“Yeah,” Joe said.
“Well, he thinks he’s got a lead on the girl. Said he doesn’t want to go to the cops. He didn’t give me much else. He knows the drill. I’m the clean middleman. He drove down from Albany this morning. He’s staying at the W downtown, near Wall Street, near the money. Wants to see you now.”
“Okay,” Joe said. He stood up and headed for the door.
“Try to be sociable, a little chitchat won’t kill you,” said McCleary. “I knew his father. He was a crook, but half-decent in his own way.”
Joe nodded and left, moving soundlessly.
“Come by next week and I’ll give you your money for the Cincinnati job, maybe we could get a drink,” McCleary shouted after him in a rush, feeling needy and old, but the door had closed and he didn’t know if Joe had heard. McCleary wondered at himself, not understanding why he had suggested a drink, except maybe to let the air out of his loneliness, like releasing a prayer that would never be heard.
Joe took the stairs down, eight flights. He avoided elevators if he could. They were dangerous boxes in every way—coffins with cameras and only one way out.
As Joe descended rapidly, his body an agile and almost ageless machine, he thought about McCleary, whom he genuinely liked. He had heard what McCleary had shouted after him and wished he could drink a beer with him, watch a baseball game, but he couldn’t allow himself such things anymore. Not for some time now. Not since he had found the girls in the truck and something in his mind had broken, like a floorboard giving way. And from beneath that floorboard in his mind there came this all-consuming self-hatred, which had always been there and which he could no longer suppress.
What Joe didn’t grasp was that his sense of self had been carved, like a totem, by his father’s beatings. The only way for Joe to have survived his father’s sadism was to believe that he deserved it, that it was justified, and that belief was still with him and could never be undone. In essence, he had been waiting nearly fifty years to finish the job that his father had started.
Joseph Sr., also a Marine, had fought in the Korean War. He went in human and came out subhuman. After his discharge with honors, he found work at La Guardia airport as a mechanic but felt that it was beneath him. So he hated his job, hated his life, hated the constant nightmares of being in battle without cover or ammunition, and he hated his beautiful Italian wife because she loved him and he couldn’t feel it. They had married before the war, before he had been changed, destroyed.
His response was to drink heavily and with great Irish tolerance, but there was no peace in his mind no matter how much he put down. Joe was born after his mother had had three miscarriages, most likely brought on by his father’s hands.
To help himself with his rage, Joseph Sr. had fashioned half a broom handle with which to beat Joe, primarily on the body. This was after a priest at Joe’s school, when Joe was eight, had taken note of Joe’s black eye and split lip and told Joseph Sr. to go easy on the child, that corporal punishment should never involve the face. So he had sawed a broom handle in half and wrapped it with black electrical tape. Joe, from this crude baton, still had notches on his shins, grooves that he liked to trace with his fingers, a private ritual he always engaged in before putting on his socks.
Joe’s mother tried, but she couldn’t stop her husband, just as Joe, too small and weak, couldn’t stop his father from beating her.
When Joe was thirteen, his father, very drunk, wasn’t able, one time, to find the broom handle and so had come at him with a hammer instead. Joe fell, trying to get away, and as he crawled he lost consciousness, fainting from terror. He woke up a few minutes later in urine-soaked pants and his father was smiling at him and laughing, white spit in the corners of his mouth like battery acid.
A month later, Joseph Sr. died, choking on his own blood from burst esophageal ulcers, a heavy drinker’s death, but that didn’t seem to change things much for Joe and his mother. Even after they put him in the ground, they seemed to be waiting always for him to return.
Senator Votto was a big man, bigger than Joe, but he was soft and heavy. He was wearing an expensive gray suit and a red tie that looked like a streak of blood down the middle of his chest. He had a full head of hair, like most politicians, and he had a bland, fleshy American face. It was as if the Italian in him, the Votto in him, had been bleached out. Because of his size he was garrulous and cocky, which made him a good candidate, a good politician, but as with most sons of powerful men, if you looked closely, there was a weakness to his face and a petty cruelty. A different kind of shadow followed him than followed Joe.
