At 9:45 A.M. the next day, I was sitting at my desk staring at the calendar when my cell phone rang. Caller ID: Nancy Stewart.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hey. Can you and Toni shoot on down here to the Juvenile Detention Center?” Nancy skipped the small talk. “I’ve been talking to Paola-her name’s not Jasmine Jones by the way, and she’s not eighteen. She’s fifteen, and her name is Paola Morales. I’ve been talking to her for about an hour now. She’s starting to come around. Anyway, she knows Isabel, and she’s willing to talk to us about her. She’s not ready to give up her pimp-she won’t go that far. But she is willing to help find Isabel. We’re taking a break now while we wait for you.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “We’re on the way.”
Toni had overheard me talking, and she walked into my office as I was hanging up.
“She’s cooperating?” Toni asked.
“A little, anyway. Nancy said that she knows Isabel, and she’ll talk about her. She doesn’t want to talk about her pimp, though.”
“That’s okay. It’s better if she can give us some good information on Isabel,” she said as we hustled down the hall and out the door.
“Agreed,” I said. “Hopefully, she knows where we can find her.”
“Maybe she could lead us right to her,” Toni said.
“Wouldn’t that be nice.”
The King County Juvenile Detention Center sits on Alder just east of Twelfth Avenue. The building consists of two distinctly different sections. The back section is the residential area. It looks like a typical, four-story apartment building except that the doors and the exterior stairwell are painted bright orange. Someone probably thought it looked artistic when they selected the colors. I think it looks pretty odd. The front section consists of offices and classrooms. This section is a single story and made of brick. We parked in the visitors’ parking lot on the north side of the building and hopped out. Then we walked past the American flag and into the lobby of the front section.
Inside, the building was quiet and smelled of floor wax. In fact, the guy doing the waxing was still running a floor machine maybe forty feet down a long hallway. The tiles glistened. The receptionist sat behind what appeared to be a bulletproof glass partition-the kind like at movie box offices with the little chrome intercom speaker grill in the middle of the glass. I find it odd that someone would go through the trouble of installing an expensive piece of bulletproof glass for protection and then go and drill a three-inch hole in the glass for the intercom, right about at head level for the unlucky soul sitting behind the counter. I guess the intercom is supposed to be bullet-resistant, but I’m pretty sure my.45 would have no trouble shooting right through that hole-even with the intercom in place. I wouldn’t want to trust my life to it. But I digress.
We gave the receptionist the information that Nancy had given me and were issued visitor passes and told to have a seat in a long row of blue-and-orange seats-the kind that are attached together like those in a train station. Five minutes later, Nancy popped out through a set of double doors marked Authorized Entrance Only.
“Come on back, you guys,” she said.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Pretty much like I said on the phone,” she said. “Paola is a stubborn young lady. She’s only going to come along just so fast-we can’t push her. But if we can gain her trust by following through and making good on our promises, then she’ll probably open up more and more. For now, though, here’s where we stand. She seems to like Isabel. She actually seems like she’s worried about her. She wants to help.”
“Wonder why she’s worried,” I said. I was worried about Isabel when we started this case. Then, yesterday, I’d gotten hopeful. Then last night, worried again. Now-based on what I’d just heard-even more so.
“Don’t know,” Nancy said. “As soon as she agreed to talk to the two of you, I stopped our discussion and came and phoned you. We’ve just been waiting for you to arrive to pick up where we left off.”
“Did you find her parents?” I asked.
“Paola is from Las Vegas,” Nancy said. “She doesn’t know her father, but apparently her mother is still there. They don’t speak.”
“That would explain things a little, anyway,” I said.
Nancy stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to face us. “It gets worse. This morning, Paola told me she was introduced into prostitution when she was eleven years old. She’s fifteen now.”
“Oh my God,” Toni said quietly.
“Exactly,” Nancy said. “This little girl has been living with one pimp or another, turning tricks as a way of life-a way to survive-for more than four years. Last year, apparently, she made her Las Vegas pimp mad, so he sold her to a pimp up here who she won’t name.”
“Donnie Martin,” I said.
“Perhaps. I don’t know if she has any sort of alcohol or drug dependency-that’s something we’ll find out in the next few days. But even if she doesn’t, Paola’s going to need treatment and counseling and schooling for several years in order to get her life back together.”
“That poor girl,” Toni said.
“This is so typical of what happens to these girls. Paola’s a lucky one-last night really was her lucky night. For her, there might be a happy ending. At least, there’s the possibility. We’ll move to have the court appointed as her guardian. I talked to Annie Hooper-she’s putting Paola on the list and thinks she might be able to squeeze her into one of the Angel Houses in the next day or so.”
