Birthdays of a Princess (19 page)

Chapter
42

Harding and Macintosh had been snowed under with the South Vancouver
case and a few other loose ends. However, about mid November one of their busy
workdays ended with an unexpected bonus. The South Vancouver shooter placed
himself into custody, probably fearing repercussions from the rival gang if he
stayed out in the streets. His confession cut a lot of red tape, and they
suddenly had a free moment and remembered with a pang of guilty conscience that
they had let the Princess case slip. Hadn’t they planned to pay Tiara’s mother
another visit?

While Macintosh dialed to make the appointment with Melissa Brown,
Harding did a final check on his emails before closing shop.

Macintosh glanced up, saw the color drain out of his partner’s face,
and hung up.

“Something wrong?”

Harding pointed to the screen.

It was a video clip of a young girl, no more than nine, being undressed.
She was facing the camera without registering her surroundings. Her eyes were
clouded over, with heavy lids. She seemed to be sleepy.

“Josh sent me this.” Harding whispered. “It’s Tiara.”

The person undressing her was expertly avoiding the camera. To begin
with, the detectives could only see hands, stuck in black gloves. They held
their breath. Slowly one garment after another fell on the floor. Tiara stood motionless,
letting herself be handled like a lifeless mannequin. When she was fully
undressed, the black gloved person moved behind her, again not exposing any
details that would make identification possible. One could only see a wide dark
purple cape flowing all the way down like a curtain. Underneath the folds of
the cape was the shape of a fairly large stomach. Tiara’s upper body was then
pressed against this bulbous shape, with one black leather hand cupping her
chin and lifting her head up so the camera could focus on her face. Her eyes were
now closed.

For a brief moment the head of the handler became visible. Macintosh
gasped. The face was covered with a black mask with narrow eye slits only. It
made the action they were watching even more sinister, like a scene for the
dark ages. The head disappeared again, the camera zoomed in on Tiara until only
her body was exposed. The other hand stroked over her lower body.

Tiara’s face twisted, she wriggled around and moaned without opening
her eyes, as if in trance. It looked like she was trying to fight a nightmare,
but the black gloved hands held her tightly in position.

“Jesus,” Macintosh said. “Stop it.”

Harding hit the stop button. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

He kept hitting the keyboard, closing down his computer. A few
seconds later, he started it up again.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Macintosh sounded bitter.
“You’re on your own if you play that again.”

His partner didn’t sound much better. “Don’t be daft. I’m not
watching it again. I’m forwarding it to the Sexual Offense Squad. This is proof
our suspect has a history of abuse which goes way beyond participation in
beauty contests or semi-pornographic modelling.”

Macintosh sat down again. “We should send it to the shrink as well.
He should know too.”

“Yeah, right.”

Macintosh was already digging for Dr. Eaton’s card. He found it and
gave it to Harding.

“And we should show it to the mother,” he said. “I’d love to see her
reaction. The crazy lying bitch must have known all along. She must have. She
sold her own daughter to those black leather handlers.”

Harding typed Dr. Eaton’s email address in and forwarded the link.
Before he handed the card back to Macintosh, he dialed the phone number and got
connected to Dr. Eaton’s office. This time they wouldn’t wait for a call back.
He told the secretary that it was an emergency, and was asked to hold.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t surprise Melissa Brown with this,” he
said, covering the mouth piece with his hand. “She’s in deep shit now.”

Dr. Eaton came on the phone and Harding cleared his throat.

“Dr. Eaton, good of you to talk to me. I just sent you an email link
of a pornographic video clip featuring Tiara Rodriguez-Brown. Our Texas
connection has discovered it and just mailed it to us. Thought you should see
it… Yes, unfortunately I was informed there are more of a similar nature… No,
I’ll have them forwarded directly to the Sexual Offense Squad. I can’t stomach
more of those. And anyway, we are homicide. But it does give motive, if we ever
find out who the f… excuse me, who the victim is… Yes, we assume she must be
connected to Tiara’s past. We had thought we had identified her already, a
woman called Graciella Rodriguez… that’s right, her aunt… yes, but it can’t be
her. She’s dead, died in a fire a few years ago, can you believe this? ... Sure,
you look at the video and judge for yourself… Okay, I’ll keep you in the loop,
no worries. And if you ever… I mean, I know your conversations with her are
privileged… what did you say? ... What’s his name?” He scribbled something on
his pad. “Yeah, great, thanks, we’ll check into that.”

