With no room in the driveway, and not wanting to block the ambulance’s departure, the team parked their vehicles on the side of the road just past the end of the driveway. They exited en masse and made their way toward the beat-up old house in the middle of nowhere.
Now, slipping under the yellow “Crime Scene” tape and descending Martin Krall’s rickety basement stairs, Miller gasped as he got his first view of the scene. His initial thought was that Carter’s description had been right on target. It
was
a bloodbath. A pair of paramedics worked feverishly over the body of Angela Canfield, who lay crumpled and unmoving on the basement’s cold cement floor, just feet away from the body of a man—presumably the I-90 Killer—with half of his head blown off. It was plain to see the man was dead, an assumption that was confirmed by the fact that the medical personnel steadfastly ignored him as they worked on Canfield.
Blood covered an area roughly six feet in diameter around the two prone bodies. It was an incredible amount of blood; the gruesome scene looked as though someone had attached a garden hose to a bucket of human blood and then sprayed it indiscriminately around the basement. The two bodies, one gravely injured and the other already dead, lay next to an old, rickety bed with an iron headboard, upon which lay a thin, filthy mattress.
Miller reached the bottom of the stairs and was approached by a tall, balding man who had been standing out of sight in a corner. The man wore a Mason PD uniform and held his hat in both hands, twirling it over and over before finally clutching it in his left hand and offering his right to Miller.
“You must be Special Agent Miller,” he said. “I’m Greg Branson, chief of the Mason PD. I’m also chief investigator. We’re a small department, ill-equipped to deal with this sort of situation, which is why we don’t have many bodies working the scene yet. I’m pretty sure, though, that you will have your people all over this house in a matter of minutes, anyway, especially once you hear what our two witnesses are saying about your agent.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, chief, and I’d like to thank you for the expeditious notification. I’m sure it doesn’t sit well with your officers that you will be ceding control of the investigation to the Bureau.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Chief Branson answered. “Like I said, we’re not equipped to deal with this sort of thing, anyway. If a Bureau agent hadn’t been involved, we would be calling in the State Police for assistance.”
“Still, I do appreciate it,” he said. “Is Special Agent Canfield going to make it?”
“Good question,” Branson answered and shrugged. “The two EMT boys have been doing all they can for her, working like dogs for the last twenty minutes. They’ve been too busy to answer any but the briefest questions. It looks like they’re getting ready to transport her now, though.”
Almost as if on cue, the paramedics lifted Canfield’s limp frame onto a body board and strapped her securely to it, immobilizing her arms and legs and securing her head. The one who seemed to be in charge had obviously heard Miller’s question to Chief Branson, and he shook his head at them almost imperceptibly. “It doesn’t look good,” he said in a near-whisper. “She’s lost a lot of blood. If I was a betting man, I’d say she won’t make it to the hospital alive.”
Miller looked down and blinked in surprise as Angela Canfield returned his gaze. He had thought she was unconscious, but now he understood the paramedic’s reluctance to speak at a volume she might hear. The FBI agent’s eyes were glazed with pain and shock but alive with understanding. Her skin was bone-white, and she shivered uncontrollably despite the heat and humidity the passing storm had left in its wake, and despite the fact she was draped in a heavy wool blanket.
“Angie,” Mike Miller said in an agonized voice as the paramedics trundled her past and struggled up the stairs. “What happened? Is it true what they’re saying?”
To his astonishment, she smiled like the cat that ate the canary, as his mother used to say. “A gal’s got to prepare for her retirement, you know,” she said weakly. Her voice was quavering and paper-thin. She sounded to Mike like a ninety-year-old woman rather than the sharp, lively, cat-quick young woman he had come to know over the past year.
“Oh, my God,” he mumbled to himself as Chief Branson nodded unseen next to him. He made a snap decision; there was no time to run this one by the SAC. He hustled up the stairs behind the two paramedics, who were now carrying the board with the frighteningly wan body of Special Agent Angela Canfield down the hallway toward the front door. There was blood everywhere, Miller noted. The men had apparently made the decision simply to carry Canfield rather than try to wheel her across the rough terrain to the ambulance.
