Isabel's Run (30 page)

Ms. Red Hair’s expression changed from belligerence to concern almost immediately. Even Toni glanced at me, surprised. I winked at her, from the side that Ms. Red Hair couldn’t see.

I turned back to the girl. “You know that makes you guilty of being a pimp in the eyes of the state of Washington, don’t you?” I said. I think this may have been true, at least in a thin sense, anyway. “That’s a Class B felony.” I turned to Toni. “Is that five or ten?”

“Ten years,” she said. “And a $20,000 fine.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Red Hair said. She tried to sound tough, but I got the distinct impression that she wasn’t as tough as she was trying to appear. “Are you guys cops?”

“Nope,” I said. “We’re private investigators. But we’ve got lots of friends who are cops. I’m sure our buddies at the Lynnwood Police Department can figure out if what you’re doing is something you can go to jail for. We can call them out here and turn this over to them.”

“Fuck off,” the girl said. “What do you want from me, anyway?”

“Tell you what,” I said, “Let’s start over. I’m Danny. This is Toni. You are—?”

“Megan.”

“Megan,” I said. “Good. We’ll leave everything on a first-name basis for the moment. Let me tell you, Megan, before we even get started—we’re not interested in seeing you get in trouble. But we need some information, and you’re going to give it to us; otherwise, we’re calling the cops, and you can explain things to them. Understood?”

She glared at me. “What kind of information?”

“We’re here this afternoon looking for a girl. We think she’s been through here probably today.” I pulled out my phone, opened up a picture of Kelli, and handed it to her. “Does she look familiar?”

Megan looked at the photo and then handed the phone back to me. She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said.

“Ahh—not good enough, Megan. You’re stonewalling. Here’s what we do when you stonewall.” I turned to Toni and said, “Toni, make the call. Lynnwood police.”

Toni pulled out her phone and started dialing.

“Wait,” Megan said. Toni paused.

“Okay,” she said.

I turned back to her.

“I saw her.”

“When?” I asked.

“Earlier today. Probably around eleven.”

“Where was she? Do you know where she is now?”

She lowered her head. “She went with Crystal.”

Hadn’t taken Kelli long at all. She’d been gone what—six hours? And she’d already infiltrated the gang.

“From the start,” I said. “Tell us what happened.”

She shifted her feet. “I saw her sitting outside the food court this morning. So I started talking to her. She said she ran away because her stepfather was giving her shit.”

“Then what happened?”

“I told her I knew someone who helped runaways. I told her I’d call her if she wanted.”

“That’s Crystal Wallace?” I asked.

“Crystal, yeah,” she said. “I don’t know her last name.”

“So you called Crystal, then?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what happened?”

“It usually takes Crystal about an hour to get here. She came and talked to me for a minute, and then she went outside and started talking to the girl. Then they left.”

“Are you sure they left together?”

“Yeah. I saw them leave together.”

“Here’s another picture,” I said. I opened up a picture of Isabel and handed the phone back to Megan. “Ever see her? It would have been a month or so back.”

Megan studied the picture. “Yeah. I called Crystal for her, too. Then she and Crystal came in shopping together.”

“So—back to my first question. How much money does Crystal give you for the lead?”

She looked back down. “A hundred dollars,” she said.

I nodded. “A hundred dollars. Do you know what happens to these girls?”

She looked at me and then shook her head. “No.”

“You don’t? Really?” I asked.

She shook her head again.

“You don’t know that these girls are almost all turned into prostitutes by Crystal and her people? That they advertise them on Backpage.com? That they’re basically held captive—sometimes for years? That they’re made to have sex with three-four-five men a night, seven days a week? You didn’t know any of that?” Despite my best efforts to remain perfectly calm, my voice probably made it pretty clear how upset I was getting.

Megan’s eyes were moist with tears. She shook her head. “I didn’t know.”

I stared at her for a minute and then asked, “Do you have a driver’s license?”

“I thought you said that it was just first names?” she said.

“I said ‘for the moment.’ That moment’s over. And here’s the way it is now. You’re going to give me your driver’s license so I can copy down everything on it. Also, you’re going to give me your cell phone number. I’m not going to do anything with any of this information—like I said, we’re not interested in seeing you go to prison.”

“Then why do you want it?”

“Two reasons. First off, there might be a question pops up that I need answered. If that happens, I’m going to call you on your cell phone, and you’re going to need to answer truthfully. Second, you may be called to testify. If that happens, you’ll need to do so truthfully.”

“I don’t want to testify,” Megan said. “I don’t want to be involved at all.”

I smiled. “Oops. Too late. You’re already involved. You’re making money off of prostitution. You don’t have many options here. Remember. Ten years. Twenty grand.”

She looked at me, then nodded. “Okay.”

She dug through her purse and then handed me her driver’s license. I took a picture of it using my phone. She also gave her cell phone number. I typed typed it into my phone and, just for kicks, tried her cell phone. It worked. When I was done, I turned to her.

“And I lied. There’s one other thing you have to do, Megan.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe you when you say you don’t know what happens to these girls. Or put it this way. If you really don’t know, then it’s because you don’t want to know. But you have eyes. You’re not stupid. So here’s the last thing for you to do. When you leave the mall today? If you ever come back, it better be to go shopping. If she or I ever see you in this mall hanging around girls again, then we’re turning over all this stuff to the Lynnwood cops. You’ll be in jail so fast you won’t believe it. And you’ll stay there for a long damned time.”

“One other thing,” Toni said. “You’d better not try to get in touch with Crystal and warn her about us. We’ll be pulling all her phone records—cell phone and home phone. We’ll trace down every caller, and we’ll know if you called after today. There’d better not be any calls from you. Got it?”

