14 - J. T. Ellison [53]
“I guess is only natural he want me. Many men want me, but my sister keep them away from me. Once she gone, I have men like bees, swarming me for my honey. I have no choice. When man decide to have sex with me, he takes me to the back bedroom. There is a camera. He does what he likes, doesn’t care if it hurts. After, he give money.
“I feel great shame. But what am I to do? I cannot go police, they deport me. I have no man to watch out for me, no sister anymore. I at their mercy.
“He starts by bringing other men, older men who like little girl. They ask for ‘massage.’ They do all the things that he do to me, force me to spread my legs, my ass, my mouth for their pleasure. I do it, not because I want to, but because I know the sooner they finish, the sooner they go.
“There are cameras in the room. I find the video camera in the closet. They make video, too, sell video of me having sex with strange men.”
Taylor had snapped to attention at that.
“Are you sure? There are videotapes and still pictures?”
The girl nodded. “Yes, I sure. I see them making video, then mailing envelopes. There is computer in spare bedroom, that is the man’s office.”
“What is his name?”
“Oh, no. I no tell. I no want to get dead.”
“Saraya, how’d you end up in the park?”
At that, panic had replaced fear in the girl’s eyes. “I run away. I figure it better to be dead.”
Funny, Taylor thought to herself as she drove back toward headquarters. She hadn’t doubted the girl’s story for a second. Was she so immune to death and destruction, to the very evil living in people’s souls, that she was programmed to believe a victim? She knew that wasn’t the case, she had a bullshit detector a mile wide. People claim to be victims for myriad reasons. Taylor was pretty good at determining who was lying and who was telling the truth. She’d been duped before, but not often.
Saraya Gonzalez was not a Snow White victim. The reality gave her pause. She’d been so caught up in the Snow White case that many of her other cases had been temporarily shelved. They needed to solve these fucking murders so she could go back to her job. There were people in the city who needed her help. Give me your poor, your weak, your downtrodden. I’ll fight for them. That’s what she was, what she longed to be. That was the very thing her father would never understand.
There it was, that damn scent in her nose. Why couldn’t Win Jackson just leave her alone? She tried to shake off the memories, but her primordial olfactory senses defied her and made her doubts rise to the surface as if she was a little girl, vulnerable and weak, unable to win her father’s love. She hadn’t talked to him for three years, since right before she made lieutenant. They always fought—Taylor had little respect for Win’s desire to take shortcuts to the top, and the knowledge that his daughter was a cop rankled him to no end. But the last conversation had been particularly virulent, and Taylor was through. She’d told him to take her trust fund and screw himself.
She knew he wasn’t dead. That much she could feel. As divorced as she’d become from her family, from her father, she still had the presence of mind to know that he was out there. She’d be able to feel if he weren’t. Wouldn’t she?
At least she didn’t have to worry about asking him to walk her down the aisle.
She dragged her thoughts away from her past and anchored them firmly in the present. She had another mystery on her hands. At least this one was definitely alive.
Taylor shuddered. Hearing Saraya’s story, her tiny, accented voice uttering atrocities so frail, so tortured, Taylor didn’t doubt her veracity for an instant. She wondered whether it would have been better to die than be so horribly abused, understood the girl’s desperate attempt at flight. She was too weak to make it very far, the massage parlor must be within a day’s walk. But Saraya had clammed up, refusing to answer