“Okay, okay. Here you are.”
He handed her a paper plate through the counter window. Ballard’s tacos were on it, wrapped in foil. She handed a ten through the window and Digoberto held his hands up like he was under arrest.
“No, no, for you,” he said. “I like you. You bring other police here.”
“No, but you need to make a living. That’s not fair.”
She put the bill down on the counter and refused to take it back. She carried her plate over to a folding table where there were a variety of hot sauces and napkins. She grabbed napkins and a bottle of the mild sauce and went to the communal picnic table that was empty at the moment.
Ballard ate facing Sunset Boulevard and with her back to the taco truck. The tacos were delicious and she didn’t bother with the sauce on the second one. Before she was finished, Digoberto came out of the truck through the back door of the kitchen and brought her another taco.
“Mariscos,” he said. “You try.”
“You’re going to make me el gordo,” she said. “Pero gracias.”
She took a bite of the fish taco and found it to be just as good as the shrimp. But it was milder and she put on hot sauce. Her next bite was better but she never got a third. Her rover squawked and Washington sent her to a traffic stop on Cahuenga beneath the 101 freeway overpass. It was no more than five minutes away. Ballard asked Washington why a detective was needed and he simply said, “You’ll see.”
Since she had heard no call earlier from patrol or dispatch concerning that location, Ballard knew that whatever it was, they were keeping it off the radio. Plenty of media gypsies in the city listened to police frequencies and responded to anything that might produce a sellable video.
Ballard waved her thanks to Digoberto, who was back in his truck, tossed her plates into a trash can, and got in her car. She took Sunset to Cahuenga and headed north toward the 101. She saw a single patrol car with its roof lights flashing behind an old van that advertised twenty-four-hour rug cleaning on its side panels. Ballard didn’t have time to wonder about who would need rug cleaning in the middle of the night. One of the patrol officers who had stopped the van came toward her car, flashlight in hand. It was Rich Meyer, whom she had seen earlier at roll call.
Ballard killed the engine and exited the car.
“Rich, whaddaya got?”
“This guy in the van, he must’ve gotten off the freeway and pulled under here so that the women he had in the back could take care of business. Me and Shoo come passing through and there’s four women squatting on the sidewalk.”
“Squatting?”
“Urinating! It looks like human trafficking, but nobody’s got ID and nobody’s speaking English.”
Ballard started toward the van where Meyer’s partner, Shuman, was standing with a man and four women, all of them with hands bound behind their back with zip ties. The women wore short dresses and appeared disheveled. They all had dark hair and were clearly Latina. None looked older than twenty.
Ballard pulled her mini-light off her belt and first pointed the beam through the open rear doors of the van. There was a mattress and some ragged blankets strewn across it. A couple of plastic bags were filled with clothes. The van smelled of body odor and desperation.
She moved the light forward and saw a phone in a dashboard cradle. It had a GPS map glowing on it. Moving around the van to the driver’s door, she opened it, leaned in, and pulled the phone out of its holder. By tapping the screen she was able to determine the van’s intended destination: an address on Etiwanda Street in the Valley. She put the phone in her pocket and went over to where Meyer and Shuman were standing with the detainees.
“Who do we have working tonight that has Spanish?” Ballard asked.
“Uh, Perez is on — she’s in the U-boat,” Meyer said. “And Basinger is fluent.”
Ballard now remembered seeing both officers at roll call. She knew Perez pretty well, plus she thought a woman would be better for interviewing the four females. If she was working the U-boat, which is what they called a single-officer car that only took reports on minor crimes, calling her would not pull her off active patrol. She raised her rover and requested that Officer Perez roll to the scene. Perez came back with a roger and an ETA of eight minutes.
“We should just call ICE and be done with this,” Shuman said. Ballard shook her head.
“No, we’re not doing that,” she said.
“That’s the protocol,” Shuman insisted. “They’re obviously illegals — we call ICE.”
Ballard saw that Shuman had one bar on his uniform sleeve. Five years on the job. She looked at Meyer, who had four bars on his sleeve. He was standing slightly behind Shuman. He rolled his eyes so only Ballard would see. It was a sign that he wasn’t going to cause Ballard any grief on this.
“I’m the detective,” Ballard said. “I have control of this investigation. We’re not calling ICE. If you have a problem with that, Shuman, you can get back in your car and go back out on patrol. I’ll handle it from here.”
Shuman averted his eyes and shook his head.
“We call ICE, they get sent back and then they do it again,” Ballard said. “They go through all the rape and horrors they went through getting here the first time.”
“That’s not our concern,” Shuman said.
“Maybe it should be,” Ballard said.
“Hey, Shoo,” Meyer said. “I got this here. Why don’t you go back to the shop and start the incident report.”
The shop was the patrol car. Shuman walked off without another word and got in the passenger side of the patrol car. Ballard saw him roughly swing the MDT on its swivel toward him so he could start to type in his incident report.
“I hope he spells my name right,” Ballard said.
“I’m sure he will,” Meyer said.
Perez got there two minutes early. With her translating, Ballard first questioned the driver, who claimed to know only that he was paid to take the four young women to a party. He said he did not remember where he picked them up or who had paid him. Ballard had Meyer put him in the back of his patrol car and transport him to the Hollywood Station jail, where she would later file paperwork arresting him for human trafficking.
The four women found their voices after the driver was gone from the scene. Through Perez they one by one told stories that were sad and horrible, yet typical of such journeys made by desperate people. They had traveled from Oaxaca, Mexico, and were smuggled across the border in an avocado truck with a secret compartment, each forced to pay for the trip by having sex with several of the men involved. Once across in Calexico they were placed in the van, told they owed thousands of dollars more for the remaining trip, and driven north to Los Angeles. They did not know what awaited them at the address on Etiwanda in the Valley but Ballard did: sexual servitude in gang-operated brothels where they would never break even and would never be missed should they stop earning and their masters decide to bury them in the desert.
After calling for a police tow for the van, Ballard made a call to a battered-woman’s clinic in North Hollywood, where she had delivered women before. She spoke to her contact and explained the situation. The woman agreed to take in the four Mexican women and see that they were medically treated and given beds and fresh clothes. In the morning, they would be counseled on their options: returning home voluntarily or seeking asylum based on the threat that the group that procured them would seek to harm them should they go back to Mexico. Neither choice was good. Ballard knew that many hardships awaited the women.