Shards (20 page)

“No. I don't want to move at all.”

“Get dressed then.” He picked up my jeans then and said, “Good thing you didn't get blood on your jeans. It's your only pair.”

He disappeared then, and I got dressed. It took me a long time
to pull my jeans up. I could hear him calling me from the computer room. I put my shirt on carefully. Every movement felt like I was still ripping.

I walked slowly down the hall to the computer room, where I was rarely allowed to go. This time, he invited me in.

“Sit down,” he said. Porn was playing on his computer screen. He was sitting there naked in front of it. He loaded a bowl and we smoked a lot of meth.

He continued watching the porn and pointed out what he liked about the girls on the screen. I let my eyes wander around the room, trying to figure out how the cameras were connected to the computer.

Later I found all the footage, organized in different files on his main computer. He was very particular. Most of the files were names of women; some were just dates. I didn't have time to look at all of them, but I found all the footage of me. It was more than disturbing, how much he liked to watch, what he liked to watch. He had sound clips of me, phone conversations I had with Keawe, everything. I found another file he kept on me, emails from work, emails between Keawe and me. He had all the contacts from my phone. My mom's address. All my sister's information. He also had my father's phone number, which I didn't even have.

He had investigated me more than I had ever investigated any of my targets. On his computer I found a file called “vice.” I tried to open it, but it was password protected. I hated to think what was in that file.

Later I would find all this, but for now we were back to playing boyfriend and girlfriend. Only the girlfriend had just been raped, and every single movement she made was recorded, broadcast, replayed, and saved in this very room.

It took days for that
pain to go away. Not only did my ass hurt, my back stung from rug burns I had gotten while he dragged me across the floor. The dealer gave me painkillers—oxys—to help. This was the worst it had been, though it would get worse. Worse not because the beatings got worse, though they did. It was the feeling that I might not survive. Every day I thought about suicide, but eventually I realized I might not be the one to take my life. He might kill me first.

I don't have one simple answer when it comes to why I didn't try to get away after that. Ask for help. A neighbor. Anyone. After a while, I knew that calling the cops was out of the question. He was so careful not to leave bruises on me. His ex-wife had filed a restraining order against him, and he didn't want to draw any attention to himself. Just as he hid his drugs and paraphernalia, he also hid his abuse of me. I knew from my experience as a cop that there
would be no way for me to prove what he had done. Once I found the film footage on his computer, he encrypted it.

Stripped of my sense of self, unable to move or think without questioning the outcome, I quietly resigned myself to the idea that being with him—trapped in that house—was my fate. Nothing else really existed. The idea of dreams or any sort of future was shut out. I lived day to day, sometimes minute to minute. He had a way of igniting meth-induced rage within me while also beating me into submission. It got to the point where I wouldn't dare touch him for fear of the consequences. I was breaking physically and already broken emotionally.

Over time, I figured out the details of his camera system. He had them hidden in every room—even the bathrooms, especially the bathrooms—so he always knew where I went. If I went from one room to another, a colored light in his shop would alert him. If I opened the front door, he would get a text message on his cell phone. His tweaker thing was technology—microphones, cameras, sensors—and for an addict, he was brilliant.

I was a virtual prisoner in that house, watched all the time. If he left the house to work or do a deal, he would bring in Tiffany or one of his drug groupies to babysit me.

Around this time, the dealer moved the kittens from the attic into the guest bedroom on the second floor, just at the top of the stairs. Of course I begged him to let me have a kitten, but once he knew I wanted one, he used that against me.

I don't remember at what point he started abusing them to get to me, but he locked the kittens inside the room and kept the mother out. He let all the kittens cry while the mom went crazy outside the door.

“Would you let her in?” I screamed at him. “Please let her in.”

“Goddamned cats,” was all he would say.

