10-33 Assist PC

by Desmond P. Ryan

  The Juvenile Prostitution Task Force was stationed in the north end of the city in the middle of nowhere. When the unit had first been formed five years earlier, all the existing police facilities in the city were crammed. The Powers That Be determined that a satellite location would suffice and plunked the motley crew on the first floor of an office building filled with dentists, accountants, and other conservative types. The cheap rent that attracted the dentists and accountants also kept the bean-counters at HQ quiet, and the

  irregular hours of the unit kept the neighbours from noticing too much. When the team made an arrest, the accused was processed in the division where the bust occurred. All very neat and tidy.

  “Here. It’s the special blend,” Sal said, nodding at a cup identical to the other three cups in the tray. “Just for you.”

  “Special blend, my ass,” Mike scoffed as he pulled the cup from the tray.

  “Well, maybe if you had come with me instead of taking a crap—”

  “I’ll take a good crap over a trip to one of your bargain-basement coffee shops any day.”

  “Then take what you get and stop bitching.” Sal put the tray and donuts down on the long table and glanced over at the big screen that showed Julia sitting in the interview room down the hall across from the girl they’d apprehended. “Man, the res on this feed is amazing. When did we splurge on this equipment?”

  He looked back at Mike. “So tell me: Why didn’t you shoot her, Mikey?”

  “I’m not a cowboy like you. It was the right call at the right time.” Mike took a sip of coffee, then examined the two figures on the screen. “It doesn’t look like Julia is getting very far with the girl, does it?”

  “Dunno. Where’s Hoagie? Past his bedtime? I read somewhere that once a guy hits forty, it’s a downward spiral.”

  “I didn’t even know you could read,” said Robby Williams as he entered the observation room. “Thanks for picking up the coffee, Sal. My buy next time.”

  “Oh shit, boss. Sorry,” Sal stammered, looking at the greying man. “No offence intended.”

  “None taken,” Robby replied. As the detective sergeant running the JPTF, he was used to Sal’s idiosyncrasies, just as he was with the idiosyncrasies of the rest of the team. As he walked to his seat at the head of the table, he took a deep breath, pushing his chest out. At sixty years old but with forty-two years of hard, boots-on-the-ground policing behind him, Robby Williams was as fit as most of the recruits. The grey hair, however, gave away his age.

  “Good call on not shooting the girl, Mike,” Robby said. “You would’ve been justified, but a live witness is always better than a dead one.”

  “Thanks, boss,” Mike said, glancing at Sal before the three men looked at the woman and the girl on the screen sitting silently across from one another.

  At twenty-seven and with four years on the job, Julia Vendramini did not look like a cop at all. The clothing allowance she was given as an undercover, she often joked, hardly covered the cost of a pair of her shoes, never mind her designer black clothes. To the girls they dealt with in this unit, Julia looked like the kind of woman they dreamed of being, which made her the natural choice for debriefings like this one.

  “She’s not going to talk, is she?” Mike said after what appeared to be a long period of silence between Julia and the girl.

  “Doesn’t look like it, does it?” Robby agreed.

  “That surprises me,” Mike said, snapping off the lid of the cardboard cup to take a look at the brown water inside. “Julia’s usually pretty good with these girls.”

  “Not this one, it seems. Maybe she’ll talk to you,” Robby suggested.

  “I’m going in, too, right?” Sal asked, looking over at Robby like a puppy not wanting to be left behind.

  “Yeah. But keep your mouth shut, okay? This is Mike’s game,” Robby said only half-jokingly.”

  *****

  The so-called ‘Soft Room’ where they debriefed the girls they rescued was anything but soft. It was actually quite cold, with grey walls, which reminded Mike of death, and a beige rectangular table just long enough to seat two detectives on one side and the victim and her social worker or parent on the other. The metal chairs made Mike’s butt cheeks numb after a couple of hours. In fact, the only soft thing about the room was the lighting, and that was only because maintenance hadn’t replaced a couple of the fluorescent tube lights that had burned out long before the JPTF had taken over from the insurance company that had previously occupied the suite.

  “Hello, detectives,” Julia said, smiling with relief as Mike and Sal entered the room. “This is Britney, from Port Hope.”

  “Hi, Britney. Feeling a little better now that you’re safe and sound?” Mike asked, trying to look and sound warm and caring, but not too warm and caring. “I’m Mike and you remember my partner, Sal, right?”

  “Hrmph,” Britney grunted, barely looking up from the table in front of her. For the first time, Mike was able to get an actual look at her. By his estimate, she was likely no taller than five foot three and weighed maybe eighty pounds soaking wet. Her plain brown hair was parted in the middle and fell half-way down her back. It was also greasy and speckled with dandruff. Judging by Julia’s report of the hold house, this girl, like most of the girls they dealt with, hadn’t seen a shower in weeks. Hardly the stuff of Pretty Woman.

  “Britney was just telling me that her parents are both teachers and that she has two younger brothers, right?”

  “Uh huh,” the girl mumbled.

  “If I understand correctly from what you’ve said, Britney,” Julia continued, her tone revealing a mounting exasperation, “you came to Toronto to do some shopping at a mall a couple of months ago, met some guy, and now…?”

