Breaking News
“This just in,” the polished CNN news anchor reported grimly. “Tragically, the body of a young woman was found today in an abandoned warehouse located in a city just north of Denver, Colorado. Police have confirmed it to be that of Alina Petrov, the Russian college student reported missing by her parents when she didn’t show up for classes at Brown university. No official word yet on the cause of death, but police are calling this a homicide.”
“I don’t believe this is a coincidence, Drew.” Fatema felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach by a mule, hearing the news of the discovery of that woman’s body. The story was on every channel, and finally she couldn’t take it anymore, and Fatema turned off the television, pulled out a bottle of Merlot, and called her ex-husband—just to talk. Drew was fast becoming a crutch, and even though she could see it, and she knew it was a mistake, Fatema couldn’t seem to bring herself to stop it from happening, before it even got started.
There was a time when he’d been her best friend, and she could talk to him about anything, and he got her. He really got her; even when everybody else around her thought she was a loon, Drew had a knack for knowing exactly what she meant, or what she was trying to say, or what she was going to say. Somewhere along the line, shit went awry between them, but in a crunch, he was still her friend, butter babies or no butter babies.
They sat next to each other on the sofa, shoulder to shoulder, sipping on wine, forgetting all about the fact that he was seeing another woman, and that she hated him for it. But she could never blame him for leaving her for someone else. She was just pissed that he couldn’t have picked somebody less superficial than the redhead.
“Toni had pages of files on that Alina Petrov—search queries, pictures. And now both of them are dead all of a sudden? Does that sound right to you?”
He took a drink of wine, before responding. “Don’t ask me to be the investigative reporter, Fatema. I’m just a jock, and for all I know, it could simply be coincidence. Didn’t you say she had all kinds of articles and stories about missing people?”
“She did, but—I don’t know. Something in my gut tells me that there’s more of a connection here.”
“Maybe there is, but for the life of me, I can’t see what it could be.”
She leaned forward and sighed deeply. “The cops still don’t have any leads, at least none that they’re willing to talk about.”
He rubbed his hand across her back. “They’re working on it. It’s going to take time.”
“You sound just like them.” She finished the wine in her glass and filled it again. “I tracked down this guy I think she was seeing. Nelson Monroe. He works at the shelter where she volunteered.”
“Thought you said she was seeing some cat named Luke?”
“She broke up with Luke, for Monroe, I think. Anyway, he’s a do-gooder like Toni from what I hear. She was really feeling him, too.”
“You talk to him?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. We’re going to talk over coffee on Thursday. The police have really been grilling him, and for the most part, he’s all talked out. I think they were getting pretty serious.” All of a sudden, Fatema choked up. “It’s so unfair, Drew—for one human being to think they have the right to take life away from another. Toni—that young woman—they both had their whole lives ahead of them, and—”
Drew pulled her close and held her in his arms. Fatema had him trained, or sprung or something, because all she ever had to do was call, and he came running. They’d been divorced for almost a year, and despite the façade of having moved on, he always kept one foot in Fatema’s doorway, waiting for the opportunity to try one more time. Fatema might’ve been blind to it, but Aisha, the woman he had been seeing, wasn’t. He never told Aisha that he still saw Fatema, but he never had to, and the thing is, he never denied it either.
Detective Bruce Baldwin didn’t believe in coincidences either. Toni Robbins was on to something. He suspected she wasn’t even really sure of what that something was, but she had pieces of a puzzle that she had no idea how to put together, or maybe she did, and maybe that’s why she was murdered.
The press hadn’t reported it yet, but the woman had been sexually abused and there was evidence of drugs in her system. Speculation among police was that Alina Petrov was too visible; her picture had been splashed across every newspaper and on every news channel across the country from the moment she’d been abducted. Someone didn’t want to be found with Alina, and the only way to make sure that didn’t happen had been to discard her.
He slowly flipped through copies of Toni’s files, seeing face after face of abducted women and children. Locally, a prostitution ring operating under the guise of a massage parlor that had been closed down a few months back housed half a dozen illegal Korean immigrants, all female, forced to sleep on dirty floors, allowed to eat a can of soup a day, forced to have sex with patrons, and beaten or tortured if they refused. He remembered the case. The women were terrified victims who refused to talk, fearing they’d be deported or killed. He came across another article about a group of men from Mexico, forced to work eighteen-hour days in peach groves for pennies with hardly any food to eat, and no medical care for those who became ill.
If Miss Robbins was always down for the cause, as her sister had put it, then she picked one hell of a cause to be down for. One as ancient as time itself, and the pessimist in him settled into the fact that this modern day slavery would certainly outlast him.