Human Traffic (Detective Damien Drake Book 5) Read online

  “You can’t just put a person’s picture on TV, least of all one of our own. And especially not when Drake hasn’t been charged with anything.”

  Palmer licked his lips before speaking.

  “Yet. Sgt. Yasiv might I take a moment to remind you of your rank? You may be the sergeant of 62nd precinct, but I am the Commanding Officer of Major Case Squad. I’m leading this investigation, and I recommend that you watch your tone moving forward.”

  Yasiv chewed his lip. Even though he was not a man prone to violence, Yasiv was positive that if things continued along these lines, it wouldn’t be words that either of them would have to watch, but fists.

  “You may be my superior, but it’s customary to consult with the person in charge of a case before going on live TV. And the Skeleton King and Church of Liberation case? That was my case.”

  DI Palmer cocked his head to one side.

  “You’re right, Sgt. Yasiv. You’re right that the Simmons murder and the Skeleton King cases were yours. And I let you take the lead on them. But those are now closed — you said so yourself. I’m pursuing something new now.”

  Yasiv’s eyes narrowed.

  “What case? And how is Drake involved?”

  Again, a deliberate and annoying pause.

  “I’m sorry, Sgt. Yasiv, but the details of this case are confidential.”

  Yasiv took an aggressive step forward, but Palmer didn’t even flinch.

  “Confidential? You’re sitting here in my precinct in an office that I lent you… and now you’re going sit there and tell me that there’s some bullshit case against Drake that’s confidential?”

  Palmer shrugged.

  “I didn’t mention Drake, you did. Sorry, but this comes directly from the chain of command and it stops at the DI. I’m more than willing to give up this office, but I’ll have no choice to put that in my report for when I meet with the mayor later this month. So? Do you want me to leave?”

  “You can keep the damn office,” Yasiv snarled. “But I’m going above your head, Palmer. I’m going to find out what this personal vendetta that you have with Drake is all about. He’s a good man, a great cop, and I consider him a friend. This isn’t over.”

  With that, Yasiv spun and started towards the door. He was nearly in the hallway when Palmer managed to get the last word in.

  “You know what they say about the company we keep, Sgt. Yasiv. A rising tide may float all boats, but when you don’t have a boat, you’re bound to get stuck in the mud. You’d do well to keep that in mind.”

  Chapter 13

  Drake sighed and rubbed his palms together. Mandy’s story had been horrible, but the sad fact was that he’d heard dozens of similar ones before during his time in the NYPD.

  “So, when everyone else started collapsing, you did the same? Pretended that you were dead like them? And then you managed to sneak away after they opened the container? Do I have that right?”

  Mandy nodded.

  “Mandy, do you think that any of the other girls did the same as you? Pretended to be dead?”

  The girl turned her to the side and Drake saw her shudder.

  “No. They were all dead,” she replied quietly.

  “And what did they tell you back in Colombia, exactly?”

  As Mandy collected herself, Drake turned to Screech and asked him to fetch them a drink.

  “They said that… that we would have a better life in America. That we could continue doing what we were doing in Colombia, but that it would be safe. That we would be protected.”

  Drake nodded. This was another common refrain of sex traffickers overseas. And, in all honesty, it was usually true. The risk of being murdered while working the streets was far lower in NYC compared to Bogota, but it wasn’t as if these girls were trading up for the good life. They were still subjected to violence and abuse regardless of geographic location. And this ‘protection’ that Mandy spoke of? A pimp that would more than likely get her hooked on crack to control her and keep her docile. She may be young and pretty now, but after a few years of smoking crack and working the streets for days on end, she would become something else entirely. Eventually, her earning power would be next to nothing and the pimp would simply cast her out. Mandy would be resigned to performing whatever deplorable sexual acts were demanded of her just to get her next hit. She would continue doing this until the day her body rotted from the inside out.

  “And what… what did they ask from you in return? If they were offering you safe passage to the United States, what did you have to do for them?” Drake asked.

  Mandy flushed and averted her eyes. While Drake waited for the woman to reply, Screech returned and handed him a glass of Scotch. Surprised by the amount — the rock glass was nearly full — Drake raised an eyebrow and turned to face his partner.

  Screech wasn’t even looking at him; he was sipping an equally tall glass of Scotch.

  For someone so adamant that they needed to vacate the premises, to lay low until DI Palmer’s witch hunt was over, Screech hadn’t been shy with the alcohol.

  Drake returned his gaze to Mandy.

  “Mandy, we’re not here to—”

  The girl’s eyes shot up.

