IT WAS AFTER seven when Darcy Gaines got back to me. She was just leaving the Family Justice Center. She asked what the favor was. I told her about the glass and the prints. She said she had a friend at the lab, but since it wasn’t a priority, the earliest they could run the prints was next week.
“You want to meet up in the morning so I can give you the glass?” I said.
“How about a drink right now?” she said. “Because I could goddamn well use one.”
I told her I was on my way to Spike’s. She said she kept a change of clothes at the office for situations involving emergency cocktails; that way, Spike’s other customers wouldn’t think it was a raid.
“My husband got to make the mac-and-cheese after my daughter’s hockey practice tonight,” she said.
“I didn’t know she played hockey.”
“She’s the kind of player her mommy would be,” Darcy said. “When she goes into the corner, she comes out with the puck.”
Spike and I were at a corner table in the back room when Darcy showed up. By then I had told Spike about Tony’s call and taking the phone off Lisa’s body, and telling Lee Farrell about neither event. Spike said he promised to visit me at Massachusetts Correctional, but couldn’t promise it would be every single Sunday, especially not during the pro football season.
Spike and Darcy had met a few times in the past. As he hugged her he said that the only times he’d broken any laws lately were because I had made him.
She sat down and told him she needed a martini, and fast, and it better be good. Spike waved over our waiter and told him the same thing, and that it was an official request from law enforcement.
Darcy wore a lavender pullover and jeans that were bad-girl tight. I told her she still cleaned up nicely. She said, “Blah, blah, blah. Where’s the glass?”
I took the Ziploc bag out of my purse and she put it in her own.
“I’m thinking this guy might just turn out to be Tony on training wheels,” she said.
“He appears to have a loftier vision of himself, and his professional pursuits,” I said.
“Yeah,” Darcy said. “Don’t they all?”
The waiter came back with her drink. Dirty martini, four olives, Beluga Gold Line vodka, Russian, which Spike said was the best the mother country had to offer.
“Those mothers,” Darcy said.
We all clicked glasses and drank. Darcy closed her eyes as the first taste ran through her. “But God bless America,” she said in a husky voice.
“You look tired,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“That doesn’t mean unattractive.”
She grinned. “Thank you for that, too.”
“Anything in particular?”
“It’s not just one thing,” she said. “Sometimes it just feels like everything. The last couple of months there’ve been a bunch of those skeevy massage parlors sprouting up like mushrooms. Providence police got a tip last week about one of those pop-up brothels that have become all the rage. And the guy who seemed to be in charge, it turns out, used to run women doing hotel work for Tony. So the guy immediately lawyers himself up with a local attorney who, shall we say, seemed to exist in a world slightly above this particular perp’s means.”
“Where is he now?”
“In the wind, as we like to say in the business,” she said.
“Pop-up brothels?” Spike said. “Like vendors at the Public Market at Christmas?”
“They take short-term leases, or even go through Airbnb,” she said. “A week at a time. Maybe two. They generally stay until the neighbors wonder about the parade of assclowns going in day and night. But you do enough of them, you can make a very nice killing before moving on to the next.”
“With young girls,” I said.
“Goddamn it all to hell,” she said. “I actually thought Tony had moved away from high school girls. Maybe not. I still haven’t been able to get a legit ID for the kid who OD’d. I wonder if she was somebody else who was just collateral damage.”
She drank more of her martini. She seemed happy to have it, happy to talk, happy to have us listen.
“Over the past couple of months,” she said, “there has been an uptick, up and down the coast, of young girls disappearing from shelters and group homes, and a concurrent uptick in runaways.” She shook her head. “And those are the runaways getting reported, because so often with these kids they’re on the run from abusive situations.”
“And then transition into the life,” I said, remembering Millicent Patton.
“They recruit them in all sorts of ways,” she said. “The pimps have charming young guys on the lookout all the time. They find these girls at the mall, at train stations and bus terminals and in the park when the weather is nice. They offer them a place to stay, they offer them drugs. Same old same old. Sometimes they move them back and forth between Boston and New York and Philly.”
“High school girls,” Spike said.
“Give the people what they want,” she said. “These girls think there’s never been anything good in their life, and now they’re getting paid to do something they are good at. Or so they tell themselves.”
“Until they figure out that they’ve just changed abusers,” Spike said.
“Sometimes I don’t just want to arrest the pimps,” Darcy said. “I want to kill them all.” She shook her head. “And, might I add, this is all going on while there’s been a boom in trafficking of young girls from other countries.”
I looked at her. Somehow, out of uniform, she looked as pretty as she ever had. And so much younger than she had in uniform. I wondered, and not idly, if she looked at me and thought I had aged as well.
I had been nursing my own martini. I drank some of it now. And was already debating whether or not to have another.
“If Tony really is skewing younger again,” Darcy said, “I will make it my personal mission to fuck him up as badly as I can, whether I get in Jake Rosen’s way or not.”
“I’m just curious,” Spike said. “When you two were with the cops, did you take swearing training together?”
Darcy said, “We just both come by it naturally.”
“But if you guys do take down Tony, doesn’t that leave the field open for an up-and-comer like Jabari?” I said.
“Unless I take the up-and-comer down, too,” Darcy said.
She finished her drink, staring sadly at her glass as soon as she had, then asked Spike how much a bottle of Beluga Gold Line cost. He told her she didn’t want to know.
Darcy looked at me. “You think Tony and Jabari are getting ready to fight for the title?” she said.
“It’s a boxing reference,” Spike said, grinning.
“I know what it means,” I said. “What I don’t know is the title of what.”