“That would be fantastic,” I said.
“Frankly, it’s her only hope,” Nancy answered.
Nancy led us into a room that served as a sort of small classroom. There was a table for the teacher at the front of the room in addition to four round tables, each with four chairs, spread through the remainder of the room. The entire front of the room was covered with a large chalkboard.
Paola sat by herself in one of the chairs, reading a pamphlet that read “Angel House” in bright, cheery letters. The difference in her appearance between now and last night was striking. Last night, she’d been heavily made up-apparently to look like someone’s idea of a dream date. The makeup had been overdone to the extreme. This morning, she wore no makeup at all. Someone had given her a dark blue T-shirt and a pair of matching dark blue sweatpants. She looked freshly scrubbed. In fact, now she looked like a teenaged girl.
We walked over to her table. “Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning,” she answered. Her voice was soft and demure. We took the other seats at her table.
“Paola,” Nancy said, “you remember Danny Logan and Toni Blair from last night, right?”
Paola nodded. “Yeah.”
“Okay, good. Now, before I begin,” Nancy said, “I’m going to turn the tape recorder on. Okay, Paola?”
She nodded.
Nancy said, “We’re here on Friday, June 8th, 2012, at 10:25 in the morning. I’m Lieutenant Nancy Stewart. I’m the commander of the Seattle Police Department Vice and High Risk Victims Unit. I’m here today talking to Paola Morales. Paola is a fifteen-year-old girl we detained last night pending identification of her legal guardian. That work continues. To be clear, Paola is not under arrest. With us this morning are Danny Logan and Toni Blair, both licensed private investigators with the Logan Private Investigations firm.”
Nancy turned to us. “May Paola call you by your first names-Danny and Toni?”
“Absolutely,” I nodded. Toni indicated her agreement as well.
“Good.” She turned back to Paola. “Like I said, Danny and Toni are private investigators. They’re not police officers. Do you understand the difference?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“In this case, they’re working to find Isabel Delgado. You told me earlier that you know her, right?”
She nodded.
Nancy said, “Okay. Just to remind you of the ground rules, Paola-you’re under no obligation to answer any questions at all. You’re not under arrest here. You’ve got all the control. You’re helping us-kind of like doing us a favor. This is not like TV where ‘anything you say can and will be used against you.’ In fact, it’s the opposite. Nothing you say here will be used against you for any reason. Like I told you earlier-I’m not interested in seeing you go to jail. I think you and I are past that now, right?”
Paola smiled and nodded.
“As a matter of fact,” Nancy continued, “I want to see you go to college and then come and work for me. Do you understand?”
Paola laughed. She had a little-girl giggle.
“And if you change your mind and don’t want to talk about anything anymore, you can stop anytime you’re uncomfortable, or you can simply say, ‘I don’t want to answer that question.’ Anything like that will work, okay?”
“Okay,” Paola said, nodding again. “I get it.”
“Good,” Nancy said. “So with that understanding, do you still want to talk to us about Isabel Delgado?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Good. Then why don’t I just let Danny and Toni ask you the questions, alright?”
She nodded.
“Thanks, Nancy,” Toni said. She turned to Paola. “I’m Toni. It’s good to meet you, Paola. Do you mind if we call you Paola?” she asked.
Paola shook her head.
“It’s a beautiful name,” Toni said. “I love it.”
Paola smiled. “Thanks.”
Toni looked to me. Guess it was my turn. I put on my best smile. “And I’m Danny,” I said. “Thanks for agreeing to talk to us about what you know about Isabel.”
She smiled again.
“Like Nancy said, we’re looking for Isabel,” Toni said. “My sister-she was also in the room last night-I don’t know if you noticed her-anyway, she’s a good friend of Isabel’s. They go to school together. When Isabel went missing, my sister asked us to help find her. That’s how we’re involved.”
Paola nodded. “And you guys thought it was Isabel who was supposed to be there last night?” she asked.
I nodded. “We did. We found an advertisement on Backpage.com with Isabel’s picture in it. We answered that ad, thinking Isabel would show up. You showed up instead.”
“They just told me to be at the Snuggle Inn at eight thirty,” Paola said. “Nobody told me anything else.”
I wanted to ask who told her this, but I figured she might not be willing to give that information just yet, and I didn’t want to start off the conversation with her having to say no.
“Must have come as quite a surprise to you,” Toni said.
Paola nodded. “Yeah.”
“Tell me,” Toni continued. “Why were you there instead of Isabel?”
“I’m not sure,” Paola said. “Last week, I know they told Isabel that it was time for her to move over to the girls’ house and go to work.”
“Where’d she live until then?” I asked.
