Chasing Shadow Demons

by John Moore

  I drove to Sarah’s House. I found Karen Durio in the family room breast-feeding her infant. I told I was her proud of the care she was giving her baby. I asked how she’d chosen to breast-feed. She was only seventeen years old. She explained she’d been on the Internet ever since she learned she was pregnant, preparing herself to be a mom. She’d learned breast-feeding boosted the immune system. When she finished, she asked if she could speak to me privately.

  We sat in Susan’s office with our chairs close enough to hear each other’s whispers. “Two other girls came to the center on the same day Tiffany arrived. I thought it was a little odd that so many women needed help on the same day. I grew suspicious when I saw they all knew each other. Something was wrong with them. They didn’t seem to fit in here. Yesterday, they were in the bathroom together. I needed to wash my baby’s face, so I waited by the door for them to finish. I heard them say they felt bad for what they did, but Tiffany had to go. Victor insisted. It was either her or them. I don’t know exactly what they meant, but I thought you should know.”

  “Do you know the girls’ names?” I asked.

  Karen pulled out her cell phone. “Not their real names, but I have their pictures if that will help.”

  She handed me her phone and I texted the photos to myself. I’d send these to Piper, hoping she’d recognize them. I thanked Karen and warned her to stay clear of those two and keep this between us. She assured me she wouldn’t say a word to anyone.

  I left the center, heading back to my condo. So that’s how Victor pulled this whole frame-up job. He sent three girls into the center. Tiffany’s job must have been to lure the Dixie Mafia’s girls to a hotel, thinking they were going to turn a trick. She sent the Uber driver to pick them up. When the girls refused to cooperate she or one of Victor’s goons killed them and disposed of the bodies. When Jaeger found out Tiffany was working for Victor, he texted Tiffany’s photo to Clinton Cunningham. He didn’t know Victor had cloned his phone and intercepted the photo and message. That must have been when Victor gave the order to the other two girls at the center to poison Tiffany and frame Susan. Victor had done his homework on Susan and knew her family’s history, planning to frame her all along. He was brilliantly diabolical. He just didn’t count on Karen’s loyalty to Susan and me. He also didn’t know how incredible a hacker Piper was.

  My next step was to tie these two girls to Victor if possible. I sent the photos to Piper with instructions to find their true identities and get back to me as soon as possible. I couldn’t wait to hear back from her. When Piper’s email arrived on my blog, I wasn’t disappointed.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine:

  Turned Inside Out

  There were two emails from Piper, one sent earlier in the day. It contained videos of the two girls whom Jaeger had taken advantage of in London, Piper concealing their identities with clever video editing, covering their faces digitally with an editing program. I don’t know how she did it, but the little minx talked the girls into allowing her to use their names and videos if necessary. That wasn’t all she’d done to Jaeger. She’d hacked his phone and sent the videos to him, making it appear they were all over the Internet. I’ll bet he crapped his pants when he saw them.

  I nearly broke my fingers opening Piper’s second email. She’d attached a diagram of all of Victor’s websites on the dark web. There were photos of girls who appeared on multiple sites. She had even recorded the dates, times, and locations the photos were taken. In some cases, when the photo had been taken by a cell phone, she gave me the registered owner of the phone and added that she could give me the complete address book as well as the most recent calls.

  She also delivered what I was most interested in: a picture of Tiffany, whose real name was Althea Antipov, from Ukraine; the other two girls—both Americans from Los Angeles; and complete dossiers on all of them. There were photos of each of the girls on many of Victor’s websites. Piper had hacked the phones of the two girls and had printouts of the telephone numbers they’d texted. The phones led back to Victor. Though one of the correspondences definitively linked them, or Victor, to the death of Tiffany, a.k.a. Althea, I had enough to clear Susan of the murder. I wanted to do backflips.

  I took all of the information and wrote an article detailing Victor’s background and connection to the porn and hooker sites. I described the various services the girls offered as well as how long they’d worked for him. I included gobs of photos of each of the girls from the sites on which they were featured.

