Anybody's Daughter (Angela Evans Series No. 2) (8 page)

L
oretha left the track in Compton and rushed over to juvenile hall. She filled out an endless number of forms, then spent the next few hours sitting on a hard wooden bench in a wide hallway with walls bright enough to startle a blind man.

She scolded herself for rushing down there. There was always a long wait. She should’ve spent a few more minutes with Peaches before abruptly running off. But the call of another young girl in need of her help always caused an excitement she could not quell.

Loretha pulled out her smartphone and sent yet another text asking how much longer it would be before they brought the girl out. A reply text advised that it would be about ten minutes. As it turned out, it was closer to thirty.

The sound of high heels click-clacking against the tiled floor made Loretha jump to attention. She glanced down the hallway and spotted her friend and social worker Sonya Moreno. Sonya’s right arm was draped around the shoulders of a pouty young Latina. The girl’s arms were defiantly folded across her chest.

Loretha briefly hung her head, prayed for strength and got to her feet. This girl was even younger than Peaches. When Loretha was part of this world, it was rare to see a girl as young as sixteen or seventeen. Now, girls that age were considered old. There were more babies walking the track than anything else.

“This is Carmen Lopez,” Sonya said when they reached Loretha. The weariness in Sonya’s voice matched the anguish in her eyes.

“I told you to call me C-Lo,” the girl spat.

Carmen had large, dark eyes, curly black hair and a sullen attitude that said she’d rather be someplace else. Her spindly arms and legs gave her the appearance of a stick figure.

Sonya ignored the girl’s rudeness. “And Carmen, this is Loretha. She has a place much nicer than the group home you went to last time. You’re going to stay there until your hearing.”

“I told you I don’t wanna go to no group home!” Carmen shouted in a voice that sounded like Dora the Explorer. “Just keep me locked up. Big Daddy’ll come get me.”

Loretha placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Harmony House isn’t anything like the group homes you’ve been to. I promise you’ll like it. You’ll make lots of friends there.”

Carmen shrugged Loretha’s hand off her shoulder. “I don’t need no friends. I have six wives-in-law and that’s all the friends I need. I don’t see why y’all don’t leave us alone. We ain’t hurtin’ nobody,” she whined. “If you take me away, Big Daddy won’t know where to find me.”

The tears glistening in her eyes belied her bravado.

Loretha had once been as mouthy and rebellious as this child. She too had been glad to have a
Big Daddy
and other girls she called wives-in-laws, her first real family. Loretha could picture Carmen’s wives-in-laws. A bunch of beaten-down little girls who were content to live in a crowded, rundown house, all vying for the respect and approval of a man whose only concern was the number of tricks they could turn in a twenty-four-hour period.

“Aren’t you tired of being abused by strange men?” Loretha asked.

“I don’t have sex with nobody but Big Daddy,” she said, her face full of pride. “He don’t make me turn tricks no more because I’m his favorite. I only do blow jobs and I make good money.”

Loretha pressed a hand against the wall to steady herself. Her work drained her emotionally far more than it did physically.

“Do you get to keep any of the money?” she asked Carmen gently.

Carmen rolled her eyes and puffed out her chest. “That don’t matter. Big Daddy gives me everything I need. He took me shopping to get this outfit last week.”

Her
outfit
was a red Spandex skirt and a short top that exposed her not-so-flat stomach. Both were no bigger than a hand towel.

Loretha pointed to a dark spot to the right of her navel. “Is that a bruise? Did somebody hurt you?”

Glancing down at her waist, Carmen blocked it from view with one of her frail arms. “No. A trick did that. Big Daddy is nice to me. He’s only slapped me a couple of times because I talked back to him. So I deserved it.”

Loretha and Sonya exhaled at the same time.

“Have a seat while we talk,” Sonya said, directing Carmen to the bench where Loretha had been sitting.

Carmen slumped down on the bench, her legs spread wide enough to reveal that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Sonya motioned Loretha several feet away, out of Carmen’s hearing range.

