Michiko could barely conceal her gasp as Father Soltera blinked with shock.
The man before them looked to be no younger than his mid-eighties.
The drive from Eighth and Figueroa to the City of Lomita was as “straight-shot” as it got in Los Angeles. The 110 Harbor Freeway South, all the way. Maggie had lived in a lot of cities while being stalked by her psychotic ex-fiancé, Michael, but most of them had been in cities on the East Coast, which were compact and dense, with street grids that were equally so.
But LA was a discombobulated kind of city, almost a city made up of five cities, and she still hadn’t gotten the freeways down at all, which was why she was so thankful for the ease of this drive.
Luisa was still curled up in the passenger seat, the seat belt squeezed over her awkwardly, her face buried in her hands with her head resting against the passenger window. Maggie had tried talking to her a few times, to no avail, but she wasn’t going to give up that easily.
“Hey. You gotta talk to me, Luisa. Okay? Please.”
“No.”
One word, but it was the crack in the door that Maggie needed. “Yes. C’mon. We’re gonna get you somewhere safe, it’ll be okay.”
“No!” Luisa screamed.
“Luisa . . .”
She was talking to the passenger window. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
“What?”
“People . . . too many people . . . are getting hurt because of my shit.”
“That’s not true.”
“Please!” she yelled, finally spinning around in her seat, her face a blanket of tears. “I heard them, Maggie! All those people at the shelter? They were yelling and screaming. They were afraid. Felix and his asshole friends came in there and sent everyone scattering . . . It was h-h-horrible,” she sobbed.
“I know, Luisa. But that’s on Felix. That’s not on you.”
She pushed her long, curly black hair out of her face. “Bullshit. I should’ve just gotten the damned abortion!”
“Not if that’s not what you wanted, no you shouldn’t have.”
“I’m sixteen! How the hell do I even know what I want?”
Having made it out of downtown smoothly, they’d finally hit traffic near the Los Angeles Coliseum exit. Maggie eased over into a lane that wasn’t as gridlocked as the rest. She remembered being a sixteen-year-old girl quite well and Luisa had a point. It was a hard time to go through at all, much less to do so while pregnant.
“I should’ve never listened to Father Soltera.” She had a head of steam now, it was obvious, but it was utterly robbed by the mention of Father Soltera’s name. She came unwound again. “Oh my God! This can’t be happening!” Cupping her face in her hands, she cried out the rest. “Look what’s happened to the Father because of me.”
Maggie sighed. She really wished they hadn’t told Luisa back at the shelter what had happened, but they had. There was no putting that cat back in the bag, so she went with all she had left. “He’s alive, Luisa. He’s recovering in the hospital.”
Luisa paused, pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her hands and wiped her face dry, leaving a small dab of smeared mascara under her left eye. “Is he going to be okay?”
“I think so, yes.” Not a lie. Not the truth. Shit, Maggie. Be careful. Because what little trust you have built up with this girl will be trashed if things go south at the hospital.
“What happened? They told me he was attacked, but they didn’t tell me anything else.”
Time for another half-truth, like it or not, because if Maggie told her that Father Soltera was nearly stabbed to death, Luisa would lose it for good. “He was assaulted.”
“Badly?”
“Pretty bad, yes.”
“Oh, God. Felix. How could he?”
“I dunno.” Get her back on track. “But the Father is safe now.”
Her head snapped toward Maggie. “You saw him?”
“Yes. I went to the hospital. He’s also under police protection, so you can quit worrying about him and get back to worrying about yourself.”
Luisa’s face eased with relief and Maggie’s heart nearly broke at the sight of it; she was sixteen, but her face was much, much younger. She looked only thirteen. And she was struggling with questions not even meant for a thirty-year-old. “Maggie . . . if I get the abortion? Then Felix will go away. He will. He’ll leave me alone. He’ll leave everyone alone.”
