Profile of Fear: Book Four of the Profile Series (Volume 4) (13 page)

Carly eased around to a visitor chair and sat down. “It’s doubtful she has any information. He’s been in hiding for years, conducting his business from Mexico. What did she say about him?”

Cameron shifted in his chair, picked up a pen and tapped it a couple of times. He’d screwed up. If he’d been a bit more persuasive and a lot less sarcastic, Donda might have already given him the information on Ortiz and he wouldn’t feel like such a jerk. “I pissed her off and now she’s demanding to talk to a Fed. She says she has important information about Ortiz.”

“Do you believe her? I mean you’ve got her for possession and dealing meth. How credible could she be? Are you sure she’s not working you for a get-out-of-jail card?”

Nodding, he chewed on that possibility. “She might be messing with me. But what if she’s not? The guy’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.”

Carly leaned forward in her chair. “
I’ll
talk to her.”

“What?”

“You said she’s demanding a Fed. I’m a Fed. At least a former Fed. What would it hurt if I interviewed her?”

Cameron looked her straight in the eye. “Is there something you want to tell me about Juan Ortiz, Carly? You had a strange reaction when I mentioned his name before.”

“Not much to tell. I was an agent based in the FBI’s Orlando office when I first heard of Ortiz. He ran a prostitution ring there, capitalizing on the influx of tourists. We set up an undercover operation to capture him, but he got away. End of story.”

There was no way this was the end of the story. Carly knew more about Ortiz than she wanted to share. She’d never held back information from him before. And that she was doing it now made him determined to find out why. Cameron shot her a cut-the-bullshit look that would have had most people spilling their guts. But not Carly. She seemed completed unfazed.

He eased back in his chair. “No reason why you can’t talk to her. Like you said, she wants to talk to a Fed.”

“Give me some background on her.”

Cameron slid Donda Hick’s file across his desk to her. “She’s Becca’s mother.”

“She’s the meth-head birth-mother that abused Becca?”

“Yeah, does that impact your impartiality?”

“I’m a little more professional than that, Cam. Did it impact yours?”

Cameron flinched. “Can’t say I’m not angry with her for the way she treated Becca. So if it comes to you asking me to give her a deal for information on Ortiz, the child abuse charges stay on the table. Not budging on that.”

“Seriously, Cam? You should know the chances of me asking for leniency for the woman that hurt Becca are extremely unlikely. I may not have had the time to spend with her that Kaitlyn has, but I love Becca just as much.”

“I’m sorry, Carly. I shouldn’t have said that. This woman unnerves me. I think she might be fishing for Becca’s location. She can’t know that social services placed her little girl with us. I don’t trust what she might do if she finds out.”

“Mrs. Hicks won’t get the information from me. Have you thought about asking her to hand over her parental rights so you can adopt Becca? I mean, that little girl is as much a part of the family now as I am.”

“I can’t ask her now, not when she’s looking for some leverage.”

“Sorry, Cam.”

“Let’s get back to Donda’s background. As you will see in her file, she’s been arrested for petty thefts as well as prostitution, but that was several years ago in Indianapolis. Nothing since she moved here, married Hicks, and gave birth to Becca.”

“I’m not seeing an obvious connection to Ortiz. Like I said, he’s been hiding in Mexico for years.”

Cameron sat quietly for a moment, chewing on his lower lip as he thought. He remembered talking to Donda’s husband when he was in the back of the police cruiser. The man had told him Becca wasn’t his—that Donda had run off a couple of years ago and came back pregnant. He scrubbed wearily at his face. He had a bad feeling in his gut. The girl could be telling the truth. Cameron wanted to see if Carly found out this same information.

“This all might be a ploy to get out of jail, but I appreciate you talking to her.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Carly paused before the one-way glass window to get her first view of Donda Hicks. The woman inside the interview room was gaunt and wore the worried expression of someone who had made too many mistakes in life to count. She wore an orange jumpsuit with a worn gray sweater too large for her small frame. Pulling the cuffs over her hands, she was worrying the frays of yarn with her fingers. As if she sensed she was being watched, she crossed her arms and stared at the one-way glass.

Cameron moved beside her. “What do you think of our informant?”

“She looks angry, but she also looks scared.”