“Vice officers caught her in a car giving a blow job to a guy behind a liquor store on Market Street,” Sonya explained. “When the undercover cop moved in to arrest her, her pimp tried to take her away. They arrested him and the john too. She wouldn’t ID the pimp and claimed she’d never seen the john before. Those two bailed out hours ago.”

“How old is she?” Loretha asked.

Sonya folded her arms. “Fourteen. But she claims she’s eighteen. This is her third arrest. Been in and out of six different foster homes over the last few years. Her mother kicked her out of the house after finding her in bed with her boyfriend. She was ten.”

Loretha’s cheeks expanded with air and she slowly let it out.

“She met her pimp walking home from school,” Sonya continued. “He was obviously out scouting for girls he could groom. He took his time luring her in. The first time, he bought her some food and paid to get her nails done. Over the next three or four months, he started giving her money and taking her out on
dates.
” She used her fingers to make imaginary quotation marks. “The movies, amusement parks, nice restaurants. Bought her a cell phone and clothes. Whatever she asked for, which wasn’t much. Next thing you know, she’s bragging to her middle school friends—on the rare occasion that she went to school—about her rich, older boyfriend.

Sonya paused and closed her eyes as if recounting the story was too much for her.

“You know the rest. They start having sex, then he convinces her to sleep with his friends. Weeks later, he wants her to prove how much she loves him by going out on the track to make money for him, supposedly to pay him back for everything he’s done for her. Each time she’s picked up for prostitution, we put her in a group home, but she runs right back to Big Daddy. At least he’s one of the less-savage pimps. It’s rare for him to beat his girls. By the way, Big Daddy is thirty-two.”

Loretha grabbed both of Sonya’s hands and squeezed. Without trading words, they both leaned in, their foreheads pressed together. They just stood there in silence, grieving for this child who had no idea she was even a victim.

“Hey!” Carmen yelled over to them. “Are y’all lesbos or what? Y’all need to get a room.”

Sonya pulled away and threw her arm around Loretha’s shoulders as they trudged back over to Carmen. “You’re going to have your hands full tonight,” Sonya said with a gentle smile.

Loretha laughed softly. “Unfortunately, it won’t be different from any other night.”

F
ollowing Deke’s directions, Dre drove east on Florence. Minutes later they arrived at a boarded-up house with thigh-high grass, peeling paint and broken windows a block west of Hoover. In the backseat, Apache sat next to their captive, his Glock aimed squarely at Deke’s stomach.

“Okay, I brought you here,” Deke cried after Dre turned off the engine. “Now, y’all gotta let me go.”

Apache raised the gun from Deke’s stomach to his head. “Don’t say another word. Just do what I tell you to do.”

The three men exited the car. Dre popped his trunk and pulled out a flashlight.

“Let’s go around to the back door.” Apache had lowered his voice and lightened his steps.

With Deke leading the way, they traipsed along the side of the house. Dre was about to switch on the flashlight, but the spotlights dotting the roofline of a neighboring house provided them with more than sufficient lighting. They opened a gate and stepped into the backyard, where the grass was taller than it was in the front of the house.

Pointing his flashlight toward the back of the house, Dre spotted a large window and a wooden door that had multiple holes in it. The door was opened just a crack.

Dre peered through the window, which was clouded grime. There was enough light from the house next door to see three figures sitting on the floor, their backs against the wall. They were either high or asleep or both. He could smell the strong scent of piss through the windowpane.

“There’re three of ’em in there,” Dre said.

Apache snatched Deke by the collar and pressed his face to the glass. “Is one of them dudes Leon?”

“Yeah, man. Please, can I go now?”

Apache didn’t let go. “Which one?”

“The one in the middle. Now please let me go. If The Shepherd finds out I brought you here, he’ll kill me!”

Apache jerked him away from the window. “Lay down on the ground and don’t move. If I hear even a peep out of you, I’m going to shoot you in the head.”

