by Seth Harwood
The phone beeps again. “We’re ready for you,” a man’s voice says.
Jack opens the car door and gets out. In the dim fluorescent light of the garage, he sees an exit on the far side.
“You thinking about trying to go out on your own?” she asks from the other side of the car. “Go ahead.”
Jack turns to see she has him fixed in her stare. She runs a hand through her hair, exhales a hard long breath. “You still don’t trust me?”
“Tell me one thing: If Akakievich knows the Feds are onto him and you might have a leak on your team, how do you know I’ll be safe here at a Bureau location?”
She nods. “You wouldn’t. That’s why I brought you to my home.”
30
Going up in the elevator to the fortieth floor, Jack keeps his eyes trained on the numbers above the door. If the doors were reflective, he’d check how he’s holding up, but the whole elevator’s made out of dark mahogany with gold trim. Class.
As soon as the doors open and Gannon steps out into the hall, Jack hears “Mommy!” A little girl runs up and jumps into Jane Gannon’s outstretched arms. Gannon sweeps her up, spins her around, the two of them all smiles.
The simple pleasures, Jack thinks: home, love, kids.
He’s surprised a federal agent has the confidence in her own safety to go ahead and have them. But life, he knows, doesn’t wait for anyone.
Jack sees a tall man with dark hair standing in a doorway farther down the hall. He’s clean-cut, wears a T-shirt advertising a local basketball league. As Gannon carries her daughter down the hall, the girl points at Jack. “Who’s this?”
“This is our new friend, Jack.”
Her husband offers Jack his hand. “Tom Gannon. Pleasure.”
Inside the condo, Jack finds more dark wood and ceiling-to-floor windows looking out over downtown and the Bay. The scene is impressive.
“We’re lucky,” Tom says, as if he’s read Jack’s mind. “It’s one of the perks. You know, with both of us working for the Bureau.”
“Two agents?” Jack asks. “A family of Feds?”
Gannon turns, holding her daughter. “No more talking about that, okay?” She kisses her husband on the cheek. “Mr. Palms here doesn’t need to know more about us.”
“Fine,” Tom says. He raises his eyebrows at Jack. “How about a drink?”
“Just water.”
Tom winks at Jack and turns toward the kitchen. “Still on the wagon, huh? A smart man.”
“I’m taking this one to bed.” Jane carries their daughter down the hall.
“We never suspected someone as big as Clarence was involved in this mess.” Tom opens a cabinet and takes out a glass.
Now Jack knows who Jane was e-mailing on her BlackBerry in the car. She calls to her husband from down the hall, asking him to come put their daughter to bed.
“Excuse me.” Tom hands Jack a glass and points toward the sink. “Duty calls.”
When Gannon comes back, she looks hard at Jack and asks if he doesn’t want something stronger.
Jack holds up his glass. “I’m okay.”
“So let me fill you in. That way we can make a move when we need to.” She opens a cabinet and takes down a tall bottle of Talisker.
“Freeman told me it’s the white girls. That’s the big draw.”
She gets a low glass out of the cabinet and fills it with ice. “More or less. The Eastern European connection satisfies the city’s demand for white girls. But it’s more complicated than that: You squeeze the Asian sex trade, you can imagine how they feel about it. So Alexi’s operation is high cost, high risk.
“Still, the upside…” She waits until she has Jack’s undivided attention. “Is that demand goes high enough that he can ask any price he wants. Not money, but power. And real estate.”
“From the big swinging dicks.”
She winces as she pours two fingers of scotch. “Nice.” She takes a sip of the scotch, and it makes Jack want to have a smoke.
“You guys have a balcony or something here?”
“Come on.”
She leads him down a darkened hallway toward the bedrooms, stopping to kiss her daughter goodnight. Even for two agents in the Bureau, the U.S. government doesn’t pay this well. The Gannons have a crystal table, leather couches, fine mahogany built-in bookshelves, and a flat-screen TV mounted into the wall. It doesn’t come out all clean, not the way Jack sees it. It makes him think of O’Malley driving the Saleen.