Maggie had already begun shaking her head at the words “go away.” She was an expert in the “Land of Denial” that Luisa was trying to visit.
“No . . . no . . . and no.”
“What?”
Maggie remembered Michael’s looming figure in the hallway of her apartment complex once, in Virginia. “He will never go away.” Then again, in DC, when he’d promised to follow her wherever she went. “He’ll never leave you alone.”
And his voice came to her, from a phone call not all that long ago, threatening her family if she ran anymore. “And he’ll never leave those you love alone, either.”
“You don’t know that,” Luisa said defiantly.
Maggie nodded. “Not for sure, no. But I know the odds. I know that eighty percent of the time, I’m right. He’s obsessed. At this point, he’s psychotic. Monsters like this don’t ever go away, not unless—”
She stopped herself, the image of Michael’s bullet-ridden and crushed body in the driveway of the house in Georgetown flashing before her eyes. Not unless you kill him.
“Not unless what?” Luisa asked.
Maggie shook it off and recovered just in time to reply confidently, “Not until his ass is put in jail, for a long time.”
“How?”
She had to give Luisa hope, and hard as it was to talk up law enforcement, the very people who had failed her all those years, Maggie had no choice but to do so now. To keep Luisa calm and get her to the shelter. Because, truth be told, either she or her mom could pull the plug on this whole thing any moment, and within hours Luisa would be back in her little apartment in East LA like a sitting duck. And Maggie was sure, she could feel it to her core, that Felix would kill her.
“He’s attacked and assaulted a priest, Luisa! Are you kidding me? Then to come marching into a protected women’s shelter? You heard Tonya. He or his people shot that guard, then came inside and did all that you heard. You can’t just walk around shooting up buildings and assaulting people like that and get away with it. When they catch him, he’s totally screwed.”
Luisa nodded, and Maggie was actually surprised that she, too, was comforted. By her own words.
Felix was not Michael. Not nearly as smart, cunning or covert. He’d gone Rambo in front of witnesses and no doubt a bunch of security cameras at the shelter. She repeated the words. “He’s screwed.” Really meaning it this time. The press alone from what this idiot had done would prevent any defense attorney or judge from getting or letting him off the hook.
The traffic broke apart as drizzle began to hit the windshield. They were passing Gage and Florence, marching through the legendary land of South Central Los Angeles, where the riots had taken place in 1992 that Maggie could still remember watching on TV with her parents.
Moving at a steady seventy miles per hour, Maggie figured they’d get to the shelter in Lomita in twenty minutes or so. She remembered it well from her training days. A light-blue building set back from the road by a long driveway, it was fenced in and completely nondescript.
The only way in was by the side door, which stood under a security camera with two guards just inside it. Best of all? A Lomita sheriff’s substation was only a mile away. Luisa would be safe, Maggie was sure of it.
Luisa seemed to have found a bit of resolve, despite the gray day around them. She grew quiet as they made their way to the Sepulveda exit and then down Pacific Coast Highway.
When Maggie finally stole a glance at her, Luisa was just opening her eyes. “I was praying,” she said softly.
Maggie nodded.
“For
Father Soltera,” her voice trembled again, “and for my mom. And for you.”
Maggie was stunned. “For me?”
“Yes,” Luisa said matter-of-factly, “because now you’re in danger too.”
The words seemed to echo around the car as they made a left on Cayuga Street and the shelter came into view.
Chapter Fifteen
Parker, Murillo, Klink and Captain Holland waited as Agent Clopton pulled a laptop computer out of a case on the table and started it up.
“What you’re about to hear is a series of undercover recordings of Güero that we obtained earlier this year from one of our informants, Alberto Trejo, who had been with Güero from almost the beginning and worked his way up the ranks before something happened that made him want to flip.”
“And what ‘something’ was that?” Captain Holland asked.
“According to Trejo, a seventeen-year-old prostitute was brought into a warehouse over by the Arts District here in LA. Güero had a little whiskey and then, in front of Trejo and two other men, he strangled the girl to death with shipping twine.”