“McCleary said you were ex-FBI and ex–Marine Corps.”
“That’s correct,” said Joe. They were in the living room of Votto’s suite. Votto was on the couch, Joe on a hard chair pulled over from the desk. A sleek coffee table was between them. The W was modern and uncomfortable and smelled like a spa, like scented candles—the effete odor of new wealth. Joe had been forced to take the elevator, no access to the stairs from the lobby, and so he was a little on edge.
“Were you in Iraq or Afghanistan?” McCleary was playing the senator, a smart man who asks smart, to-the-point questions of inferiors.
“Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. The first war. Ninety-one.”
Votto was momentarily thrown. He had miscalculated Joe’s age. The unlined face. Then he said, “Nobody died in that one, right?”
Joe closed his eyes. Votto was ignorant. But most people were. Joe had been part of the first ground assault in Khafji, Saudia Arabia. He had lost eleven friends and was credited with eighteen kills. Joe opened his eyes. He said, “Yeah, nobody died.”
Votto, despite his own terrible problems, smiled reflexively in a Pavlovian way. He was not a deep thinker. It was reassuring to know that America sometimes fought good wars.
“And what did you do in the FBI?”
Joe knew that clients needed to ask questions, that vetting him in this way gave them a sense of control, even if it was illusory, because, of course, there was no control. Not for anybody. But he had ready answers to put the client at ease. For the job, whether with the people who were paying or with the people he had to go through, he could make conversation. It wasn’t personal. There was an objective. He was an instrument. He had a use and could let his mask speak almost freely. He could play-act normalcy of a kind.
“For twelve years I worked undercover, part of a sex-trafficking task force,” he said. “The victims were mostly women and children brought over from other countries and forced into the sex trade. There were also the children, already living in the States, who were baited on the Internet and kidnapped. Some boys, mostly girls. All of them sex slaves. That was my beat. The last few years I’ve been working with McCleary, doing more or less the same thing.”
Votto nodded, was quiet now. He had taken in what Joe said and seemed distracted, in pain. There was sweat on his upper lip and at the line of his hair. The room was cool. Votto’s phone, on the coffee table, buzzed. He stared at it, lost. Didn’t pick the thing up. It stopped buzzing. Joe wanted to move the conversation along. He said, “McCleary told me that your daughter went missing after meeting a man online.”
Votto’s phone buzzed again. He picked it up this time. Read an e-mail. Put the phone back down on the table. “Sorry,” he said. “Albany.” He spoke the name of the state capital like it was a poison.
“Right,” Joe said. He started over: “So your daughter went missing after meeting a man online?”
Votto didn’t answer. He looked away, stood up, and went to the small refrigerator, hidden in a cupboard, and removed a bottle of club soda and a minibar Jack Daniel’s.
With his back to Joe, he poured some soda into a glass and emptied the whiskey. He didn’t offer to make Joe a drink. He took a slug, kept his back to Joe, and then said, “Yeah, it was some guy she met on Facebook. Thirty years old, looked like a male model. And she was mature for her age. They say it’s hormones in the food. She was thi
rteen and already boy crazy, but the thirty-year-old didn’t exist. Was somebody else’s picture. They don’t know who she met. The cops got nowhere. She vanished. My wife couldn’t take it.”
Joe let that hang a moment. Then he said, “How were things at home with your daughter before this happened?”
Votto took another slug and then turned. In a small voice he said, “She hardly spoke to her mother and she hated me. A phase, I guess.” Votto, ashamed, his eyes lowered, came back to the couch and sat down. Then he looked up at Joe, like you look at a priest—Will you forgive me?
Joe arranged his face and body—he widened his eyes, tilted his head, and raised his shoulders; all of it meant to signify sympathy and a deep resignation. This was a face and posture that his mother made often. It occurred to him that he was increasingly borrowing the gestures of an old woman slipping into dementia, an old woman, nearly deaf, who communicated with him like they were both in a silent movie.