They make their way through the master bedroom, past a huge bed—solid wood headboard, a nice soft carpet, the whole room immaculately clean—and out onto a small corner balcony.
She slides the door closed when they’re outside. The balcony can’t be more than four feet by four feet: It’s cozy and the two of them are close. The wind whips around the building—especially this high up, the wind is the coldest thing about the city. The wind and the fog. Tonight the fog is thick.
Jack pulls out his pack, offers her one, but she’s already got a cigarette of her own between her lips. She lights it and offers Jack the cupped flame. But before he can mouth a cigarette out of his pack, the match goes out. She lights another one with Jack’s help, his hands shielding it from the wind.
He takes a long drag. “Tell me about the girls. Tell me what this is all really about.”
Gannon gulps back a good pull of scotch.
“It started small enough,” she says. She stares out toward the Bay, her hair blowing around her face. “Just a few young girls coming over: dancing, pouring drinks, and Akakievich sets up his first club. Call it the Playboy Club meets Barely Legal. He starts expanding when word hits the streets he’s got these underage white girls. Young virgins, no STDs, clean from Kiev. The first time is his best money. This town is fucked up, Jack, what can I say? The price starts going north. Pretty soon only the guys with the deepest pockets can afford to buy their way in. We’re talking tens of thousands of dollars.”
“What?”
“Yeah. This gets big. Guys are buying in as fast as Akakievich can bring the girls over. That’s when things change.” She takes a long drag and blows into the wind. “That’s when it starts to be more about power.”
“But we’re still talking about a small club here. Right?”
Gannon shakes her head. “Akakievich still has a regular club, but he isn’t content being a pimp. He wants to sell the girls themselves. That’s when the big deals start to happen. He sets up the house on Prescott, starts asking half a million per girl.”
“Half a mil?”
“At least. These girls are owned, one man to a girl. Akakievich offers home delivery, sends them in a car.”
Jack ashes his cigarette against the rail of the balcony and grinds it out. He’s suddenly not interested in smoking.
“Why would you want to own someone?”
She shrugs. “How do we know what goes through these bastards’ minds? This is the sequence of events—that’s all I can give you. The demand gets so big, money can’t get you in. It’s not enough. Soon it’s the city’s power: people who can give Akakievich something he can’t buy with money. People who can give him protection. Like Clarence.”
“I knew about cops. O’Malley? Definitely. Just someone Akakievich paid to look the other way. But the fact that it goes all the way up to Clarence?”
She nods. “That’s what I’ve been waiting to get proof of. Now Freeman says it goes further.”
Jack shakes his head. What else can he do? “When Akakievich has Clarence, what’s he need a small-time vice cop for?”
“Exactly. I’m thinking Clarence needed O’Malley to make it look like something was being done. But it wasn’t.”
She holds up her hand, first finger extended.
“And this is where it gets real pretty. The next service Alexi starts charging for is anonymity: the assurance that no one can get his client list. This becomes the premier service, where the real money comes from. These guys want to keep their names sec
ret, he asks them for another half million.”
“Are these people insane?”
Gannon looks out over the city, the tall buildings and the city lights all around them in the fog. “They’re fucked. They’ll give him whatever he wants now. Including a new red-light district all to himself in Mission Bay. That, Jack, that’s what this is all about. It’s about getting the names on that list and stopping Akakievich.”
“Clarence isn’t enough?” Jack says. “You’re going after them all.”
She nods. “Clean up the city. That’s what the U.S. government is paying me to do.”
“That’s what O’Malley would’ve given you.”
She shakes her head. “O’Malley wouldn’t have known about everyone. Still, he’d have been a start. He could have given us more than Clarence, I’m guessing. And we could have used his testimony in front of a grand jury.”
“That was O’Malley’s private girl in the back of his car?”
