Authors: Melissa Simonson
SIXTY-ONE
John made his way down the stairs and parted the sea of CSU and men in SWAT clothes on his way out the open French front doors. He started toward the sloping driveway and dialed Stacy.
“I was just going to call you,” she said, her usual tapping filling her end of the line.
He plugged the ear he wasn’t using. “I need you to run full background on Bianca Cartwright, DOB—”
“No, let me go first.”
He stopped beside Lisette’s unmarked cruiser. “Okay. Go.”
Her typing broke off. “I got through the three layers of encryption on the media files posted to that blog. I’m emailing all four, but fair warning, watching them will be painful. I only watched long enough to make sure I had the right files.”
He leaned against the still-hot car hood. “
Thanks. Anything else?”
“Yeah
. There’s a contact form on the blog. I have no idea why, but I’m going to hack the email the messages are routed to. It’ll be a long shot, but it can’t hurt.”
John
slid a pair of aviators on his face to stave off the sun looming low in the sky. “I need you to get full background on Bianca Cartwright before you get into that. Date of birth October second, 1985.”
“I’ll call when I’ve got something.”
He disconnected. Lisette galloped down the steep driveway with the cardboard box on her hip, Kevlar flapping in the salty sea breeze. “Nothing at Aunt Melinda’s. The units I dispatched checked in.” She puffed to a stop beside the open car door. “I’d say we can hit that next, but getting all the way there will take too long, and I told Brooke I’d stop by at lunchtime. I want to check on her. She sounded okay last time I spoke with her, but you know.” She shrugged and dropped the box. “She’s an actress.”
You really should check on her,
the voice wheedled, clanging against his ears like a tiny, annoying gong.
“You’ve still got units watching her apartment?”
She jostled her holstered gun as she tucked her cell phone in her back pocket. “Around the clock. I just got off the phone with Aaron, and everything’s been quiet. They’re not allowed to leave their post, even if Brooke and Jack aren’t there. Told them to piss in a bottle if they have to. This crazy bitch might try breaking in when they’re gone, or some shit.”
In retrospect,
this may be a good life lesson. Never underestimate the ability of other people letting you down.
Monday at 10:1
0 a.m.
IP Address: 75.84.67.69
Sent via contact form by an anonymous viewer on your website
SIXTY-TWO
“Tell your friend to let Jack go,” I say
, once we hit the sidewalk. “You’ve got me. I won’t fight.”
She wipes off a smudge of fuchsia lip gloss
, and all but drags me through an alley that leads to a neighboring street. A thick worm of scar tissue curls around her wrist, and a grudging sort of sympathy stabs my gut. Was she his first victim? Victim turned accomplice? Was it her I heard up there with that man, being raped, instead of the willing participant I’d imagined? Has he kidnapped her fiancé too, forced her into this? If so, I can reason with her. Appeal to her better judgment. Something.
“So you can try to
be a hero or start screaming bloody murder the second I do? I don’t think so.”
SIXTY-THREE
“She works part-time at a strip club,” Stacy said. “I’ll text you the address. Only real estate holdings are the ones you already know about. The house where she grew up in Laguna
, and Melinda’s house. Minimal activity on credit cards; grocery deliveries and whatnot. For as much money as she’s supposed to have, she doesn’t act like it, having a job she doesn’t need and a boring Honda. No work history before the club. Seems like she was a recluse up till the past year.”
“What does she do at the strip club? Wait tables?” John held his iPhone out so Lisette could hear on speakerphone.
“Uh, no, sweetheart. She’s a dancer. I need to take you out more if you don’t know what goes down in strip clubs.”
“But that makes no sense,” Lisette said from behind the wheel. “Why would she strip for a living when Aunt Melinda hammered it into her head how awful whores are?”
When one is told something over and over,
the voice said,
eventually they’ll start to believe it.
“
Maybe as a stiff middle finger?” Stacy offered. “I dressed like a goth in highschool to piss my mother off.”
Or there’s that.
“Any other records?” John asked.
Stacy’s typing cut off. “She doesn’t have a criminal record, but ther
e are some from the psych ward. She spent two months there. Can’t say I blame her much, looking over the old police reports from what happened.”
“Email the hospital records.”
“Already done. Don’t get your hopes up, though. They’re not much. I see she had a psychiatrist, but she hasn’t gone in a few years, and I can’t get those records unless you have a warrant, or I get creative with the insurance’s firewalls.”
“Can you tell if she’s running?” Lisette hunched over the wheel as she squinted into the wing mirror.
“Does she know you’ve been poking around on her site?”
Stacy made a noise between a snort of derision and grunt of affronted disgust.
“I know how to cover my tracks. She hasn’t emptied her accounts. Latest cash withdrawal was quite a lot, but that was two months ago, and only ten thousand—wouldn’t keep her afloat for long, if she wanted to get out of Dodge. No plane ticket purchases. No hotel room check-ins. No large-scale contract job order. I’ll flag her name and let you know if anything changes.”
“Call Chief Foster at LAPD and tell him I need to see Stanley Heckles, Stacy.”
“Got it. I’ll call him now.”
