Truth & Lies: A Queen City Justice Novel (2 page)

“Does she know where the salon is?”

Shawn asked.

Lee Jing dropped her chin and shook her head slowly.

“Does she know what station the TV was on when she saw her parents?”

They conferred.

“Channel 5.”

“We’re going to need more information from her. But first, let me call the station and see if we can get her parents down here.”

Shawn translated Deck’s words for Lee Jing and she started crying again, this time sobbing into his handkerchief. “Thank you!” Her words were heavily accented.

Deck located the number for the station on his computer and picked up the phone. “This is Deck Murphy with Cincinnati Police.  You had a report on a Chinese couple who had a car accident this morning looking for their daughter? Their daughter is here at our station, and I’d like to get them in touch.”

“One moment please.”

“Jane Stephens.”

Deck explained.

“Oh my goodness. That’s amazing. The parents were staying at an Extended Stay America. I’ll go pick them up and bring them to you.”

“Keep the cameras away. There’s an active investigation.”

“Oh.” She sounded like she might argue for a moment, and then she sighed. “Fine.”

She hung up, and Deck excused himself to talk to the desk sergeant. “Did the couple with the truck say where they were coming from?”

“They had been parked at Rookwood before they discovered her,” Sergeant Tyler said.

“How long had their truck been there?”

“They were parked outside of Marshalls and were there for less than thirty minutes.”

Deck returned to his desk.  “Do you know the name of the salon where you worked?”

Shawn translated.

She shook her head. “She doesn’t read English. And barely reads Chinese. She’s from a little farming community and didn’t do well in school.”

Deck felt his frustration level rise. “Can she tell me anything about the salon? What it looks like? Where it’s located? Anything nearby?”

“She said the salon overlooks a parking lot next to trees.”

That really wasn’t enough to go on.

“Does she have any names that I can follow up on?”

Shawn asked her, she replied and then he turned back to Deck.

“The woman who is in charge at the dorm and at the salon is Chinese. She’d been here for years and had more privileges than the other girls. Her name is Mei Ling, but she’s not really the boss. Mei Ling usually called the boss ‘Mr. Milton’ on the phone, and she thinks also maybe Mike of the Night as a nickname but Lee Jing never heard her say it to him. Lee Jing wasn’t sure what that meant, or even that she was pronouncing it right. I suspect it could be a reference to the cartoon Mike the Knight, but she didn’t watch any television except the news that was on at the salon.”

Lee Jing let out a loud squeal at that moment and jumped from her chair before she raced across the bullpen to a Chinese couple who welcomed her into their embrace.

Shawn continued to help with the translation. “Could you let her know we’d like her fingerprints?” Deck asked.

Lee Jing took a step back behind her father as a burst of Chinese came from her mouth.

“She’s been kind of traumatized,” Shawn said. “The people holding her told her the police would lock her up.”

Deck sighed. He needed a way to corroborate her story before he warned the Feds, which was standard procedure in trafficking cases.

He got her father to write down the location and phone number before the older man insisted they leave.

Deck sat back down to his computer to do a search on the name Mike or Michael Milton. There were forty-seven Michael Miltons in Ohio. Ten in the greater Cincinnati area on the Ohio side, five in Northern Kentucky, and a couple more in Southeastern Indiana.

It would have been so much easier if the guy in charge had an unusual name.

Still, this was the first time in months that Deck had felt even remotely useful, and he couldn’t wait to dig into this case.

Chapter Two

Monday, November 10—9:00 a.m.

Cincinnati FBI Field Office, Kenwood Neighborhood, Cincinnati, Ohio

Dana fiddled with the file folder in front of her, glancing around the war room at the other six agents gathered at the conference table.

Special Agent in Charge Andrew Sherwood stormed into the room like a tank, bringing their little party to eight. “Yenichek, can you bring everyone up to speed?”

