“Just do it,” I said.“I’ll explain in a minute.”
I’m not sure what he thought, but he did it.On the next block, he waited for a gap in traffic and made a U-turn that put us on the other side of the road, going back toward the nightclub.
“Here.”I pointed to the parking lot of a fast food restaurant.“Pull in.”
“You have a craving for a Big Mac?”
Yuck.No.A Big Mac would add a good half hour to my workout tomorrow morning.And that was in addition to the half hour I had to add from not working out today.
“I want to see,” I said.“They had three girls in the backseat of that car.Young women.Late teens, early twenties.Blond.Pretty.I want to see what they do with them.”
Mendoza didn’t say anything.There wasn’t much to say, I guess.The implications were pretty clear to both of us.
Unfortunately, what we could see wasn’t much.By now, the car—a black sedan; why are they always black sedans?—was on its way around the corner of the building.
“Taking them in through the back,” Mendoza muttered.
So it seemed.And much smarter of them.The parking lot ended in a retaining wall.There was nothing behind the building but a hillside, and on top of that, maybe an apartment complex.A couple of two-story brick buildings with blank walls facing us.Barely visible behind a scraggly line of trees.
“If we were on top of that hill,” I began.
Mendoza nodded.“No way to get there before they’re inside, though.”
No.They had probably moved their cargo through the back door already.By the time we could figure out how to get up to the apartment complex and make our way into the trees, there’d be nothing to see.
“Do you want to go ring the bell again?”
“It won’t do any good,” Mendoza said.“But I think I might want to have a talk with this guy I know in Special Investigations.And maybe ICE.”
“Immigration and Customs?”
He nodded.
“Trafficking?”
“We’re not immune from it,” Mendoza said.“A lot of what goes on is interstate trafficking.Young American girls selling themselves—or being sold by their pimps—at truck stops up and down the interstates.But we see our share of foreign trafficking, too.It isn’t all that long ago that Special Investigations shut down a string of Asian massage parlors that were a front for prostitution.”
I hadn’t heard anything about that, but I’d take his word for it.
“It happened in the spring,” Mendoza said.“You weren’t interested in crime then.”
I guess I hadn’t been.I’d been the happily married trophy wife of David Kelly, with no idea that my husband had already taken a mistress and was juggling both of us until he could see his way clear to divorce me.
I scowled.“It’s not that I’m particularly interested in crime, you know.All I was supposed to do, was figure out whether Steven Morton was cheating on Diana.”
Mendoza nodded.
“It wasn’t my fault that somebody got killed next door.”
He shook his head.
“And if it hadn’t been for Edwina walking around loose, I wouldn’t even have known about it.”
He shook his head.His lips were twitching.
“Things have gotten a little out of hand.But it’s not like I can leave Diana to figure this out on her own at this point.She asked me for help.”
“Of course,” Mendoza said, and sounded like he meant something else entirely.