  “Whatever you say, lady,” the girl replied, staring beyond Julia at nothing.

  “Good to know,” Mike said, nodding at Julia, releasing her from the standoff. “Mind if I sit down, Britney?”

  “Do what you want.”

  “Thanks. Sal, why don’t you sit down, too?” Mike said.

  “I’ll just be outside if you need anything,” Julia offered as she walked to the door, her relief to be escaping obvious.

  “I assume that Julia has already told you that everything is being recorded by cameras here and here,” Mike began, pointing to a camera behind the emaciated girl and another behind him, “as well as the camera in the dome above us.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So everything is being taped on video and audio.”

  “I guess.”

  “And that you don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to.”

  “Am I under arrest?” Britney said, her head still down, although she raised her eyes in moderate defiance to meet Mike’s.

  “No.”

  “Really?” she asked warily.

  “I promise.”

  “What my partner is trying to say,” Sal interrupted, kicking Mike under the table, “is that you’re not under arrest yet.”

  Britney lowered her head onto the table, her greasy hair covering her face, and started to cry into her hands.

  “We’re not going to charge you with anything. Ever,” Mike advised, glaring at his partner.

  “But the gun?” Sal whispered, a bit louder than he had intended to.

  “Fuck the gun,” Mike said out of the side of his mouth.

  “I don’t wanna go to jail, and I don’t wanna die. I just want to go home!” Britney sobbed, not lifting her face from her hands.

  “We’ll get you home,” Mike assured her.

  “That’s what the lady cop said, too, but I don’t know....”

  “Why not?”

  “Because all cops lie.” The girl jerked her head up, trying her best to sound defiant.

  “You don’t have a sheet,” Sal jumped in, “so how do you know?”

  The girl looked at Sal, her eyes already red and puffy, before settling her gaze on Mike. She
waited a moment before muttering, “Chelsea told me.”

  “Who’s Chelsea?” Mike asked. Never show surprise.

  “One of the others,” Britney replied, her chin extended in another weak gesture of defiance. “Their favourite.”

  “How do you know she’s their favourite?” Sal asked. Mike hit him under the table with his knee.

  “What?” Sal looked at Mike, an aggrieved expression on his face.

  “I’m the lead,” Mike whispered. “You’re the scribe.”

  “Okay already,” Sal whispered back as he rolled his eyes at the camera in the dome and set his pen on the blank steno pad in front of him. “Lead away.”

  “She’s been around the longest,” Britney said, ignoring the byplay between the two officers.

  “And how long is that?” Mike began.

  “I dunno.”

  “How do you know she’s been around the longest?” Sal asked.

  Mike glared at him again.

  “Because Malcolm told me,” the girl answered as she began to bite at the already-short nail on her right ring finger.

  “Who’s Malcolm?”

  “A guy.”

  “Was he at the house?” Mike asked more quickly than he would have liked, but trying to preempt Sal’s questions.

  “Dunno.”

  “Was Chelsea at the house?”

  “Dunno. I don’t even know anyone named Chelsea. I’m cold. I want to go home.” Britney spat out whatever she was able to chew from her fingernail and looked around the sterile room, studiously avoiding making eye contact with Mike.

  “You’re afraid,” Mike challenged her.

  “No, I’m not,” she said, her eyes meeting his.

  “I would be.”

  She shrugged. “Good for you.”

  “So you want to go home?”

  “Yeah,” the girl nodded, biting her lower lip.

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” she asked, her jaw dropping.

  “No. I’m not. There’s the door. You can walk through it at any time, get on a bus, and go back to Port Hope. Why don’t you?”

  “And then what?” the girl sneered. “Say ‘Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. I’ve been sucking dick for the past couple of months and now I want to come home and sleep in my princess bed.’ Yeah, sure.”

  It was clear to Mike that her bravado was only a veneer. He gave her space to sigh, then asked gently, “Is that the only thing stopping you?”

  “No.” She sat back, looking down at her hands in her lap.

  “So? What is it?”

  Britney stared down at her hands for a good three or four minutes before Mike broke the silence.

  “Britney, I know who Malcolm is,” he bluffed. “I know he’s a pretty big talker who pretends to be a tough guy.”

  “He is a tough guy,” Britney exclaimed.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s the slasher.”

  “Really? And you’ve seen this?”

  “Yeah. I have. Made us all watch while he sliced the sides of Gretchen’s mouth up like this.” Britney took both of her index fingers and made a cutting motion from the corners of her mouth up to her ears. “He cut her up pretty good.”

  “Glasgow smile,” Sal muttered.

  “Why?” Mike asked.

  “Why what? Why’d he slash her? Because he could? Because he’s a sicko? Because he thought she was trying to rat him out? I dunno. You ask him.”

  Mike waited as Sal scribbled madly on his steno pad. Britney watched Sal for a moment before looking back at her chewed fingernails.

  “I can get you home if that’s what you want, Britney,” Mike began, sensing that the girl was shutting down again.

  “Yeah?” She leaned across the table towards Mike, curled her tongue, and spat a piece of fingernail through it at him. “How?”

  Mike did not flinch.

