by John Moore
I felt like I couldn’t go to my condo because it might not be safe. I went to the only refuge I knew, Sarah’s House. Susan was surprised to see me, but as always was the perfect hostess, offering me coffee. We sat together chatting as we drank our coffee, as she updated me on who was new and who had left. She was so excited to see me she went on and on about the broken lives of the girls who’d come and gone. She asked if I would meet the new girls since they’d heard her talk about me.
“Susan, I’d love to spend some time with each of the new girls, but first I have a favor to ask. May I use your computer to copy a disk?”
She led me to her desk. “Use this one. It’s the newest we have.”
I copied the disk for the police and uploaded the contents to my private cloud account. Mission accomplished, I said, “Now introduce me to the new residents.”
She took me to the common area room. There sat many of the girls I knew and a couple of new ones watching TV and chatting while others played with their kids. Susan introduced me to the whole room, and one of the new girls sidled up to me, her accent unfamiliar to me. She said she was from the North and had only been in Louisiana for a month. She was petite, well-groomed, and intelligent, and she stood out from the rest. I wondered how someone as much on the ball as she was could end up with some jerk who abused her. Not an unusual story though. Love is blind.
“Your accent sounds unusual to me,” I said.
“Maybe because my grandparents were Romanian. They immigrated to the United States after World War II. My parents were shopkeepers. They worked long hours, so I spent most of my time growing up with my grandparents. My grandmother spoke Romanian to me much of the time.”
“Do you still speak Romanian?” I asked.
“A little,” she said.
It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to view the disk at Sarah’s house—it wasn’t safe. I needed to get home, so I said my goodbyes. I thought there was something funny about the Romanian girl’s story, but I decided to look into it more tomorrow. I was pretty anxious to see the contents of this disk, so I hurried, hoping my condo was safe, locking my car’s doors and scanning my rearview mirrors for thugs.
Chapter Fourteen:
Lighting the Shadows
I drove past my condo twice, my head swiveling in every direction to see if any unusual cars or activity stood out. It all seemed normal, so I parked, went in, and secured the door behind me. For the first time I wedged a chair against the door as an extra measure of security, freaked out by all of the seedy characters trying to commandeer my life.
I checked in with Tom to make sure all was well with him and Piper. They were eating popcorn watching the Twilight movies. Piper took the phone from Tom to tell me the story reminded her of the French Quarter Vampire. I laughed and told them goodnight.
I’d forgotten all about food today. Thank goodness I had some cage-free brown eggs in the fridge. After eating, I placed the disk in the computer to watch the video. I felt like a scream queen in a horror flick waiting to see something that would hypnotize me and turn me into some sort of zombie. What I saw was nothing like that at all.
I watched a car with an Uber driver sign on the windshield and both sides of the back bumper pull up to an obvious prostitute in the French Quarter. After some conversation, she got in the car. Then the car drove off. Nothing pointing to Victor in that clip. As I watched three more clips, the scene repeated itself. An Uber vehicle pulled up, picked up a streetwalker, and took her away. But wait, it was the same Uber vehicle every time. Maybe he was working for Victor. Maybe that was the connection the scary guys in the strip joint were trying to expose. I decided to take a copy to Detective Baker tomorrow morning.
I turned to my blog retrieving all of the entries from the Mobile area. There were scads of women who turned up missing or dead around the same time last year. I wrote a post explaining I was doing a story on the missing women of Mobile and invited all who had information to contact me.
Bushed from a long day, my gun and I headed to bed. I hoped to have responses from Mobile tomorrow morning. I felt I needed to learn how Victor operated to fight him.
I arrived at the police precinct at eight thirty, shortly after Detective Baker got in. He brought me to the coffee room for a huge cup of Community coffee before we started our conversation. Both gassed up on caffeine, we took the short walk to his office.
“What can I do for you, Alexandra?” he asked.
“It’s about what I can do for you,” I said. “Here is a video from a confidential source showing what I believe are your murdered working girls being picked up by the same Uber driver. I’ll venture to say they were never seen again after their ride.”
