Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (8 page)

The three young
women in the interview room didn’t look at all like Riley had expected. For a
few moments she just watched them through the one-way window. They were
tastefully dressed, almost like well-paid secretaries. She’d been told their
names were Mitzi, Koreen, and Tantra. Of course Riley was sure that those weren’t
their real names.

Riley also doubted
that they dressed so acceptably when they were on the job. Working for about
250 dollars per hour, they’d surely invested in elaborate wardrobes to cater to
all sorts of clients’ fantasies. They had been colleagues of Nancy “Nanette”
Holbrook at Ishtar Escorts. The clothes Nancy Holbrook had been wearing when
she was killed had been markedly less proper. But, Riley figured, when not
actually on the job, the women wanted to look respectable.

Although prostitutes
had played a role in some of the cases Riley had investigated in the past, this
was the first time she’d been called on to work so directly with any of them.
These women were potential victims themselves. They might even be potential
suspects, although virtually all murders of this type were carried out by men.
Riley felt sure that these women weren’t the kind of monsters she hunted in her
job.

It was late Sunday
afternoon. Last night Riley and Bill had settled into their separate and
comfortable hotel rooms not far from the FBI building. Riley had phoned April,
who was in a Washington, DC, hotel with the history field trip. April had been
giggly and happy, and had warned her mother that she didn’t really have time
for phone calls. “I’ll text you tomorrow,” April had said, shouting over the
teenage clamor in the background.

Riley felt that too
much of today had already been wasted. It had taken most of the day to round up
the prostitutes and bring them in. Riley had told Special Agent in Charge Elgin
Morley that she wanted to talk to the women without any men present. Perhaps
they’d be more open with another woman. Now she thought she’d observe and
listen to them unseen for a few minutes before actually questioning them.
Through the speaker, she could hear their conversation.

Their styles and
personalities were distinctive. Short, blonde, buxom Mitzi displayed a certain
small-town, girl-next-door image.

“So has Kip popped
the question?” Mitzi asked Koreen.

“Not yet,” Koreen
said with a conspiratorial smile. She was a slender brunette with something of
the grace of a ballerina. “I’ve got a feeling he’s bought a ring, though.”

“Does he still want
to have four kids?” Mitzi asked.

Koreen let out a
high, lilting laugh. “I’ve talked him down to three. But between you and me, he’s
only going to get two.”

Mitzi joined in
Koreen’s laughter.

Tantra gave Koreen a
nudge. She was a tall African-American with a tawny complexion. She seemed to
have adopted the glamorous poise of a supermodel.

“Better make sure he
doesn’t find out what you do for a living, girl,” Tantra said.

All three women
laughed heartily. Riley was taken by surprise. These three prostitutes were
talking about having families, just like any ordinary women in a beauty parlor.
Was that kind of normality really in the cards for any of them? She couldn’t
imagine that such a thing was possible.

Riley decided that
she’d kept the women waiting long enough. When she walked into the interview
room, she could feel the relaxed atmosphere suddenly pop like a bubble. Now the
women were visibly on edge.

“I’m Agent Riley
Paige,” she said. “I’d like to ask you all a few questions.”

All three women let
out groans of dismay.

“Oh, God, not more
questions!” Mitzi said. “We’ve talked to the cops already.”

“I’d like to ask a
few questions of my own, if you don’t mind,” Riley said.

Mitzi shook her
head. “This is starting to feel like harassment,” she said.

“What we do is
perfectly legal,” Koreen said.

“I don’t care about
what you do,” Riley said. “I’m an FBI investigator, not a judge.”

Koreen murmured
under her breath, “Like hell.”

Mitzi looked at her
wristwatch. “Can we make this quick?” she said. “I’ve got three classes today.”

“How many credits
are you taking this semester?” Koreen asked.

“Twenty,” Mitzi
said.

Koreen gasped. “That’s
a pretty big load.”

“Yeah, well, I want
to get my degree as soon as I can.”

Riley was taken
aback again.

Mitzi is going to
college,
she
thought.

She had heard that
sometimes women pursuing an education chose prostitution as a way of paying
tuition. With the money she was making, she might not have to go too deeply in
debt. Still, it struck Riley as strangely unsettling.

“I’ll try to keep
this short,” Riley said. “I just want to know more about Nanette.”

Koreen’s expression
suddenly turned pensive. “Poor Nanette,” she said.

But Mitzi seemed
unperturbed. “What happened to Nanette’s got nothing to do with us,” she said.

“I’m afraid it does,”
Riley said. “We have good reason to believe that her murderer is a serial
killer. And I can tell you from years of experience, serial killers are
relentless. He’ll kill again. And one of you might be his next victim.”

Mitzi frowned
disdainfully.

“Not a chance,” she
said. “We’re not like Nanette.”

Now Riley was
shocked. Could these women possibly be naive enough to think that what they did
for a living was safe?

“But you work for
the same business, doing the same kind of work,” Riley said.

Mitzi was starting
to get defensive.

“Hey, I thought you
weren’t here to judge,” she said. “You can look down your nose at us if you
like. But what we do is as respectable as this kind of thing can be. And as
safe. We can turn down any clients we don’t like. We keep the sex safe, and we
get regular check-ups, so we don’t have diseases. If a guy gets too kinky or
violent, we can walk away. But it usually doesn’t come to that.”

Riley wondered about
that word “usually.” Surely their business sometimes took them into pretty dark
territory. And how “safe” could hired sex possibly be? How long could they
continue without falling prey to AIDS?

