The Doomsday Girl Page 14

  When the Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war ended in 1991, the U.S. no longer saw it politically expedient to support Mobutu, and in 1996 rebel forces overthrew his rule. If the citizenry hoped that the elimination of an evil despot would bring peace and prosperity, they were sorely disappointed, for what followed was a six-year conflict sometimes referred to as the African World War. Nine African countries participated, their weaponry often bought with smuggled diamonds. Although the savagery and genocide were on a grand scale, the biggest killer was disease and starvation. Over five million people perished during the war and its aftermath.

  Although its diamonds are reportedly no longer used to fund bloodshed, the Congo is still struggling to realize the economic benefit of its diamond mines. Much of its diamond supply is provided by artisanal mining, the career choice of thousands of unregulated workers who are routinely robbed, cheated, and murdered by ragtag bands of soldiers, some of whom simply never turned in their uniforms and weapons after the war ended.

  South of the Congo is Angola, a former Portuguese colony. Rich in oil, iron ore, and diamonds, Angola was ravaged by civil war from 1975 to 2002. The fighting was primarily between two rival factions that wanted control of Angola’s abundant natural resources. One group was backed by the Soviet Union, the other by the United States. Still recovering from the political fallout over Vietnam, the U.S. was reluctant to send troops to Angola. Instead, the CIA operated in the shadows, enabling a flow of arms and money and providing military training and intelligence.

  Soviet and U.S. funding of the Angolan conflict continued to increase into the 1990s, until a ceasefire was signed in 2002. Although the combatants agreed to disarm, pockets of rebel militias continued terrorizing the population for years. CIA operatives remained in place, ostensibly to monitor the fragile peace. The KGB was also in no hurry to leave, for while post-Soviet Russia was no longer motivated to defend communism, they were very interested in financial gain. And certain members of the CIA felt the same way, for Angola was ripe to be plundered.

  The revenue from smuggled Angolan diamonds sold to fund the war has been estimated as high as $10 billion. The fighters supported by the U.S. relied heavily on blood diamonds, and employed thousands of diamond miners who were underpaid and forced to suffer harsh work conditions. Toiling in riverbeds in only their underwear, these workers clawed diamonds from the earth by hand, under the close scrutiny of armed guards.

  It was seven p.m. when I stood and stretched. I’d wanted to avoid the grim prospect of researching child pornography, and had instead wandered into the modern history of Africa, which read like a script from a horror movie. But my labor had not been without benefit, for now I was convinced that the uncut diamonds in the Jordans’ safe were likely smuggled onboard the freighter in either Sierra Leone, the Congo, or Angola, and then passed to Jeff Jordan by someone from the ship. I still didn’t know by whom, or why, but at least I had a premise from which to move forward.

  The skies outside my window were dark but a few miles away the lights on The Strip glowed brightly. I left my room and took the elevator down to the ground floor casino, to the ever-present melodies of the slot machines. I walked past the food court and out the main entrance. The night air was dry and cold, and I zipped my jacket while waiting to cross Main Street, into the pedestrian-only section of Fremont Street.

  The party on Fremont was in full swing. Crowds lined the sidewalks and spilled out onto the main drag, where a man on stilts in a silver Elvis costume sang into a microphone. I walked past the former Glitter Gulch strip club, which had closed and was being converted into a casino. I continued past souvenir shops, restaurants, more casinos, a live band, and street bars selling beer and liquor in plastic cups. A pair of men, one who bore an uncanny resemblance to actor Robert De Niro, and the other an Al Pacino lookalike, were taking pictures with tourists. Thirty feet up, four teenagers, hooting and hollering, rode by on a zip line. Above the zip line, the LED canopy flashed brilliantly.

  Looking for a restaurant, I came to an intersection and saw a scattering of colorful cards lying in the street. I picked one up, then went into an uncrowded diner. The waitress seated me at a booth in the back.

  The card was an advertisement for escorts. On either side were pictures of young women in bikinis who were obviously call girls. I stared at the card and the phone number, wondering if this outfit would traffic in underage girls. After a minute I realized I was frowning. It was day twenty-nine of my sobriety.

