“I might have my life, but I’ll spend the rest of it in a jail cell.”
There was nothing for me to say to that. If Albert had been involved, he would be charged as well.
Albert cleared his throat. He did not look at me but said, “A businessman never ventures too far from his product. Check out the old barn on State Route 710 near Bayton Bridge. There’s an abandoned house out there. The local PD will know where it is.”
I scribbled down the directions. “Product…is this where the drugs were kept? Or is this where the older women stayed who were recovering in Heart to Heart?”
Albert balled the tissue up in his fist. Tears filled his eyes, and he struggled with the decision of whether or not to tell me more. After some hesitation, he finally gave me his trust. “This is where the other product is kept. The younger women. The ones marked up and bid on.”
My blood ran cold.
Young women. For sale.
*
Harvey and I pushed through the overgrown grass and weeds, both nervous and unsure of what we might find. Thistles and thorns swatted against our legs until we came to the old, abandoned farmhouse near Bayton Bridge. The windows of the three-story home were broken, and chips of white paint peeled away from the wood in long shards. Creeping vines wound their way up the sides of the old home where portions of wood had rotted out. The nearest neighbor was at least a mile away. Just as Albert had said, there was also a barn on the property. We’d been inside it and found nothing other than a stray cat and her kittens along with some old farming equipment. A farmer who lived in the area was rumored to have taken over the land and used the abandoned barn to store his plow—a squatter of sorts. When we located him, he apologized profusely, terrified we’d arrest him for using land that wasn’t his for profit. Once we convinced him we only wanted information, he said he tended to the crops most days, but hadn’t seen any unusual activity on the land.
Harvey and I stood before the tall farmhouse with guns drawn. I’d already called in the location where the girls might be held, and Riley responded with a strict order: Wait for backup. Since Albert told me the girls were in the barn and we’d found nothing, I didn’t have much hope there would be anything in the crumbling farmhouse. But there was always the chance—the chance Albert had told me the truth, the chance there were girls caged inside—and I couldn’t let them wait any longer for help. I turned the broken doorknob. It clicked, and I slowly pushed open the heavy wooden door. I gave Harvey a signal: Go left. I’ll go right.
I rounded an old dining room table and made my way into a kitchen barren of anything but a sink and a ceiling fan with broken blades. The floorboards creaked beneath my weight, unsteady and soft with lack of care and years of moisture. I turned the corner into a small room that was most likely used for laundry, my stance rigid with tension. A large steel tub sat in the corner, and trash littered the space along with a few overturned paint cans. When I emerged from the room, Harvey stood waiting before me. The first level was clear.
I directed her upstairs while I went down. The steep, slatted stairs led me into darkness so thick I couldn’t see my hands in front of me. I flipped on a flashlight and rested it above my gun, descending slowly into the silent cellar. I finally landed on the cement flooring, which had cracked, and the pieces had grown disjointed with age. The pungent odor of mold filled the air. I made my way across the uneven flooring, scanning the space with the flashlight. The cellar was empty featuring a wide-open cavern with a small staircase to a hatch exit like the one they used to escape the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.
The cellar stairs creaked above me. My light beam spun around.
“All clear upstairs,” Harvey said when she met me in the cellar. “Maybe Albert sent us to the wrong location on purpose.”
“Or maybe they moved everything as soon as we arrested Joan Marco,” my voice hardly above a whisper. My light beam scanned along the seams of the walls.
“The mold down here is enough to kill a horse,” Harvey said.
“Breathe through your mouth.” I dropped the light beam to scan the edges of the flooring along with their connection to the walls.
“Come on, Hansen.” Harvey’s voice sounded nasally through her scrunched nose. “Let’s get out of here.”
Just as I turned to follow her up the stairs, the light hit a section of the wall that was different—cement blocks that were painted brown to look like the rest of the heavy wooden slats. I stepped toward it, and Harvey followed. Leading with my gun and flashlight, I ran my hands along the wood and cement. The rap of my knuckles against the slatted wood sounded hollow, like there could be an open space behind it.