 “As far as Nanette
goes,” Mitzi continued, “she was on her way down. She’d lost all her class. She
was meeting clients outside of the service, shooting smack, losing her health
and her looks. She wouldn’t have lasted at Ishtar’s a lot longer. She’d have
been fired for sure.”

As Riley took notes,
she eyed the women, trying to understand them better. Little by little, she
sensed something behind their placid expressions. She was pretty sure it was
denial. They refused to accept that theirs was a losing way of life, and that they’d
all fall into the same decline as Nanette sooner or later. Their dreams of
family, education, and success were ultimately doomed. And deep down, they knew
it.

Riley noticed that
Tantra had gotten quiet and was looking off into space. She had something to
say, but hadn’t yet said it.

Riley said, “We
believe that Nanette was killed about a week ago, probably on Saturday. Do you
know who her client was that night?”

Koreen shrugged. “I’ve
got no idea.”

“Me, neither,” Mitzi
said. “Actually, that’s none of our business, you’d have to ask Ishtar about
that.”

Riley knew that the
local agents were already looking for the escort service owner and would bring
her in for questioning.

“What about other
places of work?” Riley asked.

“We’re contracted to
Ishtar,” Mitzi said firmly. “We’re not allowed to follow our line of work
through any other agency or on our own.”

The other two women
were looking downward, avoiding Riley’s eyes. She asked the question more
directly.

“Did Nanette ever do
extra work anywhere else? Did she ever go out on her own without having a date
made through Ishtar?”

The room was silent.
Finally, in a barely audible voice, Tantra said, “She told me she’d just
started working at Hank’s Derby.”

“What?” Mitzi said,
sounding surprised.

“She didn’t want me
to tell anybody,” Tantra told the other women.

“Jesus,” Mitzi said.
“So she was turning into a lot lizard. She was in worse shape than I’d thought.”

Riley’s mind was
buzzing with questions.

“What’s a ‘lot
lizard’?” she asked.

“It’s the lowest
class kind of whore,” Koreen said. “They work truck stops, like Hank’s Derby.
It’s really a rock bottom life.”

“She was just so
strung out,” Tantra said. “She wasn’t getting the clients she used to at Ishtar’s.
She told me she wasn’t making enough to feed her habit. She said she was just
doing it on the side. I told her how dangerous it was. I mean, hookers just
disappear from truck stops without a trace, it happens all the time. But she
wouldn’t listen.”

A cloud of gloom had
settled over the women. Riley didn’t guess that they had a lot more information
to give. They’d given her one important lead already.

“That will be all,”
Riley told them.

But as they got
ready to leave, the women started chatting again as though nothing unusual was
going on.

They really don’t
understand,
Riley thought.
Or they don’t want to understand.

“Listen,” she said, “this
killer is dangerous. And there are many other men like him. You’re making
yourself into targets. If you think you’re safe doing what you do, you’re just
lying to yourselves.”

“And just how much
safer is
your
job, Agent Paige?” Mitzi asked.

This retort left
Riley speechless.

Is she really
comparing what she does with what I do?
she wondered.

As she followed the
women out of the interview room, Riley’s heart sank. She felt as hopeless for
them as she would if they had been common streetwalkers. In a way, this seemed
worse. Their superficial veneer of respectability concealed a life of
degradation even from themselves. But there was nothing she could say or do to
make them face the truth.

Riley felt sure that
this killer wasn’t finished murdering prostitutes. Was his next victim here
right now, or would she be someone Riley hadn’t yet met and warned?

*

Riley was in the
field office hallway looking for Bill when her cell phone buzzed. She saw that
the call was from Quentin Rosner, head of the dive team that was searching
Nimbo Lake.

Her heart quickened.
Surely he and his divers had found the second body by now.

“Hello, Mr. Rosner,”
she answered eagerly.

The voice on the line
said, “I called Special Agent in Charge Morley. He told me I should report to
you directly.”

“Good,” Riley said. “What
have you got for me? Have you found the other body in the lake?”

She heard a faint,
wordless grumble, followed by, “Agent Paige, you’re not going to like hearing
this.”

“Well?”

“There’s no body in
that lake. It’s a big area but we’ve looked everywhere.”

Riley had trouble
believing her ears. Had her hunch been wrong?

No, she still felt
sure that Nancy Holbrook’s killer had previously dumped a different body in
that lake. It helped explain why he hadn’t gone down to the water to make sure
that his latest victim had disappeared into the lake’s depths.

As she puzzled over
what to say, she saw Bill walking down the hall.

“I’m headed out to
interview Ishtar Haynes,” he said. “At her place of business. Want to come
along?”

Riley nodded yes,
but first she had to sort things out with Rosner.

“How was the
visibility?” Riley asked.

“I won’t lie to you,
it really sucks down there,” Rosner said. “Flooding a canyon stirs up a lot of
sod and rotting vegetation and it can take several years for the water to clear
up. Anything dumped here when the lake was new could actually be buried under
debris.”

“The body I’m
looking for could have been put there several years ago.”

“Then that’s a
problem. But we know what we’re doing, Agent Paige. We’re a well-trained unit.
And we’re really sure there’s no body to be found in this lake.”

Riley thought for a
moment. She deeply wished that Morley had called in actual FBI divers. The
Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team was amazing and those divers would
have considered every possible angle without any prompting. Instead Morley had
called in help from a local dive training school. He’d said that there was no
legitimate reason for the FBI to be involved in this case anyhow. He wasn’t
going have an FBI team fly in here from LA.