Harding hung up, a smile flitting over his somber expression.

Macintosh took the pad and read the name Harding had written down
out loud. “Tony Alvares. Who’s he?”

“The shrink said Melissa mentioned a guy called Tony Alvares, and
whatever she tells him is
not
privileged, so he can tell us anything she
said. Apparently that Tony guy was the choreographer employed by the mother to
teach Tiara the moves for her stage appearances. Now what does that tell you?
The moves! He was involved in training her for those degrading competitions.
God knows what else he made her do.”

As much as viewing the video had affected their mood, they felt a
little better now. Finally they had a name. It was their first real lead in the
case after the victim’s identity had gone cold. Harding sent off another email
to Josh, thanking him for his help and giving him the name of the person they
suspected to be involved in Tiara’s sexual exploitation. Tony Alvares. A dance
teacher.

Then he entered the same name into VPD’s own search engine, just to
make sure.

Macintosh was thinking back to one of his hunting expeditions up
north. He always did that when he needed to sort his brain, conjuring
wilderness visions of magical quality, where the prey and the hunter became
one. They had to think alike if they wanted to succeed, be it life or death.
Many times the prey had been able to get away because it was more clever and
faster than him, and just as often he had won because he had been able to think
like his prey.

“If I were Melissa and were confronted with this video, I’d deny
everything. There’s nothing that ties her to the crime,” Macintosh said.

“Except being the mother.”

“Right, but being her, I made sure I’m not visible in any of the
pictures or video clips. I’d know that I mustn’t be connected to them.”

“What?” Harding asked, shaking his head in disbelieve. “You think
her own mother was stuck underneath that purple cloak?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“And she covered herself to make sure Tiara wouldn’t recognize her?”

“Not just Tiara. Nobody should. Whoever is stuck under that cloak
had a good reason to hide. We can’t identify her, we got nothing. If I’m her,
I’d know that. I was careful all those years. I don’t leave a trace.”

“Do you really think Melissa is that smart?”

“She’s a lot smarter than we gave her credit for. What bugs me most
is the incident with the fire. When exactly was that?”

Harding looked at his notes. “Same month she and her daughter came
to Vancouver.”

“See. I’m Melissa. Something happened that made it necessary for me
to leave the country fast. I pack up my daughter. Before I go, I burn the place
where I lived to the ground. Destroy all possible evidence. Or I got somebody
do it for me. The aunt is still in the house. I might not know this and might
not even be aware that Graciella Rodriguez is dead.”

“That means they have cut off all ties, otherwise she’d know.”

“Right again. But if I do know, I’ve willingly accepted her death. I
probably made sure she was in the house and incapable of leaving when I burnt
it down. Again, I’m trying to get rid of anything or anybody that might
implicate me in the future. The aunt was part of the whole pedophilic
operation. Wasn’t she the one who had signed Tiara up for the pageants? Didn’t
she register the girl as Tia Rodriguez? Graciella was a major player and I,
Melissa, will now shift all the blame onto her. I know nothing and I’ve done
nothing wrong. I’ll be shocked when I see the video, and there isn’t a goddamn
thing anybody can do about it.”

“Unless we have proof.”

Macintosh nodded. “We have to tread real careful there. Just as well
I didn’t make the call yet. We have to get a lot more than this video before we
confront her with it. How high would this clip rank on the Copine Scale?”

“I do murder, I don’t deal in pedophile pornography.”

Harding, being Harding, did type ‘Copine’ into the search engine and
pulled up the information. Together, the detectives skimmed the ranks of the
scale compiled by the London Metropolitan Police in 1990 in an effort to
categorize child abuse images. Although revised many times since then, the ten
level typology still provided a guideline for research and law enforcement all
over the world.

There were ten levels, least to worst. The ninth, gross assault, was
defined as
“grossly obscene
pictures of sexual assault, involving penetrative sex, masturbation or oral
sex, involving an adult.”