At Sherwood’s terse demand, Dana leaped up from her chair. No one wanted to see the bossman more pissed off than usual, so she quickly summarized the two previous cases. “Early on Sunday, September fourteenth, road workers found a young woman, approximately twenty, in an industrial area near the Western Hills Viaduct. She wore a spandex tube top with a matching micro-mini and platform stiletto heels. She had more than forty stab and slice wounds made with a very sharp, single-edged blade, consistent with a scalpel or X-ACTO knife. All the cuts were made to her torso and extremities. He didn’t cut her face, and it appeared her makeup had been reapplied. She had small amounts of duct tape residue on her wrists and ankles, and trace amounts of isopropyl alcohol on both, as if the killer tried to remove it. Cause of death was a blunt force crush injury to the back of her skull, but the blood loss would have killed her shortly thereafter. She was posed with one leg straight, one leg up and bent. The only personal effect found with her was small crucifix on a small gold chain wrapped around her fingers.”

Dana nodded at Emilie, their tech guru, who projected a photo of the crime scene on the large, high-def monitor at the front of the room. Dana continued. “There were obvious signs of sexual trauma. The autopsy showed that spermicidal lubricant from a popular condom brand was present. No hairs or fibers. Lividity indicated she’d been moved and there was minimal blood at the scene. We got nothing in the way of trace except what’s indigenous to that area.

“Local cops assumed, based on the way she was dressed, she was a professional. Because of the graphic nature of the crime, they did a VICAP search and, out of courtesy, informed us of the case.”

Dana took a deep breath and exhaled, finding it difficult to keep her voice steady in the face of the horror the first woman had suffered.

And the second woman.

And the third.

“A Realtor found the second victim on the morning of Sunday, October eleventh in a fenced-in backyard of an unoccupied, for-sale home in a fairly quiet neighborhood over the river in Newport, Kentucky. The Realtor was there to prepare the property for an open house later that day. The body was almost exactly the same. Revealing clothes, duct tape, and alcohol residue, cuts and stabs, crushed skull, and posed the same way. Clearly dumped. No personal effects except a gold St. Jude’s medal pinned to her skin.” Dana shuddered as a new photo replaced the first on the screen. Why the pin through the skin of her upper chest seemed so much more horrible than the knife wounds, she couldn’t say. Nevertheless, it did.

“Same spermicide. No trace evidence. Since we were working with multiple states’ jurisdictions, Thompson and I started coordinating with the local authorities at that point, based on the similarities between the two cases.” Dana motioned to Emilie to go to the next slide.

“Early yesterday morning—that would again be the second weekend of the month—we got another one.” She rifled through the stack of papers in front of her, locating the autopsy report a second too late.

Eric jumped in. “The toxicology report was completely clean. Victim number three didn’t have so much as an aspirin in her system. Blunt force trauma to the back of her head was the cause of death. The coroner said it looked like her head had been smashed into the ground several times—just like the other two. She had more than forty knife wounds. More slices than stabs. No DNA evidence. No tissue under her nails and no semen. Interesting fact of note, the coroner said it’s likely she’d been a virgin until that night. Lots of…” He cleared his throat.

Dana looked up at Eric. This was the first time she’d seen him show any signs of how this case affected him. Of course, Dana didn’t feel any too steady when thinking about what the poor woman had been through either.

Eric continued. “There was lots of trauma. Torn hymen, bruising. Like the others, she was killed elsewhere and deliberately displayed in the alley. This guy’s still being careful. There’s nothing trace-wise that leads us to anyone or anything in particular. This time, the victim’s coin purse had been tucked into the waistband of her skirt. Dana?”

She hoped her steady gaze on the papers in front of her kept the team from noticing her emotion and fatigue. She was a consummate actor. She could do this, in spite of the dark blue circles she’d seen underscoring her eyes like bruises this morning in her bathroom mirror. Six hours of
nearly
uninterrupted sleep hadn’t been enough. But at least she was more or less alert—thank you, Juan Valdez.

If ever there were a time she needed to be on top of her game, this was it. Clearing her throat, she spoke. “A set of rosary beads were twined through the victim’s fingers.” She shared what she knew about the beads’ origin.

“We all agree these cases have to be related, right? The date they’re killed. All of them either new to prostitution, or more likely not pros, but simply dressed in revealing clothes. The religious artifacts… There were no drugs in any of their systems. No usual signs of long-term life on the streets. And there’s not a single matching missing person report here in Cincinnati or anywhere else in the country for any of these girls. And when Cincinnati Vice canvassed other local prostitutes, none of them recognized the victims.”

Sherwood gestured for her to get to the point. He was a great agent, but he had a fast mind and a short attention span.