Baker popped the DVD into his computer. He watched it carefully and said, “You aren’t going to tell me where you got this disk, are you?”
“No, but it’s yours to keep. I only have one request,” I said as I batted my eyelashes at him. “I want you to let me watch you question the Uber driver.”
“I can’t officially promise you that, but maybe I could carelessly leave the door to the observation room open when I’m questioning him. Do you think this Uber driver is our killer?” he said.
“I think your killer is Victor Ivanovich, and the Uber driver is his accomplice. Do you have to involve Jaeger in this?” I asked.
“No, not really,” he said. “Right now, it’s still an investigation of a serial killer preying on prostitutes. We have no evidence pointing to anyone else. I’ll bring this Uber driver in for questioning. I’ll let you know when I get him.”
Tom was dropping Piper at my condo at nine thirty. I was running a little late, so I ran some red lights on my way home. Maybe if I stop twice at some others my traffic signal karma will balance itself.
When I got home, Tom and Piper were there. Piper went on and on about the Twilight movies. I wondered if it was the vampire part or the love story that got to her. Maybe it was the part about the vampires being a family.
She asked if Mandy could take us on the haunted cemetery tour. She wanted to see Marie Laveau’s grave. Marie, a Creole woman, was the voodoo queen of New Orleans. Tom begged me to let him go to Mexico, and I finally agreed since I needed to go to Mobile to follow up on some leads from my blog.
“So it’s settled then,” Tom said. “I’ll head to Mexico for two days and you can stay overnight in Mobile. We’ll meet back here. You know, Alexandra, we also have to go to your farm in Indiana to choose a contractor to remediate the poisoned well.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “But can’t it wait till I get to the bottom of the prostitute murders? There’s more to that story than has been reported. They may not be dying at the hands of a serial killer after all.”
“OK, we’ll make plans to deal with the farm after Mexico and Mobile,” Tom said.
I chose not to tell Tom about the Dixie Mafia encounter or what Detective Baker and I discussed. He wanted to help Hector in Mexico so badly, I didn’t want to do anything that would make him cancel his trip. Maybe the right thing to do was to get out of town.
Did Detective Baker pick up the Uber driver yet? I wondered. Maybe the Dixie guys were wrong. Maybe the Uber driver was the serial killer. I could just be making too much out of the Victor thing. After all, he hadn’t really tried anything yet. Maybe Jaeger was playing me. He could be working Zach and the Dixie guys to use me and Piper as bait to smoke Victor out. Was I in over my head? All of these thoughts swirled through my mind as I made reservations for a hotel room in Mobile.
“Hector told me some of the small farmers from Northern Mexico have mobilized against the industrial farm companies using the genetically modified corn plants. They are joining Hector’s efforts to stop the spread of the Frankencorn to Southern Mexico. They tell stories of water they use for irrigation from streams and ground aquifers containing pesticides and herbicides. They can prove the pollution
was caused by runoff from the Frankencorn fields. Worse yet, the pollution in the water is killing their crops,” Tom said.
I couldn’t help but notice how animated Tom’s face became as he spoke about Hector’s activism. His eyes twinkled like the stars in the night sky. He leaned forward like a snow ski jumper about to launch from the ramp. He emphatically punctuated each sentence with symphonic hand gestures. Even Piper noticed; she cast me a wry smile. That’s your family, Piper, I thought. Intense but lovable, and now my family too.
Tom waved to Piper and me as he sped off to work. How could I stop him from doing what he was born to do?
My thoughts were disturbed by a rap, rap, rap at the door. I looked through the peephole to see a man dressed in a suit with a sheriff’s deputy badge around his neck. He had a wad of papers in his hands. What now?
“Are you Alexandra Lee?” he asked as he looked past me into the condo. “Is Tom Sanders here?”
“Yes, I am Alexandra, but Tom Sanders isn’t here,” I said.
“Does he live here?”
