Claire beat down her own emotions as Marie revealed everything.
“The guy was old. I was drunk enough to not really care. He had a thick accent.”
“Do you know what kind of accent?”
“No. Didn’t matter. The party lasted for three days. At least that’s what I concluded once I woke up. Blips of men and bedrooms and Big Brian telling me I was doing the right thing. And I was high. I know now someone had given me something. I don’t remember how I got from one hotel to another, just that there were different places and a different group of men. When I came down, Mykonos was there.”
“Who is Mykonos?”
Marie looked at Claire. “The man who owned me.”
Claire listened while Marie spelled out what that meant. Mykonos made it clear that he owned Marie. That she needed to do anything and everything he told her and she could live a comfortable life, or he’d send her to a dirty country where she’d be whored out for pennies.
Twice Marie tried to get out.
Twice Mykonos sent her out for a lesson.
Marie explained how she’d lived with a handful of his girls that were rotated through like chattel. They’d come in young, some as young as fourteen. Some would filter in and be gone within a week, mainly the young ones.
By the time she turned nineteen, she almost never saw Mykonos. He would come in, sometimes he’d use her and reward her with a weekend away from Vegas. The rewards were always a hotel where a convention was going on. Marie had made it clear that she never searched out the men. They were always there, and arrangements were made. Whoever Mykonos had hired to stand beside her pointed at the men, and she was told to do whatever they wanted. No one ever handed her money directly.
When Claire asked how Marie got away, her voice was so monotone it sounded as if she were a robot. As if all emotion had been drained like the last drop of blood.
“Two months ago, Mykonos sent me to San Francisco. I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize myself. I wanted out. I made it as far as a bus station. Mykonos told me I wasn’t worth the money to fly me out of the country for another lesson. I was relieved at first. But then he told me if I wanted to be on the streets in America, he’d make sure I knew what that looked like. I was drugged in the back of a van. My eyes were open but I couldn’t move. From the van, I was put in the trunk of a car. I knew I was in Seattle. When Mykonos’s man handed me over to Ice, I knew things were not going to be the same.”
Marie described how Ice took over. The fancy hotel parties where she was the party favor were gone, and the dark corner of an occasional motel was where she turned tricks. Ice, or one of his guys, was always there. The men were dirty and mean. But Ice was meaner.
When she was busted and processed, she never even considered telling her story. Who would believe her? She wanted to go back to Vegas, where at least she had clean clothes and some freedoms. She knew it wouldn’t be as good as it had been, but it was better than Ice.
Only that didn’t happen. She knew she was never going back to Mykonos when Ice removed half of the pinky on her left hand. Mykonos didn’t like his merchandise permanently damaged.
Ice still pimped her out. The men didn’t care about a mutilated hand. It gave them permission to hurt her more.
Claire listened to the whole story with her stomach in her throat.
The day Marie had been taken to the warehouse, two other girls showed up. One was Russian, and spoke very little English. The other was American, and from what Marie figured out, both of them were like her. And they were scared. Like they knew what was coming. She tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t say a thing.
Marie overheard a fight between Ice and his guys. She heard them talk about finishing the job. Make a little more money and get rid of them. It was then she understood the fear.
The three of them were showered and put in clean clothes. Marie thought that she could talk her way out of whatever was planned.
Only speaking wasn’t allowed.
And when Ice lined up the other members of his gang, he made his last dollar on her. If she cried out while they raped her, one of the other girls would get cut.
She lost track of time, stopped feeling the pain.
Marie stopped talking at that point. And when Claire asked if Ice lit the flame that killed the other girls and nearly killed her, all she did was nod.
“I didn’t think she was going to talk,” Detective Phelps said, bent over a fresh cup of coffee in an isolated conference room a few steps away from the ICU.
Cooper sat beside Claire, saw the fire in her eyes as they reviewed the testimony Marie had provided.
For the first time in their assignment, they had names.
“I thought I lost her. Thank God I brought the photographs,” Claire said.
“This is much bigger than it first appeared,” Phelps told them.
“Do you have any idea who Ice is?”
“Obviously a street name. We’ll start our search with the known gangs out of White Center where she was found and work our way out. We’ll get a sketch artist in as soon as we can. The downfall of these guys is their love for street credit. Their name is everything to them. We’ll find him.”
Cooper had already texted the name and the location of the abandoned industrial building to the team. Along with a request to the precinct commander that had given Claire and Cooper access to the witness to give them more time before releasing the case to the feds.
“Mykonos sounds like a big fish,” Phelps suggested.
Cooper leaned back in his chair. “The party in Vegas, the first one Big Brian took her to. She describes a lot of girls, most of them young, some with accents, foreign and domestic. And all of them painted up like six-year-old pageant divas. Whoever arranged that party and cashed out those girls is the bigger fish.”
“We need Las Vegas vice on this,” Phelps said.
Cooper exchanged looks with Claire, both of them had the same concern.
“We need time. Big Brian sounds like someone we’re already following. But he’s not smart enough to have put all of this together. We need to know who fed her to Big Brian,” Cooper said.
“It sounds like she did that all on her own.”
Claire shook her head. “That’s how our unknown fish stays underground. From the first meeting to Vegas is less than a month. Poof, she vanishes. How does this case look if Big Brian pleads that his biggest sin was not knowing she was sixteen? That she had a fake ID to prove it? They go to a party in Vegas and she runs off with some rich guy? Just taking Mykonos into custody without finding the players that handed her to him in the first place only gives those players a chance to disappear.”
Phelps nodded her agreement. “And since I’m sitting here with a private investigator and a bodyguard at the request of my commander, and not a detective from your local sheriff’s department, I’m going to assume there’s a dirty officer involved.”
“If there is, we’ll find them. But if Mykonos is taken in, and whoever Big Brian works with is tipped off, everything crumbles.”
Phelps rolled her shoulders. “I’ll report everything to my commander.”
They all stood.
Claire tucked in the file of information Phelps had for them into her purse.
After they shook hands, Claire asked, “Is she going to be safe here?”