by Osborne, Jon
Angel shook her head and corrected herself mentally. If she ever found the girl, that is.
Fifteen minutes later, she located Elite Escorts of Cleveland, sandwiched between a tanning salon and an H&R Block accounting office in a surprisingly upscale strip mall. The girl sitting behind the front desk showed fresh-faced good looks and an unmistakable youthful glow. Angel guessed her age at about nineteen.
The young girl smiled at her as she entered the front door, displaying perfect teeth in the most natural sense of the word. No masterful dentist had sculpted those pearly whites. They’d been a gift straight from God Himself.
Lucky girl.
“Good morning, ma’am,” the girl said, still smiling brightly as Angel approached the front desk. “Have you come to apply for the open position?”
Angel didn’t detect any irony in the girl’s voice, and she couldn’t help feeling embarrassed. Also, flattered as hell.
“No, no,” she said quickly, flipping open one of her old badges from her days on the Cleveland police force and showing it to the girl. “My name is Angel Monroe and I’m looking for information on someone who may have worked here recently.”
Angel shifted a little as she waited for the girl’s reply. Passing herself off as a current member of the Cleveland PD probably didn’t constitute the most honest thing she’d ever done in her life, but she hoped it would grease the wheels a hell of a lot faster than showing her private investigator’s license would. Cracker Jack cop. Rent-a-cop. Meter maid. She’d heard them all before and she really wasn’t in the mood to hear any more of them right now.
The young girl widened her clear blue eyes in astonishment while she stared at the burnished-copper star cupped in Angel’s right palm, her bright smile faltering like a loose light bulb in a passing train. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.
Angel could tell that the poor thing didn’t have the faintest goddamn clue of what to say or do next, so she gave the girl a smile of her own, tried to make it a strong and reassuring one. “Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “You’re not in trouble for anything. I just need to talk to your boss for a quick minute, that’s all. No big deal.”
The young girl still didn’t look so sure as she rose from her seat on long legs that were encased in a jet-black leather mini-skirt. Not only were the girl’s teeth perfect, the chick had a great pair of gams too. Really lucky girl.
“That would be Mr. Hathaway,” the girl said uncertainly, finally finding her voice again and knocking a pencil off her desk before leaning down to pick it up, which afforded Angel a clear view down her blouse of extremely taut cleavage. Those, Angel felt pretty certain, hadn’t been a gift from The Man Upstairs. More likely a gift from the mysterious Mr. Hathaway himself. Or at least somebody like him. The very best that money could buy.
“Is there any way I could talk to him for a minute?” Angel asked.
“I’ll go get him right away, ma’am,” the girl said, knocking the pencil to the floor again but leaving it there this time. Who should I tell him is here to see him? Officer… deputy…”
Her voice trailed off, her face reddening, then turning an alarming shade of purple.
Angel let the girl off the hook as quickly as she possibly could, resisting the urge to come around the desk to give her a reassuring hug. “Just tell him Angel Monroe wants to talk to him, sweetie. Please tell him it’s a very urgent matter.”
The young girl turned and disappeared quickly down the hall on her beautiful legs, which Angel saw were attached to an equally beautiful butt. Angel pursed her lips as she watched the girl walk away. Some chicks really did have things just too goddamn easy in this life.
A moment later, a tall, distinguished-looking man in his mid-forties, dressed in a flawlessly cut suit and wearing a pair of wire-framed designer eyeglasses, poked his head into the reception area. “Officer Monroe?” he asked. “I’m Stephen Hathaway, owner of the agency. If you’ll please follow me.”
Angel followed Hathaway down a long hallway and into a comfortable-looking office paneled in heavy wood. The escort-agency maven closed the door behind them as Angel stepped inside.
Angel paused and looked around. A potted fern. Decent art hanging on the walls. A heavy brass paperweight that was sitting in the middle of a desk blotter in the center of a massive mahogany desk. A hell of a lot nicer than Angel’s own office over at The Caxton Building – and no doubt a hell of a lot more costly. Angel guessed what they said was true. Sex really did sell.
