Paola shook her head.
“It’s a beautiful name,” Toni said. “I love it.”
Paola smiled. “Thanks.”
Toni looked to me. Guess it was my turn. I put on my best smile. “And I’m Danny,” I said. “Thanks for agreeing to talk to us about what you know about Isabel.”
She smiled again.
“Like Nancy said, we’re looking for Isabel,” Toni said. “My sister-she was also in the room last night-I don’t know if you noticed her-anyway, she’s a good friend of Isabel’s. They go to school together. When Isabel went missing, my sister asked us to help find her. That’s how we’re involved.”
Paola nodded. “And you guys thought it was Isabel who was supposed to be there last night?” she asked.
I nodded. “We did. We found an advertisement on Backpage.com with Isabel’s picture in it. We answered that ad, thinking Isabel would show up. You showed up instead.”
“They just told me to be at the Snuggle Inn at eight thirty,” Paola said. “Nobody told me anything else.”
I wanted to ask who told her this, but I figured she might not be willing to give that information just yet, and I didn’t want to start off the conversation with her having to say no.
“Must have come as quite a surprise to you,” Toni said.
Paola nodded. “Yeah.”
“Tell me,” Toni continued. “Why were you there instead of Isabel?”
“I’m not sure,” Paola said. “Last week, I know they told Isabel that it was time for her to move over to the girls’ house and go to work.”
“Where’d she live until then?” I asked.
“She was at the big house across the street from the park, by the-,” she stopped suddenly. “I don’t want to say,” she said.
“That’s fine,” Nancy said. “You don’t have to.”
“Sorry, Paola,” Toni said. “I didn’t mean to ask you a question that made you uncomfortable. Let me move past that. When you say that Isabel had to ‘go to work,’ you mean someone put an ad in Backpage.com and Isabel was supposed to start going out on dates?”
“Yeah. They probably took her picture that day,” Paola said. “They have us dress up all sexy, and they take pictures all the time.”
“But up until then, Isabel didn’t have to go on dates?”
“No, she was new. She didn’t live with us. The new girls aren’t ready for dates at first.”
“But a week ago, you’re saying Isabel’s time was up. They told her she had to move into the girls’ house and go to work?”
Paola nodded. “Yeah.”
“What happened when they told her that?” Toni said.
Paola shrugged. “They brought her over to show her around. We met her and stuff. We talked a little by ourselves. She told me she wasn’t going to go out on any dates.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“A couple days later, they moved her over to our house. It was the end of last week, I think.”
“Were you able to talk to her again?”
“Yeah. She was there a couple days. I worked at night, but I talked to her in the daytime. I thought she was cool. She loaned me the coat I was wearing last night.”
“And did she start going out on dates?” Toni asked.
“No. They had dates all set up for her, but right after she moved in, she came right out and told them she wouldn’t go on any dates. She told them she was going to leave.”
“What happened then?”
“They all got really mad. Isabel got punishment.”
“What’s that mean-punishment?”
“They beat her with the belt. Right in front of us. Then they threatened her family. They said they were going to kill her mom.”
“What did Isabel do?”
“She got mad. She told them to go ahead, she didn’t care. Then she told them to fuck off-those were her exact words. She said she was leaving.” She looked down for a moment before continuing. “So then they took her to a party.”
“A party?” I asked. “What’s that mean? What’s a party?”
She looked down and shifted her feet. She was clearly getting nervous.
Nancy noticed, too. “Paola, you don’t have to answer if you don’t like.”
She looked up and then said, “It’s alright.” She turned back to me. “A party is when they take you over to the boys’ house, and everybody gets high, and then you have to have sex with all of them at the same time.”
I could feel my skin start to tingle-a clear sign that I was on my way to getting good and pissed. Whenever I think I’m past the point where I can be surprised by the pure depths of depravity some scumbags seem able to reach, something new like this comes along. The drugging and gang rape of a child by a group of men as a means of forcing the girl into prostitution-this was a new low in my experience. I shuddered. Poor Isabel ran away from home to escape an abusive prick of a stepfather-an animal who liked to rape her just for fun and where’d she end up? With a bunch of the worst kind of thugs I’d ever heard of. Wonderful. I noticed I was staring at the ceiling, holding my breath, so I slowly let it out and looked at the others. They were all looking at me.
“Sorry,” I said. I shook my head slowly. “Paola, it makes me very sad to hear about the kind of life you’ve had to live. I’m so happy for you that Nancy found you and wants to help you. Really. No one deserves to go through this.”
She looked at me for a second and then shrugged. “There’s worse,” she said.
How? Tough little girl.
Toni continued. “So Paola, after the beating and the party, then what happened to Isabel? Did she start going out on dates then?”
“I don’t think so. They probably wouldn’t send her out all beat-up. But I haven’t seen Isabel for about a week-since the night they took her to the party.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
Paola stared at Toni for a moment before she answered. “No. I just know that she wasn’t at our house anymore.”
“Why would they take her away?” I asked.
“They said he was going to sell her.”
