Читать книгу Mania - Craig Larsen - Страница 10

After leaving the coffee shop, Nick headed downtown. He parked his car at the Telegraph, then cut back a few blocks on foot to Fourth Avenue to stake out the address the senior editor had given him over the phone. The rain had let up, but a drizzle was soaking through his clothes. Across the street from his target, he took his camera from his bag, checking its settings as he killed time, brushing water off its lens, scoping out the neighborhood. A few pedestrians were wandering in and out of some of the storefronts, but for the most part this section of town was abandoned in the middle of the day. A wind whipped up for a few seconds, scattering cold raindrops in its wake. Nick turned his back to it, waiting for it to die.

The address belonged to a nondescript three-story brick building. A massage parlor occupied the second and third floors, above a rundown store selling vitamins and health supplements. A small neon sign glowed feebly in a curtained window on the second floor, spelling out MASSAGE in dusty red letters. The heavy blackout curtains in the windows had been sitting undisturbed so long they were streaked and faded. One or two had come loose from their rods and had been tacked back into place with nails.

After ten minutes, the flimsy, worn door leading up to the second floor hadn’t been disturbed. Except for the glow of neon, there wasn’t any sign of life upstairs. The clerk in the vitamin shop on the ground floor had spotted Nick, leaning against a street lamp half hidden by an old and rusty, junked car, and every so often the greasy-haired man would glance at him, trying to figure out what he was doing there. Nick looked up at the sky, measuring the light. It was dark, but he wasn’t going to have to worry about the resolution of the photographs. He made a few adjustments to the camera’s settings, then snapped a picture, examining it for shadow on the LCD screen. Satisfied, he raised the camera back to his eye and took a few pictures of the neon sign and the front door.

Some minutes later, an unmarked squad car slowed in front of the parlor before continuing down the street. Nick watched it slow again at the end of the block and come to a stop at the curb in front of a fire hydrant. The brake lights glowed bright red, seeming to streak the heavy air with their color, then went dark. All four doors swung open. Nick zoomed the camera in a few notches, then snapped several pictures of the street cops as they stepped from the car.

An unmarked white van with wired windows followed half a minute behind the cops, pulling to a stop just in front of the car. The lead officer went over to the side window and said a few words to the driver of the van, then turned to face the other three uniformed policemen. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get this done.” He let his eyes travel the length of the street. Nick was aware when the officer’s gaze paused on him, taking him in. The policeman gave Nick a nearly imperceptible nod, then, checking his watch, led his squad toward the parlor. “Me ’n Wilkins’ll do the honors upstairs. Horace, you stay out here in the street. Murphy, you take a run down the alley there and find the back of the building. Radio in when you’ve got the rear covered.”

“You got it,” one of the cops said.

The officer glanced at the sky. “Hoof it, why don’t you, Murph. It looks like it’s going to pour again in a few minutes here.”

The cop disappeared down a narrow alley halfway down the block. Nick could hear the scrape of his footsteps echoing off its close walls, then the rattle of a metal gate in a chain-link fence.

When his radio squawked a few moments later, the officer checked his gun, then led another of the cops through the scarred, peeling door to the second floor, leaving the fourth patrolman behind them on the sidewalk. Nick took a quick snapshot of the two policemen disappearing into the building.

They were standing barely twenty feet apart on an otherwise empty street, and it didn’t surprise Nick when the remaining cop addressed him. “You with the paper?”

“With the Telegraph,” Nick replied.

“You drew the short straw, huh?”

Nick shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s a pretty routine bust,” the cop offered. “We don’t expect any trouble.”

“It’s not so often you close these places down.”

The cop slid his hands beneath the edges of his utility belt and squared his shoulders. “No, not so often,” he conceded.

“What makes this one worth the trouble?”

The cop shook his head. “They say the girls are underage, I guess.”

Nick nodded, remembering that Daly had told him the same thing on the phone. They say they’re trafficking in young girls from China. Laura Daly had spoken the words strangely, without much feeling—like this was something that might go down every day. Her lack of emotion had surprised Nick a little, and the words stuck with him.

From upstairs, a single, truncated shriek rent the silence. The cop twisted to look up at the curtained windows. “That’ll be one of the girls,” he said. “Sounds like they probably caught her in mid-session.” He smirked at Nick. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

Five minutes later, the flimsy door swung back open. Nick raised his camera to his eye. The first person into the street was an old Chinese woman dressed in a robe and slippers, her hands cuffed in front of her. She was followed closely by the lead officer. “Why don’t you get over here, Horace”—he said to the cop, yanking the door all the way open—“give me a hand with this.”

As the cop joined him, the officer reached back into the building to lead the next person out—one of the prostitutes. Nick snapped a picture as she stepped into the street. She was anything but underage. She was short and squat, wearing tight black pants that failed to hide her lumpy legs, a pink shirt streaked with stains. She bent her head forward as she emerged from the stairwell, covering her face with her hands in shame. Four more women followed, all of them Asian. None of them was attractive, and, like the first one out the door, not one of them was young.