Somebody alert marketing.
In addition to its plush amenities, Hathaway’s office had been set up in such a way as to imbue the aura of authority. His high-backed office chair had been strategically placed a couple inches higher than the one on the other side of the massive desk in which he motioned for Angel to sit.
Hathaway turned sideways in his own chair and raised a delicate-looking hand, gesturing to a long row of cut-glass decanters that were filled with an amber liquid on the shelf above his head. Brandy, Angel guessed. Probably the good stuff.
“Would you care for a drink, officer?” Hathaway asked. “No? How may I help you then?”
Angel leaned forward in her chair and flipped onto his desk the business card she’d taken from Sasha Diggs’s bedroom. “I’m looking for information on a girl named Sasha Diggs,” she said. “You probably know her better as Candy, but I’m pretty sure you also know her as Sasha. Tax purposes and all that.”
Hathaway leaned back in his enormous leather chair and studied the card. After a moment or two, he slid it back and leaned back in his chair again, templing his fingers in front of his face. The move was meant to project power, Angel knew, coming straight out of the Insincere Corporate Fat Cats guidebook. “Ah, yes, Candy… Sasha. One of my best girls. Certainly one of the brightest.”
Angel slipped the business card back into her purse. “Let’s see the roster book,” she said, her tone letting Hathaway know that she wasn’t here today in order to listen to any of his false protests about what he really did for a living. Richly paneled office or not, the man was a pimp, plain and simple. And they both knew it.
Hathaway didn’t flinch, leaning forward to pull a leather-bound volume from a desk drawer. Angel lifted her eyebrows in surprise, getting the distinct impression that Hathaway had been shaken down before, knew how to play the game. If she played her cards right here, that could work in her favor.
She rose from her chair and came around to Hathaway’s side of the desk as he opened up the book, finally leveling the playing field between them and hovering just a few inches over his left shoulder.
Hathaway flipped through a few pages in the book before he stopped at Sasha Diggs’s smiling face. Angel narrowed her eyes and studied the photograph. Same gorgeous girl from the picture in the newspaper article. Same smooth, caramel skin. Same huge, hazel eyes. Same shiny black hair. Same beautiful body that stuck out in all the right places.
All in all, an embarrassment of riches.
Hathaway’s expensive cologne floated up into her nostrils and tickled the tiny hairs lining the inside of her nose, making her want to sneeze as she adjusted the book on his desk and read quickly through the short bio printed beside Sasha’s picture:
Candy is a young African-American woman who’s always up for a good time! Her basic rate is $300 an hour, but she can be all yours for the night for the low, low price of just $1,500.
Barely out of her teens, Candy doesn’t believe in taboos. Greek, threesomes, role-playing – nothing’s out of the question when it comes to this delicious piece of milk chocolate. So why not give this sweet little bon-bon a call and get a taste of “Candy” for yourself? You won’t be disappointed. As a matter of fact, we’re pretty sure you’ll develop a sweet tooth for Candy after just one night!
Angel slid out the eight-by-ten photo from the plastic cover directly to the left of the bio without asking Hathaway’s permission. “Cute,” she said. “You write this all by yourself, Hemingway?”
Ha
thaway didn’t answer.
“I’ll be taking this with me, of course,” Angel said.
“Of course,” Hathaway agreed, waving a manicured hand in the air as though her statement represented a foregone conclusion that required no further discussion.
“Now, where’s the logbook?” Angel asked.
Again Hathaway didn’t hesitate, sliding open another drawer and pulling out a ledger book. Sasha Diggs’s appointments had been noted in pencil about a third of the way through the book.
Angel tore out the appropriate sheet neatly at the binding and folded it up lengthwise before slipping it into her purse next to the business card. “I’ll be taking this with me, too,” she said.
“Of course,” Hathaway agreed again. “Is there anything else I can do to be of assistance, officer?”
