“All right.”
“He’s just a hardworking man who lives in Virginia with his family and does a lot of handyman work here in the city. He was doing some work on a home in the Adams Morgan area and got all his tools stolen. I’m talkin’ air compressor, ceramic tile cutter, circular saw, drills, reciprocating saw, and on and on. Everything he owns to make a living. Shit’s expensive, and he certainly didn’t have the money to replace any of it. Well, an associate of mine who works this kind of stuff gave me a call and asked if I’d be willing to take it on ’cause he didn’t have the time. He advised me that the client didn’t have a lot of money, but would be willing to trade in labor. And you know my house on Twelfth, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I still got a lot of work I’d like to get done, so I told him that I’d meet with the guy, but couldn’t promise anything. So I meet with him and come to like him and feel sorry for him. Actually, I don’t know why I took it on, except that I felt sorry for him having his livelihood taken like that. I don’t work cases like this and don’t know the first thing about recovering stolen property. But I do know drugs and that most of those types of crimes are committed by crackheads. And I still have my contacts on the street. One of them led me to a burglar in the area who is known to target construction sites and homes under renovation. This source of mine told me that they’d commonly trade the stolen property for crack at Sixteenth and Park. So I set up a bit of surveillance there.”
“So you have photographs?”
“No. I didn’t get a chance to do that. So it doesn’t take me long to figure out those boys you showed me the photos of are running things pretty hard. I also manage to see some deals being made in exchange for possible stolen property. I watch them put the shit in the trunk of their vehicle, and at the end of their workday I follow them and that’s what leads me to the house on Kenyon.”
“So that’s why you busted into the house, to get his tools back?” Hicks asks, like I’m an idiot.
“You outta your head? Of course not. I’m not crazy. For a drug house like that, I would’ve used one of my sources,” I say with a smile.
“Sheeit,” Hicks grunts.
“Seriously, though, I decide that the next day I’ll sit on them at Sixteenth and Park some more and start taking pictures of the deals, maybe get some good photos of them transporting the property from the trunk of their vehicle into their house. And then when I think I have enough, I was gonna take everything to McGuire and Luna, who I knew would jump on it. They’d maybe send in one of their confidential informants to trade bait property, like power tools, for narcotics. We used to do that kinda shit all the time, and it’s good for a quick hit. I figured once they hit the place, my client could ID his property and get it released back to him. It woulda been nothing more than a few hours of work and then maybe I’d finally get my kitchen remodeled. Would’ve saved hundreds in labor.”
I sip my Coke. I can tell by the look on Davidson’s face that he’s a believer. Damn, I even believe it.
“I go back the next day, early in the morning, but this time to sit on their house. I wait for them to leave, which is at about ten hundred hours, and I decide to sit there for a bit to see if they got anything working at the house, too, because that’d be easier work for a CI. Nothing is happening, so after about a couple hours I exit my car to scope out the area, get the layout of the house, see if I can see anything through a window. When I’m at the side of the house, I notice one of the boys has returned and is walking up to the patio. I’m figuring he’s there to re-up. I scoot myself tight against the side wall, and that’s when I hear his cell phone ring. You know I speak Spanish, right?”
“No, I didn’t, but go on,” Davidson says.
“Well, I speak good enough to understand. He answers the call and greets some dude he calls Angelo. Had to be the one you locked up, right?”
“More than likely, yes,” Davidson says.
“He’s talking to him on the patio, and I hear him ask this Angelo about a girl and if he should ‘let her out to eat.’ Obviously I couldn’t hear what this Angelo was saying, but the way this boy was talking, it sure as hell sounded like they had a girl being held against her will and locked up in a bathroom. I mean things like, ‘I won’t fuck her,’ ‘She has to eat or she’s going to die on us.’ Man, I knew they had someone in there. My mind started working, and I remembered on the news about some of these young teenage girls that had gone missing in Fairfax County recently, and how the police there had made a stop on these young Latino boys after it was reported they were following a young girl that just got off the school bus, but she ran away and got home.”