Paola stared at Toni for a moment before she answered. “No. I just know that she wasn’t at our house anymore.”
“Why would they take her away?” I asked.
“They said he was going to sell her.”
“Sell her?” I asked. I didn’t bother asking who “he” was.
She nodded. “I think they took her away so everyone else wouldn’t feel bad.”
“Who would they sell her to?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe his friends in Las Vegas. They have girls, too. They’re always checking out each other’s ‘inventory.’ That’s what they call it.”
“How often do they hook up?” I asked. I needed to find out how much time we had.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Whenever they need to, I guess.”
She looked at me, right in the eyes. I looked back. For just a moment, I felt like I could see straight into her inner thoughts. They were a child’s eyes, yet they weren’t the innocent eyes of a fifteen-year-old. They were hard eyes, eyes that had seen way too much evil for one so young.
We talked for another fifteen minutes, but we didn’t really get any more pertinent information. Paola did let slip the fact that she liked riding around in the “beemer”-which I took to be Donnie Martin’s white BMW. I was already pretty sure that Donnie was her pimp. And now we knew that he had been trying to become Isabel’s as well. Except Isabel-God bless her-was no eleven-year-old. She was fighting back.
PART 2
Chapter 13
At Logan PI, we don’t have a motto, but if we did, it would probably be: “When in doubt, get back to the basics.” No question about it, we were in doubt now. No one knew exactly where Isabel was. Unfortunately, since she was too young for a bank account or credit cards that we could trace, our magic shortcuts list had pretty much been reduced to one item: her cell phone. And Kenny’d tried that and struck out. So we were left with no choice but to fall back on the basics-back to good old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts detective work. We needed to eliminate some of the unknowns.
Nancy had someone send us an audio file of the recording of our interview with Paola and now the whole Logan PI team was assembled in the conference room, listening to the playback from one of the PC speakers. We’d suffered two unfortunate setbacks in the last sixteen hours. First, of course, was the simple fact that the girl who’d showed up at the sting last night wasn’t Isabel. We’d been excited to see the ad with Isabel’s pictures, and we’d gotten our hopes up, only to see them come crashing down. Now, even after Nancy’d worked on Paola this morning and gotten her to loosen up a little, the only information she had offered didn’t sound too good for Isabel. She’d been “punished,” and Paola’d had no contact with her for a while. Worse, Paola wasn’t certain that Isabel was even still around. For all she knew, Isabel might have been sold. Or she might even be on the run. Again. This was beginning to look like a bigger job than I’d originally anticipated.
“There!” I said, focusing back on the recording. “Back it up and play that part again.”
Kenny started the recording again. “They live across the street from the park-by the-,” Paola’s voice echoed on the recording.
“Stop,” I said. “I knew she said something about a park.” I was thinking that if we could figure out where the houses were located, maybe we could discover something about where Isabel was. Or where she wasn’t-either way would be helpful.
“Good memory,” Toni said. “I wonder which park she meant?”
“She wouldn’t say, but we know-or at least we think we know-that it’s in the area north of the U-District.”
Doc was standing by a whiteboard mounted to the wall opposite the window. I turned to him and said, “Write it down anyway, okay?”
Up to this point, clues were pretty scarce, but we were still writing down what we had. So far, Doc had written:
CLUES
Donnie Martin-BMA-early twenties
DeMichael Hollins-BMA-early twenties (?)
Crystal-??
Auto: white BMW with tinted windows
multiple houses
— girls’ house
— boys’ house
— big house
north of the U-District
To this he now added:
across from a park
We stared at the board.
“Not much to go on,” Toni said.
I shook my head. “Not much.”
“Well,” Kenny said. “We could always just jump in the car and drive by the houses around all the parks north of the U-District looking for a white beemer with two black guys in it.”
I looked at him then at the board. Then I looked back at the group. “I suppose.”
“Really?” Kenny said.
I shrugged. “It’s a simple answer.” I looked at the board again. “But sometimes the simple answer is the right answer-especially when you don’t have any others.”
“It’s called Occam’s razor, dude,” Doc said to Kenny.
I looked at Doc and smiled. “Doc, you never cease to amaze me.”
“Part of my job description,” he said, smiling back. “So how many parks you think are up there, anyway?” Doc asked.
“We can look on a map and count ’em out,” Kenny said.
“How long will it take?” I asked
“We can do it right now,” he said. “While you wait.” He opened up a map program and zoomed to the area north of the U-District.
I studied the map for a few seconds. “It’s a pretty big area, but according to the map here, there aren’t that many parks-maybe fifteen or twenty if you count school playgrounds.”
We all looked at the map for several seconds. Finally, Toni said, “This is a big area, Danny. Are you seriously thinking about driving around up there looking for a white BMW?” She looked like she thought it was a bad idea. Looking at the map, I started to think that it might not be such a great idea. We’ve done this before, and it usually doesn’t amount to much. Then again, we were short on clues. That said, I decided to give the creative process one more shot.
“As a last resort,” I said, “we’ll drive the area. But before we go burning gasoline, let’s use our heads and think this through. Kenny,” I looked at him, “I really need you to come through for us. I want you to go back to your office and close the door. Then, I need you to sit there where it’s all nice and quiet, and just think. Figure out some little angle that we’re missing-something you can use to help us find these guys and short-circuit this groping-around-in-the-dark search of ours. Then, maybe we can zoom right in on Isabel. You can search a lot faster on your computer than we can in our cars. Be a detective for us.”
Kenny considered this for a second, then he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’m on it.”
“Good.” I turned to Doc. “Doc,” I want you to take the DMV records and the property records that Kenny found earlier and start assembling them into a report we can give to Nancy. If we find anything, we’re going to need her to move on it, and she’s going to need the backup.”
Doc nodded. I turned to Toni. “You,” I said, “you and I have an appointment with Ferguson and Sons. We’ve got to keep the money engine running.”
Two hours later, Toni and I were on the way back from the SODO district of Seattle where Ferguson’s main warehouse is located. We’d presented them with a contract for review, and we’d agreed on a start date a week from next Monday. The stereo was on, and Toni had chosen “Something in the Water” by Chris Webster. Just as we exited I-5 onto Mercer, my cell phone rang. Caller ID: Kenny.
I tapped the speakerphone button. “Hey there,” I said.
“Got something,” he said.
“Go.”
“I checked out the name ‘Donnie Martin’ with DMV, and there was nothing, so I checked ‘Donald Martin’ instead and bingo! — I got a match on a Donald Allen Martin on Twenty-First Avenue. Didn’t you say Donnie Martin’s aunt lived in the Central District?”