“What is this guy,” Klink exhaled, “the damned boogeyman?”
“You have no idea,” Clopton responded. “When he was done, he then engaged in necrophilia.”
Klink grimaced. Murillo was confused. “Necro-what?”
Agent Sharma answered in a monotone voice. “Necrophilia. Sex with a corpse.”
“Good Lord,” Captain Holland groaned.
Unable to entirely wrap his head around what he was hearing, Parker remained silent.
After another minute, Clopton spun the computer around to face the group. “Here’s some audio taken early on. He and Trejo are alone in his office. Trejo wore a wire in the collar of his shirt. The battery was actually one of the neck buttons. His job was to make small talk as best he could while getting Güero to make incriminating statements of any kind.”
The audio recording sounded scratchy at first, then it came through . . .
A voice, presumably Trejo’s, came alive. “The H and X are doing so good right now, jefe. Why do we still mess with the girls?”
“You know why, chaparrito,” a man with a deep voice replied. Parker recognized it immediately as Güero’s. “How many times I gotta tell you? Drugs are a volatile market. All it takes is a DEA director with a hard-on or another election in Mexico with an ‘attack the drug lords’ candidate to throw things out of whack.”
“Yeah. But never for very long.”
“Only six to twelve months, right? Shit! In that amount of time we lose millions. The distribution chain must be altered, we get a backlog in product, prices climb for a while and then the market is flooded, driving them down again. Up. Down. Up. Down. Chaos. Bullshit. But the girls? Now there’s a product that has a loooong, steady shelf life.”
Trejo chuckled. “You think?”
“Oh, yeah. The new ones . . . young and pretty. Top dollar right out of the gate. Some are even virgins. And we have clients all over this city, hell . . . all over any city we wanna go into, that will pay a superpremium for that.”
“Yeah, but—”
“How many times I gotta tell you, chaparrito? Look at the math. How am I ever gonna retire someday if you don’t know your math?”
Trejo laughed and burped. “Shit. You? Retire?”
“The math, Trejo!” Güero yelled. “Think about it.”
“Okay.”
“How much for a gram of decent coke?”
“Sixty to eighty bucks.”
“An oxy tab?”
“Eighty.”
“A gram of H?”
The recording was muffled again for a second before Trejo answered, “$150–200.”
“Okay . . . now you tell me, how does any of that compare with a fresh little chinita from Thailand, clipping me $1,500 per client, maybe five to seven clients a night?”
There was silence on the recording and in the conference room. Parker didn’t want to admit it, but he was doing the math right along with Güero on that recording, and he knew Klink, the cap and Murillo were too.
Clopton seemed to be reading Parker’s mind as she hit pause. “And?”
“That’s $7,500 to over $10,000 per night—”
“Per girl.”
“Is it PC to call them ‘girls’?” Klink asked.
“We do. Because most of them still are,” Agent Sharma said.
Agent Clopton nodded. “Many coming into the country start out at age fourteen. Fifteen to seventeen is the norm. They age-out by twenty-two.”
Parked looked to the ceiling. “In-sane.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of sex trafficking, Detective Parker?”
“Oh, I’ve heard about it. But I never knew the numbers.”
“And we’re just getting started. But before I hit play again? Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand females a year are trafficked into the US for the sex trade. Those are only the ones we know of.”
“Land of the brave, home of the free . . .” Klink murmured.
The recording began again. Trejo was musing, “Yeah. Good money.”
“Not pure profit, of course, but the margins are still there, don’t you see? We can make more off the girls than we ever could with the other stuff, with fewer people taking their cuts along the way and the ones that do taking such small cuts it’s a joke.”
“Yeah, jefe. I hear you. But coke don’t talk, right? Neither does H.”
“Hmm,” Güero grunted, “yeah. That’s the risk. Human beings, especially stupid putas, are unpredictable.”