“She was at the big house across the street from the park, by the-,” she stopped suddenly. “I don’t want to say,” she said.
“That’s fine,” Nancy said. “You don’t have to.”
“Sorry, Paola,” Toni said. “I didn’t mean to ask you a question that made you uncomfortable. Let me move past that. When you say that Isabel had to ‘go to work,’ you mean someone put an ad in Backpage.com and Isabel was supposed to start going out on dates?”
“Yeah. They probably took her picture that day,” Paola said. “They have us dress up all sexy, and they take pictures all the time.”
“But up until then, Isabel didn’t have to go on dates?”
“No, she was new. She didn’t live with us. The new girls aren’t ready for dates at first.”
“But a week ago, you’re saying Isabel’s time was up. They told her she had to move into the girls’ house and go to work?”
Paola nodded. “Yeah.”
“What happened when they told her that?” Toni said.
Paola shrugged. “They brought her over to show her around. We met her and stuff. We talked a little by ourselves. She told me she wasn’t going to go out on any dates.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“A couple days later, they moved her over to our house. It was the end of last week, I think.”
“Were you able to talk to her again?”
“Yeah. She was there a couple days. I worked at night, but I talked to her in the daytime. I thought she was cool. She loaned me the coat I was wearing last night.”
“And did she start going out on dates?” Toni asked.
“No. They had dates all set up for her, but right after she moved in, she came right out and told them she wouldn’t go on any dates. She told them she was going to leave.”
“What happened then?”
“They all got really mad. Isabel got punishment.”
“What’s that mean-punishment?”
“They beat her with the belt. Right in front of us. Then they threatened her family. They said they were going to kill her mom.”
“What did Isabel do?”
“She got mad. She told them to go ahead, she didn’t care. Then she told them to fuck off-those were her exact words. She said she was leaving.” She looked down for a moment before continuing. “So then they took her to a party.”
“A party?” I asked. “What’s that mean? What’s a party?”
She looked down and shifted her feet. She was clearly getting nervous.
Nancy noticed, too. “Paola, you don’t have to answer if you don’t like.”
She looked up and then said, “It’s alright.” She turned back to me. “A party is when they take you over to the boys’ house, and everybody gets high, and then you have to have sex with all of them at the same time.”
I could feel my skin start to tingle-a clear sign that I was on my way to getting good and pissed. Whenever I think I’m past the point where I can be surprised by the pure depths of depravity some scumbags seem able to reach, something new like this comes along. The drugging and gang rape of a child by a group of men as a means of forcing the girl into prostitution-this was a new low in my experience. I shuddered. Poor Isabel ran away from home to escape an abusive prick of a stepfather-an animal who liked to rape her just for fun and where’d she end up? With a bunch of the worst kind of thugs I’d ever heard of. Wonderful. I noticed I was staring at the ceiling, holding my breath, so I slowly let it out and looked at the others. They were all looking at me.
“Sorry,” I said. I shook my head slowly. “Paola, it makes me very sad to hear about the kind of life you’ve had to live. I’m so happy for you that Nancy found you and wants to help you. Really. No one deserves to go through this.”
She looked at me for a second and then shrugged. “There’s worse,” she said.
How? Tough little girl.
Toni continued. “So Paola, after the beating and the party, then what happened to Isabel? Did she start going out on dates then?”
“I don’t think so. They probably wouldn’t send her out all beat-up. But I haven’t seen Isabel for about a week-since the night they took her to the party.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
Paola stared at Toni for a moment before she answered. “No. I just know that she wasn’t at our house anymore.”
“Why would they take her away?” I asked.
“They said he was going to sell her.”
“Sell her?” I asked. I didn’t bother asking who “he” was.
She nodded. “I think they took her away so everyone else wouldn’t feel bad.”
“Who would they sell her to?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe his friends in Las Vegas. They have girls, too. They’re always checking out each other’s ‘inventory.’ That’s what they call it.”
“How often do they hook up?” I asked. I needed to find out how much time we had.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Whenever they need to, I guess.”
She looked at me, right in the eyes. I looked back. For just a moment, I felt like I could see straight into her inner thoughts. They were a child’s eyes, yet they weren’t the innocent eyes of a fifteen-year-old. They were hard eyes, eyes that had seen way too much evil for one so young.
We talked for another fifteen minutes, but we didn’t really get any more pertinent information. Paola did let slip the fact that she liked riding around in the “beemer”-which I took to be Donnie Martin’s white BMW. I was already pretty sure that Donnie was her pimp. And now we knew that he had been trying to become Isabel’s as well. Except Isabel-God bless her-was no eleven-year-old. She was fighting back.