Isabel's Run

by M. D. Grayson

  I never knew it before, but this area almost reaches my front door. When I saw this, I was suddenly struck with an idea. I’d never noticed any prostitution-type activity around my place before, but I suppose it could happen. But if it was happening, how did it take place? What did it look like? I decided to hop in the Jeep and take a cruise around the Track for an hour or so, just to see what I could see. I was under no illusions that I would find Isabel out there, at least not tonight. Hell, for that matter, I’d only seen one little picture of Isabel before, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to recognize her on sight anyway. But maybe I would see some activity. I was thinking that perhaps I might be able to get a sense as to what the girls went through on the streets. I didn’t plan on talking to anybody or even stopping. Just observe, maybe get a feel for the area.

  Of course, getting out and doing a little recon could have another benefit. It might help me to get my mind off Toni—at least for a while.

  I shut off the computer and the stereo, strapped on my sidearm, turned out the lights, and shut the door behind me. I had no idea what to expect.

  * * * *

  Maybe I’d formed pictures in my mind of the stereotypical scenes of streetwalkers standing in dark doorways, approaching cars as they slowed down for stop signs. Nope—I didn’t see anything like this. Maybe the fact that it had rained earlier had something to do with it, I don’t know. Fortunately, the rain had stopped, but the streets and the sidewalks were still wet. I drove around for maybe half an hour, and I think I saw three or four girls who looked more like secretaries than prostitutes. I saw no prostitutes or, I should say, no one who I thought looked like a prostitute. I suppose I should mention that I have very little experience identifying prostitutes, so it’s possible that I wouldn’t recognize one even if I saw one.

  After about a half hour of burning gas with this fruitless exercise, I had a sudden, enlightening thought. I am a detective, after all. Eventually, I figure shit out. Here was my thought. If the Track fell within an official SOAP area, the girls probably knew this. If they were going to get busted, they didn’t want it to be here. So they probably didn’t make a habit of streetwalking in areas that were heavily patrolled by the police, as this area appeared to be. I’d have to get a little smarter if I wanted to discover any activity. See how this detective stuff works?

  So I drove into the parking lot of a hotel called the Snuggle Inn, right off Aurora, right in the heart of the Track. The place looked like a typical suites-type business hotel—one of those where all the rooms have Wi-Fi and little mini-fridges tucked beneath a counter that holds a mini-coffee pot and a small basket of coffee packets with brand names no one’s ever heard of. The hotel was only a few years old, still neat and clean. It consisted of four buildings surrounding a central courtyard with a swimming pool.

  I drove around to the back and found a space near the stairway. Then I switched off the lights and waited.

  Ten minutes later, a girl walked past. Was she a prostitute? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t get a chance to see her face as she passed in front of the Jeep, but I watched her walk up the stairs and saw her knock on one of the doors and be let inside. Then, thirty minutes later, the door opened, and she walked out.

  As she walked down the stairs, she was facing me, and I could see that she was a cute blond girl. She wore a bulky coat over loose, billowy pants that appeared to be gathered at the ankle. As she passed beneath the outside lights, I could see that she was heavily made up—it was impossible for me to tell her age–she could have been sixteen or she could have been twenty six. She turned and walked back to the front entrance, a path that would take her right past the front of the Jeep.

  When she reached the edge of the Jeep, she noticed me. She slowed down and looked at me. Our eyes locked, and I knew. She paused for a moment, but I didn’t move, so she picked up her pace and hurried past the Jeep. I probably scared her—she must have thought I was at least a little strange, sitting in the dark parking lot. She turned the corner and walked quickly away, silhouetted in the gap between the buildings by the overhead lights.

  * * * *

  I’d been home maybe fifteen minutes when the phone rang. Caller ID: Toni.

  “I’m home,” she said. “Safe and sound.” I’d asked her to call when she got home. Don’t ask me to explain this sudden propensity to worry about her just because I’m not there. Truth be told, she’s more than capable of taking care of herself. Still . . .

  “Good,” I answered. “I’m glad.”

  “You miss me?”

  “A little.”

  “Just a little?”

  “Well, I had a good book.”

  “Bastard.”

  I laughed. “Just kidding. I missed you. A lot. How was your dinner?”

  “It was nice. Mom’s good. Kell’s all antsy about us finding Isabel.”

  “It’s only been two days,” I said. “Tell her I’m supposed to get my magic wand out of the shop tomorrow. Then, I’ll just go ahead and give it a wave, and Isabel will appear.”

  “Very funny.”

  “It’s not like we’re sitting on our hands. It won’t happen overnight.”

  “I know. But she doesn’t. And besides, patience isn’t her strong suit.”

  “Did you explain things to her?”

  “Yeah, she’s cool. She’ll be okay. For a while.”

  It was silent for a few seconds.

  “What’d you really do tonight?” she asked.

  I chuckled. “Really? I played the guitar. I read. I watched TV. Then I did some work.”

  “You were busy,” she said. “What kind of work did you do?”