“Hey,” Lisette half-yelled. “Before you go—what’s the name of this strip club she’s supposed to work for?”
“Garden of Eve. Tacky, huh?”
John agreed it was tacky, hung up, and stuffed the phone into his pocket.
Lisette slapped the steering wheel. “Garden of Motherfucking Eve. I know that place. Narcotics say the owner uses it to run drugs—mostly blow, but stuff like E and ketamine, too. We’ve never had anything more than circumstantial evidence. We need to go there before we talk to Heckles.”
John suppressed a groan. A strip club raid was absolutely last on his list of things he’d like to do.
Lisette gave him a dark look, and the slow driver blocking the road ahead of her the finger. “Suddenly this shit makes a lot more sense if the Ivashkovs are involved. Have you heard of the Ivashkov brotherhood? I’ve heard horror stories about their brothels and sex clubs back in the homeland—Czech Republic. Clients can do whatever they want to the girls, as long as they have the money. Videotaped torture’s not a long way from what I’ve heard.”
SIXTY-FOUR
The lacy hem of her blouse flounces as she
walks to the mouth of the alley. She whirls around to look at me, crooking a finger. “Come on.”
She takes my hand when I catch up and swings it back and forth like we’re little girl
s BFF’s.
“Where’s
Jack?”
She
forces the sunglasses back on the bridge of her nose with her middle finger, and tosses a sideways glance. “We’ll discuss that later.”
I stop
, smack in the middle of the road. “No. If you want me to go with you, I have to know he’s okay.”
“He’s okay. Would I lie to you?”
I assume that’s rhetorical. She thinks I’ll believe she’s a killer, but not a liar? “I want to talk to him.”
That cute little button nose
wrinkles into a peach accordion. She wags a finger. “Not until we’re there.”
I’m tugged forward again when she continues across the street, winding through ano
ther alley, and inside an outdoor mall’s parking garage.
“That’s us.” She points with the hand still grasping mine. It’s a pearl-white Escalade.
She presses the car clicker, and the locks pop down.
“I’m not getting in
until you let Jack go. I need to talk to him first.”
“I hate to break it to you sweetheart, but you don’t have a card to play.”
I cross my arms over my chest.
S
he unclasps her purse and digs through the contents. “So stubborn,” she chides, pulling a black case from her bag. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Is the man holding Jack the one who took me?”
“No, silly.” She unzips the case. Something glitters, snug in a black pocket. A needle. I try to slap it from her hand, but she’s quicker. “That was me.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Lisette walked ahead of John to the middle of the strip club’s main lounge, before a s
tage on which a pair of topless, dark-haired women with melon-shaped breasts gyrated around slick silver poles, their bronzed, thick areolas glistening with glittered oil.
He
looked away before the glitter made his eyeballs detonate.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” Lisette yelled over the music. When it pulsed to a stop, she kept her voice raised. “My name is Sergeant Jennings from LAPD Homicide, and I’ll be your
official pain in the ass for the day.” She lifted the chain from her neck and held up her badge. “I need employees on that wall by the door, and sad perverts on the wall closest to me.”
The room exploded into clicking stiletto heels, grumbles, and muted
are you fucking kidding me’s
.
“
Afraid I’m not fucking kidding,” she called, as the room’s occupants were corralled into their respective walls by uniformed officers.
A man with a groomed goatee and close-cropped hair wound a path through the sad perverts and police officers. He came to a stop before John and Lisette, a smile of polite confusion plastered on his face. “Is there a problem?”
Lisette turned, slipping her chained badge back over her head. Her stoic expression morphed into one of amusement when she saw the newest arrival. “Well, shit, look who it is. You’re an employee
and
a sad pervert. I don’t know where to put you.” She elbowed John in the ribcage. “This is Jacob Ivashkov. He used to be a low-level loser, but now it seems like he’s a mid-level loser. Are you the manager, Jacob?”
He
crossed his arms over his purple satin button-down, rocking on the balls of his loafers. “I am.”
“That’s wonderful. You’re come a long way
from being a greasy dumbfuck who beats on escorts.”
He smiled. The crinkles around his dark eyes told John it was sincere, and the pupils dilating within them made it obvious he liked what he saw. “And you as well. Sergeant, now. Last time we met
, you were a detective. I guess congratulations are in order. I should have known it was you by the scent. Like Vegas. Sort of smoky and sweet at the same time.”
She took a step toward him and stabbed him with her index finger.
“If you smell me again I’ll make you gargle your balls.”
He showed off every one of his pricey porcelain veneers as he laughed. “How do you make that sound so hot?”
Lisette rolled back on the heels of her Timberlands. “Jacob, you’ve got an employee named Bianca Cartwright working for you, yes?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did you know she’s suspected of multiple murders?”
“I d
id not,” Jacob said, gaze traipsing over the swell of cleavage peeking from the ribbed neckline of her LAPD tank top. “You could knock me over with a feather. She’s such a quiet girl.”
“It’s in my experience,” John interjected, massaging the space between his brows to ward off the beginnings of a migraine, “that quiet girls don’t usually turn to stripping.”