Angel resisted the urge to flip him the bird as she walked back around his desk and made her way to the door. “No, I think that will be all for now, Mr. Hathaway. I’ll be in touch with you if and when I need anything else. Good day.”
“Good day, officer.”
On her way out of the escort agency, Angel found the pretty little receptionist seated at the front desk again. The young girl still looked shaken up, like she’d been crying the entire time that Angel had been in the back with Hathaway.
The girl lifted her enormous blue eyes to meet Angel’s. They were brimming over with tears.
Such a pretty little thing, Angel thought. It really was a pity that she’d gotten mixed up in this ugly world so early on in life.
“Am I in trouble?” the girl asked weakly.
Angel smiled. “Of course not, sweetie.” She slipped out a business card from her purse and slid it across the desk. “As a matter of fact, if Mr. Hathaway back there gives you any trouble with anything at all, just give me a call at the number on this card. Any time, honey. Day or night.”
The girl nodded and plucked the card off the desk before delicately wiping away a single tear from her left eye with a freshly manicured pinkie finger, obviously not wanting to smear her mascara any further than she already had with her crying. “Thank you, ma’am,” the girl sniffled. “I’ll do that.”
Angel left Elite Escorts of Cleveland before the girl could figure out that she no longer rode with the Cleveland police force in any official capacity. And – as Angel would soon find out – she’d left the office just in time.
Still, her exit had only delayed the inevitable, hadn’t it?
And the inevitable would soon find her tied to a sturdy wooden cross constructed of I-beams that was cemented into a barbecue pit behind The Brotherhood’s white-supremacist compound deep in the woods of Creek Run, Mississippi.
CHAPTER 46
Gerald Trebblehorn’s entire body trembled in electric ecstasy as his penis exploded inside the nigger girl’s mouth, every last nerve-ending in his body shaking and shimmying with the nearly indescribable pleasure of a mind-blowing orgasm. It seemed almost too much to take.
Thoroughly drained, Templeton pushed the girl roughly off him. As he withdrew, her teeth scraped the sensitive skin on the underside of his manhood, but he didn’t mind. Hell, it marked the first time he could tell the girl even had any teeth in her mouth at all. A true sign of a professional, if ever there’d been one.
He buckled up his jeans and took a step back. “I’ll tell you what, nigger,” he said, shaking his head in admiration. “That’s one fantastic mouth you’ve got there. Tell me something: How much would something like that cost me out on the street?”
Sasha Diggs fought the incessant waves of nausea that were wracking her body like powerful ocean tides crashing up against a rocky shore, trying her best to not throw up. Doing what she’d just done disgusted her, of course, made her want to vomit up her guts all over the filthy basement floor, just like it had every time she’d performed a similar act on one of her clients at the escort agency. But sickening as the realization might be for her to get to grips with, Sasha knew that she needed whatever little nourishment the semen could provide.
You should have bitten off his fucking dick, dumb ass. That would have kept you eating for an entire week.
Sasha shook off the horrible thought, feeling ashamed of herself despite the circumstances. She hadn’t been raised to think like that, though. She’d been raised to think and act like a good girl, to always live right in the eyes of Jesus. Still, those days seemed long gone now, and from the look of things they were never coming back again.
Sasha closed her eyes and fought back the fresh wellspring of tears that was threatening to burst from her face in a frantic rush. It was truly pathetic how low a human being could sink when his or her life hung in the balance, but with her body eating away at itself a little more with each passing day, the hunger clawing at her insides outweighed even what little pride she had left.
She almost laughed out loud at the ridiculous thought.
Pride? Is that what you called it when you’d just sucked off some white supremacist’s cock? Your pride died a long time ago, honey. Crushed like a baby bird’s skull beneath a monster’s heavy boot the first time you ever spread your legs for money in the hopes that it would lead you and your family to a better life.
Bitter tears finally burst from her eyes, blurring her vision badly while her jumbled thoughts flashed to her grandmother. The old woman was undoubtedly beside herself with worry by now, and as Sasha marked her grandmother’s sole source of income, Jelani Diggs would need to turn to the government for a handout soon to get by, if she hadn’t done so already. And doing that would kill the old woman just as surely as a bullet right between the eyes.
