The front door was unlocked, either through sloppiness or thanks to the smokers, and the three entered. They found the reception area unattended. Clearly it got no walk-in customers. Dingy framed photos of herbs drying on foreign hillsides graced Masonite paneling straight out of a Khrushchev-era basement bomb shelter. Inside the dust-caked display cases, bowls of dead and decayed spices were laced with cobwebs. From their pallid color and texture, they might have been delivered by Marco Polo himself.
The door to the side of the counter opened, and an imposing guy ripped with muscles stepped in, hastening to pull it closed behind him. “Help you?” he said in a voice an octave higher than anyone expected from his roided body.
“Interested in some spices,” said Rook. “I’m just mad about saffron.”
Both the officer and the muscleman gave him strange looks. Heat’s focus stayed on the hard body, whom she saw stuff something in his back pocket and cover it with his untucked shirt tail. “I’d like to speak to the manager. Is that you?”
“We’re closed.”
“The door was open.” She parted her coat to show some tin and Sig Sauer. “Are you the manager?”
“No.”
“Who is?”
“You have a warrant?” As soon as he asked it, the inner door behind him opened wide. A slender Asian man holding an unlit cigarette and a disposable lighter stood in it. Behind him they could see a portion of a large, open warehouse with about a dozen foreign men, women, and children off-loading garbage bags from a box truck. Muscle Man gave the guy with the cig a shove back inside and pulled the door shut.
“Won’t be needing a warrant. I just happened to observe illegal activity. That girl I just saw is working in violation of child labor laws,” said Heat, approaching him. “And you are under arrest for carrying an illegal weapon.” She reached in his back pocket and pulled out a telescoping billy club. While the uniform frisked and cuffed him, she said, “I think I’d like my tour now.”
An hour later, still handcuffed, but seated in a stained executive chair in the middle of the warehouse, the muscleman, Mitch Dougherty watched glumly as his workforce of forty-six illegals called him names in foreign tongues as they filed past to be processed by Social Services. SSD personnel had braved the weather and arrived with two buses to transport the dozens of abused and malnourished aliens to emergency shelters and to get a health assessment.
To use the term Heat had heard from FiFi Figueroa, Mitch was only one of the bulls, an enforcer. But he was inside, and that meant he must know who ran the business. And what a business it turned out to be.
Ana, a young woman from Honduras who spoke excellent English, approached Nikki on behalf of the other workers, desperate to share the story of their plight. “I am like most of these women. We have been abducted from our hometowns and brought here against our will.”
In the case of Ana, she was taken one night in La Ceiba by gangs who first raped her, then smuggled her to America to be a prostitute. “Sadly,” she said, “it is true for some of the boys as well, although many of the men and women were not kidnapped, but were tricked to come here. Who does not want to come to America for education, si? That is what they told some, and then they arrive, and there are no identity papers or no colleges, and they are then forced to work for pennies in this living hell and live in the squalor of the rooms they keep us in.”
Heat scanned the lineup of vacant-eyed souls. Of course she knew about human trafficking—the underground industry of human servitude that kept the moral outrage of slavery alive and well in modern times. But here she saw it in the flesh, en masse. Men, women, and—as she learned from Social Services—children, as young as nine, caught in the historic form of abduction, abuse, and enslavement for the enrichment of their captors; and all who supported the system. Here before her were forty-six lives. What made her shudder was the certainty that they were the proverbial grain of sand on the beach.