Jacob’s hands slid into the pockets of his pinstriped pants as he considered John with professional curiosity. “And it’s been in my experience that girls who like money turn to stripping, Mr.…?”
“Mr. Special Agent Maxwell.” John shook the smooth, hairless hand Jacob proffered.
Lisette put her hands on her hips and tapped one foot on the polished, dark wood. “But wait, Jake. Your club doesn’t make its money from tits and ass. You move coke through this joint and use your girls as mules.”
“You all’ve
been trying to prove that for years. Narcotics has never managed to find any real evidence. You may want to give up the witchhunt. You’re not that good at it.”
She gave him a tight smile. “I’m going to ask you a few questions about Ms. Cartwright, and I need you to
be honest. I’m not above sending ICE down here to check work permits, and a team to raid this place tonight. You’ll hemorrhage money.”
“Of course I’ll be happy to cooperate. When have I ever passed up an opportunity to
talk to you?” He gestured for the pair of them to follow. “If we go to my office, I can give you her file.”
They hacked a path through the throng of tetchy patrons and cops. The sounds from the main floor faded as they walked further into the bowels of the building.
“Nice digs,” Lisette remarked when they’d made it inside, gazing at the wood-paneled, dark finished walls and plush burgundy carpet. “Who’d you off to get this gig?”
“I’m a hard worker.
” Jacob slid behind his oversized mahogany desk. “Bianca, Bianca. I forget that’s her real name. She goes by Roxy here. Wears a black wig. Guys go crazy for that whole morbid, emo thing she’s got going on.” He opened a drawer and thumbed through the contents.
“When’s her next scheduled shift?”
Jacob ran a finger down the employee roster on his desk. “Wednesday at seven. She’s part-time. Couple nights a week.”
John sunk into the seat beside Lisette
, and peered into the corners of the room. Dark walls made the room seem dim, despite being well-lit with four wrought-iron lamps in each corner. “Do you have cameras throughout the club?”
Jacob passed a file off to Lisette. “Everywhere. Though I’m afraid I’ll need a court order if you want to watch the footage.”
John lifted a small potted plant on the desk and inspected the base. “And microphones, too. You’ve got a high-quality setup.”
Jacob smiled appreciatively. “Good eye. My bo
ss is vigilant about security.”
“Your boss is vigilant about moving
coke and importing prostitutes on work Visas, Jacob,” Lisette said, flipping through the file. John caught a glimpse of a snapshot of Bianca Cartwright before she turned another page. “Shut the fuck up.”
“That mouth.” Jacob shook his head, smiling at John. “I wonder what else that mouth is capable of?”
Lisette snorted, head still bent over the folder. “You’ll never find out.”
“She’s always been a tease.” His fond smile widened. “I keep telling her she can only be a cock-tease so long
, before a man can’t handle it any longer. What are you wearing under that cute little tank top?”
“A gun.” She snapped the file shut and handed it off to John. “Who set this shit up?” She gestured with her chin to the small cameras tucked within the corners of the ceiling. “I know you’re not smart enough to do it on your own.”
“We had a private security company install the devices and microphones.”
She tapped her lips with two fingers. “You know what’s odd, Jacob, is Bianca has a setup not unlike this one. She runs a torture-porn
blog. But I’m thinking you already know about that, since you’ve always liked it rough.”
“What can I say?” Jacob leaned back in his chair. “Rough is more excitin
g.”
How exciting do you think he’d find watching a girl bludgeoned to death?
She pushed herself away from the desk and stood. “You know what excites me?”
Jacob sucked in a long breath and stared at the domed ceiling for a moment. “Nipple clamps and those handcuffs in your back pocket? I hate when they’re in your back pocket, by the way. Make
s it that much harder to stare at your ass.”
“
One more comment about my ass, I’ll bend you over and fuck you with your own cock.”
“Now you’re teasing again
.” Jacob folded his hands on the desk and looked at John. “Is that even physically possible?”
John didn’t want to know whether it was, but he wouldn’t put it past her to find a way.
“The thought of throwing you in jail for being an accomplice to murder is what’s exciting me.” She pointed at the cameras. “You have access to smart people. People who are good with computers. Something tells me Bianca’s insane ass would need your tech people to help her out with the anonymous proxy server bullshit.”
“I have no idea what you’re implying, Sergeant.”
“Of course you don’t.” John rose as well. “But the Bureau has access to smart people, as well. Eventually we’ll find the origin of the blog.”
“Are you
the babysitter?”
Lisette slapped the file on the chair’s arm. “Yes, Jacob, he is. He’s my fucking babysitter. He’s my fucking federal agent babysitter. You want to know what else he is?”
“Well, when you put it that way.”
She pressed her hands into his desk, and Jacob leaned forward conspiratorially. “He’s the one who can make your life a living hell. I’m j
ust a dumb homicide sergeant, but he’s with the FBI. He’s got a lot more pull than I do.”
“Don’t be self-deprecating. You’ve got plenty of talents. I’ve always thought you’d look good wrapped around a pole.”
She slung her purse over her shoulder. “I’ll be in touch, Jake.”
“I’ll
look forward to it,” he said, following John and Lisette to the door.