CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEKay sat in her car for a few minutes after pulling into the massage parlor parking lot. It was in what she would call a dead shopping center, with only a few shops. There was a grand opening banner above it, obviously it had been set up for very finite purposes and would, no doubt, disappear off the map once their work in this area was done.
Taking a deep breath, she exhaled slowly and stepped out of the car, making her way to the glass and metal door at the front entrance. This wasn’t the kind of place she would ever step foot in under normal circumstances, but she had no choice today.
“I have a ten a.m. appointment. My name is Kay.”
“Of course, Kay. I’m Maggie. Come with me,” she said, handing Kay a robe, supposedly to change into once she was in a room. Stopping at a doorway all the way down the hall at the end, she waved her in. It looked like a regular therapy room. “Your therapist will be right with you.”
Kay nodded, and the woman shut the door, leaving her sitting in the room alone, wondering what to do next. After a few minutes, six men and two women, one of them the woman she had met at the pool, emerged from a door opposite the one she had come into.
“Thank you for joining us this morning, Kay. Would you like some coffee or a soda? Water?”
“No. Nothing. Thank you.”
Kay felt incredibly intimidated, just as she had been at the pool yesterday. Of course, that is what they wanted her to feel. They began with their smiles and light chatter, as if they were her friends. It was meant to put her at ease, but it only served to make her more anxious.
She focused on the woman from yesterday. She seemed kind somehow, and that soothed Kay a bit. Then they dropped their pretexts of kindness and got right to the point.
“We want you to be our eyes and ears at the ranch.”
“Eyes and ears for what?”
“There are large shipments of drugs coming in and out of that ranch and we want to nail down the people responsible.”
“I don’t know anything about any drugs,” she said, trying not to look shifty.
One of them opened a file and shoved a photo toward her. It was a girl, maybe early teens. Her face was horribly disfigured, and she didn’t appear to be alive. Kay had never seen one before, but she was sure it was an autopsy photo or a crime scene photo and that the girl wasn’t just sleeping.
“Her name was Selina Mandross. She was fifteen years old.”
“Was? She is dead then?”
“Yes. She and a few of her girlfriends from a local Catholic girls’ school decided they wanted to be a bit rebellious and sneak away to party in the woods, a girl’s night out.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“With you? Probably nothing,” he said, shoving another photo toward her.
In this one, a girl was smiling brightly at the camera. It appeared to be the same girl based on hair color, but too hard to tell with the distortion to the face in the first photo.
“That was how she looked before she and her friends scored a nice sized meth rock and went into the woods to have a good time. These are her friends-Monica, Sable, Carla, and Bridgette.”
With each name, he slipped another photo toward her. All of them were school photos of smiling, well-adjusted looking girls in the same style uniform. Kay looked them over, still confused.
“We haven’t recovered their bodies yet.”
“Bodies?” Kay muttered, feeling sick at her stomach.
“Yes. All presumed dead, but possibly abducted. We’re still investigating.”
“What happened to the first one? Selina?” Kay asked, unsure if she wanted the answer.
“She jumped off a cliff and hit a few rocks on the way down before landing in the water and getting hung up on a fisherman’s dock downstream.”
“Jesus. Why?”
“The meth. It’s laced with a street drug they call Freebird. People seem to think they can fly when they take it. They can’t fly, Kay.”
Kay hung her head, devastated for the parents of all these girls. What did all of this have to do with Bradley and their clan though?
“And you think that the other girls tried to fly as well?”
“Well, we thought so, but there’s no sign of any of their bodies. We now think they’ve been abducted, possibly being trafficked elsewhere. That’s why the FBI is taking the case over from DEA. They are still in the loop, but we believe the girls were lured out to the woods, injected with the drugs and taken elsewhere.”
“Why not Selina then?”
“Not sure. Perhaps she decided to test her wings before they finished subduing all of them or perhaps she tried to run and went in the wrong direction. We may never know. What we do know is that one girl is dead and four are missing, likely transported across state lines.”