Three customers stepped outside behind the prostitutes. Nick took a picture of each of the men as they stepped into the street. The first was an awkward young man with a pimply red face. The second, a tall man in a plaid shirt and jeans, looked like a construction worker. Finally, dressed in a cheap dark blue sports jacket and a pair of ill-fitting khaki pants, a stout, mustached man with a thick head of wiry hair was escorted through the doorway by the last cop. His eyes drawn to a flash of gold in the weak light, Nick zoomed in on the heavy wedding band encircling the stout man’s pudgy finger and pressed down on the shutter.

The lead officer spoke a few words into his radio, and the driver swung the white van around and met them in front of the building. Nick took pictures of the police helping the prostitutes and their johns into the van. The cop had been right. It had been a routine bust. There was nothing spectacular here, but Nick figured he had captured the tawdry color Daly wanted for the spread. The van pulled away to take the offenders to the station to be booked.

About to return his camera to his shoulder bag, Nick was surprised to see the stout man in the blue sports jacket still engaged in a conversation with the lead officer. Why hadn’t they arrested him like everyone else? Nick snapped a quick picture of the officer unlocking the handcuffs from the man’s wrists, then at last continued down the street toward the Telegraph.

Nick was staring at his computer in the cavernous newsroom. The room was bustling with reporters. The desks were all occupied, and messengers were running down the aisles and corridors. The editors were hunched over copy, laying it out and readying it for the next edition. After turning in his pictures of the raid, Nick had caught the second half of the staff meeting late that morning. Afterward, though, he hadn’t sat down to begin his new assignment. Instead, he Googled Sara Garland on his computer, and he spent the rest of the day sorting through the few images he found.

“What a beauty,” Laura Daly said over Nick’s shoulder.

Nick hadn’t heard the senior editor approach over the din of the newsroom, and he swiveled in his chair to look up at the tall, gray-haired woman. Despite the fact that she was large boned and dressed in a predominantly masculine wardrobe, there was something unmistakably feminine about Laura Daly. She ran the paper on a shoestring, and she demanded the respect of the entire staff, from her editors down to the clerks. Nevertheless, she rarely raised her voice. She never tried to dominate at all. Instead, her authority derived from her character. She led because people wanted to follow. Nick tracked her eyes to the screen of his computer. “I met her today.”

“Did you now?” Daly studied the screen. “There’s something curious about her eyes. She looks like she’s seen a lot.”

“How much you think someone like her can earn acting?” Nick asked. “Bit parts, I mean, on a few TV shows.” He was thinking of the gold and platinum Rolex on Sara’s wrist.

Daly considered the question. “I have no idea. They don’t earn all that much, though. A few hundred dollars—a thousand dollars—an episode if they’re lucky. I don’t recognize her. You?”

“No.” Nick imagined that he would have remembered her if he had ever seen her on the screen, even in a small part. She was that beautiful. “Her name’s Sara,” he said. “Sara Garland.”

“Garland?” Daly let a quiet whistle sneak out through her teeth.

“You know her?”

“Not her,” Daly said. “Her dad. You work for him.”

Nick looked up at his boss, perplexed.

“Her stepfather is Jason Hamlin. That’s Jillian’s daughter. Now I say it, she even looks like Jillian, doesn’t she?”

Nick had seen Jason Hamlin in the office a few times, but never his wife. “I’ve never met Jillian.”

“Google her, too, why don’t you?” Daly chuckled dryly. “So it doesn’t really matter how much she earns acting.”

“She said she’s living with her parents in Bellevue.”

“That’s the Hamlins,” Daly confirmed. “Their house is on Lake Washington. Right on the lake, with its own pier. It’s a place Jay Gatsby would have found impressive.”

“I’m having dinner with her tonight.” Nick regretted the note of pride in his voice.

Daly pursed her lips. “That reminds me, Nick. I’ve been meaning to ask you something about your brother. Sam’s behind that biotech start-up, isn’t he? Matrix Zarcon, right? He and that fellow from Harvard—Blake Werner—started the company a couple of years ago.”

“That’s right.”

“There’s a rumor going around town the company’s knee-deep in Hamlin’s money—about to go public. You might want to ask your brother for details. With all the stem cell research floating around, there’s bound to be a controversy there. I bet it’s something we’re going to want to cover.” Daly smiled. “You might even ask Sara about it tonight. Maybe she’s heard something we can use.”

“No problem, Laura,” Nick said sarcastically. “I’ll work it into the conversation in between where were you born and what’s your favorite color.”

Laura Daly rapped her knuckles lightly on Nick’s desk before moving on. “Atta boy, Nick,” she said. “It gets into your bones, the newspaper, doesn’t it?” She was two or three steps beyond Nick’s desk when she turned back around. “Just don’t forget the spill on Elliott Bay,” she said, referring to the assignment she had given Nick earlier. “The EPA’s saying over fifty thousand gallons of toxic sludge spilled into the bay before Hanzin Shipping caught the leak. I want to see photographs on my desk—front-page stuff for Sunday—within the week.”

Nick waited until Daly had taken another few steps, then turned his attention back to the screen in front of him.