She thought for a couple of seconds. “Bad situation. Very bad-April 7, 1997. I’ll never forget.” She looked at us. “You should get him to tell you about it one day.”
“Dwayne’s a pretty modest guy,” I said. “He doesn’t blow his own horn much.”
“Well one day, you ask him about Raymond Allan Johnson. Mr. Johnson-may he rot in hell-nearly had my number. Dwayne fixed it for me. I’ll owe him forever.” She thought for a few more seconds, and then she focused on us and smiled. “But you’re not here to hear about my old war stories. Dwayne tells me you guys have a problem that falls into our purview.”
I nodded. “I’m afraid we do.”
I was just about to launch into the story when a handsome black man in his mid-thirties entered the office. He wore a badge clipped to his belt, alongside a holstered Glock. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t get off the phone.”
“Danny and Toni, this good-looking young guy is my assistant, Detective Tyrone Allison.” We shook hands and Tyrone pulled a chair up to the table.
“Ty, your timing’s good. Danny was just about to start explaining what’s happened.” She turned to me. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks. Yesterday, Toni’s little sister, Kelli Blair, approached Toni and me. Kelli said she was worried about her friend, Isabel Delgado.” I went on to explain Isabel’s story to Nancy and Tyrone, all the way up through the details of our visit to Isabel’s house. When I was done, I showed them copies of Isabel’s text messages to Kelli. After they’d read the messages, they looked at each other for a second, and then Nancy looked at me.
“What’s your initial impression?” Nancy asked. “What do you think happened?” If I was reading her correctly, she was probing, trying to figure out how to deliver bad news, wondering how to break it to us.
I nodded. “Let me start by saying you should know you can speak plainly to us-you don’t have to worry about saying anything that will shock or offend us.”
She nodded, and I continued. “That said, we’re starting to think that it’s possible-maybe even probable-that Isabel’s gotten herself caught up in some sort of underage prostitution racket, perhaps with a gang.” I looked at her. “We believe that Isabel probably felt like she needed to run away to escape her stepfather. She hooked up with some people and at first, her text messages seem to indicate that she was happy. Then, at some point, Isabel apparently came to some sort of realization that things weren’t as rosy as she’d been led to believe. No word since then.”
Nancy seemed to relax, knowing that she wasn’t going to have to deliver unexpected news. “I’d say there’s almost no doubt that that’s exactly what’s happened,” she said. “As a matter of fact, this seems like a classic case of a runaway being scooped up. Let’s start at the beginning. We usually figure that a runaway girl has less than forty-eight hours before a pimp approaches her. Of course, the pimp won’t actually say he’s a pimp-he’ll just offer shelter, clothes, food-stuff like that. A huge number of these girls don’t have any alternatives. The pimp’s initial offer is like a life ring to a drowning person. The next thing she knows, the girl’s completely caught up in the life.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Until yesterday,” I said. “I hardly knew anything at all about this. I had no idea the problem was so big.”
She nodded. “It’s very sad. We probably have somewhere around one thousand minor-aged girls actively being prostituted in Seattle right now. Basically, they’re sex slaves. And it’s growing faster than we can stop it.”
I shook my head. “It makes me wish there were more we could do. But at least with regards to Isabel Delgado, maybe we can help out.”
“We’ll take one-at-a-time victories,” Nancy said. “Sometimes, we’ll arrange stings where we can get five-maybe ten girls even. But one-at-a-time works well, too. Everyone we can pull out is one young life potentially saved.”
“Speaking of that,” Toni said, “what happens to these kids after you arrest them? We were wondering what would happen to Isabel when we find her.”
“We don’t actually arrest all that many kids anymore,” Nancy said. “Not unless it’s the only way to help them. A few years ago, the law enforcement community finally came to the realization that thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girls being coerced and manipulated by an older man into prostitution aren’t really the criminals in the equation. They’re actually the biggest victims of all-even if they are doing something illegal. That’s when we changed the name of our unit from just plain ‘Vice Squad’ to ‘Vice and High Risk Victims Unit.’ It turns out that the kids are the high-risk victims-have been all along. They’re subjected to physical violence from either the johns or their own pimps. They’re exposed to deadly diseases. If they live through it, they almost always have emotional scars that last the rest of their lives. It’s enough to make you cry. You wouldn’t have thought that it would have taken law enforcement so long to figure that out, but bureaucratic inertia sometimes takes a while to overcome.”
I nodded. “I was in the army,” I said. “I understand how large organizations work. Let me ask, then, where do the kids go now if they don’t go to juvenile hall? Some sort of shelter?”
“A shelter or back to their home if it’s possible, although a lot of the kids can’t go home. Like with Isabel, a lot of kids had their problems start at home in the first place.”
I pictured Tracey Webber. “I agree 100 percent with that,” I said. “There’s no way Isabel can go back home with her stepfather still in the picture.”
“Agreed,” Nancy said.
“Any hints on the best way to tackle finding Isabel?” Toni asked. “I think we’re basically planning to treat it like a missing person case.”
“We don’t spend much time hunting down specific individuals,” Nancy said. “But I think you’re probably on the right track. You said the mother was going to file a missing person report? When she does, that will get the case entered into the NCIC and WACIC databases. After that, like you say, it’s pretty basic stuff-a lot of interviewing and legwork.”
“But it’s made all the more difficult because your subject is a minor,” Tyrone added. “She’s not going to be leaving any electronic traces-no credit cards, no bank withdrawals, nothing like that.”
Nancy thought about this for a second. “On the other hand, there are a few things that might help you out. First, if there’s a gang involved-and odds are that there is-then you might be able to work another angle and get some help from our Gang Unit. They might have some information on the gang itself. Can I see those text messages again? What were the names of the people Isabel ran into?” She looked over the transcripts.
“Crystal, Donnie, and Mikey.” She turned to Tyrone. “Any of these sound familiar to you?”
He thought about it and then shook his head. “No.” He looked at me. “But don’t read anything into that. Unless we’re dialed in on someone as a subject of one of our investigations, we probably wouldn’t bump into them during our normal course of business, and we’d have no reason to know their names. The Gang Unit might, though. They bounce around in those circles all the time. I’ll hook you up with those guys before you leave.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Nancy continued. “The second thing is that, as I was saying, whoever Isabel’s gotten herself involved with is going to try and prostitute her-most likely on the Internet. That may be what led to this last message-the one that reads ‘too good to be true.’ She may have finally been exposed to the big picture-the timing seems about right. She might have even tried to resist. As distasteful as it is, I’d start monitoring the Backpage.com website. Leave us a picture, and we’ll keep an eye out, too. That’s something we can do-we monitor Backpage all the time anyway. That’s where most of the pimps run their ads. There’s a reasonable chance that you’ll see a picture of Isabel in some provocative pose posted there. Brace yourself.”
The thought disgusted me, but the tactic made sense.