“Yes, I do, and I’ll fill you in, tell you what I can when I can.”
“I appreciate it, and I appreciate the call.”
“Ah, one more thing, Ms. Phillips . . .? Breakfast?” Gianna could still hear the woman’s laughter as she made her way across the room to the action center, and the gleeful looks on the faces of her team as she told them breakfast was on the way would, along with Dee’s laugh, help keep her together through what was about to be a truly horrible day.
Gianna took advantage of the momentary lull in activity to gather her thoughts, to order them, to think through things, to be as certain as she could be that she hadn’t missed anything or, worse, screwed up anything. This was a big operation and lives were at stake. That kept coming back to being her first and primary concern: getting those girls out of that warehouse alive—in body if not in spirit. Then there were the perps—Larry, Curly, and Moe. She’d already decided to ask the Chief to manage that aspect of the operation since its success would be reliant on the cooperation of law enforcement entities in Virginia, state and local, and local could mean city as well as county, and that meant a very large headache.
But it was exactly the kind of maneuvering and manipulating the Chief enjoyed and that he was so good at, and he arrived loaded for bear. He watched and listened without interrupting as the techs walked him through the videos that led up to the hurried exit of Larry, Moe and Curly and the shutdown of the trafficking operation. He muttered and cursed under his breath when he saw the john observe the cameras on top of the Phillips warehouse. He cursed and muttered some more as he watched the three perps haul the evidence out of the warehouse and load it into the van. He didn’t explode until he learned that the duty officer, Taylor Johnstone, hadn’t left a written record of the events and that he had failed to alert anyone when it happened, and he went ballistic when he learned that Johnstone apparently hadn’t remained until the end of his shift.
“Stupidity, laziness, or something worse?” the Chief asked.
Gianna shrugged. “I don’t know him well enough to have an opinion, but I do know that I don’t intend to get to know him any better.”
He gave her a speculative look, then shifted his gaze back to the video screen. “I’m trying to recall who suggested we take him—ah! I remember now,” he said, but he didn’t reveal the name to her. He wouldn’t, so she’d never know who’d be paying the price for palming this loser off on the Chief and causing a major fuck-up in a major operation. He readily accepted her suggestion that he huddle with the Virginia authorities to guarantee a smooth takedown of the traffickers when that became necessary, leaving her to focus on the rescue operation and on Officer Taylor Johnstone when they brought him in.
Without telling him where she was going, Gianna left the Chief in the unit and headed to the scene. She’d already told him to expect the breakfast delivery at some point, which caused him to smile and pat her on the shoulder. He didn’t need to say the dreaded “promotion” word; she knew he was thinking it, that he would continue to think it until she gave in and took the damn test. Dear god she didn’t want or need to be a captain! It was stressful enough now.
Dudley and his takedown crew were huddled together in the parking lot, looking intently at the empty space where the door they’d blown off its hinges a short while ago used to be. Gianna had parked at the Phillips warehouse and walked around the corner to the scene, and as soon as Jim Dudley spied her he ran over, his face etched with worry. “I think we got a problem, Boss.”
“You think?”
“Can’t say for sure—the medics won’t let us back in the building—but it seems like the girls don’t want to leave. They’re refusing to leave, some of ’em, and some of ’em are so strung out they don’t know what’s happening. They keep asking for ‘Jimmy.’ We’re guessing that’s one of the perps, the one who doses ’em. And, Boss? There’s at least one fatality, and at least one more is unconscious and unresponsive and the medics can’t bring her around. They rushed her to the hospital. That’s all they’ll tell us.”
“Let’s see if they’ll tell me a little more,” Gianna said in the tone of voice Bobby Gilliam called “her chilly self,” as she headed for the door in full lieutenant cowboy-cop mode.
“They will,” Tony Watkins and Tim McCreedy said in unison. They knew from firsthand experience what to expect when she got this way; the people in the building were about to find out.
“You can’t come in here,” someone Gianna didn’t know said, blocking her entrance with a hand on her arm. Tallish, forty-something, dark blond hair in a ponytail.