I only saw the kittens once or twice and was not allowed to hold or touch them. He didn't hold them either, and separated from their mother, with no human interaction and very little food, they soon became feral. They never stopped crying. They made horrible sounds. I had never had an experience with feral cats before, but they were vicious. I could hear them clawing at the rug, the wall, the door. Eventually the entire stairway began to smell from all the feces in the room. I became terrified of that room, and of those cats. Day and night, their screaming tormented me.

•  •  •

Many times afterward, I tried to go back and reconstruct the timeline of my life in that house. How long was I there? How many days or weeks or months? How much time passed between beatings?

I didn't know. I could sometimes remember on what day of the week something occurred—a Tuesday, for example, definitely a Tuesday—but had no idea which Tuesday, in which month, even in which year. The dealer kept me so high that I barely knew where I was most of the time. I knew time was passing in that house but I had no idea how much.

Nor did I know that everyone was looking for me.

When I didn't show up in Maui as expected, the department started to worry. Keawe became suspicious after our phone conversation and believed something was very wrong.

Thinking that my mother and father were dead, Keawe tracked down my sister. By this point, Carol had realized she wasn't getting any phone calls and had reset the call forwarding on her phone. Keawe's call went right to her.

“This is Officer Davis,” Keawe told Carol. “One of Alli's beat partners. I'm worried about her. We were expecting her in Maui five days ago and she didn't show.”

“She didn't?” Carol asked. “I haven't talked to her, but I know she got on a plane to Maui a few days ago.”

“I spoke to her briefly,” Keawe said, “but she didn't sound good, and she won't return any of my messages. I know she's in LA, but I don't know where.”

“LA? What in the world is she doing there? Have you talked to my mom yet?”

“Your mom?” Keawe asked, uncertainly.

“Yes. Our mom.”

“Alli told me your mother was dead.”

“What?”

Carol didn't waste time on the phone with Keawe. She immediately called my mom, and the two began a frantic search, calling and emailing everyone they could think of who might know where I was. Carol was still in occasional contact with our father, and she emailed him and his wife, Claire, in Florida. Claire did a Google search and came across an online flyer advertising one of the fund-raisers Erin had organized to raise money for my cancer treatment. Claire emailed the flyer to my sister with two words: “What's up?”

Panicked, Carol called Keawe. “How could you keep this horrific secret from us?” she demanded. “How could you not have enough respect to alert the family to this nightmare?”

Keawe was shocked that the family didn't know about my cancer.

“How could she not tell you?” he said. “She has stage four ovarian cancer. And lymphoma.”

“Are you sure?” Carol asked.

“Of course. She's very ill. Too ill to travel very far.”

At the dealer's house, I hadn't been answering calls, but I did listen to my messages sometimes, just to hear my family's and
friends' voices. After she spoke to Keawe, Carol left me a message.

“What is going on, Alli?” the message said. “You have cancer! I'm so scared that you're alone and hurting. We're devastated, and we love you. You need to talk to us. Please. Call me as soon as you get this message. We need to hear from you.” At the end, her voice broke, and she whispered, “God, do you really have cancer?”

I didn't call Carol back, but I did manage to call my mom.

“Alli!” she said. “Thank God. We can't believe what we're hearing. Cancer?”

“That's right,” I said. “I do have cancer. I just don't want anyone to see me like this. I've got lymphoma.” I explained to her that I was in a hospice in LA and was expecting to die soon.

My mom began sobbing and tried to ask me a hundred questions. Down the hall, the cats wailed and hissed.

“I've got to go,” I said. “I'm sorry. I love you all.” I hung up the phone.

I had nothing to say to my mom. I
did
feel like I was dying, not from cancer, but from meth. I had already accepted that I would never see my family again. I just didn't want them to know what had become of me. My crazy meth brain convinced me that my mother would buy this, would understand I was about to die and quietly leave the matter alone. That's how worthless I felt. I sat on the carpeted floor next to the bed and listened to myself cry almost as loudly as the cats.