  I ordered a cheeseburger, fries, and a non-alcoholic beer, and sat in the quiet restaurant with my fist against my mouth. A sudden pang of loneliness and yearning struck me, and I sat there for a minute before I shook my head and called Candi. I felt remorseful that I hadn’t spoken to her for a couple of days. I hadn’t called her after Melanie Jordan’s nude excursion into my bedroom, nor had I told her I’d met Cody’s daughter. She was also totally unaware that I was in Las Vegas with Cody.

  The call went to voicemail. I left a message, then texted her. The key to maintaining a relationship is communication, a woman I knew before Candi once told me. To some this may sound obvious, but I don’t always find it intuitive. I have to sometimes push myself to open up, to make conversation. I always felt better after talking to Candi, so I don’t know why I was prone to go silent. She never failed to brighten my spirits and push my dark thoughts to the sidelines.

  Shortly after we got married, my ex-wife said that when I immersed myself in a case, there was nothing left of me for her. That’s not what killed our relationship, though. I drove her away with a drunk binge, one that I used as an excuse to deal with my fatal shooting of a pedophile.

  I slouched forward on the yellow vinyl upholstery, my elbows on the white table top, and wished the florescent lighting wasn’t so bright. But what I really wished at that moment was to be either at home with Candi, or in the friendly confines of a dark bar, tilting back a shot of Canadian whiskey followed by a draught beer in an ice-rimmed glass. After a few rounds, a calming euphoria would come over me, and my concerns and guilt would temporarily melt away. And sometimes, in that state, I would see things more clearly, as if the alcohol released subconscious insights that were tightly bound by my sober mind.

  Or maybe that was just a lame drunkard’s rationale, a preposterous twist of logic I’d created to justify the drowning of my thirst.

  I was halfway done with my dinner when Candi called back. We talked for half an hour, and I told her everything about the case, including the situation in Vegas with Cody and his daughter. She listened and asked a few questions, and then the conversation turned lighthearted, then flirtatious. She only made one request, and that was that I stay safe, which was something she always said when I was away working, especially if Cody was around. When we hung up, I was smiling so broadly my jaw hurt. I swore to myself I’d get home as soon as I could and take her to dinner after an afternoon in our bedroom.

  ******

  It was almost nine o’clock when I got back to my room at the Plaza. I began searching porn sites online, looking for escort services or strippers servicing Las Vegas. I found several links, but when I tried to narrow the search to young girls, I hit a dead end.

  Back when I was barely a teenager, the Internet was in its infancy. I remember an older kid in our neighborhood, a nerd with prolific acne and a penchant for technology, talking about what the Internet would eventually become. Cynical for my age, I asked him how it was currently being used.

  “Mostly pornography,” he said.

  I rejoiced smugly, thinking that surely more mainstream businesses would have already embraced the World Wide Web if it had so much potential. I mean, how valid could it be if only smut peddlers used it?

  Within a couple years, I learned two things: First, I’m not a technical visionary, and second, uninformed skepticism is the domain of fools.

  As I sat scanning through what seemed like dozens of sites in the sex trade, I had a third revelation: pornography is a business
like any other, and it’s a big business, one that makes millionaires out of savvy marketers. It’s also not an industry where the purveyors would be foolish enough to advertise anything as blatantly illegal as prepubescent prostitutes.

  I entered a variety of keywords, hoping to find a backdoor to a hidden site where pedophiles might lurk. I knew these sites existed, sometimes in the form of chatrooms or forums. A few links I found looked promising, but firewalls blocked my access. I kept searching, but most of what came up were stories of men arrested for possessing child pornography. None lived in Las Vegas.

  An hour later I gave up. Want to visit sites promoting terrorism and racism, maybe join the Islamic State? No problem. Feel like hooking up with cannibals, necrophiliacs, or Satanists? Piece of cake. In the mood to view an unending stream of vile and abhorrent videos, including real snuff films? Easy to do. But child porn? It’s a sure ticket to a long stretch in prison, and I couldn’t find anyone dimwitted enough to advertise it.