  “I did a little prep work for our canvas tomorrow. Looked at maps. Looked at aerials, that kind of stuff. Then, I got a crazy idea and decided I’d go for a recon drive through the Track. You know where that is?”

  “Yeah. You see anything useful?”

  “It was weird. There were actually more SPD squad cars than there were people. The area seems to be really heavily patrolled. I didn’t see any prostitutes.”

  “Uh, gee whiz. Maybe that’s because it’s so heavily patrolled,” she said.

  “Duh.”

  “Besides, most of the girls probably work through the Internet now, anyway.”

  “I figured all that shit out all by myself about half an hour after I started driving around. That, plus the fact that the entire area called the Track falls into a special anti-prostitution zone.”

  “A SOAP zone?” she asked.

  “You know about SOAP zones?”

  “Duh.” Again with the “duh.”

  “Touché. I should have known. Anyway, after that, I went and parked at a little hotel, just to see if I could see anything there.”

  “Did you? See anything?”

  “Sure enough. A few minutes after I park, a girl walks past me, walks up the stairs, and knocks on a door. Door opens—she heads on in. Half hour later, out she comes.”

  “Could you see her?” she asked.

  “On the way out? Yeah, I could see her.”

  What’d she look like?”

  “I think she looked like a prostitute,” I said.

  “Really? How could you tell?” she asked. “What does a prostitute look like? Dress? Makeup?” She asked.

  “Makeup, for sure. She was dressed pretty plainly, but she was heavily made up. But that wasn’t it. You want to know what the big tip-off was for me?”

  “What?”

  “When she was walking past, she walked right in front of the Jeep. When she got there, she slowed down—almost stopped. Then, just for a second, she looked right at me, and our eyes locked. The thing that got me—it was her eyes. She had the same eyes as I remember from Fort Benning. The same sad eyes.”

  Chapter 8

  THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, June 7, I called Nancy and passed on the information Reverend Art had provided, particularly the names Donnie Martin and DeMichael Hollins, along with details about the North Side Street Boy
z. She said she’d spoken to the gang-unit commander and that he was in the process of talking to the two detectives in charge of the north area. She agreed to have them call me directly.

  After the call, the Logan PI team held a short meeting in the office before breaking up for the day. Reverend Art had said that NSSB was active in the area north of the U-District. Our plan was for Doc and Toni and me to leave the office at nine thirty or so and drive over to the Ravenna area, which abutted the U-District on the north. Kenny’d done a little research, and in addition to the 8 x 10 photos of Isabel he’d printed for us from the mall photo-strip photos, he gave each of us a list of half a dozen shopping centers to canvas. We decided to pay particular attention to drugstores, coffee shops, beauty supply stores, hair salons, and clothing boutiques—the kinds of places we figured Isabel, Crystal, and the other girls would visit and be remembered.

  Walking the street, talking to shopkeepers, showing pictures around—this is about as low-tech old school as it gets for detective work. It’s pretty much the way it’s been done for a hundred years or so. Granted, it’s a little crude, and it’s not terribly efficient. But when you’re looking for a low-profile missing person who either by choice or by coercion is off the grid, it’s still the best way to develop leads and get the ball rolling.

  Ironically, even though she was just sixteen, Isabel wasn’t completely off the grid. For starters, she’d left home with a cell phone. Kenny’d had some luck in the past using a cell phone to locate a missing person. The easy way to do this requires the missing cell phone to be equipped with GPS (most new phones are) and its owner to either have installed an appropriate app or subscribed to an appropriate service. If one of these things has happened—and if the owner of the phone gives his consent—then the cell phone can be remotely commanded to “ping” its exact GPS coordinates. This can be very useful in many situations—parents keeping track of their kids, for example. The drawback—at least from our perspective—is that absent the owner’s advance consent—something that’s basically impossible to obtain if someone’s gone missing—the phone won’t respond to a ping request.

  Of course, law enforcement agencies have the ability to get around the consent requirement. And, thanks to Kenny Hale, so do we. Not legally, but from time to time I’ll make the judgment call that the ends justify the means. I won’t use it to track down someone running from a creditor. And I won’t use it to track down someone I think is just trying to get away from someone else—most often a wife trying to ditch a husband. But in the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who’s potentially being brutalized by gangbanger pimps, then the decision’s a no-brainer. I’m all over it.

  I walked into Kenny’s office. “I’ve got some things I need you to check out while we’re out walking,” I said.

  Doc was there, too. “No walking for him?” he said.

  I shook my head. “He gets out of it.”

  Kenny smiled. “Oh, darn,” he said. He turned to Doc. “You should have paid more attention in math class, dude.”

  Doc gave him a little stink eye, and then he got up and left.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said. I gave Kenny Isabel’s cell phone information and told him to pull the billing records and start working on trying to ping the phone while we were gone. Hopefully, she still had her phone, and it was turned on.

  “Next thing, the police said another way Isabel might pop up on the grid was when her pimps decided it was time to try to put her to work. They would need to advertise, and now that Craigslist has stopped accepting these kinds of ads, there’s pretty much one game in town—”

  “Backpage.com,” he said.