She nods. “His message that he’d become expendable.”
“But what about the other girl? The one in the Chevy.”
“That we don’t know. That’s why Akakievich has to go down fast.”
Jack looks out over the city skyline through the fog. The buildings around him hold hundreds of fancy apartments; in their windows he can see flat-screen TVs, beautiful furniture, tasteful lighting. New buildings are coming up close to the bridge; streets of row houses stretch north toward the Bay. The city’s growing, expanding, getting bigger and richer every year.
“Motherfucker learned the American way,” Jack says.
“Maybe he did.” She shrugs, wraps her arms around herself, and shivers a little. “Or maybe he knows he’s in the shit. All I know is I want to stop him before he kills any more girls.” She turns toward the door and slides it open. “That can’t stand.”
31
Gannon’s phone is ringing, and she takes off down the hall to answer it. Jack meets Tom as he’s closing the door to their daughter’s bedroom.
“You’re lucky,” Tom says, “most people would have bet on you being dead by now.”
“Really?”
He gives a bit of a shrug. “This is serious, Jack. It’s a good thing you’re taking our protection.”
Jack’s about to respond, but Gannon comes at them with her phone closed. She grabs her purse off the kitchen counter. “Come on, Jack, we’ve got a scene in Japantown. It looks like another girl.”
“What?” Jack looks back at Tom, unsure why he’s going out again into the night. “Shouldn’t I stay?”
“No. You come with me. Until this is over, I’m not letting you out of my sight.” Gannon puckers an air kiss toward Tom. “Stay with Samantha?”
Tom nods. With a solemn look on his face, he follows them into the kitchen and to the front door. Jack still wants to say something back to him, but Gannon’s pulling him out the door by his arm.
***
In the car, Jack braces himself against the dashboard with both arms as Gannon corners hard toward the garage exit, clicking the door opener above her visor.
As the door slides out of the way, Gannon shoots the car out onto the street above and scrapes the rear bumper against the bottom of the ramp. “Shit,” she says. “I always do that.” She looks back in the rearview mirror, and Jack turns around to see the door sliding closed.
She turns hard again and starts heading west toward Japantown.
As Gannon blasts through a stop sign leaning on her horn, Jack watches a few spectators follow the car with wide eyes. Pretty much anything goes in San Francisco, but someone starts driving around like the chase scene in Bullet and it doesn’t go unnoticed.
“Don’t you have a siren on this thing or something?”
“FBI, Jack. We don’t do that.” She slows down as they come to a red light and pats Jack on the knee. “It’s okay, though.” When she sees there’s no traffic coming, she drives through the light.
Jack puts on his seatbelt. Not always his first instinct when he gets into a car, but a precaution he’s not too big to take when needed.
Gannon blows some hair out of her face and makes a hard right onto Sutter heading west. The traffic’s heavier on Sutter, and she slows down. Jack thinks about lighting a cigarette but doesn’t want to encourage her. On the other hand, a cigarette on her breath will play a lot better at a crime scene than a good whiff of what she’s been drinking.
He takes out his pack. “Smoke?”
“Thanks.” She takes one and lets Jack light it for her. When he’s got one lit for himself, he lowers the window.
She takes a long drag, squinting her eyes, and then puts her hand back on the wheel like she’s been driving and smoking this way all her life.
“All Freeman amounts to is one questionable witness,” she says.
“Clarence, then?” When she doesn’t answer, Jack smokes his cigarette and waits.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Then she shakes her head. “We don’t know.” She reaches into her purse to get out the BlackBerry. “Here.” She hands it to Jack. “Call Shaw.”
Jack scrolls through the names on her caller list without recognizing any. Then he gets to Shaw’s and calls the man’s cell, but Shaw doesn’t answer.
“So we’ve got three dead girls now and O’Malley and Hopkins. Does that mean Akakievich’s big fish start showing up dead next?”
She shakes her head. “Or worse. My bigger fear is they’ll give Akakievich what he wants.”