“I get the angry part, but what are you seeing that suggests she’s afraid? Not seeing it.”

“Look at her, Cam. She’s just a scared kid. See her arms folded under her breasts? It’s a typical gesture of defense. There is something she thinks she must defend herself against. Something or someone she fears. I’d be willing to bet she’ll ask for some type of protection.”

“I doubt if Donda Hicks has the kind of information to warrant
any
kind of protection.”

Carly shouldered past him to enter the small interview room. Once inside, she sat across from Donda without saying a word, putting her briefcase on the floor. She pulled out the information Cameron had printed about Ortiz and placed the pages on the table, right where Donda could see them.

Donda shot her a suspicious look. “Who are you?”

“You asked for a federal agent. “I’m Special Agent Carly Stone.”

Donda eyed Carly suspiciously. “Yeah, and a long-lost Kardashian. Notice the family resemblance?”

Reaching into her briefcase, Carly pulled out her identification card and slid it across the table. “Is this proof enough for you, Ms. Hicks? Now start talking. I’m too busy to play games with you. If you have information on Juan Ortiz, spill it.”

“I need some promises from you first.”

“No deal. You get consideration if the information is useful. Period.”

Donda blew out a breath, and then crossed and uncrossed her arms. It seemed to Carly as if she were wavering between talking or not. “How do you know Juan Ortiz?”

“I fell for one of his modeling schemes.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ortiz puts these ad things on Craigslist and Backpage for models. The ads said I could be famous and make a lot of money, so I emailed my photo. Why not? I was living with my mom and my grabby, pervert stepfather at that point, so what did I have to lose, anyway? At least that’s what I thought. I get a response almost immediately. The email had a flyer attached that gave a time and place for model tryouts.”

“Where?”

“A fake office he’d set up in Indianapolis. There are two other girls waiting when I get there. They were dressed up with makeup and shit like a pro on Saturday night. A sour-faced bee-ach sitting at a desk tells us we have to wait fifteen more minutes for two more girls to arrive. One of the girls who was here before me gets up and says, “I’m not waiting. I’m done with this gig,” and she leaves.

The rest of us waited, and when they don’t show up, the boss, this Ortiz guy, has another place for the modeling tryouts, and that there is a van in the back waiting to take us there.”

Carly wrote notes on a yellow notepad. “Was Ortiz in the office?”

“No. There were two badass dudes, who alternated between speaking Spanish and English, and the hostile secretary who said as little as possible. She mainly glared at us.”

“So what happened at the tryouts?”

“That’s a joke. There is no modeling tryout. Once we are, like, herded in this van, this one girl, she starts freaking out. She leans forward and demands to know where they’re taking us. The dude in the front seat turns around and slaps the shit out of her. That’s the first sign that tells me we are in deep trouble, so I just keep my dumb-ass mouth shut. The second sign is when we are blindfolded.”

“Where did they take you?”

“Lady, haven’t you heard a word I said? I was blindfolded. How in the hell would I know where we were going?”

Tapping her pen on the table, Carly gazed at Donda. Not expecting to believe anything the woman said, Carly was beginning to think she was telling the truth—at least this part of her story. It was like the tales she’d heard from the few women who were willing to talk about Ortiz’s operation. “Go on, Donda. What happened next?”

“When the van finally stops, the men lead us through a house and didn’t remove the blindfolds until we were shoved into a small room together. The house stank like cigarettes, booze, and sex.”

“Even though your eyes were covered, do you remember anything about the house that would help us find it?”

“No. We were kept in a small room on the second level and the windows were covered from the inside with plywood. We broke our damn fingernails trying to pry off that plywood.”

“So the house has more than one floor?”

“Yes, but the only room I seen downstairs was the kitchen when we ate our chow. Afterward, we were marched back up the stairs.”

“You couldn’t see into the other rooms?”

“The house had few lights and the staircase led right into the kitchen. The only other rooms I saw upstairs were the three rooms where we had sex with customers.”

“You claim you know Juan Ortiz. Before you tell me how you met him, give me a good description of what he looks like.”

“The girls call Juan ‘the man of many faces.’ He’s always changing his look and identity. When I knew him, he had a deep tan and had black, curly hair over his forehead, to just below his ears. If you could overlook his cruel streak, he’d be hot.”