“Sell her?” I asked. I didn’t bother asking who “he” was.
She nodded. “I think they took her away so everyone else wouldn’t feel bad.”
“Who would they sell her to?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe his friends in Las Vegas. They have girls, too. They’re always checking out each other’s ‘inventory.’ That’s what they call it.”
“How often do they hook up?” I asked. I needed to find out how much time we had.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Whenever they need to, I guess.”
She looked at me, right in the eyes. I looked back. For just a moment, I felt like I could see straight into her inner thoughts. They were a child’s eyes, yet they weren’t the innocent eyes of a fifteen-year-old. They were hard eyes, eyes that had seen way too much evil for one so young.
We talked for another fifteen minutes, but we didn’t really get any more pertinent information. Paola did let slip the fact that she liked riding around in the “beemer”-which I took to be Donnie Martin’s white BMW. I was already pretty sure that Donnie was her pimp. And now we knew that he had been trying to become Isabel’s as well. Except Isabel-God bless her-was no eleven-year-old. She was fighting back.
PART 2
Chapter 13
At Logan PI, we don’t have a motto, but if we did, it would probably be: “When in doubt, get back to the basics.” No question about it, we were in doubt now. No one knew exactly where Isabel was. Unfortunately, since she was too young for a bank account or credit cards that we could trace, our magic shortcuts list had pretty much been reduced to one item: her cell phone. And Kenny’d tried that and struck out. So we were left with no choice but to fall back on the basics-back to good old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts detective work. We needed to eliminate some of the unknowns.
Nancy had someone send us an audio file of
the recording of our interview with Paola and now the whole Logan PI team was assembled in the conference room, listening to the playback from one of the PC speakers. We’d suffered two unfortunate setbacks in the last sixteen hours. First, of course, was the simple fact that the girl who’d showed up at the sting last night wasn’t Isabel. We’d been excited to see the ad with Isabel’s pictures, and we’d gotten our hopes up, only to see them come crashing down. Now, even after Nancy’d worked on Paola this morning and gotten her to loosen up a little, the only information she had offered didn’t sound too good for Isabel. She’d been “punished,” and Paola’d had no contact with her for a while. Worse, Paola wasn’t certain that Isabel was even still around. For all she knew, Isabel might have been sold. Or she might even be on the run. Again. This was beginning to look like a bigger job than I’d originally anticipated.
“There!” I said, focusing back on the recording. “Back it up and play that part again.”
Kenny started the recording again. “They live across the street from the park-by the-,” Paola’s voice echoed on the recording.
“Stop,” I said. “I knew she said something about a park.” I was thinking that if we could figure out where the houses were located, maybe we could discover something about where Isabel was. Or where she wasn’t-either way would be helpful.
“Good memory,” Toni said. “I wonder which park she meant?”
“She wouldn’t say, but we know-or at least we think we know-that it’s in the area north of the U-District.”
Doc was standing by a whiteboard mounted to the wall opposite the window. I turned to him and said, “Write it down anyway, okay?”
Up to this point, clues were pretty scarce, but we were still writing down what we had. So far, Doc had written:
CLUES
Donnie Martin-BMA-early twenties
DeMichael Hollins-BMA-early twenties (?)
Crystal-??
Auto: white BMW with tinted windows
multiple houses
— girls’ house
— boys’ house
— big house
north of the U-District
To this he now added:
across from a park
We stared at the board.
“Not much to go on,” Toni said.
I shook my head. “Not much.”
“Well,” Kenny said. “We could always just jump in the car and drive by the houses around all the parks north of the U-District looking for a white beemer with two black guys in it.”
I looked at him then at the board. Then I looked back at the group. “I suppose.”
“Really?” Kenny said.
I shrugged. “It’s a simple answer.” I looked at the board again. “But sometimes the simple answer is the right answer-especially when you don’t have any others.”
“It’s called Occam’s razor, dude,” Doc said to Kenny.
I looked at Doc and smiled. “Doc, you never cease to amaze me.”
“Part of my job description,” he said, smiling back. “So how many parks you think are up there, anyway?” Doc asked.
“We can look on a map and count ’em out,” Kenny said.
“How long will it take?” I asked
“We can do it right now,” he said. “While you wait.” He opened up a map program and zoomed to the area north of the U-District.
I studied the map for a few seconds. “It’s a pretty big area, but according to the map here, there aren’t that many parks-maybe fifteen or twenty if you count school playgrounds.”
We all looked at the map for several seconds. Finally, Toni said, “This is a big area, Danny. Are you seriously thinking about driving around up there looking for a white BMW?” She looked like she thought it was a bad idea. Looking at the map, I started to think that it might not be such a great idea. We’ve done this before, and it usually doesn’t amount to much. Then again, we were short on clues. That said, I decided to give the creative process one more shot.
“As a last resort,” I said, “we’ll drive the area. But before we go burning gasoline, let’s use our heads and think this through. Kenny,” I looked at him, “I really need you to come through for us. I want you to go back to your office and close the door. Then, I need you to sit there where it’s all nice and quiet, and just think. Figure out some little angle that we’re missing-something you can use to help us find these guys and short-circuit this groping-around-in-the-dark search of ours. Then, maybe we can zoom right in on Isabel. You can search a lot faster on your computer than we can in our cars. Be a detective for us.”
