The Stolen Ones (9 page)

“IT’S DONE,”
Mike told the Dragon. “The message is sent.”

The American sounded groggy. It was nearly dawn in Romania, and Mike had been running the Dragon’s errand all night.

“Excellent,” the Dragon said. “And the message was clear?”

“Oh, it’s clear,” Mike replied. “Nobody in that pissant town will mess with you again. And if big sister calls home, she’ll lose her fucking mind.”

The Dragon smiled to himself. “Perfect,” he told Mike. “You’ve done well, Mike. Thank you.”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “Maybe you can pass the good news on to that partner of yours. Maybe he stops worrying so much.”

“I’ll tell him,” the Dragon said. “I’m sure he’ll be very pleased.”

“You can tell him his next shipment’s on the way, too,” Mike said. “The
Atlantic Prince
. Give it four or five days.”

“You made the changes to the order as I instructed?”

“Sure did. Swapped out any girl over eighteen, put together a box full of the prettiest teenage product you ever laid eyes on,” Mike said. “I guess that means Andrei finally agreed to go in with you on the New York thing, huh?”

“Not yet,” the Dragon said. “But he will.”

IRINA MILOSOVICI LOOKED AROUND
the little conference room where the FBI had decided to keep her. It was comfortable enough; there was a couch and a big TV, and somebody had run out for sandwiches, but it was still a prison. The police were everywhere, the famous FBI. An army of strange men, just outside the door, studying her with prying, curious eyes.

Irina had decided that she trusted Agent Stevens, and his wife. She trusted the beautiful black woman who seemed to be friends with Stevens. The other agents, though, the quiet men, Irina did not trust.

Probably most of the other agents were good people. Kind men, and brave. Undoubtedly, though, a few of them were bad. They would watch her like predators. They would hurt her if they wanted, and she could do nothing to stop them. She could not even pick out the bad men from the good.

She did not want to be around any man right now, she decided. She didn’t want to take the risk. She would tolerate Kirk Stevens because he would help her find her sister. Because he had been kind to her. Because she trusted him.

She would not trust anyone else.

The translator, Maria, sat in an office chair at the conference room table, eating a croissant and watching a bottle blonde cling to a chisel-faced man on the TV set. The blonde was weeping, and the man was pouting. He was wearing hospital scrubs. Irina didn’t recognize either of them, and she knew most of the American movie actors.

A soap opera, then, and a bad one, judging by the melodramatic soundtrack and the woman’s ceaseless sobbing. Irina stood from the couch and walked to the window, gazed out over the high iron fences, the security guards by the parking lot, the roadway and the flat fields beyond. Yes, this was a comfortable prison, but it was still a prison.

Still, it’s better than what Catalina has
.

Irina watched cars pull in and out of the parking lot, heading out into the flatland beyond. The countryside resembled Berceni—not a lot, but just enough that Irina felt suddenly, terribly homesick.

Her parents must be worried sick. She hadn’t talked to them in weeks, maybe a month. And Catalina had gone missing, too. They would be out of their minds with fear.

You stupid cow. Never thinking of others. Only thinking of yourself
.

The guilt washed over her, threatened to knock her down. She turned away from the window, from the flatland beyond. Maria was still watching that insipid soap opera. Irina walked over to the TV, turned down the volume. Caught Maria’s eye when she looked up, surprised.

“I’m sorry,” Irina told the translator, “but I would like to talk to my parents.”

WINDERMERE HAD ONE MISSED CALL
when she and Stevens landed in Duluth. Mathers, back at the office. She glanced at Stevens, almost reflexively, and then dialed Mathers’s number.

“Yo,” Mathers said when he picked up the phone. “How’s Duluth?”

“Just landed,” Windermere said. “Do you answer the phone like that because I’m black, Mathers?”

“What?” Mathers coughed. “Um, wait. Carla. No—”

“I’m messing with you,” she said. “What do you want?”

