Mania. Craig Larsen
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lead officer went over to the side window and said a few words to the driver of the van, then turned to face the other three uniformed policemen. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get this done.” He let his eyes travel the length of the street. Nick was aware when the officer’s gaze paused on him, taking him in. The policeman gave Nick a nearly imperceptible nod, then, checking his watch, led his squad toward the parlor. “Me ’n Wilkins’ll do the honors upstairs. Horace, you stay out here in the street. Murphy, you take a run down the alley there and find the back of the building. Radio in when you’ve got the rear covered.”
“You got it,” one of the cops said.
The officer glanced at the sky. “Hoof it, why don’t you, Murph. It looks like it’s going to pour again in a few minutes here.”
The cop disappeared down a narrow alley halfway down the block. Nick could hear the scrape of his footsteps echoing off its close walls, then the rattle of a metal gate in a chain-link fence.
When his radio squawked a few moments later, the officer checked his gun, then led another of the cops through the scarred, peeling door to the second floor, leaving the fourth patrolman behind them on the sidewalk. Nick took a quick snapshot of the two policemen disappearing into the building.
They were standing barely twenty feet apart on an otherwise empty street, and it didn’t surprise Nick when the remaining cop addressed him. “You with the paper?”
“With the Telegraph,” Nick replied.
“You drew the short straw, huh?”
Nick shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s a pretty routine bust,” the cop offered. “We don’t expect any trouble.”
“It’s not so often you close these places down.”
The cop slid his hands beneath the edges of his utility belt and squared his shoulders. “No, not so often,” he conceded.
“What makes this one worth the trouble?”
The cop shook his head. “They say the girls are underage, I guess.”
Nick nodded, remembering that Daly had told him the same thing on the phone. They say they’re trafficking in young girls from China. Laura Daly had spoken the words strangely, without much feeling—like this was something that might go down every day. Her lack of emotion had surprised Nick a little, and the words stuck with him.
From upstairs, a single, truncated shriek rent the silence. The cop twisted to look up at the curtained windows. “That’ll be one of the girls,” he said. “Sounds like they probably caught her in mid-session.” He smirked at Nick. “Shouldn’t be long now.”
Five minutes later, the flimsy door swung back open. Nick raised his camera to his eye. The first person into the street was an old Chinese woman dressed in a robe and slippers, her hands cuffed in front of her. She was followed closely by the lead officer. “Why don’t you get over here, Horace”—he said to the cop, yanking the door all the way open—“give me a hand with this.”
As the cop joined him, the officer reached back into the building to lead the next person out—one of the prostitutes. Nick snapped a picture as she stepped into the street. She was anything but underage. She was short and squat, wearing tight black pants that failed to hide her lumpy legs, a pink shirt streaked with stains. She bent her head forward as she emerged from the stairwell, covering her face with her hands in shame. Four more women followed, all of them Asian. None of them was attractive, and, like the first one out the door, not one of them was young.
Three customers stepped outside behind the prostitutes. Nick took a picture of each of the men as they stepped into the street. The first was an awkward young man with a pimply red face. The second, a tall man in a plaid shirt and jeans, looked like a construction worker. Finally, dressed in a cheap dark blue sports jacket and a pair of ill-fitting khaki pants, a stout, mustached man with a thick head of wiry hair was escorted through the doorway by the last cop. His eyes drawn to a flash of gold in the weak light, Nick zoomed in on the heavy wedding band encircling the stout man’s pudgy finger and pressed down on the shutter.
The lead officer spoke a few words into his radio, and the driver swung the white van around and met them in front of the building. Nick took pictures of the police helping the prostitutes and their johns into the van. The cop had been right. It had been a routine bust. There was nothing spectacular here, but Nick figured he had captured the tawdry color Daly wanted for the spread. The van pulled away to take the offenders to the station to be booked.
About to return his camera to his shoulder bag, Nick was surprised to see the stout man in the blue sports jacket still engaged in a conversation with the lead officer. Why hadn’t they arrested him like everyone else? Nick snapped a quick picture of the officer unlocking the handcuffs from the man’s wrists, then at last continued down the street toward the Telegraph.
Nick was staring at his computer in the cavernous newsroom. The room was bustling with reporters. The desks were all occupied, and messengers were running down the aisles and corridors. The editors were hunched over copy, laying it out and readying it for the next edition. After turning in his pictures of the raid, Nick had caught the second half of the staff meeting late that morning. Afterward, though, he hadn’t sat down to begin his new assignment. Instead, he Googled Sara Garland on his computer, and he spent the rest of the day sorting through the few images he found.
“What a beauty,” Laura Daly said over Nick’s shoulder.
Nick hadn’t heard the senior editor approach over the din of the newsroom, and he swiveled in his chair to look up at the tall, gray-haired woman. Despite the fact that she was large boned and dressed in a predominantly masculine wardrobe, there was something unmistakably feminine about Laura Daly. She ran the paper on a shoestring, and she demanded the respect of the entire staff, from her editors down to the clerks. Nevertheless, she rarely raised her voice. She never tried to dominate at all. Instead, her authority derived from her character. She led because people wanted to follow. Nick tracked her eyes to the screen of his computer. “I met her today.”
“Did you now?” Daly studied the screen. “There’s something curious about her eyes. She looks like she’s seen a lot.”
“How much you think someone like her can earn acting?” Nick asked. “Bit parts, I mean, on a few TV shows.” He was thinking of the gold and platinum Rolex on Sara’s wrist.
Daly considered the question. “I have no idea. They don’t earn all that much, though. A few hundred dollars—a thousand dollars—an episode if they’re lucky. I don’t recognize her. You?”
“No.” Nick imagined that he would have remembered her if he had ever seen her on the screen, even in a small part. She was that beautiful. “Her name’s Sara,” he said. “Sara Garland.”
“Garland?” Daly let a quiet whistle sneak out through her teeth.
“You know her?”
“Not her,” Daly said. “Her dad. You work for him.”
Nick looked up at his boss, perplexed.
“Her stepfather is Jason Hamlin. That’s Jillian’s daughter. Now I say it, she even looks like Jillian, doesn’t she?”
Nick had seen Jason Hamlin in the office a few times, but never his wife. “I’ve never met Jillian.”
“Google her, too, why don’t you?” Daly chuckled dryly. “So it doesn’t really matter how much she earns acting.”
“She said she’s living with her parents in Bellevue.”
“That’s the Hamlins,” Daly confirmed. “Their house is on Lake Washington. Right on the lake, with its own pier. It’s a place Jay Gatsby would have found impressive.”
“I’m having dinner with her tonight.” Nick regretted the note of pride in his voice.
Daly pursed her lips. “That reminds me, Nick.