Jasmine Trade by Denise Hamilton

Author:Denise Hamilton [Hamilton, Denise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, General
ISBN: 9780743214773
Google: LMAHKk2TY5YC
Amazon: B007CUA3VM
Publisher: Pinnacle
Published: 2001-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

I was sipping some cheap office sludge when the phone rang. It was a cop I had been cultivating, from the Asian Organized Crime Unit of the L.a. County Sheriff’s Department. They were doing a brothel raid and the briefing was at noon. He said I wouldn’t want to miss it but hung up before I could get any details.

The cops often invited the press on these busts. With TV cameras whirring and reporters trailing, they’d burst into some massage parlor, hauling naked johns out of back rooms, pillows clutched to their privates, the men’s terror contrasting comically with the sullen, resigned looks of the young women. Then the groveling really began, as the johns begged everyone not to publish their names or show their faces on the evening news. One john I recalled had kept switching the pillow from his groin to his face, unsure which would be most damaging to reveal. My instinct had been to fetch him a second pillow but the Girl Scout reporter in me had prevailed and so I kept my distance and merely recorded the scene in my notebook. In J-school, they teach you not to get involved, and it had taken me time to learn that objectivity doesn’t preclude compassion. Now, I would have reached over and tossed him that pillow without thinking twice.

Wheeling the car out to the sheriff’s headquarters in Temple City, I considered that life was divided into two parts. There were those brief spurts of reality when you interacted with other people, punctuated by long segments of suspended animation when you were alone in your car or apartment, wrestling with your own puny thoughts. You might be hurtling through space at sixty-five miles per hour but life was really on hold until that next interaction. It was a lonely way to live. No wonder serial killers could lurk undetected for years, committing their crimes not so much in secret but in isolation. If you had no intimate relations with other human beings, who would know how unhinged you had become?

At the sheriff’s station, the clerk hustled me into a room where thirty plainclothes cops milled about. Some looked like bikers, with greasy jeans and ponytails. They all wore oversized jackets, despite the heat, and large fanny packs around their waists to hide their guns. Off in the corner, I spied Vittorio Carabini’s supervisor, John Latham, and waved. He raised an eyebrow and went back to what seemed like an intense discussion. I sensed that this was no ordinary massage parlor bust. There was a wildcat energy in the room that fired my own nerves.

I spotted my reporter pal George Ling, animated and unkempt as usual. I smiled and he waved back. But before I could make my way to him, the crowd had jostled me toward Carabini’s former boss instead.

“Get your pen ready, Latham, I’m about to announce those addresses you were so hot for ten minutes ago,” the supervising lieutenant Phil Redman was saying. “We can’t

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