Isabel's Run (31 page)

This assessment changed a little as we turned up the walkway to the house and went through the front entry gate. The home’s security features became more apparent. The windows were all covered with decorative wrought-iron bars painted white to match the house’s trim. It looked pretty, but it was secure—no one was getting through a window unless they had a blowtorch or a chain hooked up to a truck. As we drew closer, I noticed small, unobtrusive video cameras mounted up high, under the eaves. I counted five in the front of the house alone. “Smile,” I said.

I pushed the buzzer just outside the wrought-iron work that enclosed the front porch and protected the front door.

“Hello? Can I help you?” A girl’s voice.

“Hi,” I said. “Danny Logan and Toni Blair here to meet with Annie Hooper.”

“Okay. Hold your IDs up to the camera there in front of you,” she said. We each did as she said. Shortly thereafter, the gate made a loud
click
. “Come on in. Someone will meet you at the door.” We did as she instructed. The gate swung closed behind us and latched shut.

“Great,” I said. “Now we’re in jail.”

The front door opened, and Annie Hooper greeted us.

“Hey, guys,” she said. “Come on in.”

She held the door for us.

“Very impressive, Annie,” I said. “Looks very secure.”

“Thanks,” Annie said. “We take precautions. Occasionally, these girls’ pimps try to get them back. If they come around here, we want to be ready.”

“I’ll bet you have the police on speed dial,” I said.

“Yeah, it usually takes them just a couple of minutes to respond when we make a call.”

“And the fortifications and the cameras buy you that time.”

“That’s right. Come on back. Paola’s in the family room, I think.”

We followed her through the living room, past the kitchen and into a family room located at the rear of the home. Three girls were sitting around a coffee table—Paola was one of them. I hardly recognized her.

Without the layers of makeup and the poofed-up hair, she looked like she was about twelve years old. She wore white gym shorts and a light blue Nickelback T-shirt. Her long, dark hair was back in a ponytail. It had only been a week, but she looked fuller—as if she’d been eating better.

“She looks good,” I said quietly to Annie.

“We were lucky with her,” Annie said. “So many of the girls who we get are addicted to something—usually to meth. It sometimes takes a whole year to get them straightened out. Paola wasn’t addicted.”

“Good news,” I said.

Annie beckoned to Paola, who jumped up and walked over.

“Hi, Paola,” Toni said, reaching to shake her hands. “You look really good.”

“Thank you,” Paola said. I imagine that a compliment coming from someone who looked like Toni probably carried some weight.

“They treating you alright here?” I asked.

Paola smiled. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s really good.” She seemed happy.

“Paola,” Annie said, “Like I mentioned, Danny and Toni would like to ask you a couple more questions. They’re looking for two girls now—one of them’s Toni’s little sister.”

Paola nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll help you if I can.”

Annie led us all over to the dining room, where we took seats around the table.

“Paola,” Toni said, “we’re really happy to see that you’re doing well.”

“Thanks,” Paola said, smiling. “I like it here. Everyone’s nice.”

“Good. Look,” Toni said, “we’re not going to take up too much of your time. You know that we’ve been looking for Isabel Delgado. I think I told you that she’s a good friend of my sister, Kelli.”

Paola nodded.

“We took the information you gave us last week, and we went to work. We found that NSSB seems to have three houses around Ravenna Park. Does that seem right to you?”

Paola nodded. “The house where the girls live and the house where the boys live. Plus Donnie and Crystal’s house,” she said.

“We’ve been able to study the houses, but we still haven’t found anything about Isabel. We heard what you said about Isabel being taken out of the girls’ house and maybe sold to the guy in Las Vegas, but we can’t figure out where Donnie would take her and keep her until then. We don’t think it’s at either Donnie’s own house or at the boys’ house. What do you think?”

“If he still has her,” she said, “she’s at the boys’ house. The basement.”

“The basement?” I asked. “The boys’ house has a basement?”

She nodded. “It’s where they have all their parties,” she said.

Toni looked at me. When I was inside, I hadn’t noticed a doorway to a basement, although admittedly, I hadn’t had much time to look around before the two guys who were returning home early had interrupted me.

“If you’re in the boys’ house,” I said, “where would the entry to the basement be?”

“They have a little office in the back of the house,” Paola said. “There’s a door in there that goes downstairs.”

That’s right. There were two doors in the office
. I had thought both were closet doors.

“If someone was down there, could you hear them upstairs?” I asked.

“No. They put this stuff all over down there so they can play their music really loud. You can stand outside or upstairs even, and you can’t hear anything that’s going on in the basement.”

“What’s down there?” I asked.

“There’s like a room with a sofa and a TV. And there’s two other rooms—bedrooms. And a bathroom.”

“How could they keep someone down there? Do the bedrooms lock up?”

She nodded. “Both of them.”

“So if you were locked in a bedroom, there’s no way you could get out or even be heard?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“And you think this is where they’d put Isabel?” Toni asked.

She nodded. “It’s where they put you if you got in trouble,” she said. “They called it the hole.”

Jesus Christ. If Isabel was there, I had to get her out. And I damned sure couldn’t allow Kelli to be sent there. “Let me ask you something else,” I said. “Do they do drugs over at the boys’ house?”

She laughed. “All day,” she said.

“Did you ever notice where they kept their drugs? Say, their marijuana?”

Toni and Annie both looked at me, wondering why I’d ask that.

“Yeah,” Paola said. “They kept weed in the kitchen closet, and they kept blow and crystal in the basement.”

“You saw it?” I asked.

She laughed. “Yeah.”