“This is my crime scene and I’m coming in and you’re getting your hand off me.”
“Lieutenant Maglione!” She recognized the EMT who called her name. Her badge said her name was R. Kafkalas. She’d been the one who’d transported Cassie . . .
“You get all the fun calls, huh?”
Kafkalas tried for a sad grin that failed. “It’s taking its toll, Lieutenant—”
“You call this fun?” blond ponytail snarled.
“Who the hell is he?” Gianna asked Kafkalas, not looking at the object of her ire. If she looked at him, she’d smack him.
“Arnie Spitzer from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”
“The people Jim Dudley called in at your request?” Gianna asked, and when Kafkalas nodded in the affirmative Gianna grabbed her phone and punched in Dudley’s number. She heard it ring; he was close by. “With me, please, Jim,” she said, and he had pushed Arnie Spitzer aside and was next to her before she’d ended the call to him.
“They’ve fucked our crime scene all to hell!” he said, glaring at Spitzer.
“This is more than just a crime scene!” Spitzer snarled back.
“Whatever it is, you’re standing in the middle of it because this man—Detective Jim Dudley—requested your presence,” Gianna said. Then, to Dudley, “Secure what you can.”
Dudley, who still held his phone, punched in a number, which apparently answered in the middle of the first ring. “You and McCreedy supervise the crime scene techs, everybody booted, suited and masked. And bring one for me and the Boss.”
“While we’re waiting,” Gianna said, looking from Spitzer to Kafkalas, “tell me about the women, the girls, who are resisting transport—”
“If you’d called us in first, we could have prepped you for the kinds of pathologies to expect—”
“If you don’t get your nose out of the air and your ass off your back, I’m evicting you from my crime scene,” Gianna said to Spitzer, “and make no mistake, Mr. Spitzer: It is my crime scene.”
“That may be, Lieutenant, but your department doesn’t seem very well prepared to handle this kind of situation,” Spitzer said.
“And who would you like to call in, Mr. Spitzer? The president? The attorney general? The secretary of state? The FBI or Homeland Security or some other federal government entity that doesn’t give a good goddamn about what happened to these girls?”
Tim and Tony arrived with Tyvek coveralls and helped Gianna and Jim get themselves covered from head to toe. Tim looked at Spitzer. “Him, too, Boss?”
She shook her head. “He’s already walked around back there, but do an elimination workup.” As she inhaled deeply, she realized that she did not want to venture deeper into the warehouse, that she did not want to see the drugged girls, did not want to see where and how they lived and worked. She knew that Jim and Tim and Tony were watching her. So was R. Kafkalas. And she guessed that all of them—all the cops, anyway—were feeling what she was feeling. This was new territory, and it was bad, ugly territory. And they all knew, without having to discuss it, that they dearly wished it was somebody else’s job to investigate this crime scene.
Just past the front door was the office, a space that now held empty file cabinets and desk drawers and a space where a safe once had stood. Not a single piece of paper remained, though there were plenty of stale chips and fries on the dirty c
arpeted floor. Next to the office was the kitchen. It held a large refrigerator but no stove, a dozen cases of water, and family-size packages of paper plates, cups, napkins, forks, spoons, and chips, and gallon jugs of fruit juice. Jim opened the refrigerator: It was filled with cans and bottles of beer and some store-brand soft drinks. Tim and Tony pulled open the cabinet doors to reveal empty cabinets. Gianna remembered the reports of the trash from this place—a massive and daily accumulation of empty Chinese and Mexican food containers and wrappers, and fried chicken boxes of bones.
The next space was toilets and showers, five of each. There were gallon jugs of liquid soap and packs of disposable razors and toothbrushes. No toothpaste was evident. Gianna was wondering about towels and washcloths when she noticed the half-dozen wall-mounted paper towel dispensers and equal number of hot air blow-dryers. Nothing genteel or elegant about the personal hygiene aspect of things, but it certainly was functional. The same could be said of the sleeping quarters, arranged dorm-like—nine bunk beds, three each on each of the walls.