  “For a week before we left, they made us eat these vegetables — huge plates of peas and corn. You know the small kind? Chopped up?”

  Drake nodded and encouraged her to continue.

  It sounded to him like the bags of frozen vegetables that you got from the supermarket freezer.

  “They made us eat so much of it… I almost puked every night. But they told us that if we didn’t eat it all, we wouldn’t get on the boat. Then, on the last night, they came to us with these plastic bags and told us we had to swallow them all.”

  “Competitive eating,” Screech muttered.

  Drake turned.

  “What?”

  “The peas and carrots… they’re for stretching the stomach. It’s a common tactic among competitive eaters.”

  Drake made a face.

  Gee, interesting factoid, Screech, but let’s just try to keep focused, okay?

  “Mandy, can you tell us what happened to the other girls? Why they died?”

  Mandy took her time responding.

  “At first… at first, I thought the powder in the bags was cocaine, but… Drake, they told us to drink this horrible stuff, but some of the girls couldn’t do it. I think it was… I think it was to keep the baggies from breaking during the trip. I tried to make my friend Stacy drink it, but she kept vomiting… at one point, she vomited so hard that I thought she was going to puke up the baggies. And then, not long after we were moved from the boat to the shipping container, she started to foam at the mouth and shake. I knew then that the baggies weren’t full of cocaine — I’ve been around the stuff my whole life and never seen anyone act like that.” She took a deep, hitching breath. “And then it started to happen to all of them.”

  Drake swallowed hard as the final pieces of Mandy’s story fell into place. Not only were these bastards shipping the whores from Colombia, but were using them as drug mules as well.

  And it was painfully obvious which was more valuable to them.

  Mandy was right about the powder, as well; it wasn’t cocaine. In the past fifteen years, Colombia’s heroin production had gone from negligible to becoming the US’s main supplier of the poison.

  “Mandy, can you tell me if the bag had any sort of marking on it? A symbol or design?”

  The girl looked momentarily confused, but that slowly started to nod.

  “A snake… a snake eating a ball, or the earth, maybe.”

  Screech sputtered and Drake once again turned to look at him.

  The man’s eyes were wide, his lips and chin wet with Scotch. Sometimes Drake forgot that this was all new for him, that he was just a computer analyst who had seen too much in too short a period of time.

  “Screech, why don’t you go take a walk and come back in ten. I can handle it from here.”

 
Screech didn’t look at Drake; his eyes were locked on Mandy’s.

  “I’m fine,” he said dryly.

  Drake very much doubted his partner’s claim, but he was in no position to argue. He had to get as much information out of Mandy while he still could.

  “What about the boat? Anything special you can remember about it? How about the container you were transferred into?” Drake asked.

  Again, Mandy hesitated, but this time she shook her head.

  “I was blindfolded for most of the time, and when we were told we could remove the blindfold, it was always dark.”

  “And when they opened the container… did you see what the men looked like? What about where you were… did you recognize anything?”

  It was a stretch of course; the likelihood of a working girl from Colombia knowing what part of the New York she’d landed on was slim to none.

  “I was so scared… I heard two men talking… one with a Russian or European accent and the other Spanish… and when they were deep in the container checking the other girls, I just got up and ran. The only thing I remember was a square building that looked like it was made out of metal.”

  Now it was Drake’s brow that furrowed.

  Russian and Spanish accents… a building made of metal…

  “One more thing, Mandy — I just have more question for you.”

  Mandy nodded.

  “The baggies… the drugs that you swallowed. They aren’t… still in you, are they?”

  Mandy turned red again and she shook her head.

  “Then where are they?”

  No answer this time; the girl simply hooked her chin toward the bathroom. Drake indicated for Screech to take a look. When he was out of earshot, Mandy leaned in close and whispered, “Drake, will you help me?”

  Drake frowned.

  “I am helping you,” he said quietly. He was trying to extract however much information he could to pass along to Yasiv and his team, while it was still fresh in her mind.

  Mandy shook her head vehemently.

  “No, I mean help find the bandejos who did this to me. To get back at them for what they did to my sisters.”

  Drake opened his mouth to reply, but Screech emerged from the bathroom, his face paler, his lips pressed into a frown. In his arms were the baggies of heroin that Mandy had smuggled inside her body. There were so many of them, that they almost spilled over his thin arms with every step. Drake would never know how Mandy, as petite as she was, managed to get all of them inside her body.

  No wonder the other girls died… just standing would cause the baggies to rub together. And the second there was just a small scratch, once the integrity of the plastic was broken, their stomach acid would slowly eat away at the rest.

  “Drake? Will you help me find and kill the men that did this to us?”

