Isabel's Run

by M. D. Grayson

  Nancy radioed the officers that were stationed outside. “We’re code four in here,” she said. “One in custody. How’re we looking?”

  Each officer reported no activity.

  “Call in a squad car,” Nancy said. “Seal off the parking lot entry and check around. Let’s see if we can find out how this girl got here. Then, meet us in the north parking lot in ten.”

  “Roger.”

  Nancy turned back to the girl. “Hi there,” she said. “My name’s Nancy Stewart. What’s your name?”

  The girl looked Nancy over and then said again, “Jasmine.” She did a pretty fair job of mustering up enough bravado to mostly hide any fear she might have been experiencing.

  “Jasmine?” Nancy said, her tone of voice making it clear she didn’t believe this. “That’s a pretty name. Is that your real name?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Jasmine what?”

  The girl stared at her for a moment, and then slowly and deliberately, she said, “Jasmine Jones.”

  “Jasmine Jones,” Nancy repeated. “Have you got any ID on you?”

  The girl shook her head.

  Nancy continued. “So how old are you, Jasmine Jones?”

  “Eighteen,” the girl answered.

  “Got a knife,” Tyrone said. He’d been looking into the girl’s purse while Nancy talked. He reached in with gloved hands and gingerly pulled out a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade.

  Nancy looked at it and then turned back to the girl. “You’re eighteen? Really? So that’d make you an adult, right?” she said. “That means you can be tried and convicted as an adult. Is that what you want?”

  Jasmine stared hard at Nancy, and then she shrugged. “For what? I didn’t do anything,” she said.

  Nancy smiled, then she nodded. “That’s true. You ever been arrested before, Jasmine Jones?”

  Nancy got a hard stare as an answer.

  “No answer? Well, that’s okay. You don’t have to answer. We’ll probably find out soon enough. Are you familiar with your legal rights in a situation like this? Let me go ahead and read them to you.” Nancy read Jasmine her Miranda rights.

  “Do you understand these rights?” Nancy asked.

  Jasmine nodded her head.

  “Okay, Jasmine,” Nancy said. “Here’s the way I see things. First off, if you’re eighteen, I’m 107.” She looked at Jasmine for a second and then said, “Sorry, sweetie, you’re not eighteen. What are you? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  Jasmine didn’t answer.

  “You don’t have to answer, but I can’t let you stay out on the street if I have reason to believe you’re a minor. So that means, tonight, we’re going to detain you and take you over to the Juvenile Detention Center. If you want to tell us who your parents are or who your legal guardian is, we’ll call them, or we’ll let you call them. We might be able to sort this out tonight. Understood?”

  Again, Jasmine didn’t answer.

  “Does that mean there’s no one you want us to call?”

  Jasmine looked down and shook her head.

  “I understand,” Nancy said. “But if you’re not going to help us out, it’s too late tonight for us to start trying to track down who you are and where you’re from. We’ll get started on that tomorrow.”

  “You understand that seeing as how you’re not eighteen, your parents or legal guardian are responsible for you, right? Do they know you’re out here answering ads for an escort service? Do they even know where you are? Are you a runaway?” Jasmine didn’t respond to any of these questions.

  “Next thing—and this is important. Except for providing your name, you’re not required to answer any of my questions. But if you do answer my questions, you’re not allowed to lie to a police officer. And I think you’ve already lied to me. Twice. Once about your age. Once about your name. You can get in big trouble for lying to a police officer. Do you understand?” Again, Jasmine didn’t answer.

  “Here’s the last thing. Despite the fact that you’ve lied to me—twice—and despite the fact that I think you’re out here answering calls for escort services, and despite the fact that you had that knife in your purse—despite all that? We’re not going to charge you with anything. Want to know why I didn’t have my officers wait another thirty seconds for you to solicit them? You know what soliciting means, right?”

  Jasmine looked at her.

  “It’s simple,” Nancy continued. “We don’t want to arrest you. Not for prostitution. Not for lying to me. Nothing like that. That’s not why we’re here. We want to help you.”

  Jasmine sniffed. “I don’t need your help,” she said, softly.

  Nancy shrugged. “Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. I can’t make you accept it,” she said. She paused and looked at the girl. “Jasmine, I don’t know anything about you or your home situation. I know that if you’ve run away, we’ll eventually find out. But I also know that sometimes there are reasons why you have to get away. I’m not blaming you.”

  The girl dropped her eyes.

  “Listen,” Nancy said. “I work with dozens of girls just like you. Exact same position, Jasmine. You can say what you want, but I know what you’re doing, and I know how you live, believe me. I see it with girls just like you every single day. I know you have a quota. I know you have to come out most every night and have sex for money with guys you don’t know. I know you have to bring that money back to your pimp. Jasmine—I know what you’re going through, and I know how it’s making you feel inside. And I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be that way. My one goal is to help you. You can have a better life. Your own life with your own dreams and goals. The only person you’d have to answer to is yourself. There’d be no one lording it over you, telling you what to do, where to go—whom to have sex with.”

  I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like Jasmine’s features were softening just a little bit.