  I closed my computer screen and sat in the dark. I wasn’t surprised by my lack of success in finding direct links to kiddie porn, but I’d hoped to find something that would point me in the right direction. The only thing I’d found potentially useful was numerous sites offering call girls. A few of these sites used the term, “barely legal.”

  I stood and crossed my arms. Prostitution, the world’s oldest profession, is usually a victimless crime. In many countries, and in states like Nevada, it’s legal within certain guidelines. But that status applies to women of eighteen years or older. Anyone under eighteen is legally a child. As for Mia Jordan, at ten years old, her appeal wouldn’t be to lecherous middle-aged men who craved sex with a teenager. Mia would appeal to only hardcore pedophiles.

  My lips tightened, and I felt my nostrils flare. I hadn’t yet truly accepted the likelihood that Mia Jordan had been kidnapped by those who knew no boundaries. That, I admitted to myself, was because up to now I’d avoided steering my investigation toward something I consider unspeakably sordid. But sordid barely scratches the surface in describing individuals who defile and exploit innocent children. You could add deranged, perverted, and immoral to the list, but that still doesn’t really cut it. Actually, I didn’t think any words were adequate to describe how I felt about this unfortunate subset of humanity.

  I tried to swallow a lump of anger rising from my gut. In a fistfight, when a brawler reaches his boiling point, he’ll often attack head-on with a blizzard of punches. This may be effective against a weak opponent, but it’s a losing strategy against an adversary who knows how to box, and will usually result in the aggressor waking up on the floor and wondering what hit him. I pressed my knuckles to my forehead and took a deep breath. I couldn’t afford to get knocked out this time; not with Mia’s life at stake. I needed to take the emotion out of it and think clearly.

  Of course, that was assuming Mia was still alive. I sat on the edge of the bed and slumped forward, staring at the floor. There was no evidence she’d been kidnapped, no ransom demand. There was also no evidence she’d been killed, and no motive I could imagine, other than a psychopath’s rage. Given the nature of Jeff Jordan’s gruesome murder, I couldn’t discount that Mia was killed solely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, if she was killed, why wasn’t the body left at the scene, the same as her murdered father’s?

  I went back to my computer and found one of the sites advertising barely legal call girls. I called a number and spoke to a woman who asked what I was looking for.

  “Younger is better,” I replied.

  “I have an eighteen-year-old I bet you’ll like.”

  “How about fifteen?”

  She hung up on me.

  I punched in the number for a second site and spoke with another woman, who said I could have a buxom eighteen-year-old blonde knocking on my door in twenty minutes. I checked my wallet for cash, then gave her my room number.

  The hooker arrived promptly at eleven p.m. She wore silver heels and white pants and her peach-colored top left her midriff bare and was form-fitted to highlight her breasts. Her makeup was too heavy, her eyes dark and her lips cherry red. She didn’t look like she was in her teens, but that may have been because of the jaded expression on her face.

  “What kind of party you looking for?” she asked, standing next to the bed.

  “No party, I’m working.”

  Her eyes sharpened, and she looked at me suspiciously. “You a cop?”

  “Nope, private investigator.”

  She shook her head and muttered, “Waste of my time,” then turned toward the door.

  “Wait a minute. Don’t you want to be paid?”

  “Damn right. Room call is two hundred.”

  “Take a seat then, and keep your clothes on.”

  She hesitated, trying to decide if staying would be in her best interest. I opened my wallet and pulled out a handful of twenties. Once she saw the money, she lowered herself into the second chair in the room. Like all call girls, she was coin-operated.

  “I’m looking for a ten-year-old girl who may have been kidnapped. I’m looking for pimps who deal in young children, or local child pornographers. Any ideas?”

  “Ten years old? That’s sick.”

  “You know anybody who deals in children?”

  “This is Vegas,” she said. “You can get anything you want here.”