•  •  •

Carol and my mom began calling cancer hospitals in LA but no one acknowledged having me as a patient. Carol thought I might have used an assumed name, so she had long, detailed conversations with all sorts of facilities. But for obvious reasons, the cancer story never held up. There were no medical records anywhere to confirm it.

After speaking to my sister, Keawe called Erin, and they went
into my Maui apartment to do a thorough search. They found my ice pipes and the sex tape that my dealer had made. They also found the dealer's name and address. They had no way of knowing he was a drug dealer, but when they background-checked him, they did find the restraining order filed by his ex-wife, so they were concerned. MPD began an official missing persons investigation and put Detective Keopu in charge of it.

Around this time, my mom received a phone call from my landlady looking for the rent, which I hadn't paid in a couple of months. My mom flew to Maui, and when she got to my apartment, she was shocked to see the blue investigative gloves everywhere. Meeting with Keawe and Erin, she learned for the first time that Keawe was my boyfriend, something he was still concealing from Detective Keopu and the rest of MPD. Everyone now knew about the drugs. Together with Detective Keopu, my mom contacted the Everett Police Department and asked them to send an officer to the dealer's house for a welfare check.

The dealer had spent a lot of time telling me that my mother hated me, that Keawe hated me, so when that officer showed up at the door—a female from EPD—I learned for the first time that my family was looking for me.

“I'm here to see Miss Allison Moore,” the officer said. “Are you Allison Moore?”

“Yes, she is,” the dealer said. I was hovering in the background, not sure if he wanted me there or not.

Upstairs, the cats howled.

“Is that a—baby?” asked the officer.

“Just some cats,” the dealer said, and the officer nodded.

“I need to ask Miss Moore a few questions,” she said.

“Sure,” the dealer said. I moved toward him, and the three of us stood outside the front door.

“Your mother is concerned about you, Miss Moore,” the officer said. “Are you okay? Do you want to leave?”

“Of course not,” I said. I was shocked that my mom was concerned. I thought she hated me. I didn't want to leave—I thought I had it pretty good here. The dealer was the only one who loved me, the only one taking care of me. If I left, where would I go?

The dealer laughed. “That's crazy,” he said.

“I'd like to hear it from Miss Moore, please,” the officer said.

“My mom,” I said. “She can be a little . . . a little dramatic. If I haven't called her in a few days she thinks I've been kidnapped.” I laughed nervously.

“So you are not being held against your will?” the officer said.

I looked at the dealer out of the corner of my eye.

“Of course not,” I said.

“So tell me, why haven't you called your mother?” the officer asked, adopting a chattier, let's-be-friends tone.

“She's an adult, ma'am,” the dealer said. “Her mother doesn't need to keep tabs on her.”

The officer shook her head. “I'm just doing my job.” She had no way of knowing he was a drug dealer, of course, and even if she had a search warrant, she would never have found anything in that house. He kept everything so well hidden that even I couldn't find his drugs. Believe me, I had tried.

The officer turned to me. “So there's no problem?” she asked. “You're fine?”

“I'm fine,” I said, and she left. She had only been there a few minutes and had never even gone inside the house. She didn't separate the two of us like I was trained to do in a domestic case, and I was too terrified to say anything against the dealer in his presence.

The officer would report back to MPD and my mom that I appeared
to be “adult and well.” She believed me to be at the dealer's house voluntarily, and in a way I was.

In a way I was.

“Your mother's a fucking mental case,” the dealer said, once the officer was gone.

“You told me she didn't want to see me,” I said. “If she's looking for me, obviously she does.”

“I doubt that.”

“I better call her.”

“She doesn't want to talk to you,” he said. “She hates you.”

I went upstairs, walking quickly by the door to the cat room. Sometimes the dealer would threaten to put me in the room with the cats in the dark. It felt silly to be so scared of baby cats, but I was. I knew they would attack me, claw me, and I wouldn't be able to catch them. It was all I could think about when I passed that room.