There were also four pieces of paper with blank faces drawn on them and question marks, representing the crew who had unloaded the girls from the container. Identifying them was job one. There was also a sheet of paper representing the other missing girls.
I called Hansen and Pratt over and then updated everyone on my latest conversation with Xiaolian.
“A supply refresh in Honolulu… makes sense,” Hansen said.
“I want you and Pratt to get on the phone with the agents in that field office and see if they can locate these individuals,” I said.
“Got it,” he said, and they hurried away.
Kang pinned two more sheets to the board, representing those individuals.
“Your theory that the traffickers might be someone other than the four individuals who picked up the girls is interesting. If it’s true, then there are more moving parts in this puzzle,” House said.
“Actually the four individuals who picked up the girls from the container could be the shipper or the receiver, or both. Kang and I just don’t think the typical players, like the Triads, are involved. And the Mexican cartels get their girls from Mexico and Central America.”
“So the traffickers could just be another small organization entering the trade.”
“Yes, but they’re smart. What they’ve set up goes above and beyond what we’ve seen.”
I picked up a pen, scribbled “doctor” on a piece of paper, and then pinned it to the board. “Xiaolian keeps talking about a doctor or someone who is dressed like one. I have no idea what the connection is, but we should check with the surrounding psychiatric hospitals.”
“Has she mentioned anything about her family?” House asked.
“She hasn’t, but to be honest, my questioning has always been related to the investigation.”
“It seems strange that what she’s remembering has only to do with her abduction.”
“You’re right. I’ll try and dig a bit more in that area.”
“How much longer are you planning on keeping her?”
“As long as I feel I need to. Each time we talk, her memory becomes clearer. Right now, she’s driving this investigation.”
Hansen and Pratt returned to the meeting between me, Kang, and House.
“Agent Kane, we have an angle we’d like to pursue,” Hansen said. “A lot of these prostitution rings use Craigslist to advertise their girls. The girls who were taken from the container might still be working in the city. We can set up appointments with the providers on the board and try to find out if any of them are part of the container group.”
“That’s a good idea. Run with it.”
After we adjourned our meeting, Kang and I walked over to a table with two large thermal canisters on top of it. One was labeled as coffee, the other as hot water. I removed my tin of tea leaves and proceeded to fix myself a cup while Kang filled a paper cup with the black brew. We took a seat at a nearby table, and I stared off into the distance as I sipped.
“What are you thinking?” Kang asked.
“That I should be back home talking to Xiaolian. That’s where my efforts need to be focused.”
“I agree. I’ll drive you back.”
“What will you do?” I asked.
“I’ll follow up on that tattoo. See if it leads anywhere.”
We sat for a few more minutes, warming our hands with our beverages until my cell phone chimed.
“It’s a text from the lab,” I said. “They recovered two DNA profiles from the suitcase. One belongs to a Darren Chow.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Darren Chow sat cross-legged on the small, black leather couch while tapping on the tablet he had cradled in his lap. He was busy juggling a messaging app and an online poker game. Occasionally he took a sip of the milk bubble tea leaning against his thigh.
Sitting next to him was Clifton Wong, but everyone who knew him called him Sticks, not because he was tall and thin—he was actually on the portly side—but because he used chopsticks to eat everything, from French fries, to tacos, to even cereal in the morning. He kept a custom pair on him at all times—even had a special case for them. Sticks was Chow’s closest friend. The two had known each other since grade school.
“Yeah!” Chow shouted. “Royal Flush. Cha-ching!” He turned his tablet toward Sticks, a boastful smile stretched across his face.
“Too bad it’s not real.”
“It will be someday. This is practice, man. As soon as I’m good enough, I’ll be competing in international poker tournaments. I’ll dress in black, wear shades and a dope hat with my call name embroidered on the front—The Banker.”
“Dude, you need to come up with a better name than that,” Sticks said.
“What? I’ll be taking everyone’s money like a bank. Don’t you get it?”
“I get it; it’s just literal. You need something cool like the Cross-Eyed Chink. People will hear it and think it’s racist, but when a Chinese guy shows up they’ll be like, ‘Oh okay, everything is cool.’ Just don’t forget to cross your eyes when you play.”
“No, it should be associated with his real name,” said another young man sitting at a glass-top executive desk. “Something like Chow Wow.” He laughed.
“Wait, I got it,” a young woman also sitting at the desk chimed in. “Instead of a call name, how about a call slogan—Go home and cook rice! It’s like telling the other guys they’re done, might as well go home and help with dinner.”
The two sitting at the desk, Albert Lim and Angie Dickson, made up the rest of the crew of four. They’d met while attending Stanford University. Chow dropped out after two years, followed by Sticks a few months later.
Lim and Dickson were still enrolled for the time being but had decided to take a semester off and move to the city. They were a couple and had found a small apartment near Golden Gate Park, in a neighborhood called the Panhandle.