  “I’m sure you can. But I need to know where to find a ten-year-old.”

  “How much you got there?” she asked, eyeing the wad of cash I’d set on the desk.

  “Two hundred. But you need to earn it.”

  She looked away, and I wondered if she was formulating a story, something that would get her paid and out of here quickly. Then she said, “The McGillicuddy Man.”

  “Who?”

  “He works the Greyhound station most nights, right next door. Runaways get off the bus, hungry and broke, and he takes them in. Then they owe him. And he owns them.”

  “He’s pimping a ten-year-old girl?”

  “No, I didn’t say that. Maybe fourteen is the youngest he’s ever had in his stable.”

  “Then how can he help me?”

  “McGillicuddy talks big, like he’s the badass pimp of North Vegas. He never shows his face on The Strip because the heavyweights would crush him. But he knows the business, so if anybody knows about a ten-year-old, he would.”

  “What’s McGillicuddy look like?”

  “Black, tall, six-five maybe. Scarecrow skinny. Gray beard. About forty-five.” She stood and took a step toward me. “Good enough?” she asked.

  “One more question. What’s his real name?”

  “Who knows? I think his first name starts with a J, like Jacob or Joshua or something like that.”

  I handed her the cash. “Easy money, huh?” I said.

  “You could have both got laid and got the info,” she said, showing a sly smile.

  “Not in the market,” I replied.

  ******

  It took only five minutes to go from my room to the bus depot next door. I walked in right after a bus arrived, and the disembarking passengers were milling about. There was no line at the ticket booths, but about fifty people were sitting in the rows of seats bolted to the scuffed tile floor. It was a little before midnight, and most of the folks looked tired and disheveled. I walked the perimeter, passed a closed cafeteria and restrooms, and then went out a side door to a parking lot. When I came back in, I stopped and looked at a board showing departures and arrivals. Then I took a seat a couple of rows behind two white teenage girls.

  They looked unwashed, their hair braided and matted, their tattoos blurry on their wan skin. One was dark-haired, the other blond, and both wore the same tired, blank expression, as if stoically resigned to whatever became of them. A stained, army-green duffle bag lay at their feet. As for their ages, I estimated somewhere between fourteen and seventeen.

  Fifteen minutes passed, and most in the terminal left to be picked up by cars tha
t stopped along the sidewalk. The girls remained, silent and uninterested in the activity on the curbside. My guess was they’d been here for a while, had nowhere to go, and would spend the night unless they were told to leave.

  A tall black man came from the parking lot door into the station. He wore embroidered bell-bottom jeans and a black leather coat. His shoes were pointy and the cap on his head was tilted at a jaunty angle. A sharply trimmed goatee was gray against his dark skin. In his hands was a pizza box, and when he came closer, I could see a wisp of steam rise from the cardboard.

  “Evening, ladies,” he said to the girls. “My name’s Jimmy G, and I’m an advocate for the homeless here in Vegas. May I interest you in supper tonight?” He opened the box, and the aroma wafted into their faces. He sat next to them and laid napkins on their laps, all the while maintaining a friendly patter. Both girls ate ravenously, responding with only grunts and nods.

  “You may find winter nights in our great desert very cold. Even the coyotes and jackrabbits hole up this time of year. You don’t want to be campin’, that’s for sure. You’re welcome to spend a warm night in my shelter, with a few other friendly people.”

  I kept my head down, pretending I was immersed with my smartphone. When I glanced up, I saw McGillicuddy’ s profile, his face welcoming and friendly, but when he cut his eyes toward me they had a sharp edge, as if a separate persona hovered just beneath the surface.

  I looked down and continued fiddling with my phone. A minute later he closed the pizza box and stood. “I got more food in the shelter, and you can shower and wash your clothes too. My car’s right out here, just this way.”

  The girls began following him to the exit leading to the parking lot. Their movements were almost robotic, as if they were in a trance. I let them get a four-step head start before I followed.

  When they reached the door, McGillicuddy held it open for them. His smile vanished when he saw me coming quickly.