Off the Grid (3 page)

4

G
ino looked out the passenger window as they headed toward Barrington Industrial Park, passing through the neighborhood known as Little Mogadishu. It had gotten the moniker in the early nineties when the Lutheran Brotherhood and Catholic Charities brought in thousands of Somali refugees fleeing the famine in their own country. Minnesota still had the largest concentration of Somalis in the country, and, like any other immigrant culture, the first few generations tended to settle close together and keep to themselves.

Crime Scene was already crawling all over Barrington by the time Magozzi pulled up to the curb. Jimmy Grimm was about thirty yards into the weed-choked lot, decked out in his disposable whites and booties. He held up a hand when he spotted the Caddie, holding them back. Apparently Crime Scene hadn’t yet cleared a path to the body.

Gino and Magozzi got out of the car and started pacing the street just outside the yellow tape tracing the curb, enjoying the terrific view of spent needles, syringes, and liquor bottles strewn across the broken concrete slab that had once been parking for a bustling manufacturing district. Twisted metal and chunks of cement added to the depressing tableau, probably harvested from the vacant, graffiti-covered warehouse just a few yards in the foreground—remnants of a time when this part of the city had been vibrant. Now it was a magnet for crime and a derelict civic sore that should have been razed long ago. Magozzi would never understand the logic of city planners who worked so hard to maintain Minneapolis’s pristine image of health and butter golden goodness, while letting wounds like this fester.

In the near distance, a car-sprinkled freeway overpass lifted into the blue sky, the occupants oblivious to what lay below as they passed. Lucky them, Magozzi thought, feeling the ground beneath his feet buzz from the faint aftershocks of the traffic, listening to the ambient murmurs of a city full of life while he and Gino dwelled in death.

“God, this place is a dump.” Gino summed it up tidily. “It’s going to take Jimmy’s team about a thousand years to sift through all this trace.”

Magozzi nodded, watching as Jimmy finally approached. He was the king of the BCA’s Crime Scene Unit, and every detective on the force was always happy to see him on a site.

“You guys are late,” Jimmy greeted them.

“And you look like the Pillsbury Doughboy,” Gino shot back.

“You always say that.”

“You look good to me, buddy,” Magozzi said. “What did we do to deserve the big gun today?”

“You may have the big gun, but I’m working with the B team here. Most of these kids are interns or fresh grads who haven’t seen a body since
Nightmare on Elm Street
.”

“Where’s the A team?”

“Over on Dupont at a domestic with five dead. That’s where I was, too, until I got the ID on this vic, and I came running.”

Gino raised a brow. “You already ID’d her?”

“I didn’t.” He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at a big Native American man in blues who looked like he was carrying all of Magozzi’s childhood cannoli in his gut. “That’s Officer Bad Heart Bull, first responder. He and I go way back, and the minute he recognized her, he called me on my cell.”

“Who’s the victim?” Gino asked.

Jimmy looked down, then pulled a sheet of paper off the clipboard hooked to his belt. “Sorry. I guess you didn’t get the word yet. Chief Malcherson put a serious squelch on this when he heard the first call-in, which explains why the media isn’t crawling up your shorts right now. Sure, a five-kill domestic is big, juicy news—lots of body bags, lots of crying people—but this is bigger.” He drew a circle on the paper and passed it to Gino. “That’s her. Aimee Sergeant. Somebody slit her throat, at least that’s what I got from a quick first look. Choked on her own blood, probably.”

Gino looked down at the same Amber Alert flyer every cop in the state had been carrying around all week. The photos of five missing Native American girls, kidnapped from Sand Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, stared up at him with smiling, innocent eyes. The youngest was ten; the oldest, fifteen. “Goddamnit,” he muttered, handing the paper to Magozzi. “Any sign of the other four, Jimmy?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Not so far, and thank God, because that means they might still be alive, maybe even still in the area. Aimee was the oldest one at fifteen, so I was thinking that when she finally got a chance to run, she risked it.”

Which hadn’t paid off,
Magozzi thought, feeling his stomach take a nasty acid bath. Suddenly, there didn’t seem to be enough air in the world, and Magozzi and Gino both sucked in a few deep breaths of unusually warm October air. It was like inhaling July in a concrete graveyard. “We have to tear this place and this city upside down fast.” Magozzi stated the obvious. “We lost one, but what the other four might have in store for them is just as bad. Young girls get kidnapped without ransom demands for one reason, and one reason only, and that’s to turn them out in the sex trade, either on the streets or on the Internet for cash money.”