* * * *

We stayed and talked for another forty-five minutes. Paola was completely candid, although the remainder of our conversation failed to yield anything else as useful as the revelation that the NSSB had their own private dungeon located beneath the boys’ house. Still, the talk was very helpful. Now that she was starting to see just a glimmer of how her life had been stolen by these thugs, Paola seemed almost eager to turn against them. She agreed that she’d be willing to sign a statement about everything she’d said if needed. We were very grateful. We thanked her and Annie and headed for the Jeep.

I said good-bye and then tapped in Nancy Stewart’s number. It was 5:15 p.m., but I knew she’d still be working.

“Vice and High Risk Victims, Lieutenant Stewart,” she said when she answered the phone.

“Nancy,” I said, “it’s Danny and Toni.”

“Hey guys,” she said. “Come up with anything interesting?”

“We did,” I said. “Two things, actually. First, we just came from talking to Annie Hooper and Paola Morales.”

“How’s she doing?” Nancy asked. “Did she have anything new to add?”

“She’s doing really great and yes, she helped us out. A lot. We think we may have discovered where Donnie Martin is holding Isabel.”

“Really?” she said. “Where would that be?”

“Apparently, he has a secure room in the basement of the house on Brooklyn across from Ravenna Park.”

“A secure room? Paola told you that?”

“Yeah. Apparently, she knows it well. She says it’s where the gang has its parties. She says it’s been soundproofed, and from above you can’t hear anything that goes on down there. Basically, unless you know it’s there, you wouldn’t be aware of it.”

“That’s interesting,” Nancy said.

“That’s not all. According to Paola, there are two bedrooms down there, both lockable from the outside. Essentially, they’re jail cells.”

Nancy thought about this for a few seconds. Then she said, “And Paola thinks that that’s where Isabel would be held?”

“That was her immediate response when we asked,” I said.

“Interesting,” Nancy said again. “What about Kelli?” she asked. “What does this have to do with her?”

“Nothing—and everything,” I said. “Let me explain. As you and Tyrone explained to us, we figure that Kelli will have a small amount of time in which Crystal and Martin and maybe the others will try to schmooze her. You know—buy her clothes, treat her nice, win over her loyalty. Then they’ll ramp things up and start in with the drugs and forced sex. But with Kelli, there’s a twist. Never mind the fact that she’s older, smarter, and stronger than any of these other girls. The big thing is she already knows what’s up, and at the same time they’re playing a game with her,
she’s
also playing a game with
them
. But it’s a dangerous game because when they move into phase two and try to get her to use drugs or have sex with one of the gang members, she’s going to tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine, and then there’s going to be trouble. And that’s the kind of trouble she’s not prepared for. If we don’t get Kelli out before then, she’s probably going to get beat up and tossed into one of these dungeon bedrooms until she comes around. No telling what type of abuse will be piled on while she’s there. So right now, the dungeon may only be about Isabel. But within a few days, it’ll likely be about both girls.”

It was quiet for a second, and then Nancy said, “And so your plan is to have us go ahead now and take down the whole operation in hopes that we get both Isabel and Kelli out?”

“Nancy,” I said, “first off, I think Isabel’s there now. I think she’s being held until she either comes around or literally gets sold to another pimp in Las Vegas. And I think Kelli’s next. We know she’s with Crystal. And with regards to Kelli, I don’t have any choice. She’s basically family. I will not stand by and allow Kelli Blair to be subjected to these guys’ torture. She’s young and dumb, and she got herself in a bad position, but I can’t leave her there. I’d prefer for you guys to go in and bust them, but if you won’t move in, I’ll have to go in and get her myself. There won’t be any other choice for me.”

“Hmm,” Nancy said. She thought for a second and then said, “Well, give me something. Give me anything I can use as probable cause—something other than you think Isabel is being held there. I need something solid. Give that to me, and I’ll go downstairs right now and set it up. The problem, as I see it, is that we still don’t have anything solid against these guys.”

“How about the fact that there’s large quantities of marijuana sitting in kilo bricks on a shelf in the kitchen pantry? Or that there’s cocaine and crystal meth somewhere downstairs?”

“Paola told you this?” Nancy said.

“Yes,” I said. This was most of the way truthful. She told me what and where, but I filled in the blanks concerning how much based on personal observation.

“She’ll talk to a judge?”

“She volunteered,” I said.

“Might work,” she said. “I’ll go to the judge and see what happens.”

* * * *

It’s exactly 1.29 miles from Angel House where Paola was to the intersection of Highway 99 and Forty-Sixth Avenue. It took us thirty minutes to get there. We got on Highway 99 at Forty-Sixth Avenue and headed south. Traffic was heavy but, fortunately for us, it could have been worse. We could have been on 99 headed north. Compared to the cars on that side that were completely stopped, our stop-and-go motion seemed damn speedy. Ten minutes later, we crossed the ship canal, and five minutes after that, I got off on Dexter Avenue—about a half mile from my apartment. We were home two minutes later. In total—forty-seven minutes to cover 3.4 miles. You gotta love life in the big city.

Just as we were walking in the front door, my phone rang. Caller ID: Nancy Stewart.

“What’d you find?” I asked.

“We got it,” she said, sounding as if she barely believed it herself.

“Really?”

“Absolutely. I told the judge about Isabel being a minor and that she’s missing and believed to be held there. I told him about how the NSSB gang is known to be involved in child prostitution. I told him about the dope. I think that pushed him over the edge. He called Annie Hooper, and we had a conference call with him and Annie and Paola. He asked Paola questions, and she gave him straight answers. After he hung up, he told me he was going to issue a no-knock warrant.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Paola also told him they have a lot of weapons there.”

“She did?” I hadn’t seen any except the sidearms the two men wore.

“Yeah. She said the weapons are kept in the basement. After we ended the conference call, the judge said he was afraid that with that much dope around, the NSSB guys might decide not to go quietly. He said they could arm themselves while stalling the cops at the front door. Paola was a very convincing witness.”