  Nancy continued. “We’ve helped hundreds of girls who’ve come before you. You can talk to them if you’d like. We can help you, too. Understand?”

  Jasmine looked at her for a second, then she dropped her head and nodded. Maybe Nancy was starting to get through to her.

  “Good,” Nancy said. “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to come over and see you, and we’ll try talking again. Jasmine, look at me.”

  Jasmine looked up again.

  “You might not believe it, but one day you’re going to look back at tonight and you’re going to look at it as one of the best, most important days in your life. Tonight’s the night that good people—people who really care about you as a person—are standing up for you and stepping in to help you. Tonight’s the night you get to take back control of your own life. Understand?”

  Jasmine looked at her and nodded.

  “Are you okay?” Nancy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Are you sure you don’t have someone you want us to call?”

  She looked down and shook her head.

  “That’s okay,” Nancy said. “You don’t need to. You’ll be okay tonight. You’re going to ride with these guys now. They’ll take you downtown. Like I said, I’ll come by in the morning. If you want, we can talk then.”

  Tyrone and the Bobby led Jasmine out of the room to the waiting squad car.

  * * * *

  “That went pretty well,” Nancy said. “At least she didn’t scream at me. That happens sometimes.” She looked up suddenly. “I hope you don’t mind my not asking about Isabel just now.”

  “I understand,” I said. “It’s too early. This girl’s still in a state of shock over everything else that’s happened. Maybe she’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Nancy said. “I’ll give you guys a call in the morning and let you know how it’s looking.” She looked at Kelli. “What do you think about what you saw?” she asked.

  Kelli shook her head. She had a tear in her eye. “It’s sad,” she said. “She’s just a kid. All dressed up but still, j
ust a kid.”

  Nancy nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s very sad. But maybe tonight, we saved a little girl. And if it has to be one at a time, then that’s fine with me.”

  * * * *

  It was quiet in the Jeep on the way back to the office. We didn’t talk much about Isabel or anything else, for that matter. I guess everyone was still trying to recover from the disappointment of Isabel not being the girl who showed up, combined with the reality of seeing a girl like Jasmine up close—a girl who, except for her rather desperate circumstances, seemed like she wasn’t much different than the girl next door.

  “We have to call Marisol,” Toni said, breaking the silence.

  “Right. I’ll do it as soon as I get home. I don’t feel like making that call while I’m driving.”

  “You okay, Kell?” Toni asked, looking in the backseat where Kelli was seated.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It sucks that it wasn’t Izzy.”

  I nodded. Too true. “Nancy said that when she talks to Jasmine in the morning, she’s going to ask her if she’ll talk to us about Isabel. Maybe we’ll find out something then.”

  “What happens if she doesn’t want to talk?” Kelli said.

  “Then we’ll just go back to canvasing the neighborhood,” Toni said. “If we do that and if we have Kenny monitor her cell phone, eventually we’ll find her.”

  “That’s right,” I said. Of course, I was thinking it could be a whole lot faster if Jasmine knew Isabel and agreed to talk to us about her. I crossed my fingers.

  Chapter 12

  AT 9:45 A.M. the next day, I was sitting at my desk staring at the calendar when my cell phone rang. Caller ID: Nancy Stewart.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hey. Can you and Toni shoot on down here to the Juvenile Detention Center?” Nancy skipped the small talk. “I’ve been talking to Paola—her name’s not Jasmine Jones by the way, and she’s not eighteen. She’s fifteen, and her name is Paola Morales. I’ve been talking to her for about an hour now. She’s starting to come around. Anyway, she knows Isabel, and she’s willing to talk to us about her. She’s not ready to give up her pimp—she won’t go that far. But she is willing to help find Isabel. We’re taking a break now while we wait for you.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. “We’re on the way.”

  Toni had overheard me talking, and she walked into my office as I was hanging up.

  “She’s cooperating?” Toni asked.

  “A little, anyway. Nancy said that she knows Isabel, and she’ll talk about her. She doesn’t want to talk about her pimp, though.”

  “That’s okay. It’s better if she can give us some good information on Isabel,” she said as we hustled down the hall and out the door.

  “Agreed,” I said. “Hopefully, she knows where we can find her.”

  “Maybe she could lead us right to her,” Toni said.

  “Wouldn’t that be nice.”

  * * * *

  The King County Juvenile Detention Center sits on Alder just east of Twelfth Avenue. The building consists of two distinctly different sections. The back section is the residential area. It looks like a typical, four-story apartment building except that the doors and the exterior stairwell are painted bright orange. Someone probably thought it looked artistic when they selected the colors. I think it looks pretty odd. The front section consists of offices and classrooms. This section is a single story and made of brick. We parked in the visitors’ parking lot on the north side of the building and hopped out. Then we walked past the American flag and into the lobby of the front section.

  Inside, the building was quiet and smelled of floor wax. In fact, the guy doing the waxing was still running a floor machine maybe forty feet down a long hallway. The tiles glistened. The receptionist sat behind what appeared to be a bulletproof glass partition—the kind like at movie box offices with the little chrome intercom speaker grill in the middle of the glass. I find it odd that someone would go through the trouble of installing an expensive piece of bulletproof glass for protection and then go and drill a three-inch hole in the glass for the intercom, right about at head level for the unlucky soul sitting behind the counter. I guess the intercom is supposed to be bullet-resistant, but I’m pretty sure my .45 would have no trouble shooting right through that hole—even with the intercom in place. I wouldn’t want to trust my life to it. But I digress.