  Then I wrote the story of Victor’s connections in Baton Rouge, displaying the check and deposit to Ms. Butler’s account. I attached the corporate papers from Lichtenstein showing Victor as owner.

  When I finished writing the article, I picked up the card Victor had given me when he and El Alacran visited my condo and called him. Somehow, he knew it was me when he answered the phone.

  “Well, hello, Alexandra. What a pleasant surprise. How may I help you?”

  “No, Mr. Ivanovich, it’s how I can help you that’s important,” I said. “Do you have a private email address? I need to send you an article I’m turning in to the Times today. I’d like you to review it for accuracy. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Once you’ve read it call me back at this number.”

  Victor gave me his email address, and I sent him the article, subject line: The End of Anonymity. In the body of the email I wrote, “Call me if you’d like to talk.” Of course I didn’t hear from him, but his silence spoke volumes.

  My happy dance was interrupted by a call from Detective Baker. “Alexandra, Inspector Jaeger has gotten a material witness warrant for Constance Sanders and has taken her into his custody. They are not at the police station. He’s taken her somewhere else off the grid. I don’t know the details of how and why, but I thought you should know.”

  Holy shit. He is using her for bait, I thought. Piper must be in danger. Surely he wasn’t able to track the videos back to her. Was he capable of hurting her or worse? These and more horrible thoughts went through my mind. I had to find her. But how? I called her phone. No answer. I did the only thing I could think to do. I raced down the streets of New Orleans to the French Quarter. I burst into Clinton Cunningham’s office.

  “Jaeger’s taken Piper. Where the hell is she?” I screamed.

  Clint sat behind his desk as if nothing were wrong, smiling at me, amused by my hysteria. “Go home and wait for your friend Zach to come to see you. You’ll get your answers then,” he said.

  “I’m not going anywhere until I know where Piper is.”

  “You don’t have a choice. You aren’t in control of this situation. It’s going to have an ugly end if you don’t listen, you hard-headed little bitch.”

  I wanted to lunge across the desk and knock his tobacco-stained teeth down his double-chinned throat, but that voice inside me spoke again: “Calm down and go home.” As much as I hated it, I had to listen. I had no other choice.

  The drive to my condo was excruciating. I was at the mercy of the Dixie Mafia, Russian Mafia, and a German pervert cop with nothing to lose. Jaeger must have gone off the deep end when he saw the videos, knowing his career was over. He must have reckoned this was his last chance to get Victor, and he was going to use Piper to do it. My hands trembled as I gripped my steering wheel. Tears flowed down both sides of my face. I sent a silent prayer to heaven, hoping my mom and Sarah would look after Piper. Oh my God, I was petrified.

  When I arrived at the condo, Zach was once again sitting on the steps, still bandaged, and looking emaciated from the weight he’d lost during his stay in the hospital. I felt sorry for him. I knew he’d made the choices that put him the terrible position he was in, but I thought he’d suffered enough for his mistakes. When do you get a second chance? I wondered. Sarah sought redemption and she paid with her life. Was that going to be Zach’s fate too?

  “Hi, Alexandra. Let’s get inside befor
e we are spotted,” Zach said.

  We hurried inside the condo and sat at the kitchen table. “What’s going on with Piper?” I asked.

  “I’m not really sure. I got a call from Clinton Cunningham a short while ago. He told me my debt to him would be paid in full after I did one last thing for him. He instructed me to come to your condo and wait with you for a few hours. Then he wanted me to ride with you back to the French Quarter to his strip club on Bourbon Street. He instructed me to stay out of sight till then.”

  “I don’t understand. I just left his club. He could have told me all of that himself. Why all of the cloak-and-dagger?”

  “I don’t know. I know it has something to do with the telephone call you made to Victor Ivanovich. But that’s all I know.”