Then he reassembled himself and pressed on with what was essential: “McCleary said that you had new information but that you didn’t want to go to the police. Did your daughter contact you?”
“No,” he said. “I got some kind of anonymous text this morning. I checked with the phone company. Came off one of those quick phones you can buy. They’re untraceable. You don’t even get the place where it was bought.”
Joe sometimes, out of necessity, used such phones, but mostly steered clear of them. He didn’t like his voice to be recorded, and he assumed that all conversations were. His goal, always, was to leave as little imprint of himself as possible, wherever he went, whatever he did.
“Let me see the text,” Joe said.
Votto picked up his phone, played with it, handed it to Joe. Joe read the message:
Your daughter is in new york in a brothel at 244 east 48th street. I couldn’t live with myself if i didn’t let you know. She wants to come home. I don’t think she knows about your wife i’m so sorry. I can’t go to the police for obvious reasons. So i’m letting you know. They have her on drugs but she looks ok i’m sorry with all my heart.
“Gotta be legit, right?” said Votto, suddenly agitated. The little bit of booze and the circumstances were starting to work on him. “Couldn’t be a hoax, right? He really saw her.” He drank the rest of his drink. His face was getting flushed.
Joe read the text several times quickly. There was an odd quality to it, but it also made sense. Sounded like the person was coming down off of drugs—remorseful and paranoid. Men who requested underage girls were often on cocaine or crystal meth, and not all of them were full-blown sociopaths. Some of them experienced regret.
Joe put the phone on the coffee table. The text was sent at 7:23 this morning. The guy had bought the phone at 7:00, as soon as the store, probably a Rite Aid, opened. Waited a few minutes. Screwed up his courage. Sent the text. Threw the phone away.
“It’s worth looking into,” Joe said. “Often the way the prostitution rings come after young girls is to create a fake profile on websites like Facebook. Pictures of a handsome guy is the lure, the bait. And that might be what happened to your daughter.”
Joe didn’t add that they also targeted the children who revealed themselves, usually during an exchange of messages, to be very unhappy.
“Do you think whoever sent that text fucked her?” Votto’s neck was suddenly very red.
Joe didn’t answer that. “Why did you call McCleary and not the police?”
“Fuck the police.” Votto stood up, started pacing. His jugular vein looked like a worm. “The cops haven’t done shit!” He went back to the minibar, took out a mini-vodka, and downed the thing, then choked and coughed, bending over. He wasn’t a drinker, but he was trying to act like one. Joe just watched.
Then Votto gathered himself, his voice hoarse: “I don’t want to mess around with the police, with warrants. I don’t want to waste time. I want you to go there and get her. And then I want to find out from her who she saw and take care of the bastard myself. It’s got to be somebody I know. Somebody I know fucked my daughter!”
The whole thing felt like a performance to Joe, and Votto, trying to show that he was a man, an angry man, took a swipe at the thin modern lamp on the desk. It skittered across the desk’s surface, but, hung up on its cord, it fell pathetically, ineffectively, not even breaking. Then Votto slumped back down onto the couch, lowered his head, and started crying.
Joe leaned forward, unmoved, and stroked the divots in his right shin. Votto wanted to take the law into his own hands, but not for his daughter’s sake. He wanted to find the man, maybe a friend, who knew his cell-phone number. He wanted to find the man, maybe a friend, who had raped his daughter.
Joe realized later, tragically, that he should have walked out at that moment. But he didn’t. He was thinking it wasn’t the girl’s fault that her father was a weak fool. He let Votto cry some more and then said, “Do you have a picture of her?”
Votto lifted up his wet, porcine face. He was a fat little boy. He removed from his wallet a school snapshot, his daughter’s eighth-grade yearbook picture, and handed it to Joe.
“Her name’s Lisa. Did I mention that?”
