Fox leaned across the table as if to speak. Sampson put his hand on his partner’s thigh and squeezed it hard. Fox sat back and looked at his hand and then at him in outrage.
Sampson squeezed harder, and then let go. He looked at Fox, then turned his head to Sweet, who couldn’t figure out what was going on.
“I can’t promise you a thing until I hear what you have,” Sampson said, ignoring the fact that Fox’s normally pale skin had gone beet red. “If it’s strong evidence, we’ll inform the prosecutor who draws your case. In return for testimony, you’ll get some kind of deal.”
Sweet’s lips curled as if she’d sniffed something foul. “I didn’t say nothing ’bout testifying. This is a tip. I give the tip to you. You let me go.”
Fox was about to open her mouth, but Sampson pushed back from the table, stood up, and said, “I guess we’re done, then. You’ll be taken back to central holding. Detective Fox?”
Fox didn’t move for a beat but then stood up stiffly.
“Wait, what?” the hooker said. “Shit, okay, then. I’ll talk, but Sweet Sal’s got to get some good out of this.”
Still ignoring Fox, Sampson sat back down and said, “So talk.”
Sweet told him to check with the Kansas State Police for a missing-persons report on a seventeen-year-old blonde, Emily McCabe of Wichita, who’d run away and came east after her uncle allegedly abused her.
McCabe lived on the streets until she met a man named Neal Parks; he introduced her to coke, meth, and heroin and turned her into a call girl. Sally Sweet also worked for Parks, who set up meets with his girls and johns via smartphone, like a cyberpimp.
“Emily was good people,” Sweet said. “I liked her, even when she became Neal’s favorite for a while.”
Parks evidently lavished attention on the new girls so they’d do anything he asked. Sweet had once been favored like that. In fact, she still had a key to the pimp’s apartment.
“Neal was holding cash back on me, and I knew where he kept it,” Sweet said. “Lemme back up a second. Right around then? I hadn’t been seeing Emily regular like I used to, and Neal said she’d gone up to New York to work for a friend of his for a few weeks. I waited until Neal went out to eat one night with another of the girls, and I got into his place.”
Sweet said she retrieved a lockbox hidden in the ductwork above Parks’s computer desk, got the key for it from his dresser, opened it, and took out fifteen hundred in cash.
“Just what he owed me,” she said. “I put the rest back.”
“What does this have to do with Emily?” Fox said impatiently.
Smug, the hooker said, “When I climbed up there to put the box back, I accidentally kicked Neal’s computer mouse. The screen lit up on his desktop. There was a picture of Emily on the monitor.”
Sweet realized the image was part of a video, so she played the clip.
“It looked like Neal shot it with his GoPro,” she said. “From his — what do you call it — point of view?”
Sampson remembered the GoPro videos on the Killingblondechicks4fun website, and he nodded, thinking that Sweet’s story might have legs after all.
“What did you see?” Fox said.
“Neal in full dominance mode,” Sweet said, sounding shaken. “He was hitting Emily, saying and doing nasty things to her. And she’s all submissive. And then, like, he’s got a rope in his hand, and he flips it around Emily’s neck.”
She stopped, her lip quivering at the memory.
“Neal started to strangle her,” Sweet said at last. “He put the camera in her face. You could see how terrified she was before the screen went black.”
Chapter 23
At home around ten thirty that evening, Bree said she was exhausted and going to bed.
“You coming?”
I said, “I’m going to type up some notes downstairs, catch the eleven o’clock news, and then I’ll be up.”
“Don’t fall asleep in front of the TV again,” she said, and she kissed me.
“I’ll try not to,” I said, and I kissed her back.
“You promised Jannie and Ali you’d go for an early run with them.”
“I remember. Love you.”
“Love you too,” she said and waved her hand wearily as she left the room.
I waited until Bree had climbed the stairs and shut our bedroom door before going to my basement office and putting on a dark jacket and baseball cap. Then I hit Send on a text I’d written an hour before.
I opened the outside door as quietly as I could, slipped out into the night, and went along the side of my house, creeping under our bedroom window. The light went out up there, and I trotted down the sidewalk to a waiting car.
I climbed into the passenger seat. John Sampson was at the wheel.
“Glad you could make it,” he said, and then he smiled and put the car in gear.
“You going to explain why we have to sneak around?” I said.
“I am,” Sampson said, and he told me about Emily McCabe, Sally Sweet, the video Sweet saw on Neal Parks’s computer, and how the clip had ended before the strangulation was complete.
“You believe her?” I said.
“We’re here, aren’t we?”
“Warrant?”
“We got blowback on the ask,” Sampson said. “Can’t get a search authorization based solely on the hearsay of a prostitute eager to avoid jail time. But I figure blonde lives matter, and think we should have a chat with old Neal Parks sooner rather than later.”
“Why me?” I asked. “What about Fox?”
Sampson shook his head wearily. “She’s threatening to file a complaint against me for squeezing her leg hard when she refused to follow my lead during my interrogation. She has total disregard for rank. Even dissed Bree on the deal.”
“So things are going well between you?”
“Oh, yeah, just peachy,” he said. “Which is why you’re here.”
“For a talk?”
“I figure we rattle Parks’s cage a little. See if we can shake anything loose.”
I knew I should ask him to pull over and get a taxi home. Bree would have a fit if she found out I was out with one of her detectives and both of us were defying her direct orders. But still, it felt so good and achingly familiar to be rolling with Sampson late at night that I blocked out my promise to Bree.
We cruised through the city, heading for a saloon Neal Parks liked to frequent after eleven o’clock at night. The Parrot was a serious dive bar by DC standards; it occupied the first floor of a shabby six-story building near the Maryland state line. Parks lived on the fourth floor.
“Convenient if you’re an alcoholic,” Sampson said.
“Is he?” I said.
“No idea,” he said, parking down the street. “Sally says he sits in a booth and handles business there until the Parrot shuts down. Runs the whole thing off his phone. Cyberpimp.”
“How are we going to see the video clip of Emily McCabe?”
“I thought about just going up there to watch it for ourselves,” Sampson admitted, climbing out of the squad car. “But we risk fruit of the poisonous tree. If we can get a warrant, we don’t want that clip excluded at trial.”
Trial, I thought, getting out the other side. My own day in court was fast approaching, and yet I seemed to be doing everything I could to avoid facing the issue head-on. What was that about?
“There’s an alley exit, and the front door,” Sampson said, gesturing down the block at the neon-blue macaw flickering above the bar’s entrance.
“I’d take the back,” I said, “but I’m unarmed.”
John stopped, stooped into the car, and retrieved a small Ruger nine-millimeter, which he handed to me. “I’m coming in the back,” he said. “You go in, make him, and wait.”