“No, he doesn’t. He’s my boyfriend, but he has his own place.”
“Can you give me his address?” As he wrote down Tom’s address, I read the caption on the legal documents in his hand. I could only see the caption:
Sandy Rawlins
vs.
Tom Sanders
Petition for Custody of Constance Rawlins
Oh shit, she was taking us to court to get Piper. This had to be part of Victor’s plan. We might be in some deep shit now. After all, she was Piper’s mother.
I called Tom on his cell and told him not to go home yet or show up at work. I wanted to tell him about the custody suit in person, but we had to move fast to counter Victor’s move, so I told him about the custody suit. I made an appointment for Tom and I to see my lawyer, Mr. Swartz, and a specialist he brought in to help, Joshua Clark. Mr. Clark was well known in legal circles in New Orleans, having a reputation as a ferocious and cagy litigator. He had dark brown hair, an athlete’s build, and a handsome face, his dazzling smile hiding his tenacious demeanor. I sat Piper down and told her what I’d been able to read in the process server’s hands. She loved her mother and would gladly live with her here in New Orleans but refused to go back to Victor. She agreed to come with us to see the lawyers, but she remained in the waiting room as we met with them. We told them the entire story of how Piper ended up with us. Joshua put his hand on his chin and rocked back in his chair, squinting his eyes a bit.
“Hmmm, so you weren’t served with any papers?”
“No, not yet,” Tom said.
“Here’s how we’ll proceed then. I will draw up custody papers for you to sign. I will ask a judge to give you immediate temporary custody pending a hearing. Since Constance is living with you, the judge will probably sign them. That will protect you until the complete custody case can be heard. I must warn you though, it’s only a temporary order. Mothers are given strong preference in custody cases. You’ll have to show she’s not fit to care for Constance. So go get me some evidence I can use in court.”
I asked Piper to join us in the conference room. She clung to the bottom of my shirt with both hands as we entered the room. I asked her to tell Mr. Clark about her life with her mother in California. She talked about the good times before Victor, how full of life her mother was every day, the parties, the bowling trips, the picnics in the park.
“Then the dark times came,” she said. “My mother met Victor. He made her laugh when they first met. He gave me piggyback rides. She fell in love with him. He asked her to work at his spa. She strained her back lifting a massage table and started taking pain pills. Victor furnished her all the pills she needed. Before long, she was hooked. Then, the pills weren’t enough. Heroin took their place. My mother was no longer my mother. She was a zombie doing whatever Victor wanted.”
“How did you come to leave your mom and go to live with your dad in Chicago?” Clark asked.
“She and Katerina, the woman who tutored me, took me to the bus station late one night, and that was it. I was on my way to my father, a man I’d never met. I tried to call my mom’s cell phone many times. She never answered. I even called the spa and asked for my mom or Katerina. None of the ladies would get them to the phone. Finally, I gave up.”
“Where do you want to live?” Swartz asked as Mr. Clark studied Piper’s face.
“I love my mom, as messed up as she is. But I want to stay here with Alexandra and my uncle.”
I couldn’t help myself; I burst into tears, grabbing Piper and hugging her as tightly as I could. She wrapped her tiny arms around me as we cried together. This poor child had seen too much in her short life. The only family she’d had was a kaleidoscope of drugged-out sex workers in a brothel and an emotionally unavailable father who wanted a career, not children. She needed a family who could take care of her, show her love; not drug addicts she had to care for.
“Are you willing to tell a judge everything you just told me?” Clark asked.
Piper unbuckled from me, raised her watery blue eyes to Clark. With hesitation she said, “Yes, I will.” I could tell she liked him, his reassuring manner calming her.
Swartz and Clark said they would get the necessary documents for us to sign within an hour. We went to a Starbucks near the office to pass the time. After we signed the documents, Clark took them to a judge and returned with a court order giving temporary custody of Piper to Tom and me. The order set a full custody hearing date three months from today. I was certain if Victor were behind this litigation, he would not be happy that we’d won round one, but Joshua Clark’s confident manner made me feel like we had a fighting chance.