Carly glanced at her skeptically. “You could have gotten that information from the Internet. I need more to believe you actually know him.”

Donda pulled the waist of her skirt down and stood up to reveal a tattoo on her hip—a small circle with the initials J.O. inside. It looked like a brand cowboys use on cattle. “I’m telling the truth. He called me his special bitch. This tattoo means I’m Juan’s property. All his girls have them. But no one knew him like I did. I’m the one he chose for sex, not the other girls.”

“Tell me more.”

“When it came to doing it, he liked it rough—meaning he had to slap me around, hard enough to leave bruises, before he could get it up. I think he was more turned on by hurting me than by the prospect of hot sex. He was touchy about questions, too. One time I asked him how he got the thick, white scars on his back. He said to drop it or he’d slit my throat. Then he backhanded me so hard, it knocked one of my front teeth loose.” Donda opened her mouth to reveal a space in her front row of teeth.

“Anything else you can remember about him physically?”

“Yes, he has this weird scar on his right shoulder, looks like it was an open wound that should have had stitches but didn’t.”

Carly’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a gunshot wound.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I gave it to him.”

“Oh, shit. You’re the one who shot him?”

Carly became uncomfortable and shifted in her seat realizing her mistake. Why had she blurted out a secret, only she and a few undercover cops knew? A secret she’d guarded for years. And now a woman desperate for her freedom knew her name and location. Now Donda now had a bargaining chip with one of the FBI’s most dangerous criminals. A man who would stop at nothing to take Carly’s life, as well as the lives of those she loved.

“No one can do something like that to Juan Ortiz and live,” Donda warned.

Carly swiftly changed the subject. If she could get to Ortiz first, it wouldn’t matter if he found out her name and location. “So far you’ve given me enough info to make me believe you knew Ortiz in the past, but that was years ago. But we need information about where he is and what he is doing
now
.”

“I saw him weeks ago, shortly before I got busted.”

“In Indiana?”

“No, the North Pole. Of course I saw him in Indiana. I knew it was a matter of time for him to find me. No one gets away from him. He warned me that I was his property and that if I ever escaped, he’d use his many associates to find me. He’s got meth cooks, dealers, and distributers all over the Midwest. But once I found out I was pregnant with his kid, I knew I had to escape.”

Carly’s eyes widened, her heart lodged in her throat. “Wait a minute? Are you suggesting that Becca belongs to Juan Ortiz?”

“I’m not suggesting, I know she does. I always used protection with the johns. But Juan wouldn’t hear of it. He didn’t like sex with a rubber and refused to wear one. Finding out I was pregnant with Becca was the most terrifying day of my life. If he found out, he’d either kill me or take my baby and sell her, or both. That’s why I ran.”

“How did you escape?”

“Back then a thug named Mateo worked for Juan and ran the house. He’s the one who offered me as a gift to Juan in the first place. Mateo ran the ads on Craigslist and Backstreet, and delivered us for sex in hotels close by. One day, he’d hooked a big spender but there was no one to send to the hotel. It was the weekend of a big Colts game, and all the other girls were working parties. I begged him to send me. He agreed as long as I didn’t tell his boss. Juan didn’t want me leaving the house, but greed got the best of Mateo and he let me go. Once I got inside the hotel room, I started crying hysterically. I told the john I was pregnant and was being beaten and held captive. He felt sorry for me. Paid me $500 for staying with him that night. In the morning, he took me to the bus station.”

Growing impatient, Carly sighed and ran her fingers through her long hair. She fished an elastic band out of her briefcase and then tied her hair back. “Let’s skip to the part where you saw Juan Ortiz weeks ago.”

“Gee, pardon me if I’m boring your ass.”

She met Donda’s glare head-on. “Go on.”

“There’s this farmer’s market set up in a field on Route 41 on Saturday mornings.”

“I’ve been there.”

“On this particular Saturday, I had Becca with me in her stroller. Wanted to see if I could find some used toddler clothes and get some fresh veggies. You know, for the kid. As soon as I got out of the truck, I sensed something was wrong. Made me jittery and looking over my shoulder. Once we got going, I decided it would be a quick trip, look for the clothes, buy the veggies, and get the hell out of there.”