“And now five women are dead.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Glasser’s anguished response startled them all. Abruptly, she rose to her feet and paced over to the window, where she stood gazing out at the city lights. “Do you know what the worst export our country ever sent to Russia was? The one thing we gave them that I wish to God had never been made? That movie, Pretty Woman. You know, the one with Julia Roberts. The prostitute as Cinderella. In Russia, they love that movie. The girls see it and think: If I go to America, I’ll meet Richard Gere. He’ll marry me, I’ll be rich, and I’ll live happily ever after. So even if the girl’s suspicious, even if she’s not sure a legitimate job’s really waiting for her in the US, she figures she’ll only have to turn a few tricks, and then Richard Gere will show up to rescue her. So the girl gets put on a flight, say, to Mexico City. From there, she travels by boat to San Diego. Or the traffickers drive her through a busy border crossing, and if she’s blond and speaks English, she’ll get waved right through. Or sometimes, they’ll just walk her across. She thinks she’s coming to live the life of Pretty Woman. Instead, she’s bought and sold like a side of beef.” Glasser turned and looked at Jane. “Do you know what a nice-looking girl can earn for a pimp?”
Jane shook her head.
“Thirty thousand dollars a week. A week.” Glasser’s gaze turned back to the window. “There aren’t any mansions with Richard Gere waiting to marry you. You end up locked in a house or apartment, supervised by the real monsters in the business. The people who train you, enforce discipline, crush your spirit. Other women.”
“Jane Doe number five,” said Gabriel.
Glasser nodded. “The house mother. So to speak.”
“Killed by the same people she worked for?” said Jane.
“When you swim with sharks, you’re bound to get bitten.”
Or, in this case, have your hands crushed, the bones pulverized, thought Jane. Punishment for some trespass, some betrayal.
“Five women died in that house,” said Glasser. “But there are fifty thousand other lost souls out there, trapped in the land of the free. Abused by men who just want sex and don’t give a damn if the whore is sobbing. Men who never spare a thought for the human being they just used. Maybe the man goes home to the wife and kids, plays the good husband. But days or weeks later, he’s back at the brothel, to fuck some girl who may be his daughter’s age. And it never occurs to him, every morning when he looks in the mirror, that he’s staring at a monster.” Glasser’s voice had dropped to a tight whisper. She took a deep breath, and rubbed the back of her neck, as though massaging away the rage.
“Who was Olena?” Jane asked.
“Her full name? We’ll probably never know it.”
Jane looked at Barsanti. “You followed her all the way to Boston, and you never even knew her name?”
“But we knew something else about her,” said Barsanti. “We knew she was a witness. She was in that house, in Ashburn.”
This is it, thought Jane. The link between Ashburn and Boston. “How do you know?” she asked.
“Fingerprints. The crime scene unit collected literally dozens of unidentified prints in that house. Prints that didn’t match any of the victims. Some of them may have been left by male clients. But one set of unidentifieds matched Olena’s.”
“Wait a minute,” said Gabriel. “Boston PD immediately requested an AFIS search on Olena’s prints. They got back absolutely no matches. Yet you’re telling me her prints were found at a crime scene in January? Why didn’t AFIS gives us that information?”
Glasser and Barsanti glanced at each other. An uneasy look that only too clearly answered Gabriel’s question.
“You kept her prints out of AFIS,” said Gabriel. “That was information Boston PD could have used.”
“Other parties could have used it as well,” said Barsanti.
“Who the hell are these others you talk about?” cut in Jane. “I was the one trapped in the hospital with that woman. I was the one with a gun to my head. Did you ever give a damn about the hostages?”
“Of course we did,” said Glasser. “But we wanted everyone out of there alive. Including Olena.”
“Especially Olena,” said Jane. “Since she was your witness.”
Glasser nodded. “She saw what happened in Ashburn. That’s why those two men showed up in her hospital room.”
“Who sent them?”
“We don’t know.”
“You have the fingerprints on the man she shot. Who was he?”
“We don’t know that, either. If he was ex-military, the Pentagon isn’t telling us.”
“You’re with Justice. And you can’t get access to that information?”
Glasser crossed toward Jane and sat down in a chair, looking at her. “Now you understand the hurdles we’re facing. Agent Barsanti and I have had to handle this quietly and discreetly. We’ve stayed under the radar, because they were looking for her, too. We were hoping to find her first. And we came so close. From Baltimore to Connecticut to Boston, Agent Barsanti has been just one step behind her.”
“How were you able to track her?” asked Gabriel.
“For a while it was easy. We just followed the trail left by Joseph Roke’s credit card. His ATM withdrawals.”
Barsanti said, “I kept reaching out to him. Voice mails on his cell phone. I even left a message with an old aunt of his in Pennsylvania. Finally Roke called me back, and I tried to talk him into coming in. But he wouldn’t trust me. Then he shot that policeman in New Haven, and we lost track of them entirely. That’s when I think they split up.”
“How did you know they were traveling together?”
“The night of the Ashburn slayings,” said Glasser, “Joseph Roke bought gas at a nearby service station. He used his credit card, then asked the clerk if the station had a tow truck, because he’d picked up two women on the road who needed help with their car.”
There was a silence. Gabriel and Jane looked at each other.
“Two women?” said Jane.
Glasser nodded. “The station’s security camera caught a view of Roke’s car while it was parked at the pump. Through the windshield, you can see there’s a woman sitting in the front seat. It’s Olena. That’s the night their lives intersected, the night Joseph Roke got involved. The minute he invited those women into his car, into his life, he was a marked man. Five hours after that stop at the service station, his house went up in flames. That’s when he surely realized he’d picked up a whole hell of a lot of trouble.”
“And the second woman? You said he picked up two women on the road.”
“We don’t know anything about her. Only that she was still traveling with them as far as New Haven. That was two months ago.”
“You’re talking about the cruiser video. The shooting of that police officer.”
“On the video, you can see a head pop up from Roke’s backseat. Just the back of the head-we’ve never seen her face. Which leaves us with almost no information on her at all. Just a few strands of red hair left on the seat. For all we know, she’s dead.”
“But if she’s alive,” said Barsanti, “then she’s our last witness. The only one left who saw what happened in Ashburn.”
Jane said, softly: “I can tell you her name.”
Glasser frowned at her. “What?”
“That’s the dream.” Jane looked at Gabriel. “That’s what Olena says to me.”
“She’s been having a nightmare,” said Gabriel. “About the takedown.”
“And what happens in the dream?” Glasser asked, her gaze riveted on Jane.
Jane swallowed. “I hear men pounding on the door, breaking into the room. And she leans over me. To tell me something.”
“Olena does?”
“Yes. She says: ‘Mila knows.’ That’s all she tells me. ‘Mila knows.’ ”
Glasser stared at her. “Mila knows? Present tense?” She looked at Barsanti. “Our witness is still alive.”