Jimmy looked down and angrily kicked at a tiny shard of glass that shimmered in the October sun beside his right foot. Magozzi figured he was probably thinking about his own sweet kids, who loved to ski and skate and play soccer—things Aimee Sergeant would never be able to do again.

“It’s the goddamned gangs,” Jimmy finally muttered. “They’re the ones running girls.”

Gino looked up at the freeway overpass and shot out a quick breath, trying not to think of all the horror stories he’d heard from the Vice guys about human trafficking.

By now, Officer Bad Heart Bull was approaching, looking like a carved piece of oak on the move. Jimmy looked over his shoulder at him and another man in a white jumpsuit who was hanging back a little. “I’ll get back to it while you talk to Bully and get his take. You know him?”

Magozzi shook his head. “I don’t think I’d forget him.”

“Yeah. He’s a big one.”

Gino looked the man up and down. “Big? He’s a building on legs.”

“Well, cut him some slack today, will you? You know how it is. You can’t get mushy at a scene, so you just get mad, and let me tell you, that is one seriously pissed-off Indian.” Gino watched Bad Heart Bull drawing closer and heard all the sound effects of Godzilla literally making the earth move under his feet. “Are we allowed to call them Indians?”

Jimmy shrugged. “Bully doesn’t much care what you call him. If he doesn’t like it, he’ll just fist your head into the ground and walk away. But he’s Ojibwe, just like the girls, and I think he knows some of the families. He’s just this side of losing it.”

Magozzi squatted and pulled a piece of dead, brown grass out of the parched soil. “We’ll take it easy on him.”

“He’s a good cop.”

“I’m sure he is.”

“And after you get his take on it, talk to that squirrelly-looking kid in whites, name’s Donnie Marek. He’s pretty shook up, barely out of the womb, but he’s got promise. He’ll take you to the body on the path we cleared.”

“Thanks, Jimmy.”

Bad Heart Bull had his notebook out and his mad face on. “Afternoon, Detectives.”

“What do you have for us, Officer?”

“Nothing but bad news. I’ve been walking this beat for fifteen years, but today tops anything I’ve seen on these streets. Normally, this place is hopping with all the scumbag dirtballs who hang in that warehouse, shooting up. I clean up a couple dozen losers off this lot every morning, but today it was deserted, which was weird, so I took a closer look. That’s when I found the little girl.” He took off his cap and rubbed at a blue-black brush cut, a gesture that took Gino back to his own days on the pavement. Man, he’d hated those caps, especially on hot days like this one. They made your head sweat, then itch, and by the time you finished a patrol, you were scratching like a dog with fleas.

“So no witnesses,” Gino said.

“Hell, no. Those head cases either saw the murder, or found the body and split, which means they’ll be back. I know these people, and some of them took off without their kits. So what I was thinking was that I’d get some backup and just park our butts down here until they show up again, and haul them all in so you guys can beat them with a rubber hose until they talk. Think you can get the okay for something like that?”

Magozzi nodded. “Absolutely. So these are your streets. Any thoughts on what particular brand of dirtball we should be looking for?”

Bully nodded solemnly as he looked over at the tight rectangle of double-strung tape surrounding the body. She was in a scrappy nest of weeds that screened her from view at this distance, and he was grateful for that. One look had been enough. “Yeah, I got some ideas, but you’re not going to like them. This is a big problem in the Native community lately, our girls getting lured down to the cities and then into prostitution. Usually, it’s the homeless and at risk who get preyed on. But this is the first time we’ve had them kidnapped from their own reservation. And we’ve never lost any as young as these five girls. Christ, this is bad.” He’d been talking fast, like he could hardly wait for the words to get out of his own head and into someone else’s, and now he had to stop for a couple deep breaths before continuing.

Magozzi gave him a minute, then asked, “Who’s doing it?”