“Hey, guys?” Miller said, falling into place behind them. “Would it be all right if I rode in the back of the ambulance with her? If she’s up to it, I need to ask her a few questions.”
The men shared a glance, and Miller knew exactly what they were thinking. She was going to be dead soon, so if he had questions, he had better hurry up and ask them. “Sure,” one of them said. Miller didn’t notice which one answered him.
CHAPTER 61
May 29, 7:15 p.m.
“WHY DIDN’T YOU GO to Agent Canfield with the name and address you got from Ray Blanchard like you told him you were going to? Did you suspect something was not quite right with her?” Special Agent Mike Miller watched Bill Ferguson closely as he waited for an answer. They had been over this subject more times than Bill could remember in the twenty-four hours since he had awoken from the surgery to remove one bullet from his arm and another from his leg.
In an adjacent room, Carli was undergoing similar questioning from another agent. Incredibly, other than the gash to the side of her head, which had required fourteen stitches to close, she had suffered nothing more than a few minor cuts and bruises. Her mother and a lawyer were sitting in on the questioning with her, but the session was mostly a formality. Whatever Angela Canfield had told Agent Miller in the ambulance before dying en route to the hospital had apparently confirmed most, if not all, of their story.
Bill shook his head. “No, it was nothing like that. I didn’t suspect a thing. I certainly had no idea Angela…Agent Canfield…was part of the whole scheme. I was just desperate to
do
something. I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting around waiting to find out what might happen with a rescue attempt. And, I suppose, I also felt like the FBI had already screwed up big-time by allowing Carli to be kidnapped off the bus in the first place, so I guess I didn’t entirely trust you guys. I thought I would just charge in there and get her myself. I know how stupid it was to go into that house alone against a guy like Krall, but I just wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Bill voice trailed off and stopped, and then he abruptly changed the subject. He had been chewing on Canfield’s actions obsessively, like a dog worrying a bone. He shook his head in bewilderment. “How could she?”
He looked up at Miller, who had nothing to offer. The young agent looked equally perplexed. “I was her partner for over a year, and I had no clue, either. She was a very private person, especially where her past was concerned, and now we’re beginning to understand why. We’ve only been digging for a little over a day, but what we’ve uncovered isn’t pretty.”
Bill nodded. “She made reference to years of abuse while she was holding the gun on me in Krall’s basement. But what about her mother? Why didn’t she protect her child?”
“Her mother became aware of the abuse at some point, that much we know, but it’s not clear exactly when. We started interviewing her yesterday, but she’s, understandably, reluctant to talk about that part of her life, especially now. We do know, though, that even after she found out, she did nothing about it.”
“How is that possible? That was happening to her own daughter!”
“The guy was one scary dude—he’s doing life in Cedar Junction for murder, which is the only reason she’s even talking to us—and she probably figured that, if she tried to stop the assaults, he would simply kill her, and
then
where would Angela be?
“But I don’t get it,” Bill said. “She told me she was a straight-A student, both in high school and in college.”
“Lots of people who have suffered horrible abuse are very high achievers,” Miller said. “It’s a way for them to gain some form of control over their lives when they have very little control over what happens to them at home.”
“So what happens now?”
“I’m sorry,” Miller said, “But I really can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”
Bill stared at him unblinkingly. “Are you kidding me? You mean you can’t discuss the investigation that was broken by Carli and me? That investigation?”
“You’re right,” Miller said after an uncomfortable moment. “I suppose we owe you that much after what you and Carli went through. As you know, I hitched a ride in the ambulance with the paramedics while they worked on Canfield on the way to the hospital. I was able to convince her to reveal the location where the exchanges of the girls take place.
“As Krall alluded to in his remarks to Carli, the agreement with his contact was that he be permitted to enjoy the girls, provided he did no permanent physical damage to them, for one week before turning them over to the broker for export out of the country.
