Isabel's run

what you want, but I know what you’re doing, and I know how you live, believe me. I see it with girls just like you every single day. I know you have a quota. I know you have to come out most every night and have sex for money with guys you don’t know. I know you have to bring that money back to your pimp. Jasmine-I know what you’re going through, and I know how it’s making you feel inside. And I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be that way. My one goal is to help you. You can have a better life. Your own life with your own dreams and goals. The only person you’d have to answer to is yourself. There’d be no one lording it over you, telling you what to do, where to go-whom to have sex with.”

I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like Jasmine’s features were softening just a little bit.

Nancy continued. “We’ve helped hundreds of girls who’ve come before you. You can talk to them if you’d like. We can help you, too. Understand?”

Jasmine looked at her for a second, then she dropped her head and nodded. Maybe Nancy was starting to get through to her.

“Good,” Nancy said. “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to come over and see you, and we’ll try talking again. Jasmine, look at me.”

Jasmine looked up again.

“You might not believe it, but one day you’re going to look back at tonight and you’re going to look at it as one of the best, most important days in your life. Tonight’s the night that good people-people who really care about you as a person-are standing up for you and stepping in to help you. Tonight’s the night you get to take back control of your own life. Understand?”

Jasmine looked at her and nodded.

“Are you okay?” Nancy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Are you sure you don’t have someone you want us to call?”

She looked down and shook her head.

“That’s okay,” Nancy said. “You don’t need to. You’ll be okay tonight. You’re going to ride with these guys now. They’ll take you downtown. Like I said, I’ll come by in the morning. If you want, we can talk then.”

Tyrone and the Bobby led Jasmine out of the room to the waiting squad car.

“That went pretty well,” Nancy said. “At least she didn’t scream at me. That happens sometimes.” She looked up suddenly. “I hope you don’t mind my not asking about Isabel just now.”

“I understand,” I said. “It’s too early. This girl’s still in a state of shock over everything else that’s happened. Maybe she’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Nancy said. “I’ll give you guys a call in the morning and let you know how it’s looking.” She looked at Kelli. “What do you think about what you saw?” she asked.

Kelli shook her head. She had a tear in her eye. “It’s sad,” she said. “She’s just a kid. All dressed up but still, just a kid.”

Nancy nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s very sad. But maybe tonight, we saved a little girl. And if it has to be one at a time, then that’s fine with me.”

It was quiet in the Jeep on the way back to the office. We didn’t talk much about Isabel or anything else, for that matter. I guess everyone was still trying to recover from the disappointment of Isabel not being the girl who showed up, combined with the reality of seeing a girl like Jasmine up close-a girl who, except for her rather desperate circumstances, seemed like she wasn’t much different than the girl next door.

“We have to call Marisol,” Toni said, breaking the silence.

“Right. I’ll do it as soon as I get home. I don’t feel like making that call while I’m driving.”

“You okay, Kell?” Toni asked, looking in the backseat where Kelli was seated.

“Yeah,” she said. “It sucks that it wasn’t Izzy.”

I nodded. Too true. “Nancy said that when she talks to Jasmine in the morning, she’s going to ask her if she’ll talk to us about Isabel. Maybe we’ll find out something then.”

“What happens if she doesn’t want to talk?” Kelli said.

“Then we’ll just go back to canvasing the neighborhood,” Toni said. “If we do that and if we have Kenny monitor her cell phone, eventually we’ll find her.”

“That’s right,” I said. Of course, I was thinking it could be a whole lot faster if Jasmine knew Isabel and agreed to talk to us about her. I crossed my fingers.

Chapter 12

At 9:45 A.M. the next day, I was sitting at my desk staring at the calendar when my cell phone rang. Caller ID: Nancy Stewart.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hey. Can you and Toni shoot on down here to the Juvenile Detention Center?” Nancy skipped the small talk. “I’ve been talking to Paola-her name’s not Jasmine Jones by the way, and she’s not eighteen. She’s fifteen, and her name is Paola Morales. I’ve been talking to her for about an hour now. She’s starting to come around. Anyway, she knows Isabel, and she’s willing to talk to us about her. She’s not ready to give up her pimp-she won’t go that far. But she is willing to help find Isabel. We’re taking a break now while we wait for you.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “We’re on the way.”

Toni had overheard me talking, and she walked into my office as I was hanging up.

“She’s cooperating?” Toni asked.

“A little, anyway. Nancy said that she knows Isabel, and she’ll talk about her. She doesn’t want to talk about her pimp, though.”

“That’s okay. It’s better if she can give us some good information on Isabel,” she said as we hustled down the hall and out the door.

“Agreed,” I said. “Hopefully, she knows where we can find her.”

“Maybe she could lead us right to her,” Toni said.

“Wouldn’t that be nice.”

The King County Juvenile Detention Center sits on Alder just east of Twelfth Avenue. The building consists of two distinctly different sections. The back section is the residential area. It looks like a typical, four-story apartment building except that the doors and the exterior stairwell are painted bright orange. Someone probably thought it looked artistic when they selected the colors. I think it looks pretty odd. The front section consists of offices and classrooms. This section is a single story and made of brick. We parked in the visitors’ parking lot on the north side of the building and hopped out. Then we walked past the American flag and into the lobby of the front section.

Inside, the building was quiet and smelled of floor wax. In fact, the guy doing the waxing was still running a floor machine maybe forty feet down a long hallway. The tiles glistened. The receptionist sat behind what appeared to be a bulletproof glass partition-the kind like at movie box offices with the little chrome intercom speaker grill in the middle of the glass. I find it odd that someone would go through the trouble of installing an expensive piece of bulletproof glass for protection and then go and drill a three-inch hole in the glass for the intercom, right about at head level for the unlucky soul sitting behind the counter. I guess the intercom is supposed to be bullet-resistant, but I’m pretty sure my.45 would have no trouble shooting right through that hole-even with the intercom in place. I wouldn’t want to trust my life to it. But I digress.

We gave the receptionist the information that Nancy had given me and were issued visitor passes and told to have a seat in a long row of blue-and-orange seats-the kind that are attached together like those in a train station. Five minutes later, Nancy popped out through a set of double doors marked Authorized Entrance Only.

“Come on back, you guys,” she said.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Pretty much like I said on the phone,” she said. “Paola is a stubborn young lady. She’s only going to come along just so fast-we can’t push her. But if we can gain her trust by following through and making good on our