“Jesus.” Mathers exhaled. “Sometimes you scare me, Carla.”

She met Stevens’s eye. “Anyway.”

“
Anyway
, Irina wants to call her mother. Wants to tell her parents about her sister, the translator says.”

Of course Irina wanted to call her family. Her folks were probably terrified out of their minds. But Windermere wasn’t sure she wanted the girl calling anyone at this point in the investigation.

“Tell her to wait until tomorrow, at the earliest,” Windermere said. “Me and Stevens should be back around midafternoon. We can set something up then.”

A beat. “You brought Stevens?”

“To Duluth? Yeah, Derek, we’re working the case together. Is that a problem?”

“No.” Mathers went quiet. “Just, no.”

“We’ll talk about it when I get back,” Windermere said, and ended the call. She wished Mathers would man up a little. Apparently he still had some jealousy issues, which made no sense at all—except it made plenty of sense. It had been partially to get back at Stevens, happily married Stevens, that she’d hooked up with Mathers in the first place. She’d always felt a spark, stupid and unexplainable, with the BCA agent, and though she’d never been close to acting on it, she knew Mathers could tell it was there.

Gah,
she thought.
This better not get messy
.

Then she pushed Mathers from her mind and hurried to catch up with Stevens, who was standing beside the baggage claim, talking to a tall, rather stout woman. “Carla,” he said, “meet Detective Donna McNaughton, the pride of Duluth.”

McNaughton shook Windermere’s hand, a firm grip. “Good to meet you,” she said, a twinkle in her eye. “Understand you’re in town for a little sex tourism.”

“SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT,”
Stevens said to the woman. “You’re a hooker, and Donna—Detective McNaughton—is cool with it?”

McNaughton had claimed ignorance of the local sex trade, begged off any knowledge of underground brothels or shady strip clubs, anywhere a bunch of gangsters would try to sell women.

“I can’t say I know anything about any beautiful young women at all, Kirk,” she’d said with a smirk. “Vanessa gets jealous if my eyes start to wander.” She’d cocked her head. “But maybe I can hook you up with somebody who knows this kind of thing.”

She’d driven them to a condo building in downtown Duluth, buzzed them up to a swanky unit with a view of the lake, where a pretty blond twenty-something greeted them in horn-rimmed glasses and yoga sweats and ushered them in for tea.

The girl—Shannon Spenser, she said her name was—glanced at McNaughton. “Escort,” she said. “Not a hooker. There’s a difference.”

“You have sex for money, though,” Stevens said. “What’s the difference?”

“I provide companionship,” Spenser told him. “Whatever happens above and beyond that is between two consenting adults.” She turned to McNaughton again. “Look, am I going to need my lawyer for this?”

“I just don’t understand,” Stevens said, before McNaughton could answer. “Prostitution is illegal in this state, is it not?”

“Sex for money is illegal,” Spenser replied. “I run a registered business for men who want female company. Like I said, if a client and I decide we want to do anything more than hang out with each other, it’s our business, legally and”—she looked at Stevens —“morally, too.”

Semantics,
Stevens thought.
A legal loophole.
He was fully aware that high-dollar escorts used the argument that they were being paid for their time and not for sexual activities, even in states like Minnesota, where prostitution was harshly punished. It was still sex work, cut-and-dried, and as the father of a teenage girl, Stevens couldn’t figure out why everyone in the room—McNaughton and Windermere included—seemed so blasé about the situation.

“We met at the charity Fun Run last year,” McNaughton explained. “Vanessa’s got me getting out, getting me in shape. I nearly died.”

Spenser laughed. “She made it to the finish line. We ran together.”

“I held you back.”

“Whatever.” Spenser rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I convinced Donna to come to my friend’s yoga studio.”

McNaughton groaned. “All that bending and twisting.”

“Anyway,” Windermere said. “How long before you found out—”

“About my job?” Spenser shrugged. “I guess it was about the time I found out Donna here is a cop.”

