Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (18 page)

It was just the kind of “safe” but rebellious type thing that a kid like her would get up to behind her conservative father’s back. Even if she knew it would drive her kind-hearted but old-fashioned father nuts.

Maybe especially if she knew it would drive him nuts.

Mr. Jiāng told me he’d had no idea what his fifteen-year-old daughter was really up to that day. She’d announced to him she was going downtown to shop at one of the bigger indoor malls with her friend, Hilary. Jazzy said that she, Hillary and Hilary’s older sister, Marla, would shop, get lunch, hang out and go to a movie if they found anything good to watch.

As a result, Mr. Jiāng didn’t really get worried until about seven o’clock that night, when Hilary and Marla’s mother called him and asked if he’d heard from the girls.

The two of them drove to the mall together, and couldn’t find them. They’d asked around, and no one had seen them, either.

They’d called all of their friends.

They’d driven around the neighborhood and downtown. They’d talked to more parents. They called the police and told them what happened.

Then they’d gone back to the mall and searched the movie theaters.

It wasn’t until two full days had gone by and the police were heavily involved that one of Jazzy and Hillary’s other friends came forward and stammeringly confessed about the modeling show. She admitted that Jazzy, Hilary and Marla lied, that they’d never been to the mall at all. She told the police that Jazzy and her friends had gone to a hotel downtown instead, to an open modeling call by a famous modeling school called
Madam Culare’s.

The friend hadn’t wanted to get Jazzy and Hilary in trouble.

Apparently she confessed the lie to her parents at some point, and they marched her straight into the police station to repeat her story to them.

So, given that I had about an hour to kill before the high school got out, I tracked down the hotel the girl had named to the police after I left Mr. Jiāng. I figured it couldn’t hurt to look around, although I knew the police would have been all over this place already.

It was pretty seedy.
 

Walking in from the parking lot, I saw a half-covered, algae-choked pool and a lot of moss growing on the outside walls near a vending machine alcove. The hotel itself was sorely in need of a paint job, despite being fairly close to the Space Needle and in walking distance of the Music Museum and a few other big tourist spots. The whole property looked like some kind of pre-gentrification relic, from back before Seattle became one of the richest cities in the Northwest. It was definitely nothing like one of the fancy hotels downtown, where
Culare’s Modeling School
had their real-deal talent scout functions.

It was perfect, however, for a bogus one run by some loser, mobster up-and-comer wannabe.
 

Anyway, a kid wouldn’t think to question the location much, certainly not the way an adult would. I’m sure the organizers had some lame reason for the location, too, probably to keep the number of attendees low or some other such nonsense.

I talked to the manager of the hotel, who happened to be working the front desk.

Clearly, she hadn’t questioned the whole modeling show cover story, either.

She took me to the main meeting hall, where the event took place. While she fumbled with keys and kept blowing her badly permed, bleached-blond bangs out of her eyes, she told me how the police had come to look at the same room, only a week or so earlier.

Not to be an asshole, but she didn’t strike me as the brightest bulb.

Greedy, yes. She was proud of the hotel, in a way that was almost awkward since I didn’t know how to convincingly feign enthusiasm for the dump. I mean, it must have been nice once, but those days were long gone and probably predated her being here.
 

Either way, after talking to her for a few minutes, it was pretty clear she hadn’t questioned the meeting room rental once she had the money in her sweaty, ring-adorned hands. She also confessed to me how “hot” the photographers and model recruiter guy were, and how they seemed legit with all of their expensive-looking lighting and other equipment.

She also told me––as a lot of people feel the need to tell me in these situations for some reason––that she “got the feeling” there was something off with the guy renting the place. She said she sensed he might not be right in some way, that something didn’t gel with his story or maybe just with him.

I don’t know why people say shit like that, honestly.

Truthfully? I don’t think she noticed a fucking thing except how the guy looked in his jeans, and how much money he handed her. Some people just need to convince themselves nothing bad would ever happen to them, I guess. They want to believe that their own spidey-sense is so finely attuned that they can just look at another person and know instantly if he’s a black hat or a white one. Which is total b.s., of course.

It also bugs me, because it implies that people who get screwed by psycho shitbags like these traffickers were somehow stupid or to blame for what happened. I’d been in this business long enough to know that was b.s., too. It could happen to anyone. Including me. Including this dumpy hotel manager with her lame cartoon sweatshirt and smoke-stained fingers.

So yeah, I had to fight to not roll my eyes at that one.

The conference room also needed paint.
 

The light fixtures looked about twenty years old and the carpet had been worn nearly threadbare in places. I saw water stains on the ceiling, along with some pretty iffy-looking electrical outlets...but the place was surprisingly large and it had a stage on one end, which is probably why they picked it.

The guys paid cash, the manager said.

She also specified a few times that it had been guys, too, as in all guys...as in
only
guys...no women at all on the team running the show or even on the phone. The manager told me she’d given descriptions to a police sketch artist, since she hadn’t asked any of them for ID at the time and the names came up as bogus on a database search. According to her, they got zip even using Homeland Sec channels since it was technically an Amber Alert.

I didn’t ask her where she got her information, just nodded.

As far as their stated affiliations, they used only the Culare name, which was pretty brazen, but maybe they didn’t figure on it mattering.