  Chapter 14

  “Mandy, I’m not sure where you got this idea… but I won’t… I’m not going to kill anybody. Screech and I, we’re private investigators, that’s it.”

  “But they’re scared of you, I heard—”

  Drake shook his head.

  “They should be scared, because we will find them — we’ll find the people responsible. But we won’t kill them, Mandy.”

  Beckett would, Screech thought suddenly. Beckett would find out who did these horrible things and make them pay, just like he did Craig Sloan and Ray Reynolds and Donnie DiMarco.

  A pang of guilt hit Screech that was so strong that he had to grab the back of Drake’s chair for support.

  I’m responsible for this… I saw the drugs on the yacht, on B-Yacht’ch. I saw the girls.

  His mind flicked back to his short time in the Virgin Gorda.

  I even know the drink she’s speaking of… the girls were drinking it on the yacht. What did Beckett say? It was to neutralize the stomach acid to stop the baggies from being dissolved.

  Shit, he and Beckett had even been complicit: they’d taken the boat from a bad man in Donnie DiMarco and gifted it to someone even worse in Bob Bumacher.

  Screech swallowed hard.

  “Drake, can I talk to you in the family room for a second?”

  Drake nodded.

  “Mandy, you’ll be okay here. Just stay put and we’ll be right back.”

  Mandy didn’t reply, but she didn’t protest either and the two men left the bedroom. When they were on the other side of the kitchen, Screech spoke in a hushed tone.

  “Drake, there’s something that you should know… about the photo—”

  Drake stopped him by holding up a hand.

  “Is this about the shit that happened at Triple D before the Reynolds farm? Because I saw the pictures. I know about Donnie and I know about the boat. Screech… we all have our reasons for—”

  “No, you don’t understand. I think that the yacht, B-yacht’ch, is the one that she was transported on — the same one that we found for Bob Bumacher.”

  Drake’s eyes narrowed.

  “Really? Why would you think that?”

  Screech swallowed.

  “Because we saw some things on there, some things that—”

  “Okay, fuck, we don’t have time for this shit. I’ll look into it, okay?”

  No, it’s not okay, Screech thought. None of this is okay.

  “Screech, I’ll look into it. But you said yourself we need to get moving,” Drake cleared his throat before continuing. “Now, this shit about two men with Russian and Spanish accents… the ones who mentioned me and the Skeleton King. Do you think they could be related to the Church of Liberation? To ANGUIS Holdings?”

  The question surprised Screech and it took him a few moments to catch his bearings.

  “I think… maybe. I sorta recall a couple of Russian sounding names on the list of officers for ANGUIS Holdings.”

  Among a couple hundred more, he thought, but didn’t say.

  “If these guys are shipping girls and heroin from overseas, this isn’t just some small-scale operation. I’m guessing that ninety percent of the names on the list that you dug up are just bit players — people that received payouts or whatnot. Like Detective Simmons and…” Drake’s sentence trailed off, but Screech knew exactly what the man was thinking.

  Like Detective Simmons and Clay Cuthbert…

  “And these payouts were all funneled and disguised through the Church of Liberation,” Drake continued. “Now that the church is dead, let’s hope that they slip up and transfer money that we can more easily follow. If they do, this will tell us who’s really in charge of ANGUIS. You think you can work on this?”

  Screech was taken aback. Despite what Drake had been through over the past week or so, it appeared that the man hadn’t missed a beat. Clearly, the downtime hadn’t been spent twiddling his thumbs; he’d been thinking.

  Drake snapped his fingers.

  “Hey, Screech? You alive in there?”

  “Y-y-yeah. I’ll look into it.”

  “Good. Now that other thing Mandy mentioned… the metal building?”

  “What about it?”

  “What the hell is a ‘metal building’ to you? A skyscraper?”

  “I’d say a skyscraper is more glass than anything else.”

  Drake frowned.

  “Yeah, but you’re not a scared girl from Colombia. I’d say—wait. Wait.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “I went to a metal building once with Raul and it was by the water.”

  “With Raul?”

  Drake waved a hand.

  “Never mind that—it was a hanger of sorts, for fixing up planes or something. And it was made of corrugated metal.” There was an excited look in his eyes now. “Do you still have the list of buildings that ANGUIS Holdings owns in the city?”

  “Raul? You were with—”

  “Fuck, Screech, do have the document or not?”

  Screech felt his frustration rising. He supposed that he should be used to this by now—to living outside of Drake’s world, the one that only took pla
ce inside his head. But he wasn’t. And now that he had his own demons haunting him, Screech felt poorly equipped to deal with any of this.