“Native mob, for one. They take the girls, pump them up with drugs, then turn them out to work the docks up in Duluth or on the streets down here. The whole setup got a lot worse when the Native mob hooked up with the Somali gangs down here. There’s big money for virgins in the Middle East, the younger the better, and the Somalis have the connections. The Feds are seeing this kind of thing more and more. Apparently, it’s one way the radicals are financing their terrorist agenda these days. Buy the girls on the cheap, sell them at a big profit.” He slapped his cap against his pants, leaving a circle of dust. “Goddamned media puts out an hour special on making kids wear helmets on the playground when a white kid gets a bloody nose falling off a jungle gym, but never cover Native girls getting pumped into the sex trade slime bucket. The white kid with the bloody nose is a victim. The little Indian girl teetering on five-inch heels is just another drunk Indian hooker. Why do you think the Somalis are targeting us? We’re not just marginalized; we’re invisible, goddamnit . . . oh, shit, did I really just say that to a couple of white detectives?”

Gino found a little smile. “I didn’t hear anything. But I gotta say, the media’s been all over this kidnapping.”

Bully snorted. “Yeah, for now, but just wait. If Lindsay Lohan gets another DWI, those little girls are going to disappear from the screen in a heartbeat.” He stopped abruptly, wiped at his head again, and slapped his cap back on. “Sorry. I’m way out of line. I’m just scared to death whoever’s got the other four girls will get them the hell out of here before we get a chance to put the heat on, especially after what happened here. This was a mistake. She got away somehow. For a while, at least.”

Magozzi nodded. “We won’t be sitting down on this one. We’ll tap into Gang Task Force and Vice and have them pull in the likelies from the Native mob and Somali lists before noon.”

Distant sirens pierced the air and they were getting closer fast. “That’s my canvass crew,” Bully said. “I’ll get it started.”

“Spread it wide,” Magozzi said. “I want those Amber Alert flyers wallpapering Little Mogadishu. Door-to-door the whole neighborhood.”

• • •

There were
a lot of flies. And a lot of blood. It was matted in Aimee Sergeant’s hair, streaked on her gray flesh and torn clothing, and sprayed on the tall scrub grass that surrounded her. But even in the very worst ugliness of death gone cold, you could still see that she’d once been a very pretty young girl—at least before some sociopath asshole had butchered her in a shit hole vacant lot before she’d even had the opportunity to legally drive.

Magozzi took a shallow breath against his gloved hand and tried to calm his blood pressure, which was mounting exponentially along with his fury. There was no worse crime scene than one where the victim was a child, except for one like this, when the child had been discarded like trash in a place already littered with it. “Not a body dump,” he finally mumbled, his tongue feeling like a thick, woolen sock in his mouth. “Too much blood, and the spray on the grass screams arterial. She was killed here.”

Gino nodded woodenly and knelt down to prod her gently. “A while ago. Blood is way dry and rigor came and went already.”

Donnie Marek, their mostly mute and nervous cub CSI escort, stepped in a little closer, his eyes blinking as fast as a frog’s in a hailstorm. “That’s what I thought,” he offered timidly. “Decomposition is in the early stage, even with this heat. I calculated time of death between four and five o’clock this morning. But we don’t have a body temperature yet . . .” His voice trailed away as he looked down at the ground. “The ME should be here soon,” he finished weakly.

Magozzi raised a brow at him. “You don’t need the ME to tell you what you’re seeing. What do you think about her missing shoe?”

Donnie Marek looked up tentatively, almost hopefully. “I saw a bloody blister on that bare heel. I think she got away and was running from her captor or captors, just like Jimmy figured. Lost a shoe along the way, and she finally got brought down here.”

“Good thinking so far, so think about this—every time Aimee’s foot slammed down, the impact sent some blood splatters flying. Not a lot—it’s just a blister—but maybe enough to track. There’s a blood trail out there somewhere, so get out the blue lights and trace it to its terminus, and close down the streets all the way to Iowa if you have to. And get us that missing shoe. It’s out there, and maybe it won’t bring us to the source, but it’ll get us closer.”

Marek nodded exuberantly and made tracks toward his supervisor, who was in a huddle with a few other techs.

Gino stood slowly, puffed out a breath, and looked around, wondering how far she’d run, and how you got that brave at the age of fifteen. “Damnit, Leo. This makes me want to go home and microchip my kids.”

“If I had kids, I’d feel the same way.” Magozzi pulled out his phone. “I’ll call the Canine Unit and get some dogs down here. That’s our best chance to track any further than her shoe, if the kid finds it.”