They’d never used the venue before, of course.

Nor would they use it again, I knew...even if their mob bosses didn’t shut them down.

They also would never use Culare’s name again, which is probably why they were so cocky about flaunting it, even having fake business cards made up along with the flyers and whatever else.

After talking to the manager for a half-hour or so, I found myself hemming and hawing about going to my friends in the Seattle PD, if only to get a look at those sketches. I knew I’d probably have to deal with the Yesler stuff, and I wasn’t sure it was worth the amount of time that might take. A part of me wanted to deal with that later, like in a few days, maybe after I’d exhausted a few more avenues in looking for the girls.

The hotel manager was able to give me a high-level description of the different guys making up the group, at least. When I pressed, I got somewhat more detail with some of the individual guys, too. None of them sounded familiar to anyone I’d researched at Culare’s, and the manager told me they all had accents anyway, so were likely foreigners. From what she said, between their accent and their looks, they definitely fell firmly on the European and/or Caucasian scale, versus some more southern or eastern part of the globe.

Blond hair, blue eyes, big bodies.

One guy was dark, but he had light eyes, too, from what she said.

Apparently, he was the real cutie of the bunch.

So the whole Russian mafia idea was sounding less crazy and paranoid to me, yeah.

The hotel manager described the dark-haired photographer as their leader. Said he was the best-looking and wore an expensive leather jacket and nice shoes, too. Not exactly the kind of detail I would need to pick him out of a crowd, but it was something.
 

When I pushed her more, I got a bit more to go on, too. From her hand held up to estimate his height, he was around six feet, maybe a bit more. Light blue eyes. Short, spiky black hair. Trimmed goatee. At least one earring. At least one tattoo, of a dragon on his left arm.

And yeah, that would still describe a fair number of people in Seattle, but it wasn’t nothing, so I thanked her, and spared a few bills for her, too.

Without a police sketch, it would be hard to ID any of these bozos for real, though.

So yeah, I was thinking it might be time to swing by the station. Maybe I’d bring the guys some coffees, try and smooth over my long absence and being fingered for a terrorist and whatnot. Going to the police station would mean something else, too.

Namely, I needed a decent cover story, for a change.

I swung by Greenlake High School first, since it was now inching up towards three o’clock. Jazzy and her friend Hilary had been sophomores there just a few weeks earlier. Hilary’s sister, Marla, had been a senior.

I got there about ten minutes before school got out for the day, which worked pretty well, in terms of finding the two girls I was looking for.
 

Thanks to Mr. Jiāng, I had pictures of Jazzy’s two best friends apart from Hilary, and, more importantly, I had the license plates of their cars. Well, car, really. Only one of the four friends had a car at all yet. Hilary was too young for even a learner’s permit, and Jazzy had only barely passed driver’s ed, from what her father told me.
 

That left Laurie Devereaux, the oldest in the group. She drove the rest of them to school, and according to Mr. Jiāng, she only just got her own car for her sixteenth birthday, which had been a few months earlier. Laurie was in the same grade as Hilary and Jazzy, but almost a year older than the other two girls.

The plate was pretty hard to miss, being “DollGrl8” and attached to the back end of a neon pink, convertible Volkswagon Beetle. The paint job had to be custom. It was so bright it made me blink when I looked at it, but it was hard to miss, so there was that.

I was leaning against the back end of that same bit of shiny eyesore when Laurie Devereaux got to the parking lot with Jazzy and Hilary’s
other
best friend, Mimi Braga. The four of them were kind of their own pack, from what Mr. Jiāng told me.

All four were what I would have considered rich kids growing up, but who probably technically came from the higher echelons of middle class.
 

Meaning, both parents worked in tech or some other highly-skilled job like doctor or lawyer, and they maybe had a rental property and a cabin near Mount Rainier in addition to the family home in Greenlake. I’d grilled Mr. Jiāng on Jazzy’s girl-pack a bit already and knew that Laurie’s dad was some kind of quasi-famous game developer, which is probably why he had the cash to throw at the bright pink barf mobile for his daughter’s birthday.

Mr. Jiāng implied that Laurie’s family had the most money in the group.

My relatively smooth talk––which I am capable of on occasion, whatever Gantry says––along with an old and near-to-expiration PI license and my direct mention of working for Ms. Culare herself of
Culare Modeling School
, got me in like Flynn with Laurie and Mimi.
 

I offered to treat them to coffee if they’d talk to me for a few minutes about Hilary and Jazzy and what happened around the time they disappeared.

Laurie was definitely the alpha in the group.

Well, of the duo that remained of the group, anyway.

After I’d gotten the two of them mochas with whipped cream and chocolate shavings on top from the local coffee hangout, Laurie slipped into the chair across from me at our sidewalk table, flipped her long, streaky pink, blond and brown hair over one shoulder, then gave me a direct look that didn’t lack for dramatic effect.

“I
never
thought I’d say I was glad I was grounded,” she announced, as if she’d told the same story more than a few times already. “Glad. I. Was. Grounded,” she repeated, pausing to blow on the whip cream, creating a dimple in the foam. “...Which, yeah. No way, right? Not that I didn’t know something was fishy about that whole modeling thing,” she added, in that knowing tone that only a sixteen-year-old can adopt.

Again, I had to fight not to roll my eyes.