Kenny considered this for a second, then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’m on it.”
“Good.” I turned to Doc. “Doc,” I want you to take the DMV records and the property records that Kenny found earlier and start assembling them into a report we can give to Nancy. If we find anything, we’re going to need her to move on it, and she’s going to need the backup.”
Doc nodded. I turned to Toni. “You,” I said, “you and I have an appointment with Ferguson and Sons. We’ve got to keep the money engine running.”
Two hours later, Toni and I were on the way back from the SODO district of Seattle where Ferguson’s main warehouse is located. We’d presented them with a contract for review, and we’d agreed on a start date a week from next Monday. The stereo was on, and Toni had chosen “Something in the Water” by Chris Webster. Just as we exited I-5 onto Mercer, my cell phone rang. Caller ID: Kenny.
I tapped the speakerphone button. “Hey there,” I said.
“Got something,” he said.
“Go.”
“I checked out the name ‘Donnie Martin’ with DMV, and there was nothing, so I checked ‘Donald Martin’ instead and bingo! — I got a match on a Donald Allen Martin on Twenty-First Avenue. Didn’t you say Donnie Martin’s aunt lived in the Central District?”
“Interesting,” I said, thinking. “Hold on a second-I need to pull over.” I pulled the Jeep into the parking lot at the Lake Union Park. “So you’re thinking that Martin still has his driver’s license address at his aunt’s old address, then?”
“It gets better,” he said. “I’m pretty sure of it because there’s also a car registered to the same Donald Allen Martin at the same address.”
“And?”
“2005 BMW 750i.”
“Bingo!” I said.
“Wait, boss,” he said. “There’s more. We’re pretty sure the guy we’re looking for lives up north of the U-District, not in the CD. So I started thinking, what would the guy have to have at his new house-wherever it might be-that would most likely match up to the place where he actually lived? Now that I know his name, I had something I could work with.”
“Did you hit something?”
“Yeah.”
I waited for a second, but he didn’t answer. He wanted me to pry it from him. “Come on, man, quit playing games,” I said impatiently. “Tell me what you’ve got.”
“Electric bill,” he said. “The service address on the electric bill has to match up. I took a quiet little peek into the Seattle City Light records and voila! Donald Allen Martin has power service at 6345 Fortieth Avenue Northeast-right up where you guys are looking. And I looked on the maps-the house is right across the street from the Bryant Neighborhood Playground.”
“Dude, you’re a genius!” I said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“And humble, too,” Toni called out.
We were excited again. We were back in business. Now that we had an address, it looked like a good old-fashioned stakeout was in order.
We have three vehicles that we’ve converted especially for surveillance over the past four years. The first two are nearly identical windowless vans-a white one and a dark green one. Seeing as how we’re particularly clever, we generally slap a colorful commercial sign on the sides of the vans to disguise us. The vans are tricky, but our mack daddy, crown-jewel surveillance rig is our 1982 Winnebago Brave motor home. No one ever
suspects it.
With their work areas concealed by a curtain, all three vehicles look harmless from the outside. Inside, though, they’re all business. They’re loaded with audio, video, communication, and computer gear and with a bevy of recording devices. We can take clear photos from one hundred yards, clear video from fifty yards. With a boom mic, we can record a conversation from nearly one hundred yards away if ambient conditions are favorable.
In addition to being workhorses, the vehicles are also long on creature comforts-especially the Winnebago. All the vehicles feature a sink and a microwave, a mini-fridge under the desk, and-best of all-a small enclosed toilet. Anyone who’s ever spent time on a stakeout in an automobile would look at a surveillance assignment in any of our vehicles and think they’d died and ascended to the right hand of God. With all these features, it’s easy to remain on station for hours at a time. I figure that by rotating the crews, the vans are good for a full day in place without attracting too much attention, while the motor home should be good for three or four days without arousing suspicion. The Winnebago would be the perfect choice for watching the house on Fortieth for a couple of days.
The Bryant Neighborhood Playground, directly across the street from our target house, has a parking lot at the north end alongside 165th. By parking in the far western part of the lot, the target house would be only 150 feet from the motor home-perfect surveillance distance. At ten the next morning, I backed the motor home into a parking space such that our left side faced the target house across a corner of the park. The parking spot was ideal-close enough for effective surveillance, and far enough removed to be essentially inconspicuous. Even if someone did notice us, what was threatening about a small motor home in a park? Toni followed me in her car and pulled in on my east side, blocked from view of the house by the motor home. She left an empty space between us. We were to take the 1000 to 1400 shifts plus the 1800 to 2100 shifts on both Saturday and Sunday. Kenny and Doc would relieve us at two o’clock and cover the 1400 to 1800 and 2100 to 0000 shifts. It wasn’t round-the-clock, but we only have four people, and it would have to do.
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