“And it wasn’t weird?” Stevens asked.

“Why should it be? In the eyes of the State of Minnesota, I run a legit business.” Spenser picked up the empty teacups and took them into the kitchen. “What do the FBI and BCA want with an escort, anyway?”

Stevens looked around the condo. Then he cleared his throat. “We’re looking for information on the sex industry up here,” he said.

Spenser poked her head out from the kitchen. “I’m not ratting anybody out,” she said. “Donna knows this. People think sex workers are all exploited and abused, but I—”

“These girls
are
exploited,” Windermere said. “We’re talking about girls who’ve been brought in from Europe as slaves.” She explained Irina Milosovici’s situation as Spenser came out from the kitchen and listened. “What we’re hoping is that you could point us toward a particular brothel or club that might house these women.”

Spenser frowned. “Jesus,” she said. “Yeah. Let me think.”

She walked to a computer in a small cubby of an office. Fired it up and typed something into an Internet browser. “A couple of my guys mentioned something,” she said. She looked pointedly at Stevens. “You’re not getting their names, not ever, by the way.”

“Fine,” Stevens said. “Whatever you can give us.”

“There’s this club, Heat, in the south end,” Spenser said. “A strip joint, but my guys said the rules are pretty lax. You have the money, you can do whatever you want.”

“These guys are your clients?” Windermere asked.

“
Former
clients. Guys like that aren’t exactly in my league, Agent Windermere. I cut them off pretty quick.”

Stevens watched the way Spenser looked at Windermere, noticed the way she made sure to call her by name. She wasn’t flirtatious or solicitous, but she certainly played attentive well. Stevens figured she had no trouble finding well-heeled men to pay her for that kind of charm.

Windermere, though, seemed impervious to it. “Heat,” she said. “Okay. So what makes you think this place is our spot?”

“My guys both mentioned a language barrier,” Spenser told her. “Said the girls were beautiful, every one, but none of them spoke much English. They had to negotiate with some guy to get what they wanted.”

“And what did they want?”

“You know. Sex. A blowjob. Nothing crazy, I don’t think.”

“You didn’t think about reporting this?” Stevens asked.

“Look, I take sex crimes as serious as anyone,” Spenser said. “I don’t want to see any woman abused. How was I supposed to know these women were being trafficked? It’s not like there aren’t tons of Eastern European chicks working legit in this country, you know?”

Stevens stood. “Thanks for the tea,” he said. “You have an address for this Heat place, by chance?”

Spenser scribbled something on a notepad. “I would have phoned it in if I’d known,” she told Stevens as she walked them to the door. “I’m not a bad person, you know.”

Stevens studied Spenser, her wide, concerned eyes, her yoga sweats, her comfortable condo, Kafka on the end table. Figured the girl was about as far away from Irina Milosovici as she was from Hillary Clinton. Figured it wasn’t women like Shannon Spenser who were shipping boxes of women into the country.

Still, though. If Andrea ended up like this . . .

Stevens shook his head. “Maybe not,” he told Spenser. “But still.”

FROM THE OUTSIDE,
Club Heat was small and dirty and depressing, a windowless box surrounded by warehouses, train yards, and a gravel parking lot a quarter full, mostly rusty old pickups and beat-up American econoboxes.

The interior wasn’t much better: dim lighting and a dank, pervasive odor; cloudy mirrors and well-polished brass poles; track lighting and a large disco ball. A pretty blonde stood on the main stage in a pale yellow bikini, staring at her reflection above the bar as she swung her hips more or less in time to the music.

“It’s not exactly the sultan’s harem, is it?” Stevens said, surveying the room—the girl on the main stage, the off-duty dancers working the floor, the furtive men who sat, alone or in small, grim-faced groups, watching the show. “Hardly seems like the kind of place where your every fantasy gets fulfilled.”