The four had been holed up in the small apartment all day, working diligently on their first group venture. About a year and a half ago, they launched their shipping operation. A few days ago, they received their third shipment. There were still kinks that needed to be worked out, but overall they were happy with the results thus far.
Chow was the brain of the operation. He’d had an idea to provide a service to organized crime. Sticks thought he was crazy. Chow of course knew he couldn’t do it without him on board.
Sticks was a wizard mathematician with an IQ well over 140. Chow was smart, but nothing like his friend. For as long as he could remember, people had been telling Sticks he had the potential to be amazing in fields ranging from medicine to robotics to space exploration. Sticks, however, had zero interest in pursuing any of those paths. And the more the adult authority figures tried to push that idea on him, the more he rejected it.
Chow understood Sticks though. He knew he didn’t ask to be crazy smart. And just because he was, it didn’t mean he had to become the poster child for math.
He also knew Sticks hated being told what to do, which Chow often used to his advantage. The best way to convince his friend to go along with his ideas was to tell him it wasn’t something he would be interested in or even was capable of doing.
So when Chow bounced the shipping idea off of Sticks, he made sure to present it just so. “Man, it’s crazy, but I think it could work. The problem is figuring out whether it’s feasible. That alone is a business in itself, something you would job out to Anderson Consulting.”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t sound that difficult to me,” Sticks had told him.
“This isn’t crunching the numbers on some small project. This is huge. It’s international.” Then Chow did the move that always worked. He waved off any suggestion that Sticks could do it himself.
A month later, Sticks had crunched the numbers and figured out every logistic needed in order to traffic a human being on a cargo ship from China to the US. He had accounted for every penny that would be spent and earned. He had tons of spreadsheets and gra
phs, but Chow never bothered to look at any of it. All he needed to hear from Sticks was that it could be done and they could make a lot of money doing it.
Lim’s connection to the business venture was that his family owned a small import/export business, so he brought that expertise to the group. He helped Sticks with the logistics of international shipping and how it worked. His knowledge of the ins and outs of customs, both in China and the US, helped tremendously.
Dickson had a large extended family in Taiwan. She visited them often while growing up. Sometimes she spent entire summers there. While visiting as a teenager, she met a lot of people in the party scene, including her boyfriend at the time. He was older than she and dabbled in the escort business: he paired girls at the local universities with rich businessmen. Dickson watched, learned, and eventually helped out. She felt confident she could find a willing supply of girls.
The Brain.
The Accountant.
The Shipper.
The Madam.
They were the members of the operation they had named Oyster. It wasn’t an acronym or code for what they did. They simply loved slurping raw oysters.
Until they could get the business up and running and have all bugs worked out, they had to support the business themselves. Between maxing out their credit cards, making various trips to Vegas where Sticks could count cards, and holding small poker parties in apartments near the Stanford campus, they were able to raise just over one hundred thousand dollars in six months.
But they needed to make their money back quickly.
To do that, they decided early on they would pimp the girls they brought over themselves. And that was exactly what they were doing from that tiny apartment.
Chow had secured the entire floor of the apartment building for one month. There were ten apartments available to him. These were where the girls worked and lived. Oyster kept 70% and the girls got 30% of the fee charged to customers. After thirty days, the girls were returned to Taiwan.
The first shipment of girls netted Oyster about eighty thousand dollars. The second shipment netted them nearly one hundred thousand—Sticks had increased the efficiency of their operation.
From that point forward, they focused on building up their cash reserves so they could eventually expand their operation to multiple containers. Only when they had that in place would they initiate the next step in their business plan: approach local prostitution rings with the idea of using Oyster for their trafficking needs.
Until then, the group agreed that everyone would take a small cut, enough to pay the bills and eat. The rest was to be reinvested back into Oyster.
The way Chow saw things, human trafficking didn’t have to be a seedy and dangerous cost of doing business. It could be safe, reliable, and profitable.
Chapter Thirty
Kang and I drove to Chow’s last known address. A tactical team had been deployed and would meet us there. We had no idea whether this was a personal address or literally the headquarters of a smuggling ring. We needed backup.
Chow’s apartment was located in an old rattrap building near the corner of Larkin and Austin Street, an area north of the Tenderloin. Not a great area but not crappy either. A lot of neighborhoods in SF mixed that way.
On the way over there, I read a report on my phone that Hansen had pulled on Chow. “Says here he was arrested at age sixteen in Chinatown.”
“I thought that name sounded familiar,” Kang said. “I was investigating a homicide in Chinatown when we unearthed a fairly large gambling operation. This was about five or six years ago. Anyway, a teenager was caught up in the bust, name was Chow. He essentially was the gang’s lookout, nothing major. I remember talking with him. Quiet kid, but well spoken. Didn’t come across as the type to get involved with the Triads.”
