Isabel's run

past that. When you say that Isabel had to ‘go to work,’ you mean someone put an ad in Backpage.com and Isabel was supposed to start going out on dates?”

“Yeah. They probably took her picture that day,” Paola said. “They have us dress up all sexy, and they take pictures all the time.”

“But up until then, Isabel didn’t have to go on dates?”

“No, she was new. She didn’t live with us. The new girls aren’t ready for dates at first.”

“But a week ago, you’re saying Isabel’s time was up. They told her she had to move into the girls’ house and go to work?”

Paola nodded. “Yeah.”

“What happened when they told her that?” Toni said.

Paola shrugged. “They brought her over to show her around. We met her and stuff. We talked a little by ourselves. She told me she wasn’t going to go out on any dates.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“A couple days later, they moved her over to our house. It was the end of last week, I think.”

“Were you able to talk to her again?”

“Yeah. She was there a couple days. I worked at night, but I talked to her in the daytime. I thought she was cool. She loaned me the coat I was wearing last night.”

“And did she start going out on dates?” Toni asked.

“No. They had dates all set up for her, but right after she moved in, she came right out and told them she wouldn’t go on any dates. She told them she was going to leave.”

“What happened then?”

“They all got really mad. Isabel got punishment.”

“What’s that mean-punishment?”

“They beat her with the belt. Right in front of us. Then they threatened her family. They said they were going to kill her mom.”

“What did Isabel do?”

“She got mad. She told them to go ahead, she didn’t care. Then she told them to fuck off-those were her exact words. She said she was leaving.” She looked down for a moment before continuing. “So then they took her to a party.”

“A party?” I asked. “What’s that mean? What’s a party?”

She looked down and shifted her feet. She was clearly getting nervous.

Nancy noticed, too. “Paola, you don’t have to answer if you don’t like.”

She looked up and then said, “It’s alright.” She turned back to me. “A party is when they take you over to the boys’ house, and everybody gets high, and then you have to have sex with all of them at the same time.”

I could feel my skin start to tingle-a clear sign that I was on my way to getting good and pissed. Whenever I think I’m past the point where I can be surprised by the pure depths of depravity some scumbags seem able to reach, something new like this comes along. The drugging and gang rape of a child by a group of men as a means of forcing the girl into prostitution-this was a new low in my experience. I shuddered. Poor Isabel ran away from home to escape an abusive prick of a stepfather-an animal who liked to rape her just for fun and where’d she end up? With a bunch of the worst kind of thugs I’d ever heard of. Wonderful. I noticed I was staring at the ceiling, holding my breath, so I slowly let it out and looked at the others. They were all looking at me.

“Sorry,” I said. I shook my head slowly. “Paola, it makes me very sad to hear about the kind of life you’ve had to live. I’m so happy for you that Nancy found you and wants to help you. Really. No one deserves to go through this.”

She looked at me for a second and then shrugged. “There’s worse,” she said.

How? Tough little girl.

Toni continued. “So Paola, after the beating and the party, then what happened to Isabel? Did she start going out on dates then?”

“I don’t think so. They probably wouldn’t send her out all beat-up. But I haven’t seen Isabel for about a week-since the night they took her to the party.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

Paola stared at Toni for a moment before she answered. “No. I just know that she wasn’t at our house anymore.”

“Why would they take her away?” I asked.

“They said he was going to sell her.”

“Sell her?” I asked. I didn’t bother asking who “he” was.

She nodded. “I think they took her away so everyone else wouldn’t feel bad.”

“Who would they sell her to?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe his friends in Las Vegas. They have girls, too. They’re always checking out each other’s ‘inventory.’ That’s what they call it.”

“How often do they hook up?” I asked. I needed to find out how much time we had.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Whenever they need to, I guess.”

She looked at me, right in the eyes. I looked back. For just a moment, I felt like I could see straight into her inner thoughts. They were a child’s eyes, yet they weren’t the innocent eyes of a fifteen-year-old. They were hard eyes, eyes that had seen way too much evil for one so young.

We talked for another fifteen minutes, but we didn’t really get any more pertinent information. Paola did let slip the fact that she liked riding around in the “beemer”-which I took to be Donnie Martin’s white BMW. I was already pretty sure that Donnie was her pimp. And now we knew that he had been trying to become Isabel’s as well. Except Isabel-God bless her-was no eleven-year-old. She was fighting back.

PART 2 Chapter 13

At Logan PI, we don’t have a motto, but if we did, it would probably be: “When in doubt, get back to the basics.” No question about it, we were in doubt now. No one knew exactly where Isabel was. Unfortunately, since she was too young for a bank account or credit cards that we could trace, our magic shortcuts list had pretty much been reduced to one item: her cell phone. And Kenny’d tried that and struck out. So we were left with no choice but to fall back on the basics-back to good old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts detective work. We needed to eliminate some of the unknowns.

Nancy had someone send us an audio file of the recording of our interview with Paola and now the whole Logan PI team was assembled in the conference room, listening to the playback from one of the PC speakers. We’d suffered two unfortunate setbacks in the last sixteen hours. First, of course, was the simple fact that the girl who’d showed up at the sting last night wasn’t Isabel. We’d been excited to see the ad with Isabel’s pictures, and we’d gotten our hopes up, only to see them come crashing down. Now, even after Nancy’d worked on Paola this morning and gotten her to loosen up a little, the only information she had offered didn’t sound too good for Isabel. She’d been “punished,” and Paola’d had no contact with her for a while. Worse, Paola wasn’t certain that Isabel was even still around. For all she knew, Isabel might have been sold. Or she might even be on the run. Again. This was beginning to look like a bigger job than I’d originally anticipated.

“There!” I said, focusing back on the recording. “Back it up and play that part again.”

Kenny started the recording again. “They live across the street from the park-by the-,” Paola’s voice echoed on the recording.

“Stop,” I said. “I knew she said something about a park.” I was thinking that if we could figure out where the houses were located, maybe we could discover something about where Isabel was. Or where she wasn’t-either way would be helpful.

“Good memory,” Toni said. “I wonder which park she meant?”

“She wouldn’t say, but we know-or at least we think we know-that it’s in the area north of the U-