“Help me pull down this wood,” I said.
Harvey grunted, her way of telling me she really just wanted to get out of the old house, but would appease me.
“Look for an opening in the wood, anything we can grab hold of,” I said.
The wood slats were flush, but there was a give to them. We found a chipped hole near one of the corners about the size of an acorn.
Then I heard it: a small voice. Faint at first, then gathering in volume: “Help.”
I turned to Harvey. I gave her a look that said, Did you hear that?
“Please. Get us out of here!”
Both Harvey and I leapt at the wooden wall; our hands couldn’t tear at the boards fast enough. When I shone my flashlight into the small hole and told the voice to hang on, the light beam landed on the large eyes of a frightened girl. “Help us!” she screamed.
My hands dug and tore at the crevices of wood, ripping my fingernails down to the quick. When I finally found an opening that led me to a small door, the tips of my fingers chafed and filled with splinters. Huddled together in a mass of flesh were the girls—the ones for sale.
The smell of urine and defecation overwhelmed me, and I instructed Harvey to stop pulling down the wooden slats. We needed as much of the original structure in place for documentation of the scene. I called for medical squads and the entire crime scene team, directing them toward the back of the house to the cellar door where the entrance would be easier.
Harvey motioned to the women with her arms. “Come out. You’re safe.”
“No!” I pleaded with the young women to stay. “We can’t risk moving them, Harvey. They could go into shock.”
“But the EMTs will be here in a few minutes.”
I called into the small space, “Is anyone hurt?”
No one responded, and in the glare of our flashlights, multiple large brown eyes stared back at us. Naked, bone-skinny, and strung out, their eyes hadn’t seen light in months and fought to adjust. The oldest among them couldn’t have been more than twenty years of age, and they clung to one another in a small circle for support. When one girl fell to her knees, the others lifted her back up. They turned from Harvey and me as if we might lock them back up or kill them.
I held my badge up and shone the light on it. “Police,” I said. Soon the oldest spoke to the others in a sudden burst of thick language I didn’t recognize. Then everyone fell quiet. The young women’s muscles had atrophied with the forced starvation, and I found myself staring at their knobs of vertebrae, one over the other, like a string of pearls.
“Leave them.” I directed Harvey to stay with the girls and moved over to the short set of cement stairs tucked away in a far corner of the cellar. They led up to the padlocked door where I could see a thin line of a blue sky where the two wooden doors met. I pushed against them hard, but the padlock wouldn’t budge. I resorted to kicking against the doors hard a few times before the cellar door finally popped open to let in a stream of the bright sun. I savored a few breaths of fresh air, and I went back to help Harvey watch over the girls.
In the depths of the cellar, no one spoke, and no one cried.
The young women were all alive, and the sirens roared toward us.
Chapter Twenty-four
Day Fourteen: 7:30 p.m.
I lay across the hotel bed an
d listened to the TV news commentators report on the human trafficking ring found in Wallace Lake, Ohio. In a bizarre twist to the Midwest’s recent serial killer case…Aerial photographs showed the run-down farmhouse and the collection of law enforcement vehicles surrounding it. The commentators had a field day speculating on what this latest piece could add. What the commentators didn’t say, unfortunately, was that Ohio was a common stop on human trafficking routes through the United States. Most wouldn’t guess those sorts of nightmares hid beneath the surface when they drove through the idyllic countryside or our friendly Ohio cities.
The four young women found in the old farmhouse had been airlifted to a Columbus hospital. While they were badly dehydrated and undernourished, all were expected to make a full recovery. We’d lost six women in the case that we knew of so far; the recovery of four gave our team something to celebrate, but it didn’t balance out the bloody equation. Justice, I’d found, generally carried with it a deficit.