  I looked at him. “You’re familiar with it.” It was more of a statement than a question.

  He shrugged. “Isn’t everybody?” he asked. He noticed the look I was giving him. “I don’t look at the personal ads,” he protested. He paused, then he added, “Well, okay, maybe I look, but I never call them.” This I could believe.

  “Just shut up while you’re still ahead,” I said. “Listen. If Isabel said things were too good to be true because the pimps had suddenly tried to put her to work, then it’s very possible that the pimps had already started to run ads. So, while we’re gone, I want you to start combing through all the ads. Take a look at the photos, and see if you can find one that matches the picture we have of Isabel. Look all the way back through mid-May if you can.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “And while you’re at it, take a look at the DMV records to see if Donnie Martin or DeMichael Hollins pops up.”

  He nodded.

  With all the instructions given and everyone prepared, we hit the road at exactly nine thirty.

  * * * *

  If you divide Seattle up into quadrants using I-5 as the east-west divider and the Lake Union/ship canal waterway as the north-south divider, then you’d find the University of Washington nestled toward the center of the city in the upper-right, northeast quadrant, right along the waterway. The entire area surrounding the university—from Lake Union on the south to Ravenna Boulevard on the north and from I-5 on the west all the way to Lake Washington on the east is called the U-District. The area immediately north of the university is dominated by dense student housing and commercial shops, most of which exist to support the students or the thousands of workers who are employed in and around the university.

  As I drove through the tight, crowded streets on my way up to my first shopping center on Ravenna Boulevard, I immediately saw what a smart idea it had been for Donnie Martin to base his operations around here. What better place to hide a group of teenaged girls but right smack-dab in the middle of thousands of other young people. The University District is a teeming cauldron containing an eclectic, funky mix of people. Eccentric dress, eccentric behavior, eccentric hours—hell, eccentricities are the norm for people around here. In fact, around here, it’s the normal people that stand out. Donnie’s girls could basically come and go as they pleased, with no one even noticing them. For that matter, the gang members themselves would also become effectively invisible in this area. In some areas of the Puget Sound, three or four young black men living in a house frequented by young pretty white girls would definitely not go unnoticed. But here—here in an area surrounded by an eclectic mix of young people, they would blend in.

  I parked at my first designated shopping center and started talking to people and showing them Isabel’s photo. For the next two hours, I went door-to-door, showing the picture and asking if anybody recognized her. I visited four shopping centers. I got the same answer over and over. People were polite—some even seemed concerned. But no one could remember ever seeing Isabel. Doc and Toni had the same experience.

  “It’s not surprising,” I said, as we gathered over lunch. We’d selected a Mexican restaurant on Ravenna Boulevard just after noon. “Did you notice how many shopping centers there are around here?”

  Toni nodded. “A lot. There’s a lot that can go wrong—get in the way of us finding Isabel,” she said. “We could be hitting the wrong stores, for starters. Or Donnie Martin might not be letting Isabel out.”

  “Or the store people might not be telling us the truth,” Doc said.

  I nodded. “Most of the people I talked to sounded pretty sympathetic,” I said. “After I told them that Isabel was just sixteen.”

  “I got the same thing,” Toni said. “Still, we’re only just a little better off than if we were looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “You’re a city girl,” I said. “You’ve never even seen a haystack.”

  “I most certainly—,” She was interrupted by my cell phone. Caller ID: Kenny.

  “Hold that thought,” I said to her. I tapped the talk button on the phone. “What’s up?” I said.

  “Hey boss,” he said. “I got nowhere on the cell phone so far, but right away I think I’ve got a match on the personal ads.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I can’t be certain, but I
’ve found an ad on Backpage, and the girl on the ad sure looks like the picture of Isabel we have. Looks older—sexier to be sure. But it still looks to me like it could be her.”

  “Excellent. Good work, dude.”

  “Thanks. You guys get any hits?”

  “Not a one. Hold on for a second.” I turned to Toni. “Kenny thinks he has a match.”

  “Cell phone or Backpage ad?” Toni said.

  I nodded. “Backpage. He says the girl in the ad looks older and sexier than the picture we have of Isabel, but he thinks it’s her.”

  “I’ll call Kelli and have her come in,” Toni said. “She’s the one who really knows what Isabel looks like.”

  “She can come in now? No school?”

  “I think she’s done,” Toni said. “But even if she’s not, she had a short schedule this last semester. Mornings only.”

  “Good. Go ahead and do it,” I said. I brought the phone back up. “Kenny? You still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re going to finish up with lunch, then we’ll be back in the office. Probably just a little after one or so. Toni’s calling Kelli so she can come in and confirm the ID.”

  “Cool. I’ll be ready.”

  “Well done, dude,” I said, before hanging up.

  Toni made her call and said that Kelli was “very anxious” to come in.

  * * * *

  We all walked into Logan PI together at 1:15 p.m. Kelli was already there, talking with Kenny in the lobby. We said hello to Kelli, and then I turned to Kenny. “You ready?”