“Gross Assault. That does it,” Macintosh said. “We need to inform
the Sergeant. It has to be added to our Princess file. Her lawyer must be made
aware of this, he can argue her case better if the extent of her abuse is
documented. And as far as we’re concerned, let’s figure out how we can expose
the mother bitch.”

“But if we don’t confront her with the video, what do you suggest we
do?”

“We have to put pressure on her, see if she makes a mistake. And if
my instincts aren’t totally off the mark, I believe there is one person who has
power over her. Louise, the grandmother. Let’s hassle her first, she might
manipulate her daughter until she breaks under the stress.”

Chapter
43

How long to my next birthday?

It is the end of November. Nine months to go before I’ll be sixteen.

My sweet psycho-doc tells me my psycho-social, which involves
interviewing essentially everybody who dealt with me—medical, school, friends,
you name it—is completed, for lack of anybody else to contact. As I myself am also
unable to provide further insight, he will finalize his assessment shortly. He
has even given me a little hint as to what his verdict will be.

“In my opinion, you’re not delusional. You’re also not aggressive.
You may not be consciously aware of what triggered the attack, but your
subconscious knows. I’m confident that you will eventually uncover the underlying
issues influencing your behavior. Unfortunately, I can’t expect the court to
wait for it, it may take too long.”

The problem is that treatment is very dependent on awareness, he
continues his lecture. If I’m not aware of what has triggered me, I can’t
anticipate or locate the stress that may lead to it again, and that makes me
difficult to treat. Being hard or impossible to treat will increase the level
of my guilt. The judge may feel the need to protect society from me, and if he
assumes that I have acted aggressively without any provocation but for the
sheer joy of it, he might even consider adult sentencing.

“If you don’t want to be tried as an adult,” Stanley says with an
earnest face that is supposed to impress me, “you need to be more cooperative.
The only way to avoid adult sentencing is to open up to people who usually work
on an assessment.”

“Like who?”

“Your case manager, your lawyer, a social worker, the police. You
need to give each one of them everything they require to figure out the reasons
for your actions.”

“Like what? I don’t know why I did it.”

“It would help if you at least agree to see the intern
psychologist.”

“Why? I’ve already agreed to talk to you.”

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

Not that I would ever let any other soul searcher but my dove-doc
infiltrate my psyche, but still, I ask: “What’s the difference?”

“A psychiatrist has a medical degree and can practice medicine,” he
explains. “Psychologists have training that has more emphasis on doing research
and by definition testing. To simplify it, psychologists use talk therapy.”

“Isn’t that what you are doing with me? All that digging into my
past?”

“True. Our sessions are therapeutic.”

“So why change then? Are you saying a psychologist has more clout in
court than you?”

“Well, psychologists do trump psychiatrists in court when it comes
to psychological tests, but as a psychiatrist I can query the interpretation of
the test results.”

“Which ultimately puts you in charge when the judge is undecided?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll stick with you then.”

“Once I hand in my report, no further consultation with you will be
scheduled. As bail is out of the question, you’ll be locked up in here until
your case goes to trial. You should use this time wisely. If there is anything
that comes to your mind that might explain your actions, it would really be
helpful. You can call me any time you feel the need to talk.”

Reality slowly sinks in. No more protective shield to hide behind.
How will I cope without his visits?

He watches me getting a little scared of the future.

“Your mother has asked to see you. Should you agree, I would highly
recommend you let me be present as an observer.”

I cross my arms. “I don’t want to see or speak to her.”

“Good.”

My presentiment of the coming months in the Center have been
founded. Within a few days of the dove-docs last visit, four more girls are put
into the eight-cell octagon I had entirely to myself until now. My Living Unit,
as every other separately controlled unit in this juvenile jail, is arranged
like a honeycomb with the community area in its center. The eight cells have an
odd shape as well, there is no rectangle in the whole complex. Weird shapes for
weird inmates. I guess somebody has given this some thought. We are residents,
not inmates, and our cells are not square but are organic Living Units.
Whatever.

Fact is, I now have to share my Living Unit with four other
residents-inmates, something I immensely dislike. They are hanging out in my so
far very private community area! I’m expected to live with four total
strangers! They all wear purple sweat suits!

