“Her name’s Faith.”
“That doesn’t help. They all get new names before they come to me.”
Allie stared at her. Was she lying? She couldn’t tell. Maybe it was the caked makeup or the bitch face looking back at her, but Allie couldn’t read Melinda at all.
Shit.
“Show me the records,” Allie said.
Melinda walked around the desk and reached for the top shelf—
“Slowly,” Allie said, pointing the gun in her face again, this time from across the desk. “If you think being a woman means I won’t pull this trigger, you better think again.”
The older woman didn’t respond. Instead, she pulled open the drawer and reached inside, taking out a stack of manila folders and putting them on the desktop one at a time. A Polaroid of a young girl with blonde hair slid out from one of the folders. It wasn’t Faith, though she looked much younger than Faith had been when she was taken. Fifteen years old at the most.
“How many?” Allie asked.
“What?” Melinda said, moving to the next drawer.
“How many girls are in this place?”
“Fifty.”
“In the rooms?”
“Yes.”
“Permanently?”
“Some of them. Some are in transit.”
“In transit to where?”
Melinda dumped another pile of folders on the desk. “I don’t know. Once they leave here, they’re no longer my responsibility. I don’t know where they go or what happens to them.”
“Slowly,” Allie said, even as Melinda pulled another drawer open and reached inside and looked up—
Allie saw her eyes. They were dark and black and unsmiling — the eyes of a woman who had seen and done evil things, and didn’t care. And there was something else — a twinkle of mischief — that flared across her face.
“Don’t,” Allie said, but before she could get out the rest of the warning, Melinda lifted her right hand and Allie shot her once, then a second time, in the chest.
The caretaker staggered backward, bumped into the chair, and collapsed out of view behind the large desk.
Allie hurried around the furniture and looked down at Melinda, gasping on the floor. She was gripping a black revolver in her right hand, still trying to lift it even though she barely had the strength to breathe. The older woman’s eyes stared up at Allie the entire time, refusing to let go.
“Alice!” Reese shouted from across the apartment.
“I’m fine!” she shouted back.
“What happened?”
“She reached for a gun!”
Allie kicked the pistol out of Melinda’s hand and stepped over her to rifle through the drawers, pulling out enough folders to make two more stacks on the desktop. When she looked down again, Melinda had gone still, even though her eyes were still open and staring up at the ceiling.
“That was a stupid thing to do,” Allie said quietly to no one in particular.
She looked back at the stacks of folders. Six in all. There had to be at least twenty — maybe thirty — in each pile. She processed the numbers in her head but stopped after they became too much and grabbed the first one.
Every folder contained a Polaroid of a different girl posed against a wall — maybe even this very apartment — with a single piece of college-rule paper filled with the girl’s name, age, and identifying marks. Americans, Mexicans, South Americans girls. They were tall, short, but always slender and young. That was the thing that nagged at Allie the most — their age. They weren’t just young, they looked like little girls, too.
She battled through the nausea so she could keep going, but it quickly became apparent she wasn’t making enough headway at a fast enough rate, and there were still too goddamn many folders left. After a while she started only looking for blonde hair, feeling sick to her stomach as she tossed aside the ones with brunettes, redheads, girls with dark black hair…
“Alice!” Reese again, still shouting from the hallway by the sound of his voice.
“I need more time!” she shouted back.
“You don’t have more time! We’ve been here too long! Just grab what you can and let’s get the hell gone!”
She concentrated on the remaining stacks of folders. There were five of them. She hadn’t even managed to finish the first one yet, and there were still five left. The sheer number of folders horrified her. How long had this “house” been in existence? How many girls had come through this hellhole? All the other houses she knew about, and the ones even Reese didn’t know existed? How many were snatched off the streets? How many would never see their friends and family and boyfriends ever again?
Reese again, sounding even more urgent this time: “Alice! We gotta go!”
She stared at the folders, trying to think of a better way. A faster way. There had to be. But how? How?
She finally abandoned the folders and ran outside.
Reese was visible in the hallway through the open front door. He looked over when he heard her coming. “Did you find her?”
She shook her head and darted past him and into the hallway and began moving up it, shouting, “Faith! Faith, if you can hear me, come outside! Your mother sent me! Faith, are you here? Can you hear me? Faith!”
“This is not a good idea,” Reese said behind her.
She ignored him and continued shouting at the top of her lungs, stopping every time she reached a new set of doors and banging on them. “Faith! Your mother sent me to find you! Faith! Can you hear me? Come outside if you can hear me! Your mother sent me! Faith!”
No one answered, and there was just the sound of her own voice echoing up and down the hallway. She didn’t know why she was so surprised that no one was responding. Why would they? In their shoes, she would come across as a crazy woman shouting someone’s name over and over again, minutes after what had clearly been a gun battle. You would have to be insane to answer something like that. Even if Faith was here, what were the chances she would risk coming out?
But Allie didn’t have any choice, and she kept at it, doing her very best to ignore the slightly crazed sound of her own voice.
“Faith! Come out, Faith! Your mom sent me! Faith! I’m here to take you home! Faith!”
“What about the folders?” Reese asked behind her.
She stopped screaming and moving up the hallway just long enough to answer him. “There’s too many of them. Too many girls…”
“I’m sorry, but we have to go. We’ve already spent too much time here. There are still two more somewhere inside the building, remember? Alice, are you listening to me?”
But she wasn’t listening to him, not really. She was too busy shouting Faith’s name and could hear the strain starting to appear in her voice. It just made her shout louder and bang on the doors even harder.
“Faith! Come outside! Your mother sent me! Faith!”
“Alice, she’s not—” Reese started to say, when there was a click! from behind them, and they both spun around.
Reese aimed his MP5K at a head peering out of one of the apartment doors. It was a girl, frightened, her hand shaking as she gripped the doorknob. She stared at Allie and Reese with large blue eyes, and she was just the right size, the right age, and the right shade of long blonde hair…
But it wasn’t Faith.
“Faith’s gone,” the girl said, her voice trembling slightly, but it was clear she was trying very hard to fight through it. “But if you take me with you, I know where you can find her.”