  I struggled with the idea of sitting in my kitchen doing nothing while Piper was in the hands of Jaeger, but what could I do? I didn’t know where he’d taken her. I called Detective Baker again, and he had nothing new on Jaeger’s whereabouts. My stomach turned flips as I waited. I rubbed my fingers across my forehead over and over like Aladdin rubbing his lamp, as if a thought would pop into my head to bring this episode to a happy ending. The clock seemed to move backward. Funny how time crawls when you are waiting for a disaster to strike. I tried occupying myself with my blog but couldn’t face reading the posts about missing young girls. Piper and Tom had become my life. They were still both in jeopardy, and I was confined to my condo, waiting for something. What I was waiting for, I did not know. Was I supposed to trust Clint? No way. But I did trust my inner voice, and it was telling me to be patient.

  Finally my phone rang. I sprang on it like a leopard on a gazelle. Caller ID said it was Sophia. Oh God, I thought, something has happened to Tom. “Alexandra, I have some news for you . . . Tom is being released.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Alexandra, it’s true. The Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs office called the American Embassy to confirm Tom would be released from jail today. The prosecutor brought Tom into court this morning and told the judge that Mexico was dismissing all charges. He will be free to leave later this afternoon as soon as the paperwork is complete. I am trying to book us a flight to the States tomorrow morning.”

  I cried joyous tears, because Tom was coming home. I was worried I’d never see him again, but now a miracle was bringing him home. Home to me. But, our entire family had to be reunited before I could rest. I needed to find Piper. Where the hell had Jaeger taken her?

  “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sophia,” I said, nearly screaming into the phone. Zach watched me in astonishment, my elation and enthusiasm lighting his face up like a Japanese lantern. He was happy for me. Soon his expression dimmed as the reality of our current situation brought us both back down to earth.

  Zach and I talked about Tom coming home. I think he was trying to take my mind off of Piper for a few minutes. He liked Tom and thought he was good for me. He said he’d seen a huge change in me since Tom and I got together. He was right. I’d never considered having a family life. I’m sure the dream was buried somewhere in the very back of my mind, but I feared the vulnerability that came with family ties. After all, my mother and father both passed when I was still young. My father lived longer than my mother, but his mind left him when I was still in high school. I associated family with a broken heart and loss. If you love them, they are taken away from you. I wanted to avoid that pain, and I’d tried. But now I had a family I couldn’t live without. Tom and Piper were my family, and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing them like I’d lost my parents.

  The silence was broken by Zach’s cell phone ringing. When he hung up he said, “That was Clint. He wants us to go to his bar now. He said don’t waste any time and to get there as fast as we could.”

  What the hell? Should I just blindly trust him and head to the bar? Was this some sort of trap? Were Zach and I going to get beaten or killed? I really wasn’t sure what to expect. But, if I stood even a small chance of getting Piper back safely, I had to go. I had to accept the consequences of my decision to save her from those demons who were terrorizing us. I had my .38 strapped to my leg. I was determined to use it if I had to.

  Zack and I sped along the busy streets on the way to the Quarter. He grabbed onto the dash of my car and cinched his seatbelt as tightly as he could. I kept my eyes focused on the traffic ahead as I weaved in and out, cutting cars off, ignoring the blaring horns and the extended middle fingers. I glanced at Zach. His eyes were closed, and I would have thought it cute were it not for the circumstances. Neither of us spoke a word. Neither knew what fate awaited us.

  We parked, and ran down Bourbon Street to Clint’s bar. We zipped by the dancers and security and burst into his office. Clint was seated at his desk, and Jaeger was standing in front of him, holding Piper tightly just above the elbow. She looked fine, but my blood boiled at those thick, meaty fingers digging into her thin arm. Before I could even blink, Clint threw up his right hand at me like a cop halting oncoming traffic.

  “Don’t say a word,” Clint barked. “I’ll do all of the talking.” As soon as he spoke, two of his goons walked into the room and stood in the corner with their guns drawn.

  “Is it all set up?” Jaeger asked.