There is no getting out of this unwanted company. I considered a
screaming match or slapping one of the girls, but the rule book states solitary
is only good for 2 to maximum 72 hours. I’ll only jeopardize Stanley’s
statement of my fragile but non-criminal mental health. It’s becoming somewhat
important to prove my sanity. I don’t like being confined. I don’t like being
in close proximity to strange purple girls. They automatically assume I’m one
of them and ask me what I’ve done, where I’m from, how long I’ll be here…God
only knows what else, if I wouldn’t cut them short.

One of them had the temerity to walk up to me while I was hiding
behind a book and introduce herself to me.

“Hi there, I’m Allison,” she said, extending her hand.

I ignored her, but she was persistent.

“I’m fifteen,”—aren’t we all?—“and I’m only in here for three
months. It’s quite okay in here. I should know, I’ve been in and out since I
was thirteen.”

I turned my whole body away from her and hoped she gets the message.
What it boils down to is that there is no way for me to withdraw into a corner,
literally. The cell doors are locked for the hours we are supposed to
communicate and participate in the mandatory school lessons and in all the
voluntary programs which are supposed to educate us and help us integrate into
society better when the time comes.

I don’t want to participate in anything, but now that I don’t have
the privilege of Stanley’s visits any more, I guess very soon they’ll make me
attend and I’ll have even less opportunities to withdraw into myself.

Only the nights are for me. I’m locked in my cell and ignore the
hourly flashlight check by security, making sure I have not escaped or hung
myself on the window bars with a ripped bed sheet.

I need to get out of here. I don’t belong.

The nights are too long. It gets dark so early, it gives my nightmares
a whole new quality. The dream that tortured me last night was drawn out
painfully long, reaching way into my semi-awake state. That happens when you
are locked-up in a small cell for twelve hours at a time. Your brain goes in
relentless overdrive to compensate for lack of stimulation.

The dream started with me falling into an unprotected water drain on
the roadside somewhere. I got stuck halfway down, but nobody up there looked
into the hole. The rain pelted down so hard it muffled my screaming, and soon
enough I felt like drowning whenever I opened my mouth. My yelling turned into
suffocating coughs. I couldn’t breathe. I willed myself to wake up, but it didn’t
work.

It was like those times after a session when Gracie had drugged me
with that juice. It took me only a few weeks after we had come to Canada to
figure this one out. Suddenly I was never drowsy any more. She had always
forced me to drink the sweet concoction when we were on the way to the studio,
just before we arrived, and sometimes afterwards, when I became fidgety and whiny
in the car. It made me lethargic very quickly, but I’ve always hated the
feeling of being incapable. Then, and even more so now, drugs are not for me.

Connie gave me a joint once and I took a deep drag because she said
it would take off some of the burden I carried with me. It didn’t. It
immediately threw me back to those days. As soon as Connie realized my panic,
she made me drink lots of water, and after I had snapped out of it she made me
promise to never ever again take any drugs. Easiest promise in the world. Why
should I want to feel like useless garbage?

So, in my dream, I’m stuck in the wet hole, fighting the drowsiness
I hate so much, willing me into a more alert state. Scenes come and go, with
languishing clarity or annoying fogginess, never there long enough for me to
grab one and shake it into reality. I drift in and out, lose focus and want to
slip into oblivion. It’s a nightmare alright.

Finally, the automated lights go on. It’s 7 am, I have forty-five
minutes to get up, go to the shower attached to the community area, wait my
turn, shower, go back to my cell, dress, go back to the community room, have
breakfast with my four purple resident-inmates, go back to my cell, make my
bed, clean the toilet and washbasin, mop the floor and then wait for room
inspection.

While I was doing all that, the nightmare never left me. I had it on
a leash, or it had me dragging along, who is to say. I stand by the window,
looking into the November clouds racing by. Serious rain clouds. Maybe a storm
is coming. I try not to think about any storm, but the memory of The Big One is
nightmarishly creeping in. A scene from my half-awake, half-asleep groping for
reality gains momentum. The storm. Me. Alone. All alone. The darkness. And
suddenly, the doors opening.

I know.

I start screaming. The doors open and security rushes in.