this sudden propensity to worry about her just because I’m not there. Truth be told, she’s more than capable of taking care of herself. Still. .
“Good,” I answered. “I’m glad.”
“You miss me?”
“A little.”
“Just a little?”
“Well, I had a good book.”
“Bastard.”
I laughed. “Just kidding. I missed you. A lot. How was your dinner?”
“It was nice. Mom’s good. Kell’s all antsy about us finding Isabel.”
“It’s only been two days,” I said. “Tell her I’m supposed to get my magic wand out of the shop tomorrow. Then, I’ll just go ahead and give it a wave, and Isabel will appear.”
“Very funny.”
“It’s not like we’re sitting on our hands. It won’t happen overnight.”
“I know. But she doesn’t. And besides, patience isn’t her strong suit.”
“Did you explain things to her?”
“Yeah, she’s cool. She’ll be okay. For a while.”
It was silent for a few seconds.
“What’d you really do tonight?” she asked.
I chuckled. “Really? I played the guitar. I read. I watched TV. Then I did some work.”
“You
“I did a little prep work for our canvas tomorrow. Looked at maps. Looked at aerials, that kind of stuff. Then, I got a crazy idea and decided I’d go for a recon drive through the Track. You know where that is?”
“Yeah. You see anything useful?”
“It was weird. There were actually more SPD squad cars than there were people. The area seems to be really heavily patrolled. I didn’t see any prostitutes.”
“Uh, gee whiz. Maybe that’s because it’s so heavily patrolled,” she said.
“Duh.”
“Besides, most of the girls probably work through the Internet now, anyway.”
“I figured all that shit out all by myself about half an hour after I started driving around. That, plus the fact that the entire area called the Track falls into a special anti-prostitution zone.”
“A SOAP zone?” she asked.
“You know about SOAP zones?”
“Duh.” Again with the “duh.”
“Touche. I should have known. Anyway, after that, I went and parked at a little hotel, just to see if I could see anything there.”
“Did you? See anything?”
“Sure enough. A few minutes after I park, a girl walks past me, walks up the stairs, and knocks on a door. Door opens-she heads on in. Half hour later, out she comes.”
“Could you see her?” she asked.
“On the way out? Yeah, I could see her.”
What’d she look like?”
“I think she looked like a prostitute,” I said.
“Really? How could you tell?” she asked. “What does a prostitute look like? Dress? Makeup?” She asked.
“Makeup, for sure. She was dressed pretty plainly, but she was heavily made up. But that wasn’t it. You want to know what the big tip-off was for me?”
“What?”
“When she was walking past, she walked right in front of the Jeep. When she got there, she slowed down- almost stopped. Then, just for a second, she looked right at me, and our eyes locked. The thing that got me-it was her eyes. She had the same eyes as I remember from Fort Benning. The same sad eyes.”
Chapter 8
The next morning, Thursday, June 7, I called Nancy and passed on the information Reverend Art had provided, particularly the names Donnie Martin and DeMichael Hollins, along with details about the North Side Street Boyz. She said she’d spoken to the gang-unit commander and that he was in the process of talking to the two detectives in charge of the north area. She agreed to have them call me directly.
After the call, the Logan PI team held a short meeting in the office before breaking up for the day. Reverend Art had said that NSSB was active in the area north of the U-District. Our plan was for Doc and Toni and me to leave the office at nine thirty or so and drive over to the Ravenna area, which abutted the U-District on the north. Kenny’d done a little research, and in addition to the 8 x 10 photos of Isabel he’d printed for us from the mall photo-strip photos, he gave each of us a list of half a dozen shopping centers to canvas. We decided to pay particular attention to drugstores, coffee shops, beauty supply stores, hair salons, and clothing boutiques-the kinds of places we figured Isabel, Crystal, and the other girls would visit and be remembered.
Walking the street, talking to shopkeepers, showing pictures around-this is about as low-tech old school as it gets for detective work. It’s pretty much the way it’s been done for a hundred years or so. Granted, it’s a little crude, and it’s not terribly efficient. But when you’re looking for a low-profile missing person who either by choice or by coercion is off the grid, it’s still the best way to develop leads and get the ball rolling.
Ironically, even though she was just sixteen, Isabel wasn’t completely off the grid. For starters, she’d left home with a cell phone. Kenny’d had some luck in the past using a cell phone to locate a missing person. The easy way to do this requires the missing cell phone to be equipped with GPS (most new phones are) and its owner to either have installed an appropriate app or subscribed to an appropriate service. If one of these things has happened-and if the owner of the phone gives his consent-then the cell phone can be remotely commanded to “ping” its exact GPS coordinates. This can be very useful in many situations-parents keeping track of their kids, for example. The drawback-at least from our perspective-is that absent the owner’s advance consent-something that’s basically impossible to obtain if someone’s gone missing-the phone won’t respond to a ping request.
Of course, law enforcement agencies have the ability to get around the consent requirement. And, thanks to Kenny Hale, so do we. Not legally, but from time to time I’ll make the judgment call that the ends justify the means. I won’t use it to track down someone running from a creditor. And I won’t use it to track down someone I think is just trying to get away from someone else-most often a wife trying to ditch a husband. But in the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who’s potentially being brutalized by gangbanger pimps, then the decision’s a no-brainer. I’m all over it.
I walked into Kenny’s office. “I’ve got some things I need you to check out while we’re out walking,” I said.
Doc was there, too. “No walking for him?” he said.
I shook my head. “He gets out of it.”
Kenny smiled. “Oh, darn,” he said. He turned to Doc. “You should have paid more attention in math class, dude.”
Doc gave him a little stink eye, and then he got up and left.
“Here’s the deal,” I said. I gave Kenny Isabel’s cell phone information and told him to pull the billing records and start working on trying to ping the phone while we were gone. Hopefully, she still had her phone, and it was turned on.
“Next thing, the police said another way Isabel might pop up on the grid was when her pimps decided it was time to try to put her to work. They would need to advertise, and now that Craigslist has stopped accepting these kinds of ads, there’s pretty much one game in town-”
“Backpage.com,” he said.
I looked at him. “You’re familiar with it.” It was more of a statement than a question.