  “Yes,” Clint answered as he rose to his feet and opened a closet door. “You two get in here and stay quiet. No matter what you hear, do not say a word until I tell you to come out.”

  Jaeger threw me a confident look and dragged Piper into the closet as Clint shut the door behind him. Clint looked at me and gave me a knowing wink. I was nearly at panic stage by then, but something told me to remain composed. I sat in a chair as instructed but reached down and put my hand by my .38 revolver.

  Clint yelled to his men, “OK, bring them in.”

  One of the goons walked out and repeated the command to some of Clint’s men in the bar. After a few long minutes Victor Ivanovich and El Alacran walked into the room. I nearly peed my pants. Clint put his right hand up just as before. Victor flashed a nervously confident smile at me. The Scorpion scowled. I was sure he would eat me, bones and all, if Victor gave the word. I had no idea where this scene was headed. Zach began to tremble at the sight of El Alacran. Not surprising after the beating he’d taken.

  Victor spoke first. “Do we have a deal, Mr. Cunningham?”

  “Yes, Mr. Ivanovich, we do.”

  “Then let me see the goods.”

  “It’s time, Mr. Jaeger,” Clint said.

  As soon as he spoke, Jaeger opened the door. He stood next to Piper with the same tobacco-stained smile I’d seen before. Clint’s two goons edged their way to flank Jaeger on either side. Clint nodded to Jaeger, and he let go of Piper’s arm. One of Clint’s men walked Piper to me. I noticed how pale she was, her thin face cracking a smile as she threw her arms around me.

  A shocked Jaeger looked at me and then Clint. “What the fuck is going on here?” he yelled.

  The huge goons on either side of Jaeger grabbed him and pinned him against the wall. Clint looked at me and Zach with eyes as cold as a Montana winter. “Take her and get the hell out of here. Now!”

  El Alacran squinted his eyes and wrinkled his nose, a face of complete confusion. “Yeah, what the fuck is going on?”

  Victor put his hand on the Scorpion’s forearm to silence him. Victor’s movements were quick and confident. He let El Alacran know all of these actions were part of his agreement with Clint. Only two men in the room knew the answer to the questions Jaeger and the Scorpion had asked. Victor and Clint had struck some deal that included Piper and me being reunited. It slowly dawned on Jaeger that his fate was not so certain. Piper was not the prize the two bosses were exchanging. Jaeger was.

  Whatever their deal was didn’t concern me, because I had Piper and that was the only thing that mattered. Zach jumped to his feet, and the three of us ran from the room without lookin
g back. We didn’t stop our gallop till we were in my car, Piper breathless, half crying, half laughing. I know what it’s like to be in that condition, and I knew she’d be just fine with a little time, a few hugs, and maybe a meal.

  We sped home as fast as we could. I didn’t dare stop for fear that killing the three of us might be a part of Victor’s and Clinton’s deal. It all happened too fast to make sense of it.

  At the condo, Zach was the first to speak. “I don’t know what deal they made, but I think we are safe now. I watched these guys work for years. If they intended to hurt us, we wouldn’t have been allowed to leave that room. No, they didn’t want us there to witness their next moves.”

  I gave Piper a few of the hugs she needed and then a few more. I wouldn’t let her escape even briefly from my grip. I stroked her hair as I listened to Zach. “It was like the devil’s demons had come to collect his black soul and take it away. They swooped in, grabbed their bounty, and retreated back to the shadows. Maybe we just witnessed an evil man being taken to hell,” I said.

  Zach and Piper both nodded. My phone rang as I spoke, so I dug it out of my purse. The caller ID said, “Tom Sanders.” Holy shit, Tom was calling me from his phone.

  Chapter Thirty :

  A New Home

  “Oh my God, Tom, is that you?”

  “Yes, pretty girl, it’s me. They let me out this morning and just gave me back my phone. Sophia is with me and we are getting the hell out of here tomorrow morning. I miss you so much. I can’t wait to see you. How’s Piper?”