It was almost 5:30, and Joe, using a credit card that matched one of his identities (he had three), rented a car from Enterprise, which had a branch in a garage on Thompson Street, near Washington Square Park. Before getting in the car, he slipped on a pair of surgical gloves—he always carried a small packet of them, like a nurse, but for other reasons.
Then he drove the car to a hardware store on Twenty-ninth Street. There weren’t too many left in Manhattan. He took off the gloves, not wanting to attract attention, and, touching only their disposable packaging, picked up duct tape and a cutting razor. He also got a new hammer, being careful to grasp only the cardboard sleeve on its handle.
Back at the car, he put the gloves on, got inside, and held the hammer in his hand. It fit nicely. A hammer was Joe’s favorite weapon. He was his father’s son, after all.
Also, a hammer left very little evidence, was excellent in close quarters, and seemed to frighten everyone. It held some universal place of terror in the human mind. The unexpected sight of it raised in Joe’s hand would always momentarily paralyze his enemies, and those few seconds of paralysis were usually all that he needed. Joe also liked the common fire ax for this reason, but you couldn’t conceal an ax. He put the hammer in the large front pocket of his jacket and drove to Forty-eighth Street.
The building was a three-story brownstone, on a street of brownstones. It was a mostly old-fashioned block, bookended by modern apartment towers, one at Third Avenue and one at Second Avenue. Joe circled the block several times and then double-parked, putting on his blinkers. If he saw a cop car enter the street by Third Avenue, he would resume circling. If he was lucky, which he would be eventually, though it might take a few hours, he would get a parking spot. It was early evening, already dark out, and he hoped to make his move sometime after midnight. He had picked up two large bottles of water, one of which he emptied to use as a toilet.
All the windows of the brownstone were sealed tight by metal curtains, insuring privacy. It was a premium brothel in a neighborhood of such places—it was close to the United Nations and Midtown’s centers of corporate wealth. A connected realtor most likely rented it to the Russian or Italian mob, the two largest purveyors of high-end prostitution, which sometimes included the sale of underage girls, for which there was more than enough demand.
In New York City there were nearly 700,000 millionaires who were men. There were 250,000 each in Chicago and Los Angeles, and plenty more in the other large to midsize cities. If 0.5 percent—half a percentage point—of these men throughout the country were sexually and socially deviant in their desire for young girls, which would be a conservative estimate, then there was abundant incentive in the market-place to provide what they wanted. One hour with a pretty twelve-, thirteen-, or fourteen-year-old white female cost anywhere from five t
o ten thousand dollars, and the more that was charged, the more the men wanted it, which was basic economics. It was a highly risky but very lucrative business.
Generally, at the top places, if they offered young girls, there were usually only one or two who had been properly Stockholmed. It wasn’t an easy process to get these girls functional and productive, and a brothel that offered them—mixing them in with legal-aged women—was known on the street as a “playground.” To avoid exposure and capture, the young girls were moved from city to city, working a network of playgrounds for a week or two at a time. These children usually lasted about two years before they were killed and thrown away, insuring their silence, but during their twenty-four months of work, if they were properly run, they could bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Joe had become very good at exfiltrating some of these girls, once he tracked them down, using methods that the police couldn’t get away with. Normally, Joe had time to plan his approach and tactics, but this Votto case was of the moment and required him to fly more blind than he liked. Still, at his core, Joe was a Marine, and he had been well trained, as their motto went, to adapt, improvise, and overcome.
After a few hours of circling and occasionally double-parking, he got a spot fifteen yards from the brothel with excellent sight lines. There had been nothing for him to act on—he saw black town cars and SUVs drop men off and pick them up, and he saw one slender twenty-something girl in sweatpants and a pink ski jacket leave the brownstone, done for the night, but he didn’t tail her. He was waiting for something better to work with, and it was still too early. He needed fewer people on the streets. So he sat in his car and went into a fugue state of sorts—simultaneously alert and peaceful.
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