  “We can start with a phone call to your parents.”

  “I’m sure they’d love that,” she snorted, looking over her shoulder at the wall beside her.

  “I’m sure they would, too,” Mike confirmed with a bit more sincerity.

  “What about Malcolm? I don’t want to end up with a face like Gretchen’s.”

  “Don’t worry about that. That’s our job. What happened to her after that incident?”

  “Dunno.” The girl shrugged again. “Ricky said they had to get rid of her.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Yeah. I think they…” Britney casually made a slashing mark across her throat, “killed her.”

  Mike and Sal waited for her to continue. A minute passed, then two more, before she broke the silence.

  “Not like I thought about it that much. I mostly tried to think about what I had to do.”

  “Which was?” Sal asked, giving Mike a cautious sideways glance.

  “Let greasy old men fuck me and try to stay alive.”

  “Was that hard?” Mike asked.

  “Which part?” Britney almost smiled.

  “Staying alive,” Mike clarified.

  “Kinda. I seen a lot of girls go since I got there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘go’?” Sal asked.

  “Go. You know, die,” Britney replied contemptuously.

  “How do you know they died?” Mike asked.

  “Because I seen them. Malcolm slashes them—and not just on the face—and if they bleed out, then he got one or two of us to drag them to a car and that would be the end of it.”

  Despite their experience, Mike and Sal had to force their faces to remain impassive as they looked at each other.

  Mike sighed heavily, then said, “You mentioned Chelsea…”

  “I dunno anyone named Chelsea. I made a mistake. I was thinking of someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “I dunno. I gotta pee. Can I go pee?”

  “Sure. Let me call Julia in to take you.” Mike looked up at the cameras to let Julia and Robby know in the observation room that they were taking a break.

  “Can I call my mom, too?” Britney asked, looking back as she walked towards Julia standing at the now-open door.

  “Yeah. I’ll set that up for you back here after you pee, okay?”

  *****

  “Hello. This is Detective Constable Mike O’Shea calling from Toronto Police. May I speak to Mrs. George, please?”

  Mike had made phone calls like this so often over the years that he had to remind himself that it was the first time this particular parent had received such a call.

  “This is Mrs. George,” a tremulous woman’s voice responded before whispering, “Frank. It’s the police. In Toronto.”

  “I’m sorry for calling so late and for doing this over the phone, but I have Britney here with me in Toronto and she’d like to talk to you.”

  The words almost echoed through the speaker in the conference room where Robby, Julia, and Sal were all listening intently for the parents’ response. It wouldn’t be the first time a parent had trafficked their own kid.

  “Oh my god! Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Mike reassured the woman. “She just wants to talk to her mom.”

  Mike handed the phone to Britney and then got up to leave to create the illusion that this would be a private conversation. The girl tugged at Mike’s shirt, her eyes pleading with him to stay.

  “Mom?” she began, her voice trembling. “It’s me. Britney.”

  “Oh, my baby! I am so glad to hear your voice. Frank! Frank! It’s Britney! Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay, Mom.” Britney rolled her eyes for Mike’s benefit.

  “Frank, she’s okay!”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. You crying, Mom?” Britney looked down as she twisted the phone cord around her fingers.

  “Yes, I am. I am crying. Frank, she just asked me if I was crying!”

  “Mom, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean— �
�� The cord twisted tighter.

  “Britney, honey, I don’t care what you did.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” Britney looked at the tips of her fingers as they turned red and then purple from the pressure of the cord.

  “Oh, my baby….”

  “Mom, can I come home?” Britney untangled the cord from her fingers.

  “Frank. Frank. She wants to come home. Yes. Yes. Yes! Where are you?”

  “I’m here with the cops,” Britney replied, looking up at Mike and dropping the cord.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m good. I’m just….” She sighed, her impatience with her mother only too evident to Mike.

  “Frank, they’ve found her and she’s okay.”

  “Mom, put Dad on the phone, okay?” Britney looked down at Mike’s foot. He followed her eyes and noticed something that looked like a sunflower seed shell stuck on his shoe.

  “Hello?” said a man’s voice. Robby and the team pricked up their ears in the other room, listening to the trembling voice on the line. It was very seldom the mother who pimped their child. If there was a father around, it was usually him.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Britney said, sounding even more childlike than she was.

  “Hello, sweetheart.”

  Julia looked over at Robby, shaking her head. He nodded in agreement.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Much better now, baby girl. How’s it going with you?” Britney’s father coughed as his voice broke.

  “I’m good. What’s wrong with your voice?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. Maybe a bit of a cold coming on,” he replied, coughing again, choking back any emotion.

  “Are you crying, Daddy?” Britney teased. The team in the other room looked around the table at each other. Julia shook her head again. Sal sat quietly, listening more to the father’s voice than his words.

  “Nope. So your mother says you’re okay?” Back to business.

  “Yeah. I mean, I dunno. I guess things kind of got out of hand, you know?”

  “And you’re with the police now?”

  “Yeah. Um… can you come and get me, Daddy?” And with that, the floodgates opened. Mike had been there before and had a box of tissues ready. Robby and Sal had been there before, too, and had a box of tissues ready for Julia.