  We gave the receptionist the information that Nancy had given me and were issued visitor passes and told to have a seat in a long row of blue-and-orange seats—the kind that are attached together like those in a train station. Five minutes later, Nancy popped out through a set of double doors marked Authorized Entrance Only.

  “Come on back, you guys,” she said.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Pretty much like I said on the phone,” she said. “Paola is a stubborn young lady. She’s only going to come along just so fast—we can’t push her. But if we can gain her trust by following through and making good on our promises, then she’ll probably open up more and more. For now, though, here’s where we stand. She seems to like Isabel. She actually seems like she’s worried about her. She wants to help.”

  “Wonder why she’s worried,” I said. I was worried about Isabel when we started this case. Then, yesterday, I’d gotten hopeful. Then last night, worried again. Now—based on what I’d just heard—even more so.

  “Don’t know,” Nancy said. “As soon as she agreed to talk to the two of you, I stopped our discussion and came and phoned you. We’ve just been waiting for you to arrive to pick up where we left off.”

  “Did you find her parents?” I asked.

  “Paola is from Las Vegas,” Nancy said. “She doesn’t know her father, but apparently her mother is still there. They don’t speak.”

  “That would explain things a little, anyway,” I said.

  Nancy stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to face us. “It gets worse. This morning, Paola told me she was introduced into prostitution when she was eleven years old. She’s fifteen now.”

  “Oh my God,” Toni said quietly.

  “Exactly,” Nancy said. “This little girl has been living with one pimp or another, turning tricks as a way of life—a way to survive—for more than four years. Last year, apparently, she made her Las Vegas pimp mad, so he sold her to a pimp up here who she won’t name.”

  “Donnie Martin,” I said.

  “Perhaps. I don’t know if she has any sort of alcohol or drug dependency—that’s something we’ll find out in the next few days. But even if she doesn’t, Paola’s going to need treatment and counseling and schooling for several years in order to get her life back together.”

  “That poor girl,” Toni said.

  “This is so typical of what happens to these girls. Paola’s a lucky one—last night really was her lucky night. For her, there might be a happy ending. At least, there’s the possibility. We’ll move to have the court appointed as her guardian. I talked to Annie Hooper—she’s putting Paola on the list and thinks she might be able to squeeze her into one of the Angel Houses in the next day or so.”

  “That would be fantastic,” I said.

  “Frankly, it’s her only hope,” Nancy answered.

  * * * *

  Nancy led us into a room that served as a sort of small classroom. There was a table for the teacher at the front of the room in addition to four round tables, each with four chairs, spread through the remainder of the room. The entire front of the room was covered with a large chalkboard.

  Paola sat by herself in one of the chairs, reading a pamphlet that read “Angel House” in bright, cheery letters. The difference in her appearance between now and last night was striking. Last night, she’d been heavily made up—apparently to look like someone’s idea of a dream date. The makeup had been overdone to the extreme. This morning, she wore no makeup at all. Someone had given her a dark blue T-shirt and a pair of matching dark blue sweatpants. She looked f
reshly scrubbed. In fact, now she looked like a teenaged girl.

  We walked over to her table. “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good morning,” she answered. Her voice was soft and demure. We took the other seats at her table.

  “Paola,” Nancy said, “you remember Danny Logan and Toni Blair from last night, right?”

  Paola nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Okay, good. Now, before I begin,” Nancy said, “I’m going to turn the tape recorder on. Okay, Paola?”

  She nodded.

  Nancy said, “We’re here on Friday, June 8th, 2012, at 10:25 in the morning. I’m Lieutenant Nancy Stewart. I’m the commander of the Seattle Police Department Vice and High Risk Victims Unit. I’m here today talking to Paola Morales. Paola is a fifteen-year-old girl we detained last night pending identification of her legal guardian. That work continues. To be clear, Paola is not under arrest. With us this morning are Danny Logan and Toni Blair, both licensed private investigators with the Logan Private Investigations firm.”

  Nancy turned to us. “May Paola call you by your first names—Danny and Toni?”

  “Absolutely,” I nodded. Toni indicated her agreement as well.

  “Good.” She turned back to Paola. “Like I said, Danny and Toni are private investigators. They’re not police officers. Do you understand the difference?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  “In this case, they’re working to find Isabel Delgado. You told me earlier that you know her, right?”

  She nodded.

  Nancy said, “Okay. Just to remind you of the ground rules, Paola—you’re under no obligation to answer any questions at all. You’re not under arrest here. You’ve got all the control. You’re helping us—kind of like doing us a favor. This is not like TV where ‘anything you say can and will be used against you.’ In fact, it’s the opposite. Nothing you say here will be used against you for any reason. Like I told you earlier—I’m not interested in seeing you go to jail. I think you and I are past that now, right?”