“Could be the same person, but there are a lot of Chows. Did he have a dragon tattoo?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Says here he did two years at Stanford University. A dropout. Still sound like your guy?”
“Maybe. Is there a photo?”
“There’s a booking photo.” I angled my phone so Kang could see Chow’s picture.
“That’s him. What a shame. I always thought if he stayed out of trouble he’d make something of himself.”
“He did. He became a criminal.”
The tactical unit reached the location before we did. The commander in charge briefed us as Kang and I put on our bulletproof vests.
“I’ve got a team stationed at the bottom of the external fire escape,” he said. “Other than the front entrance to the building, there’s no way out if he decides to run.”
We took the stairs up to the fifth floor. The tactical team led the way. Kang and I brought up the rear. On the third floor, an elderly man wearing chinos and a white polo shirt appeared behind us.
“Please don’t shoot up the place,” he said. “We’re short-funded as it is, and there are a ton of repairs needed.”
“Sir, I need you to return to your apartment right now.”
“I’m the manager here.” He held out his hand toward me. “Take it. It’s the master key to all the apartments. Please don’t kick down the door.”
I took the key from him and then told him again to go back to this apartment, which he did, albeit reluctantly.
The team stacked up outside Chow’s place. I had the men pass the key up to the point man. He looked back at me, and I made a turning motion with my hand.
Two minutes later, we were all standing in an empty apartment. No sign of Chow.
“Well, this isn’t what we had hoped for,” I said.
“Sometimes you win; sometimes you lose,” the commander said. “We’ll be downstairs if you need us.”
He and his team exited the apartment while Kang and I poked around.
Kang came out of the bedroom and returned to the living room, where I was. He shook his head, indicating there was nothing worth noting in the bedroom. “He lives here, but it doesn’t seem like he spends much time at the apartment.”
“Other than condiments, the refrigerator is empty.” I added. “Also the toothpaste in the bathroom looks like it hasn’t been touched in a while.”
The furniture appeared new, probably all purchased from Ikea. I’d half expected to find mismatched furniture and takeout containers littering the place. There were none. Even the kitchen sink and counters were clear of dishes.
Nothing overtly told us the apartment actually belonged to Chow—no pictures, no personal items that could identify him.
“You think this is even his place?” I asked.
“We should ask the building manager.”
“Ask me what?”
We both turned around to find the man standing in the doorway behind us. He began examining the door for damage.
“I’m Agent Kane. This is the Agent Kang. We’re with the FBI.”
“FBI? What are you guys doing here? I’m the manager, and I have the right to know.”
“Your name?”
“Swanson. Ed Swanson.”
“Mr. Swanson, can you confirm that a man by the name of Darren Chow lives here?”
“He does.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Been a while. Maybe a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t make it a point to keep an eye on everyone who comes and goes. I’m not that type of manager, you know.”
“How well do you know Mr. Chow?”
He shrugged. “I interact with him from time to time.”
“Does he live alone? Any girlfriends or friends come around?”
“I never saw anyone with him. Just keeps to himself.”
“Did he give you any trouble?” Kang asked.
“He’s a decent tenant. Always pays his rent on time. In fact, he’s paid up three months in advance.”
“Does he own a vehicle, or have you seen him driving one?” I asked.
“I haven’t. Plus there’s only street parking here, so he could have on
e and I just never saw it.”
I showed Swanson the booking photo I had on my phone. “Is this Mr. Chow?”
He leaned in for a better look. “Yeah, that’s him, but he looks a bit younger in the picture.”
“He was sixteen at the time,” Kang said. “Is there a big change in his appearance?”
Swanson shook his head. “Looks mostly the same. Did something happen to him?”
“We’re not at liberty to discuss the details of an ongoing investigation,” I answered.
“Investigation? Did he do something wrong? You need to tell me. I’ve got a responsibility to keep the building safe for the other residents.”
I handed the manger my card. “Call me if you see him.”
He took the card and shoved it into the front pocket of his pants. “Well, should I at least tell the guy the FBI is looking for him?”
“For your safety, don’t engage. Just call.”
Kang and I headed back downstairs. The tactical team was still outside the building. I thanked them for the assistance and cut them loose.
“Who pays their rent up to three months in advance and then barely sticks around?” Kang said as we crossed the street toward his vehicle.
“Yeah, seems strange.”
“I wonder...” Kang slipped off his vest. “Maybe the suitcase is his, but he has no involvement in what happened.”
“Like someone borrowed it from him?”
“Or maybe he tossed it in the trash and someone scavenged it, or he could have even sold it.”
I considered what Kang had said. It was completely plausible.
“We should see if Medina, Watts, or Xiaolian recognizes him,” Kang said.
Chapter Thirty-One
Back at Oyster headquarters, Lim and Dickson were busy engaging with customers. Lim answered the emails from Craigslist. Dickson followed up on the phone to finalize the meet.
[Abby Kanem - SG 01.0] Suitcase Girl Page 11