It had been a long and emotional day. A nurse had removed all the splinters from my hands and cleaned the abrasions. She wrapped my hands, winding around every finger, and explained to me that the community of Wallace Lake saw us as heroes. “You saved those girls,” she said. “Lord knows how many others have come through our town. Your actions put a stop to it.” I smiled and thanked her, all the while hoping that Sanders would see my actions in the same light. I’d blatantly ignored Riley’s command to wait for backup, and while he wasn’t my direct supervisor, I knew he’d report the risky behavior to Sanders.
As more details emerged about what the young women had gone through, I fought the urge to vomit all the acids churning inside my stomach. I chastised myself for taking so long to find the girls, for not asking people the right questions, and for my inability to see that the entire case could have been about human trafficking. After all, it had been me who’d initially asked Sanders about the tattoos as a marker for human trafficking. Why hadn’t I followed through on that instinct?
Henry Marco, we’d learned, was arrested during a routine traffic stop in West Virginia. He’d been speeding seventeen miles over the limit, and the officer recognized him from the BOLO. Henry was in transport back to Wallace Lake where he’d join his wife in a separate holding cell. They had been the perfect cover for a human trafficking ring: an older, retired couple with spotless records and the façade of a welcoming home. The more I learned about the Marcos, the more I saw the carefully created image they strove for—everything, including their careers, were part of their invisibility from law enforcement. What made them invisible from the police, though, made them desirable to women of all ages struggling with addictions and financial troubles. After all, who would question a retired guidance counselor or the grandmotherly type who baked fresh cookies and pies? Who could imagine the friendly retired couple down the street as pimps and human traffickers? The entire scenario was simply absurd—and the perfect cover.
My cell rang.
“I found something, and I’m not sure exactly what it means,” Richardson said.
“God, Richardson, you’re relentless.”
Richardson chuckled. “I just wanted to check into a few more things. I was running a search for the recently deceased in the area and for some reason an adoption petition came up.”
“Adoption?”
“Glitch in the system, I guess. I found a record that shows Joan and Henry Marco tried to adopt Sadie Reid two years ago.”
I sat up. “What?”
“Sadie was sixteen years old at the time.”
“Why would the Marcos want to adopt her?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but it looks like the adoption never went forward. Wilma Henderson signed the documents, but I can’t find any signature from the grandmother.”
“The grandmother didn’t know.” I thought about what Rhonda had said: Sadie was staying with Joan. Why had Rhonda even brought Sadie into that conversation?
“Remember Wilma said she owed the Marcos. She said she gave them three girls as payment from Gary’s,” I said. “What if Wilma traded her own daughter for freedom?”
“We’ve found no evidence that Sadie has been involved with any of this. Sure, she could be prostituting for the Marcos, but they didn’t need to adopt Sadie for that.”
I thought about the leather band one of the officer’s found at the river and the mistake of hear for here in the Heart to Heart flyers. I thought about how Sadie kept her wrists hidden when she spoke to me about her mother being missing. Sadie Reid, like her mother, had the tattoo.
Suddenly, I understood.
Rhonda had been trying to send me a signal, and I completely missed the message. Sadie Reid was the latest victim of Joan Marco’s sick game. Ava Washington had been a red herring planted by Joan Marco. And we bit on that bait. Hard. Marco knew that as law enforcement officers, one of our biggest jobs was to keep minors safe. While we were focused on Ava and the process of removing her from Allard’s life, Joan hoped we’d overlook the other teen that desperately needed our help. Sadie, under Joan’s strict orders, had killed our four victims posed on the Powell River land bars.
*
My fist banged against the trailer’s front door. “Ava!” I called. “Open up, Ava!”
A pair of eyes peeked out at me through a glass cutout in the door. Ava’s mother opened the door. “It’s late, Special Agent.”
“Please, I need to see your daughter.”
She sighed. “Is this about Allard?”
“No. Sadie Reid.”
As soon as I mentioned Sadie’s name, Ava pushed her mother to the side. “What’s happened to Sadie?”
“I’m not sure. I need your help.”