“I asked you a question, nigger.”
Sasha lifted up her stare to meet the enormous blonde man’s. In her mind’s eye, she was leaping across the room and clawing out his eyeballs with her broken fingernails. But in the real world – the only world that actually counted right now – she simply huddled over in the corner of the basement like a badly beaten puppy. “Three hundred dollars,” she said weakly.
The blonde man nodded thoughtfully. “Worth every goddamn cent of it, if you ask me.”
Sasha lowered her stare. When she lifted up her gaze again, she took in a deep breath through her nostrils and asked the one question she didn’t know if she wanted to hear the answer to. The answer that would decide whether she lived or died today here in this decrepit basement on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio.
“But was it… good enough?”
CHAPTER 47
Dana narrowed her eyes as she stared at the thin blonde strand pressed lightly between the tips of the tweezers.
She let out a deep breath and felt her heart sink in her chest, all the way down to the pit of her stomach. The tickle of hope that had been residing there dissipated at once. “Goddamn it,” she muttered harshly underneath her breath.
Blankenship leaned over the Subaru’s divider. “What is it?” he asked.
Dana shifted her arm in order to afford him a better viewing angle of the hair. “No root,” she said. “Can’t be tested for DNA. That means it’s basically useless to us, other than telling us the perp’s hair color, of course.”
She turned and placed the hair into a plastic evidence bag that Agent Terrance Jones was holding out. When he’d zipped shut the bag again, the Seattle agent went to work marking the evidence – however flimsy that particular evidence might be.
Dana turned back to Blankenship and shook her head. “As much as it would make things easier on us, Bruce, I highly doubt they’re gonna let us bring in every blonde-haired guy in the greater Seattle metropolitan area for questioning because of this. Not even the PATRIOT Act would cover something like that.”
“Of course that would be the one thing it doesn’t cover.”
Dana shook off the political thoughts and resumed her work scanning the backseat of the car for any additional evidence. Twenty minutes later, she finally pulled off her gloves with a loud elastic snapping noise and lowered the paper mask from
her mouth, satisfied she’d covered every last square inch of the backseat. She asked Blankenship, “Find anything interesting up front?”
Blankenship turned around and shook his head. “Not a damn thing. The front seat looks like it was vacuumed recently, maybe a week or so ago. Definitely before the murder happened, though. Enough dirt and lint on the floor to tell me that much.”
Dana exited the Subaru and closed the door behind her. She turned to Olokawandi. “Anything discovered on Betsy Campbell’s body during the autopsy?”
The Seattle fed held her stare. “Other than the forty-four knife wounds, you mean?”
Dana nodded. “Yeah. Other than the forty-four knife wounds, I mean.”
Olokawandi shook his head. “Not a damn thing there, either. No trace evidence underneath her fingernails, no DNA on her body at all other than her own. The asshole whitewashed her pretty good.”
The veteran Seattle agent pressed his full lips into an angry line. “I suppose that was his intention, though, don’t you? What I wouldn’t give right now to turn in my shield and gun and return the favor in a back room somewhere. Just the two of us. Two men enter, one man leaves.”
Dana pressed her own lips together. She knew exactly how Olokawandi felt right now. Once again, death would have been too good for whoever had done this despicable act.
Clearing her throat, she was about to tell Olokawandi as much when the ringing of her phone inside her purse cut her off. She held up a finger to her fellow agents and motioned for them to wait while she dug out the phone, flipped it open and placed it to her ear. “Whitestone.”
Ninety seconds later – after she’d filled in Bill Krugman on the discovery of the hair they’d found inside the Subaru and had listened to what the Director had to say in return – Dana snapped shut her phone again. To Jones and Olokawandi, she said, “Looks like you guys are going to get your wish, fellas.”
Jones knitted his thick black eyebrows on his broad forehead. “What do you mean by that?”