Beside him, Windermere snorted. “Truth never lives up to fantasy, Stevens,” she said. “Anyway, it
does
seem like the kind of place that would buy a truckload of women, wholesale.”

Across the room, a large bouncer guarded a velvet-curtained doorway. Another big man tended bar. And a third bouncer was now approaching them, his eyes roving hungrily over Windermere’s body. “Evening, folks,” he said. “Two-drink minimum.”

Windermere had her badge out before Stevens could react. “No drink minimum,” she said. “Who’s running this place?”

The bouncer’s jaw worked as he studied the badge. He studied it a long time. Stevens slid his hand around to his holster, hoping McNaughton and her Duluth PD cronies outside would move fast if the whole plan went sideways. Then the bouncer straightened. “You want Jimmy,” he said. “In the back.”

>   >   >

STEVENS COULD FEEL THE BOUNCER
watching him as they crossed the room toward the red velvet curtain. The bartender, too. “I don’t think these guys like us,” he said.

Windermere snorted. “What was your first clue?”

They walked between the dark tables, dodged a couple of girls hustling lap dances. Stevens overheard a brief, stilted exchange, a heavy accent, halting English. A dark-eyed brunette met his gaze, and for a moment, he saw her eyes cloud with fear. Then, quickly, she looked away.

“You seeing these women?” Stevens asked Windermere. “If they’re here by choice, they don’t exactly seem happy about it.”

Windermere nodded. “Very least, they’re drugged out of their minds.”

They walked up to the bouncer at the red curtain. The bouncer looked past them, got a signal from his friend at the front, and stepped aside, pulling the curtain with him. Beyond the curtain was a hallway, more curtains on either side: private booths.
You have the money, you can do whatever you want
.

“All the way back,” the bouncer said. “Where the office is.”

Stevens followed Windermere down the hallway. Some of the curtains they passed were open to empty booths, banquettes, knee-high private stages. Some were closed, and Stevens could hear noises from within, some identifiable, some not. Windermere’s eyes were dark. “I feel an ass-whooping coming on, Stevens.”

They reached the end of the hallway, and a flat-gray steel door. Another bouncer. Another hallway, this one drab and sparse. The back of the club. A tiny office, a little man behind a cluttered desk.

The man scrambled to his feet as Stevens and Windermere entered the room. “Who the hell are you?” he said, his face red. “Who let you back here?”

“FBI, chief,” Windermere told him. “Had a couple questions about that two-drink minimum.”

The guy stared at her. Then Stevens. His eyes were wired, his movements jittery. “FBI,” he said. “Christ.”

“Jimmy, right?” Stevens stepped toward the desk. “You run this place?”

The guy looked at them both again. Swallowed. “I want my lawyer.”

“You doing something wrong, Jimmy?” Windermere said. “Why don’t you sit down and we’ll talk.”

Jimmy didn’t sit. “What’s this about?” he said. “You can’t be—That two-drink thing is standard. Everybody does it. What does the FBI care about—”

“It’s not the drinks, Jimmy,” Windermere said. “It’s the girls.”

“Oh, shit.” Jimmy’s eyes went wide. He didn’t wait to hear the punch line, just ran: half hurdled the desk, pushing papers everywhere, scrambling for the door. Threw a fist at Windermere, quick and off balance, then shoved her aside and ran into the dingy hallway.

“Round ’em up, Cole,” he called to the bouncer. “Get the girls out of here, right fucking now.”

“Don’t you
dare
.” Windermere drew her Glock and trained it on the bouncer. “Don’t you fucking move, Cole. You keep those girls where they are.”

Cole froze. Jimmy didn’t. He bolted the other way down the hall. Stevens chased after him. Followed Jimmy through an exit door and nearly landed on top of the little man where he lay on the gravel beside the back step, grabbing his ankle, moaning.
“Shit.”

Stevens drew his gun, covered the club owner. Watched McNaughton roar up in an unmarked sedan. “You said it, pal,” he told Jimmy. “You’re in the shit now.”