“They can run off, or get one of their clients to fall in love and rat out their locations to the cops . . .”
“Only if you let them, chaparrito. Only if you let them.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Here’s the thing. You make them afraid. Remember, they’re young and stupid. We don’t know what village they came from, much less who their mom or dad is, but they don’t know that. You tell them point-blank: you run or blow our cover? Your family back home dies. We cut their heads off and roll them down the streets of your neighborhood for all the neighbors to see.”
“And?”
“They don’t want that, so it’s simple: they screw on command. You know, like sexy circus animals.” Güero laughed.
“Yeah. And the men love the new girls, don’t they?”
“Of course. But you wanna know why? Because the new girls, they still have some semblance of life in their eyes, ya know? That ‘please don’t hurt me’ face, chaparrito?” Again, Güero laughed. “It’s priceless. That means something to a man, to have a woman struggle a bit, heh? To act like she don’t want it. He’ll pay extra for it because it gets him off more, ya see?”
“Mm-hm.”
“But that’s not even the best part. You wanna know the best part?”
“What’s that?”
The tape went silent for a few seconds, and when Güero’s voice came back it sounded serious.
“They ain’t acting. They don’t want it, and these guys—these bullshit Hollywood types—they know that and that’s why they keep coming back for more.”
“No joke, jefe?”
“No joke. How many times a junkie gonna get high before they disappear or die? They come, they go, man.”
The room they were in had a television in the background that was broadcasting a baseball game. Somebody was trying to steal second.
Güero continued, his voice going stone cold. “But sex? Sex goes on forever. No hangover, no worry about needles or overdosing. Drugs are a luxury . . . a want in life. But sex? Sex is a need, vato.”
The recording ended there.
“What happened?” Parker asked.
“The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of two street dealers with a bone to pick about this, that and nothing,” Agent Clopton replied.
“It was frustrating,” Agent Sharma said, “because we were so damn close.”
Captain Hollan
d leaned on the table with his arms folded. “To what?”
“Actual facts, places, names—perhaps of one of the smugglers—or info on how the money was moved or, even better, how many girls had been brought in on a certain date and time . . . something solid to tie Güero down with, in his own voice.”
“This wasn’t enough, obviously,” Parker said.
“No. Just theoretical talk about a business enterprise. Nothing that would stick.”
“I’m assuming there’re more recordings?”
“Yes,” Clopton said, folding her arms across her chest. “A decent batch, but none any more convicting than this one, unfortunately.”
“No?”
“Nope. He’s a careful bastard, even with someone who was one of his closest confidants.”
Parker caught the word immediately. “Was?”
Agent Clopton and Agent Sharma exchanged an awkward glance before Clopton answered. “Alberto Trejo is dead.”
“How?” Murillo exclaimed.
“He was found murdered in an abandoned commercial building in Inglewood,” Agent Sharma said flatly.
“Murdered isn’t exactly the word for it,” Agent Clopton added.
Parker sighed. “Meaning?”
“Meaning he was gutted like a fish, from throat to groin, with all his internal organs placed in a pile next to the body and burned with sulfur.”
Parker was stunned. Sulfur. Just like that hole in the hotel window during the Kyle Fasano investigation.
The captain grimaced. “Oh, man . . .”
Clopton nodded. “The body cavity was filled with soil, kerosene was used to burn out the eyes and a pentagram was drawn around the victim using his own blood. Some sort of devil-worshiping ritual.”
“Inglewood’s not that far away. A murder this crazy . . . how did we not hear about this?” Parker asked.
When Captain Holland spoke next, it was with a notable tone of sarcasm in his voice. “Typical Fed investigation. Let me guess, Agent Clopton: ‘need-to-know basis,’ right?”
Agent Clopton nodded, but she seemed uneasy. “Yeah. Not my call, but I don’t get to make them all.”
“No?”
“No. But I get to make this one. I’ve asked to have you four on board.”
The Parker Trilogy Page 45