quickly said, “I haven’t found her and I’m sorry for calling so late, but I wanted to ask you about Kristin’s cell phone.”
“I’ve tried it. Over and over. I think it’s switched off. It doesn’t even go to voicemail.”
“No, I just needed the number,” Lock said, slightly embarrassed that he hadn’t already collected what was fairly basic information when he’d sat down with the family.
“Oh, sure,” she said, rattling off the digits.
Lock made a note of them and then repeated them back.
“That’s it,” she said.
There was a moment of silence between them, Lock in his car on an empty street and Kristin’s mother in the living room, or maybe in the kitchen of her small house in the Valley.
“I was so happy when Angie told me you were going to help find my Kristin.”
“I’m going to do my very best, I promise you that.”
It was a bad idea to make promises or offer guarantees. Lock had already spoken with Angie enough to know that these weren’t straightforward situations. Not by a long way. With a regular child abduction, or any kidnap or abduction for that matter, once you had located and extracted the person, that was it.
Trafficking wasn’t like that. That was what made it so difficult for law enforcement. What did you do with a victim who didn’t think they were a victim? Or worse yet, with a victim who had fallen hard for their trafficker or someone close to their trafficker?
Right now, though, that was a problem for down the line. He still had to find Kristin. The faster he tracked her down, the less deep they would have gotten their talons into her.
“Mr. Lock?”
“Yes.”
“If you do find her, will you call me straight away? No matter what time it is. I don’t care if it’s four in the morning.”
“I will,” he said.
Rather than call her back from the car, Lock went back inside to give Jenny the number. Whatever software she was using to retrieve the data on Kristin’s tablet was still working overtime.
“You want me to hack her phone records?” Jenny asked him.
“Yes.”
“That’s at least another two grand. There’s a lot of operational security involved to make sure no one knows I hacked into the account.”
“The money’s not an issue,” said Lock.
Jenny tilted her head. “Who’s paying for all this?”
“I am,” said Lock.
“Why?”
Lock hadn’t actually thought too hard about the why. He guessed it was partly because he was already invested in a way he hadn’t been in a long time. Most of his work over the past few years had been solving the problems of rich people. Problems that were often self-inflicted and a direct result of people with money having either acquired it in shady ways, or flaunting it to such an extent that they made themselves a target.
This was different. These people didn’t have money that he could see.
If he didn’t help them, who would?
“I don’t know,” said Lock. “I guess it feels good to finally be helping someone who really needs it.”
The young hacker shrugged, seemingly satisfied with his answer.
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to give you a discount, okay?” she said.
Lock laughed.
“I wasn’t looking for one.”
Jenny turned back to another computer further along the work bench.
“You don’t really know much about all this tech stuff, do you, Boomer?”
“Boomer?”
“Never mind,” said Jenny. “Anyway, you can do a lot more with a phone number than see who the person called or who called them. A lot of times they link to social media accounts. Like you can plug a number into Facebook, and depending on how they have their privacy settings set up, it will give you their account. Look.”
Lock stepped over to the bench. Over Jenny’s shoulder he could see pictures of Kristin on one of her, no doubt multiple social media accounts.
Some photographs looked recent, very recent.
“Do you mind if I take a look at that?” said Lock.
“Be my guest,” she said, moving out of the way.
Lock clicked on the most recent image. It was a selfie of Kristin. In contrast to the pictures, he’d seen in her home, in this photograph she was wearing makeup and a tight-fitting top.
“That right there is a thirst trap,” said Jenny.
Lock did his best to try to keep up with social media, but he had to admit that right now he was starting to feel his age.
; “A thirst trap?” he said, feeling even older than his chronological age.
“Yeah, Boomer, it’s when a girl posts a sexy image to get guys to like or comment. They’re usually a lot more explicit.”
Lock began to scroll down the other images she’d posted. Only a few were of Kristin herself and they were either old photographs of her as a kid or images presumably from school and things like soccer practice where she looked like any other fourteen-year-old kid. None of them, apart from the final one, fell into the category of ‘thirst trap’.
Jenny jabbed a finger at the screen. “And look at this. This guy liked her post.”
Jenny leaned past Lock and clicked. It opened the guy’s account.
It was set to private, but there was a username, a short bio and a profile picture of a young man in his late teens or early twenties. He had his shirt off to reveal a toned and chiseled torso, complete with eight pack abs, and boy band good looks.
“Can you get into his account?” asked Lock.
“Probably, yes, but I don’t want to send a request from my own account for obvious reasons, but yeah, I can set up a fake account and we can probably catfish him.”
Lock was relieved to at least know what the phrase catfish meant. He’d caught an episode or two of the TV show while channel surfing with Carmen. Catfishing was the practice of creating a fake internet persona, often with stolen images from another person’s account, to deceive other people, often into forming some kind of virtual relationship.
“You think that’ll work?” asked Lock.
Jenny shrugged. “It’s worth a shot. Might take a little time though.”
Time was one thing Lock knew he didn’t have.
“Is there any other way you can get an address for this guy in the meantime?” he asked.
“Sure, I can try. People are lazy about usernames. They tend to use the same handle all over the web. Same goes for passwords. Let me see what I can find.”
Lock stepped away, leaving her to it. There was a small kitchen area in back. He made them both coffee. He was running on the energy of the investigation, and of finally catching a break, but he could feel his energy beginning to flag and he needed an extra jolt.