Ava opened the door farther and motioned for me to come in. I followed Ava over to the couch where I’d questioned her thirteen days ago. Her mother shook her head. “I told you that girl was no good.”
I held up my hand to her; I didn’t have time for a petty argument with a mother. I needed to find Sadie.
“Don’t tell me to shut up. A woman was killed for talking to you, and now you are in my house. You are putting us all in danger.”
News of Rhonda’s death had made its rounds through town. I turned to Ms. Washington. “We are doing our best to make sure everyone is safe. We have officers patrolling neighborhoods around the clock. Time is of the essence, Ms. Washington.”
Ava spoke up. “I’m sure she’s fine. Sadie does this sometimes, when she’s really upset.”
“Does what?”
Ava shrugged. “It’s Sadie’s thing. You need to ask her.”
“I’d love to, Ava, but I can’t find her,” I said trying to hide my frustration. “That’s why I’m here.”
Ava flipped her long blond hair over one shoulder. “Sadie disappears. She checks out on life for a few hours.”
“Where does she go?” I already knew Sadie wasn’t at her grandmother’s because I had been there. Officers were dispatched to the dirt road near the river where we’d found Allard and Sadie, but they found no signs of her there or on the Powell River.
“I’m not sure she’d want me to tell you.”
“Ava!” her mother warned, hands on her hips, and lips pursed in anger.
“Wallace Lake, okay? I only know because I followed her once and tried to go with her on the boat. She wouldn’t take me with her.”
“What kind of boat?”
“She rents one from the marina,” Ava said. “You know the ones that look almost like canoes but have a little motor on the back?”
A rowboat. With a motor, she could make her way almost anywhere on the lake if the water was calm. It would be slow going, but doable.
“Where does she go on the lake?”
“I don’t exactly know where,” Ava said. “But she told me it makes her feel close to her dad.”
“Her dad?” Ms. Washington said. She turned to me. “Do you know about Sadie’s father? He passed when Ava was still in diapers.”
I’d he
ard the story from Sadie’s grandmother. “He drowned in a fishing accident on the lake, right?”
“That was the official story,” Ms. Washington said. “Word around town was that Eric took his own life. He was mixed up in the beginning of the drug trade here in Wallace Lake and was out on bail. He was looking at jail time, and I think he was afraid of what might come out in the trial.”
Sadie Reid’s disappearance made sense to me now. She knew it was only a matter of time before we determined she was the killer. Once we found her, Sadie knew she’d be arrested. Sadie wasn’t planning to pay homage to her deceased father when she took the motorized rowboat out on Wallace Lake to where her father drowned; she planned to take her own life and sink into the same watery grave where her father passed.
*
The water lapped against the sides of the rescue boat, and I yelled to the lake safety officer to push the motor as hard as it would go. We had two boats on the water—Harvey and I were on one, with Riley and another officer who regularly worked Wallace Lake manning the second. Our speedboats traveled in opposite directions with the bright search lights scanning the dark waters around us. Wallace Lake wasn’t as large as Lake Erie or Lake Michigan, but it was vast enough for someone to hide on, particularly because of all its small canals and wooded shorelines.
Detective Richardson pulled the case file on Eric Reid, Sadie’s father. The body had washed up on an eastern wooded grove about two days after he died, and officers had sketched the approximate location of his fishing boat at the time of the accident. From the records, we learned that Eric Reid’s accident happened almost dead center of the lake. He’d cut the motor about five miles from the marina and let his fishing boat drift. The watercraft didn’t have the required lights for night boating, so he was invisible to the safety officers who regularly patrolled the lake. Eric fell overboard sometime during the night, and his boat was found abandoned the next afternoon by patrolling safety officers. The chief ME at the time determined the cause of death as drowning while intoxicated along with heat exhaustion. Reid had been on the lake most of the day consuming alcohol and very little water. He lost his balance, the report read, and fell over the side. Reid did not have the strength or the sobriety to get himself back into the boat and eventually drowned.
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