She made her point quickly. “So what if they hadn’t been in the country long? Like maybe only days.” Dana went back to her notes. “As Eric mentioned, we found a coin purse at the scene. Very little in it. No wallet, no identification. A tiny mirrored compact, a couple of gum wrappers, and a tissue. Fingerprints from the compact don’t match the victim’s.”

“Is this going somewhere?” Sherwood cut in.

She fought a wince. “Whoever cleaned that sucker out wasn’t very thorough. There was an open seam in the lining, and several things had been slipped between the lining and the leather of the purse. There was a receipt from a concession stand at the Dubrovnik Airport, three Croatian Lipa—which is the local currency—and a slip of paper with an 800 number on one side of it and the name ‘Anka Pierovich’ written on the back in what looks like lip liner.”

“And the number goes to?”

Dana glanced to her right to Rey Rodriguez, who’d offered to track it down earlier that morning. “It’s a mail-order bride service located right here in Cincinnati,” Rey said triumphantly.

Everyone immediately stopped fidgeting, and Rey smiled for a moment, showcasing brilliant white teeth against his dark bronze complexion. Dana knew he’d just laid out the best piece of evidence they had.

Dana felt her right eyebrow go up in question. “Do people still order mail-order brides?”

“I checked into it. It’s more popular than you might think. I found a couple hundred sites devoted to that alone.”

“God love the Internet,” Sherwood said. “MacQuaid?”

“I spoke to the Cincinnati Police’s Investigations Bureau Commander. He had some uniforms canvassing the area yesterday. They got nothing,” Kier MacQuaid, aka “The New Guy,” said. Of course, in spite of the nickname, he hadn’t really been the new guy for almost a year. She was the new guy now. God forbid they were still calling her that in a year. She suspected they only did it to Kier because he was young and it clearly needled him.

“Anybody got anything else?” Sherwood asked, already pushing his chair back.

No one spoke.

“Okay, here’s the plan. Rodriguez, I want you to contact Interpol and track down missing Eastern European girls that were headed for this area. See if we can identify any of the women, especially anyone named Anka Pierovich. Thompson, I want you to contact the service as if you’re looking for a bride.”

“My wife is not going to be happy with this,” Eric muttered.

The only sign of amusement that Sherwood allowed was a quick twitch of the corner of his mouth. Dana wondered how he did emotionless so well and whether he’d be willing to give her pointers.

“Rodriguez, does this service have a website?”

“Yes, but I didn’t have time to do more than hit the front page.”

“Emilie, follow that up, but leave the phone calls to Thompson. Dig up as much about this company as you can.”

“Yes, sir.” Their computer specialist pushed a mass of spiky white-blond hair out of her enormous Disney-blue eyes. Emilie Presley cast her gaze over at Doc, their resident profiling expert—and her physical polar opposite—and waited for his input.

Doc, formally known as Dr. Terrance Johnson, had dark-chocolate skin and hands that could palm a basketball. He was easily six foot six, maybe taller, and had at least a hundred sixty pounds on Emilie. He looked like the kind of guy who, if he hadn’t become a forensic psychiatrist and joined the Bureau, could have made a pretty decent living as a linebacker, professional wrestler, or bounty hunter.

“I’ll work up a profile.”

Without further chitchat, Sherwood strode out of the room. The rest of the crew followed, leaving Dana and Eric to gather the rest of the folders and scattered pages left on the conference table.



Monday, November 10—9:30 a.m.

Oakley Police Station, Oakley Neighborhood, Cincinnati, OH

The next morning, Captain Rupert was waiting for Deck when he arrived. “What came of the Chinese girl?”

“She’s staying with her parents locally, but will be flying home with them in a couple of weeks. She refused fingerprinting yesterday, but I’m going to try to get them to come back in today.”

“Do you think we’re looking at a human-trafficking ring?”

Deck leaned his crutch against the desk, and dropped into his seat. Excitement and purpose rushed through him for the first time in months. “I suspect so. I’m going to see if I can track down the salon or the guy she thought might be the boss. Finding the salon or where she was kept will make the investigation a lot easier, but all that she knew was that the front of the building faced a parking lot and trees and that it’s approximately thirty minutes by highway from the Rookwood Commons shopping area. Not a name. Not a logo. Neither her apron nor her nametag had any sort of insignia, and she spoke almost no English.”