Then came the work area. Doors lined both sides of the long hallway, all of them open as if they had been checked, which they probably had, a mattress and a chair in each room. Gianna could only hope that nobody had entered any of the rooms, thus compromising any potential evidence. Not that any evidence collected would or could be of major use, given the number of men who had cycled in and out of these rooms in the last seven weeks. She very much doubted that linen was changed daily. She stopped, walked back and counted the rooms: ten. There were more than ten girls, she knew that. How much time did each girl spend with each client? Even though Gianna was sure she didn’t want to know the answer, she was also sure that Mr. Spitzer would be able to supply it.
The final area, at the end of the hall, was a large room with mats on the floor, and on each mat a girl wearing a slip-like shift. Gianna counted them: twelve, not including the one who was DOA and the one who’d been transported, which meant that two new girls had been added in the last week. Why hadn’t she known that? She made herself enter the room and walk around, looking at the girls. Several obviously were in a drugged stupor and lay unmoving. Others seemed to be emerging from the same stupor, they were tossing and turning and moving about. Three, however, seemed to be awake and were anxious and agitated and they called out for Jimmy, a pitiful, plaintive sound that made her flesh crawl. Then the others began to wail and it sounded more like some kind of animal howling. Gianna checked her watch. It had been exactly four hours since Larry, Moe and Curly had realized they were being surveilled, three since they’d fled the warehouse and the girls.
Gianna looked at EMT Kafkalas, who answered the question she hadn’t asked yet. “We’ll begin transporting as soon as there’s someplace to take them—all of them—and as soon as the translators find somebody who can communicate with them.”
“Nobody has talked to them?” She was stunned.
“Nobody has been able to, Lieutenant. They don’t understand any of the translators. At least they seem not to. The translators tried several languages and dialects and the women did not seem to understand any of them.” The medic looked as miserable as Gianna felt.
“The one who was DOA, what’s your best guess?”
“Combination of OD, malnourishment, and being fucked to death, but don’t you dare quote me on that! The M.E.’ll have me up on charges. But I’d say the same is true for the one we transported. They’re kids, Lieutenant, not much more than babies, and their bodies aren’t mature enough for what they’re put through day after day.”
It was time to ask Arnie Spitzer exactly what that was, and when she did, she wished she hadn’t, for he explained in extensive and graphic detail what life was like for sex-trafficked women and children, beginning with the drugs they systematically were introduced and addicted to, to the rapes they learned to accept and endure, and to whatever other forms of sexual depravity the client inflicted. How many sexual partners a day? As many as the trafficker could sell: five, seven, ten, more. Gianna felt the bottom drop out of her stomach, then the bile rose in her throat, and she had to get out into the open, to breathe fresh air. The thought of a twelve-or thirteen-year-old girl or boy being raped ten times a day by a grown man was more than she could stomach.
She hadn’t paid attention to their activities but once outside she honed in on the photographers, those with the still cameras as well as the videographers. “Did they get it all, Jim?”
He nodded in grim satisfaction. “Every inch, every corner, every cobweb, every dust bunny.”
“Thank you, Jim. This was a lot to ask and you stepped up.”
“I just wish we could’ve gotten those fuckin’ baby-rapers before they got away! Who could have predicted that one of the fuckin’ johns would see the cameras?!”
Arnie Spitzer was coming her way and she went to meet him, to apologize for walking away, and to tell him, in as much detail as she could, how it happened that she’d gotten involved in a child sex-trafficking operation in the middle of Washington, D.C. “You were absolutely right, Mr. Spitzer: We were in over our heads and playing catch-up from day one.”
He extended his hand and she took it. “I hope you don’t ever have to do this again, Lieutenant, but I also hope you know that I stand ready to help you in any way that I can if it should happen. I just had one of my staff background you, and you’re definitely on the side of the angels.”
