Sister Mary John’s phone call caught Jesse in his cruiser, on his way back to the station.

“Sister,” he said.

“I’ve got a frightened girl here, Jesse. I think you need to see her.”

“Okay. When?”

“Now.”

“Right now?”

“This girl is getting ready to bolt. I don’t know how long I can keep her.”

“I’m on my way.”

•   •   •

Sarah McCarthy, if that was even her real name, was a plain-looking girl, possessing a fright of frazzled red hair that cascaded haphazardly past her face, surrounded her neck, and stopped just short of her slender shoulders. She looked at the world through dull green eyes that were rife with fear and suspicion. She was buxom and thick-hipped. She had on a hooded gray Red Sox sweatshirt worn over loose-fitting blue jeans. She nervously sipped coffee from a mug. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she was burdened with sadness and seemed far older than her years.

Sarah, Sister Mary John, and Jesse were alone in the conference room of the Church of the Holy Mother. They sat grouped together around a sturdy wooden table that had been old even in the previous century. Sunlight streamed through stained-glass windows, bringing with it a small measure of warmth.

“Yeah,” Sarah McCarthy was saying to Jesse, “I know Thomas Walker.”

“How do you know him?”

“Son of a bitch held me prisoner, that’s how. He’d fuckin’ kill me if he got the chance.”

Unconsciously, Sarah started to chew on one of her fingernails. Jesse noticed that all of them had been bitten, some to their nubs. The one she was working on now was bloodied.

“I was with this Crip, T Ricky,” Sarah said. “One night he took me to meet some big-deal guy who turned out to be Thomas Walker. Before I knew what was happening, T Ricky was gone and me and Thomas were smoking weed and blowin’ cocaine and I wound up staying with him for a while.”

“For how long?”

“I’m not really sure, ’cause Thomas got me onto smack and time became a blur.”

“You were mainlining heroin?”

“Not mainlining, sniffing. Enough to get high but not so high that I couldn’t do what Thomas wanted. He’d get real mad at me if I didn’t do what he wanted.”

“Which was?”

“I was hooking.”

“Thomas put you out on the street?”

“No. Not the street. He put me in a house somewhere and had me doing maybe ten, twelve guys a day.”

Sarah lowered her eyes.

“After a while, it got to be pretty humiliating,” she said. “Thomas disappeared, but he kept me and some other girls locked in the house. The guys in charge never let us out. If any of us acted up, they’d smack us around. It was pretty scary.”

“But you escaped.”

“Yeah. I knew I’d die if I didn’t. So I stopped using the smack, but I never let on. They’d bring it around and give it to me, but I wouldn’t use it. I’d flush it down the john. I got myself straight. I stayed cool and waited for my chance.”

“Thomas?”

“He never came around anymore. I heard about him, though. Him and his girls.”

She came upon a particularly irksome hangnail and began biting it aggressively.

“Do you know any of their names,” Jesse said.

“Who?”

“His girls.”

“Nah. Well, maybe. T Ricky once said something about a girl called Janet. Or Janice. Something like that. Said she was Thomas’s latest squeeze.”

“Did you ever see this girl?”

“No.”

“But he told you her name.”

“Yeah.”

“T Ricky was the boy who introduced you to Thomas.”

“Yeah. He’d come around to see me sometimes. He felt bad about what had gone down with me. He liked me, see. He was the one helped me get out of there.”

“How did he do that?”

“Last night he came to visit me real late. After everyone had gone to bed. He told me that one of the guards had left the kitchen door unlocked for him. Said that’s how he got in. So after he left, I went downstairs to see for myself.”

“And?”

“It was unlocked. Just like he said. So I walked right through that door and got the fuck out of there. I made my way home, where my wonderful parents proceeded to throw me right back out. I had heard about Sister MJ, so I came here.”

After she was done with her hangnail, Sarah looked at Jesse and said, “I know Thomas is out there looking for me. He’ll kill me if he finds me. Make an example of me for the other girls. I have to get out of here.”

“The church has gathered some money to send Sarah to California,” Sister Mary John said. “She has a cousin in Los Angeles who told Sarah she could stay with her.”

Jesse looked at her. Then he looked at the sister.

“How can I help,” he said.

“You could get her to the airport safely.”

“When does she want to go?”

“Now,” Sister Mary John said. “She’s booked on a four-o’clock flight.”

Jesse looked at Sarah.

“What will you do in California?”

“Stay straight. Look for a job. Try to forget about the shit that went down here.”

“And?”

“Survive, I hope.”