Tom took Piper to work with him, and I went to see Detective Baker. As she stretched her arm to its full length to wave goodbye, I noticed a stamp on the back of Piper’s left hand, like the ones you get at the door of a nightclub. Hmmm, I wondered, where did that come from? This was not the time to conduct an interrogation. I’d wait till I got her alone.
Baker wasn’t at the precinct, so I sat in the lobby of the police station, making a great effort to be patient, which does not come naturally to me at all. The police precinct was almost as good a people-watching venue as the Las Vegas Airport. I witnessed daytime drunks stumble by, trannies who’d tried to scratch each other’s eyes out priss through, and pickpockets who weren’t quite ready for prime time skulk as they were paraded to a cell. The NOPD handled each and every one with professional compassion. These were the street people of the Quarter living in the dimly-lit spaces. The people the police kept away from the tourists and from each other. Outcasts in many ways, and yet also our people—inhabitants who made up the fabric of our pirate city. The cops were honoring a retiring sergeant on his last day of work. Risqué jokes flew through the air as gag gifts were given.
Detective Baker strolled in, dragging a handcuffed, scrawny man sporting a wispy wannabe beard. As he passed, Baker bobbed his head, alerting me that this was the Uber driver. I’d been in this precinct enough to know the protocol. They were on their way to the interrogation room. I’d lucked out, because the retirement party allowed me to slip into the viewing room unnoticed.
Baker questioned the Uber driver about his driving patterns. The driver seemed normal enough, a little on the weaselly side, but normal. As the questions narrowed to the dates of the prostitutes’ murders, Baker threw photos of the dead girls in front of the driver. Color left his face as he pushed back from the table, creating distance between himself and the photos as if touching one would get blood on his hands he could never wash off.
“Are these the working girls who’ve been murdered?” he asked. “Oh fuck. I recognize them. I gave all of them a ride. Hey, you don’t think I killed them, do you?”
“Did you?” Jaeger asked as he barged into the room unannounced.
“No way, man. I just gave them a ride
. The same lady booked the trips every time, and I brought them all to the same hotel. She was a really hot lady with short blond hair.”
Baker looked at Jaeger, a little shocked at his brashness in breaking into the interrogation room uninvited, before bearing down on the driver. “Can you describe her to us?”
“Dude, I can do better than that. I wanted to show my buddy how hot these girls were, so I snuck a picture of her with my phone.”
As he pulled his phone from his pocket, Jaeger jerked it from his hands. Jaeger and Detective Baker looked at the picture together for a minute before Jaeger left the room with the phone in hand. Baker resumed his questions, trying to get more details— name, method of payment, etc.
“I sent the picture to your phone and mine,” Jaeger said as he re-entered the room.
“I’ll get forensics to run it through facial recognition to see if we can get an ID,” Baker said.
God, I wanted to see that photo. Patience, Alexandra, patience, I told myself. Baker continued his questioning of the driver for another hour and a half. As he concluded, he turned toward the glass, knowing I was on the other side, and motioned me to his office. I scurried down the hall. It was excruciating waiting for Baker to come in. I wanted to see that photo.
“Here’s the picture of the woman who paid the Uber driver,” Baker said as he cupped his phone in his hand allowing me to view the photo.
“Holy shit!” I blurted. “I know that face. She’s one of the new girls at Sarah’s House.”
“I’m going to pick her up,” Baker said. “Want to meet me there?”
I was out of the door and on my way to Sarah’s House in a flash.
Chapter Fifteen:
Impostor
Gotcha, Victor. We blocked your little legal maneuver for the time being. Next I’ll bet the impostor at Sarah’s House is working for you. We’ll bust her. She’ll tell Jaeger everything you put her up to doing and your ass will head off to jail, I thought as I sped toward the shelter. What else could she do? The Uber driver’s testimony together with the photo he snapped with his cell phone camera nailed her. Her choices were to cooperate with the police or do some really hard time.