She nodded.

“You do your part,” I said, “Just go home. Stay home. We’ll not turn you over to the Lynnwood police. You go on living your life. That’s a hell of a lot better deal than these other girls have.”

She nodded.

“Now get out of here.”

She hopped up and double-timed it for the parking lot.

AS SOON AS we got into the Jeep for the trip back to Seattle, I called Doc and asked him to run over to the Bryant Neighborhood Park parking lot and keep an eye on the house on Fortieth.

“Call me if you see these guys—whether or not you see them with Kelli.”

“Got it, dude,” he said.

Next, I dialed Annie Hooper’s number. She answered on the third ring. I explained to her about Kelli deciding to go undercover and how she’d apparently hooked up with Crystal at the mall.

“You need to get her out, fast,” Annie said. Her voice left no room for uncertainty. “You have a very short period—maybe forty-eight hours or so, during which they’ll try to wine and dine her—try to impress her and get her comfortable. Most likely, they won’t touch her in this period. But after that, they’ll start in on her. She’ll be given drugs. She’ll be pressured—heavily—to have sex with one or more of the gang members. Jeez,” she added, “talk about a silly thing to do. She stepped right into the middle of a real shitstorm.”

Annie was talking to us through the Jeep’s speakerphone. I could see out of the corner of my eye that Toni was tense as she listened. I suppose that’s understandable.

“That’s the way we see it, too,” I said. “Today’s Thursday. We figure that we need to get her out by Saturday—Sunday at the latest.”

“Agreed,” Annie said.

“Along those lines, our goal is pretty simple,” I said. “Rather than go in ourselves guns blazing, we’d prefer to get Nancy Stewart to do it. They don’t have the same kind of issues that civilians do when it comes to going in with guns. But we’re having some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Nancy needs solid probable cause before she can get a warrant. The good news is that we think we have the gang’s locations and their vehicles all identified,” I said. “We’ve spent a fair amount of time on surveillance, and we’ve learned quite a bit. When the time comes, it will be a whole lot easier to mobilize and move against them. But the bad news is that this information doesn’t mean much unless we have some proof that these guys are somehow involved with Isabel. We need to be able to link them somehow. Unfortunately, so far we haven’t found Isabel—no sign of her. And because we don’t have any clue as to where she is, or even if the North Side Street Boyz are involved with her disappearance for that matter, Nancy can’t get the warrants that would allow her to arrest them or even to search the houses. The best we have regarding Isabel now is the fact that the person who answered the ad for Isabel was employed by NSSB.”

“But from what you just said, you
know
Kelli’s with Crystal,” Annie said. “You have an eyewitness. And to some degree, that corroborates the story you heard about Isabel.”

“True. But Kelli is over eighteen—she’s an adult. She can go where she wants and hang out with whomever she wants. The fact that she’s going along willingly—at least so far—makes it so that Nancy can’t go after her. No crime’s been committed.”

She thought about this for a second. “That’s tough, then. What are you going to do?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “When you said that we know Kelli’s with Crystal, you’re right. And we know where Crystal is—pretty much, anyway. If it comes down to it, we’re not going to wait for the Seattle Police Department to go in and get her out of there, to hell with the legal concerns. We definitely have the ability to do that on our own. That said, for obvious legal reasons, we’d rather have SPD do it. Which brings me to the real purpose of my call.”

“What’s that?”

“I was hoping that we might be able to speak to Paola again. When we talked to her last week, she seemed like she had more information—maybe a lot more—that she was not willing to share. Most of the good information we’ve been able to put together has come from our interview with Paola. We’re wondering if she can help us some more. Has she softened up at all? Do you think she might be able to add anything now?”

The tires hummed softly on the pavement while Annie thought. “I don’t know,” she said after several seconds had passed. “She’s been making good progress over the past week. I don’t know if that means she’d be willing to talk. And I also don’t know whether she has anything else she can offer, even if she were willing to talk to you guys. That said, my inclination is that she’d probably be a lot more willing to do it now than she was a week ago. Would you like me to ask her if she’d be willing to sit down with you?”

“That would be fantastic,” I said.

“Let me call you right back,” she said.

Five minutes later the phone rang.

“She’ll do it. Can you be here at four? She has a meeting with a counselor until then,” Annie said.

“Great.”

“We don’t usually give our addresses out, but I don’t think you two are a security risk.”

“We appreciate that.” She gave us the address—it was in Fremont, right on the way.

* * * *

Before I drove into the neighborhood of Paola’s Angel House, I thought the streets near Ravenna Park where the NSSB houses were located were narrow. Fact is, they were boulevards compared to the streets in Paola’s neighborhood. “Streets” is actually kind—goat paths might be more accurate. I resisted the urge to turn myself sideways as I squeezed the Jeep through impossibly narrow spaces on the way to Paola’s house. No way could two cars ever pass side by side there. If I’d encountered a car from the opposite direction, one of us would have had to swerve into a parking space and wait for the other car to pass before proceeding. And if the skinny roadways weren’t bad enough, the streets were lined on both sides with tall trees that canopied completely over the roads. The effect was very much like driving through a narrow tunnel. If a person was prone to claustrophobia, he’d be in trouble. Fortunately, I didn’t see any other traffic once we pulled into the general area—the neighborhood was quiet and peaceful.

I turned onto Paola’s street, and shortly afterward Toni said, “There it is.” She always finds addresses first. She pointed to a house two doors up on the right. “I see the number on the mailbox.” I lucked out and found an empty spot on the curb only two houses away. We hopped out and began walking back to the house. “It looks just like all the other houses,” she said. “You can’t tell from the outside that it’s a home for girls.”