She managed a dry chuckle. “I wish I’d had some of those angels on my side this morning.”
“You did, Lieutenant. How else do you explain that as of this moment, we have a place to take all the girls?”
How else, indeed, Gianna thought, as she prepared to leave. She told Jim she’d find out how to get another steel door installed on the warehouse after the techs had gone over every inch of the place; then she called Delores Phillips and asked to have another breakfast delivered to the techs processing the warehouse adjacent to hers. Then she drove back to her unit, but she needed a few private moments first before facing her team. She locked herself in her office, put her head down on the desk, and wept. She had made a terrible, horrible mistake! She had not known, it had not occurred to her, that the girls would not want to be rescued, to be freed from their bondage, if freedom meant an end to the steady supply of the narcotics that kept them inured to the reality of their existence. That’s why all the traffickers all over the world made addiction their first order of business, even before the rapes began. Once addicted and dependent on the drugs, the girls and women—and boys—would do whatever was necessary to keep the drugs coming. And Gianna had thought the traffickers merely evil. Certainly they were that, but they weren’t stupid. They knew something else, too. They knew that men who paid to have sex with children didn’t care if those children were unusually compliant. In fact, it was better; compliant children didn’t care what was done to them or with them.
She had learned an important lesson this morning. A couple of them. It really was necessary to keep a distance between her feelings and the job. If she hadn’t been so focused on rescuing children who didn’t want to be rescued, she might then have focused on learning what she needed to know about the victims themselves, and that would have meant taking the time to learn from the people whose day-in, day-out job was to pick up the pieces of what was left of the trafficked on the rare occasions they were found alive. She’d also learned to recognize when she was in over her head, and as much as that wasn’t something she liked admitting, she knew she’d never again risk somebody’s life to protect her own ego. Now . . . if she could only get that wailing, howling sound out of her head!
Quick knocks and the door opened and Sgt. Tommi stuck her head in. “They’re back with Taylor Johnstone. Where do you want him, Boss?”
“Let’s find an interrogation room.”
“Oh, shit!” Tommi said.
“I hope young Officer Johnstone will feel the same way,” Gianna said, but he was too stoned to feel much of anything. Tommi said if P
atel, the roommate, hadn’t had a key, they’d have had to break in to get in, which they couldn’t have done because they had no warrant. And once they were in, it took several minutes and a splash of ice water to the face to rouse Johnstone. The variety of illegal substances in his room constituted grounds for dismissal from the job. The fact that he most likely had been stoned on the job was just another nail in his coffin, for which the hole already was dug. Gianna looked at Johnstone and knew it would be a waste of time and energy trying to talk to him. He looked like all the junkies she’d tried to talk to during her days on the drugs squad, and she hoped that’s all he was—a junkie, because she didn’t think she could stomach another dirty cop. But just in case: “Put him in interrogation and call Internal Affairs. Then, Tommi, do whatever you have to do to drop him from our unit. I’ll tell the Chief.” And she went to find Patel.
“Boss!” He hurried over to her as soon as she entered the unit.
“What’s the J stand for?” she asked him before he could speak.
“Jaikirti. Jay. And I swear to you that I did not know how deep Taylor was into drugs.”
“How is that possible, Jay? You were lovers—” Gianna began, but Jay Patel was shaking his head back and forth, his hand raised to stop her talking. “You’re not lovers?”
“We had casual sex, yes, but we’re more friends and roommates than lovers. We moved in together so we both could quit our part-time jobs; that was six months ago. I knew Taylor smoked a joint now and then, but that’s all it was. At least that’s all I ever saw, I swear, Lieutenant!”
“Was this the first time he hadn’t been present to report at the end of shift?”
“I would have reported it to the sergeants if it had happened before.”
Gianna gave him a long, steady look and he held her gaze. She believed him. He had done exemplary work today, and that included volunteering to help take his roommate into custody. “Taylor Johnstone now belongs to Internal Affairs, and they’ll certainly want to talk to you, so you know you can no longer live in that apartment.”
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