Dre aimed his flashlight at the door and Apache sprang into the house, gun drawn. “Hands in the air!”

The three men were suddenly wide-eyed, but apparently too high to follow directions.

“I said hands up!”

Three pairs of arms shot up, seemingly in slow motion.

“I heard you chumps been snatching little girls off the street.”

The men were all tongue-tied.

Apache brandished the gun, slowly pointing it at each one of them.

“I wanna know where you been takin’ ’em?”

“I ain’t done nothin’,” one of the men protested. “He’s the one you want.” He pointed at the man Deke identified as Leon.

“Shut up, fool!” Leon yelled. “You tryin’ to get me killed?”

Apache pulled Leon to his feet, while the other men slithered to opposite corners of the room. He pressed the gun to Leon’s temple.

“Did you snatch a girl named Brianna in Compton yesterday? And if you lie to me, I swear I’ll blow your brains all over this room.”

Leon’s bottom lip quivered. “I just did what they told me to do.”

“Who?”

“Just some dude. I don’t know his last name.”

Dre stepped forward. “That was my niece you took. Where is she?”

“She’s at a place off Normandie. I don’t know exactly where it is. I swear.”

Apache lowered the gun from Leon’s head and pointed it down at his bare feet. “You need to tell me who you’re working with and where the house is, or I’m shooting off your toes one by one.”

“I swear I don’t know!”

Apache glanced at Dre. After several tense beats, Dre responded with an almost imperceptible nod.

Apache fired a single shot, blasting Leon’s right foot. Blood spurted upward like a mini geyser. Leon screamed and dropped to the floor, grabbing his foot. The two other men cried out and hugged the walls.

“Start talking or I’m shooting you again. I got enough bullets to leave everybody in here with two stumps.”

Apache pointed the gun at Leon’s left foot.

“Okay, okay, don’t shoot!” Leon begged and sobbed. “He’s my cousin. I been working with my cousin Clint. He run City Stars strip joint.”

Dre was so furious that he wanted to grab the gun and shoot Leon himself. He’d known when he’d looked into Clint’s eyes that the punk had been involved in Brianna’s disappearance and now his instincts had been confirmed. He wanted Apache to shoot the dude again.

“Where’d you take her?” Dre yelled.

“Sixty-second Street, off Normandie.”

“That ain’t good enough,” Dre pushed. “We need the address.”

“Man, I don’t know no address. Clint drove, not me.”

Apache fired the gun again. The bullet pierced the wall a few inches short of Leon’s head.

“I don’t know. I swear!” he cried, ducking, but still holding on to his bleeding foot. “It’s bright yellow with lots of bushes and high gates all the way around. About halfway up the block on Sixty-second. I swear! It’s the only house on the block with gates like that. Somebody’s gotta get me to the hospital before I bleed to death!”

The pool of blood around Leon’s foot was rapidly expanding.

“You working for The Shepherd?” Dre shouted.

“I don’t know nothing about no Shepherd,” Leon wailed, rocking and crying. “Clint hired me. I get fifty dollars every time I help him get a girl. I only did it two times. I swear!”

Dre stuck his smartphone in Leon’s face. “Is this the girl you took?” he asked, showing him a picture of Brianna.

“Yes, yes,” Leon cried, barely glancing at the photo. “Now get me an ambulance!”

“Is she still at the house?”

“I don’t know! I swear. I just get my money and leave. I ain’t never even been inside.”

Dre gave Apache a nod that signaled that he was ready to leave.

Just for fun, Apache pointed his gun at the other two men and laughed. They screamed and rolled up as tight as water bugs.

“If anybody in here talks to the police about that sissy’s foot,” Apache announced, “I will hunt each one of you down and kill you. Count on it.”

The other two men were trembling so hard the floor creaked.

When Dre and Apache stepped into the backyard, as expected Deke was long gone.

“Let’s roll, cuz,” Apache said, slapping him on the back. “We gotta go get little shorty.”