“Initially, Angela—Agent Canfield—refused to provide any details that could be considered helpful, but, as we got closer to the hospital, her condition worsened dramatically. She had continued hemorrhaging during the trip after already losing so much inside the house. Finally, the lead paramedic, who worked like a hero trying to save her, came straight out and admitted to her that he didn’t think she would survive the ambulance ride.”
Bill listened, transfixed, to the final, awful moments of a woman he had thought he was getting to know, but who had conned him completely. As Miller spoke, it occurred to Bill that he wasn’t the only one she had fooled. Miller was hurting, too. He took a sip of water from a plastic cup at his bedside, and the agent continued.
“Once it sunk in to her that she really was going to die and had nothing to gain by keeping her mouth shut, Canfield spilled everything—in abbreviated form, of course. Since we still have a few days before Carli is supposed to be delivered, the plan is simple. We’re keeping Angela’s death under wraps, and we’ll use the information we learned to round up as many of these slimy dirt bags as possible.”
“Well, you have no teenager to deliver now, so how are you going to do that?”
“Special Agent Kim Adkins, stationed out of the Albany office, is going to become Carli Ferguson for a few hours. Agent Adkins is an experienced, twenty-five-year-old professional who looks like a seventeen-year-old high school girl. In most law enforcement scenarios, being that youthful-looking is a serious handicap, but for this situation, it’s perfect.”
“I don’t understand. How is this even possible? Human trafficking? Right here in the United States? In the twenty-first century?”
Miller frowned. “You might be surprised,” he said. “According to our own statistics compiled by the U.S. State Department, between six and eight hundred thousand people are trafficked against their will each year across international borders. Of that number, seventy percent are female, and as many as half are children. And the majority of these victims are forced into the commercial sex trade.”
Bill stared at the young FBI agent in horror. “That’s unbelievable.”
“Believe it,” Miller said simply. “Worldwide, human trafficking is the third most profitable criminal activity, behind only the drug trade and arms trafficking, with an estimated seven billion dollars in profits earned annually.”
“But right here? In the United States?”
“Oh, yes,” Miller answered. “We’re not unaffected. Much of the trafficking occurs in developing nations, where few if any barriers to the practice exist. But American girls are prized in certain parts of the world, particularly blonde, fair-skinned ones. Virgins are even more valuable. Spiriting them out of the country is the most difficult part of the process, but once they’re outside our borders, it’s almost impossible to get them back.”
“Why?” Bill asked, sickened by what he was hearing.
“Worldwide,” Miller answered, “a three-tier system has been developed to determine which countries are doing the most—as well as the least—to put an end to this practice. In the most recent report, issued by the U.S. Department of State in 2009, seventeen nations worldwide have been identified as ‘third tier’ states, meaning they take virtually no action to combat the practice of human trafficking. Some of those include Saudi Arabia, where we theorize Carli was headed, as well as Kuwait, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, and others.”
“Wait a minute. Back up for just a second.” Bill could feel his blood begin to boil. “Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? Those are countries American soldiers have fought and died to protect. Are you telling me my child was headed to Saudi Arabia to be some sheik’s sex slave?”
“We believe so,” Miller answered quietly. “And you won’t get any argument from me about it being against everything we stand for, or at least, everything we
should
stand for. But the real risk for the traffickers in an operation such as this is in smuggling the girls out of this country. Once that happens, the issue becomes a diplomatic one, rather than a law enforcement one, mostly due to the cultural barriers between societies.”
Special Agent Mike Miller scuffed his shoe on the grey and white tiles of the hospital floor. “Canfield knew all these statistics as well as I do. Maybe better. I don’t understand how she could have been a part of any of this.”
“Canfield was irreparably broken,” Bill said. “And she alluded to what she called ‘an early retirement from the FBI’ when she was trying to justify her actions as she held a gun on me. Just how much money do you think she was making on these slave trades?”
Miller shrugged. “We have a team of specialists going over her banking records, so we should have pretty specific numbers available shortly, but, if I had to guess, I would say she alone was netting well over sixty thousand dollars for every girl she helped smuggle out of the country.”