32
Gannon flashes her wallet toward the blue suits at the crime scene, and they raise the yellow tape for her. Their main job appears to be holding back the press—a couple of beat reporters and a cameraman snapping shots of the scene. Maybe a dozen other people stand outside the yellow tape, watching the cops do their work. It’s the center of Japantown, almost exactly across the street from the restaurant Junius Ponds used to frequent. Behind the scene, the Peace Tower stretches up into the night like an ironic backdrop to the night’s events. The girl lies on the pavement, covered by a blanket.
When one of the cops starts to say something to Jack, he nods at the guy—the same one from last night—and tells him the same line: “Forensics.” The guy smiles, nods at Jack. He holds up the yellow tape to let him pass.
“How’d you—”
“The cops,” Jack says. “They’re all big fans of the movie.”
Gannon slips a cord out of her wallet and loops it around her neck to keep the badge on her chest. It sits right in the middle of her cleavage, slanting upward.
This time there’s no car, only the empty concrete plaza and a handful of police officers standing around talking, a team of guys from the coroner’s office already working around the body, surveying the scene. Gannon walks right up to the girl. There’s a detective wearing a suit, a nice tie, and when he looks at her, his mouth almost falls open.
“Williams,” he says when he’s gathered himself. “She’s been here less than two hours. Body’s just now going cold.” He gestures to Jack with his chin. “Who’s this?”
“He’s with me.”
Williams gives Jack a hard look. He knows he’s getting dicked around by a Fed and there’s nothing he can do about it. Jack gives him his best smile, trying to show the guy they’re on the same side. Williams stares at Jack for a heartbeat, then goes back to writing on his pad.
When Gannon lowers the blanket from the girl’s face, Jack sees she’s older than the others, maybe almost eighteen. The idea that she could be used up, too old for the game, doesn’t seem possible. Looking at her face, Jack doesn’t see how that could ever be true. She has red hair and a thin chin, skin pale enough to make you believe she spent part of her life underwater. Her head and a beautiful pair of soft shoulders show over the top of the dark SFPD blanket. Gannon lifts it to take a look, and Jack doesn’t think twice before he comes around to see more. She’s thin, but with a set of some plastic surgeon’s finest creations across her chest, swelling out over her arms. Below her thin, f
lat stomach, a torch of red hair is barely visible in the night.
Gannon lowers the blanket. She goes down to the legs and crouches to get close before lifting the blanket. “No scars,” she says.
Williams fills them in. “Cause of death is suffocation. Someone put a bag over this girl’s head and waited for her to die. Contusions on the wrists and ankles. My bet is she was tied down when it happened.”
Gannon stands up. “Anyone see anything?”
Williams points his pencil at an elderly Japanese couple sitting on one of the plaza’s concrete benches. “They found the body. Didn’t see it arrive. Found her here, right where you see. Drop and run.”
Gannon nods. The girl’s hair is spread out around her face, her lips dark in contrast to the rest of her face.
“She’s Russian?” Jack asks.
“No ID yet.” Williams keeps writing in his pad, speaks without looking up from his work. “But if I had to guess, I’d say she ran in the same circles with the girl we found at the Embarcadero last night. Same basic setup.”
Gannon blows out a hard breath, looking up at the big restaurant across the street, its picture window and the tables on the second floor. “No witnesses.”
Williams raises his head. He glances over his shoulder, back toward the street and up at the restaurant. “No one’s talking.”
33
After convincing Williams to sit on his report, keep the press outside the yellow tape, and not release any information about the girl, especially not any pictures, Gannon leads Jack back to her car, swearing a blue streak all the way.
She’s still calm and composed physically, walking with determination, but under her breath, she’s letting it all go.
In the car, she starts the engine and takes another cigarette, smokes it with the window open, the engine idling. Jack can feel her frustration across the seat.
“This upsets you.”
“I’ve seen this girl before,” she says. “That’s the problem.”