For the first time since he’d walked into this nightmare, Dre finally felt real hope. He was close, real close, to bringing Brianna home.

T
rying to sleep was a wasted effort, so Angela made some coffee and decided to get some work done. She’d hoped that her visions of a wild-eyed Dre roaming the streets, screaming threats and breaking down doors in search of Brianna would go away if she focused on one of her cases. That didn’t happen.

Angela perused a few files, but was too wound up to concentrate. She would have to get it together soon because she had to be in court at nine. She spent the next few minutes alternately checking the clock and her smartphone hoping for a call or text from Dre. She was trying to wait until a proper hour to call her FBI friend, but finally decided this was too important to wait.

When her former colleague answered, he sounded as if he’d been awake for hours. As an FBI agent, Marty Shaw was used to early morning calls.

“Hey, Marty, this is Angela. Sorry to call so early, but this is important.”

Marty had been a witness in one of the first cases Angela prosecuted as a young Assistant U.S. Attorney. After spending so many hours together preparing the case for trial, they’d developed a close friendship. Marty was now the federal liaison to the LAPD’s Human Trafficking Task Force.

“Hey, Angela. What’s going on?” His voice conveyed concern, but he also seemed glad to hear from her.

Angela had been nervous about how Marty might receive her call. She hadn’t had much contact with any of her legal or law enforcement colleagues in recent months. Following the barrage of media reports about the shooting of her ex-fiancé and her relationship with a drug dealer, Angela chose to resign from the U.S. Attorney’s office, where she’d been highly regarded.

She decided not to waste time with pleasantries or beating around the bush.

“I need a big favor. The child of a friend of mine’s been kidnapped and possibly trafficked. I need help. Behind-the-scenes help.”

An uneasiness suddenly seeped into his voice. “What kind of help?”

She quickly told him everything Dre had revealed to her. “The Shepherd’s real name is Rodney Merriweather. Anything you can tell me about him or his operation would be helpful. I also need you to ping her iPhone. If we find her phone, we’ll likely find her. She’s only thirteen.”

“Hasn’t she been reported missing?”

“Yes.”

“Then why aren’t you working with the local police?”

“The family’s done that. But they’re not taking it seriously. They think she’s a runaway. But she’s not. She’s a good kid. The officer who showed up barely wanted to take a missing persons report.”

Marty heaved a sigh. They’d been close over the years. But disclosing information about an ongoing investigation could jeopardize his career.

Angela decided to play on his white guilt. “She’s from Compton, Marty. A straight-A student. We both know that if this were a missing white kid from Pasadena or the Palisades, her disappearance would be leading the six o’clock news until the day they found her. I’m desperate. I really need your help.”

Angela also knew that agents did stuff off the radar for family and friends all the time when traditional channels were taking too long.

“I can’t tell you anything about our investigations,” he said quietly. “You know that. Anyway, it’s not like you can go track somebody down.”

That wasn’t true. If she turned over information about The Shepherd to Dre, that’s exactly what he would do.

“Well, have you heard of The Shepherd?”

Marty remained silent long enough for Angela to know that he had.

“We’ve got our eyes on a few of these scumbag pimps. But I can’t tell you any more than that. If you have evidence that somebody specific was involved in her disappearance, get me a name and I’ll get somebody on it. But I’m not giving you any information so you can start running the streets like a vigilante. That will just come back on me.”

“I’d never tell anyone you gave me the information.”

Marty responded with an uneasy chuckle. “I can’t risk it, Angela. If you get me some solid evidence, I’ll follow up on it myself. Off the clock.”

Angela rubbed her forehead. She was determined to do everything she could to help Dre find Brianna. Marty wasn’t the only agent she knew. She’d just hang up the phone and keep dialing until she found someone willing to help.

“Okay, Marty. Sorry to put you on the spot. I shouldn’t have asked you to—”

“I can’t give you any information on our trafficking investigation,” he said, cutting her off. “But I can probably locate her phone for you. What’s the number?”