Laurel S. Peterson

THE ZODIAC GIRLS
by

Laurel S. Peterson

CHAPTER ONE—September—Stella
    At just after two in the morning, I heard a commotion in the squad room and went to the door to see if Hank’s officers had returned. They had raided the South Street Dance Club, an illegal club in a house down near the water, back in some little neighborhood where people lived too many to one apartment, slept in shifts.
I had expected hardened eighteen to twenty-five years olds, so at first I didn’t understand what I saw. Several of the officers carried children. Half-clothed, the girls clung fiercely to them, heads buried in their necks, or they screamed and kicked, trying to get free. Older girls walked in looking shell-shocked: white-faced, silent, rigid. None of them were over fourteen; some looked as young as seven or eight.
    It was the littlest one that broke my heart. Wrapped in a plaid wool blanket and draped limply over Martin Clancy’s shoulder, her face was grey and drawn, and she was sucking her thumb. Even when he moved her gently from his shoulder to a hard plastic chair in the mint-colored bubble of the squad room, tucking the blanket around her, she didn’t move and her empty stare didn’t change. She sat unresisting, mummified by the blanket.
    I started toward her, but then stopped, unsure of my status. Detective Hank Minor met my eyes and gave a slight nod, so I went to sit with her until the interviews started. I gently retucked the blanket, and when she didn’t react, I rested my arm lightly across the back of the chair, just brushing her thin shoulder bones. Bright lights highlighted the sculpted edges of her cheekbones, and the rows of desks, the windows behind us that looked out onto the parking lot, and the scuffed linoleum floors did nothing but make her seem even smaller than she was.
    Hank and his partner, Detective Marita Salazar, would interview her—and the rest of the girls—with me in the room so I would know what I was up against when the girls talked to me alone. I was the social worker whose job it was to be sure they went through with the medical exam. After that, Child Protective Services would swoop in and take them off to foster care. Hank occasionally hired me as a consultant because he found my character insights useful. Tonight, I wished I had more experience or a more experienced social worker to help me. But I was on my own. For now.
    But there was a little time. The officers had to find food and warmer clothes for the girls; already the desk sergeant had gone off to heat water for tea, rummage for packets of instant cocoa. I might, if I were careful, get my girl to lean in a bit. She was still little enough; she might have some trust left. I sat very still, letting some of the heat from my body call to her, until the detectives were ready. In all that time, except for the nearly imperceptible in and out of her breath, she didn’t move.
    I hadn’t been prepared for this when Hank had said it would be a dance club raid. I had pictured women with overly made up faces and skirts that barely covered their pubic hair. Women who were angry and abused, women who were alternately tough and vulnerable, afraid and cocky--those were the women I’d gone to graduate school to help. But then, what did I know about dancers and prostitutes anyway? I was a middle class white girl, an educated and financially independent social worker. Well, financially on the edge. Enough that Detective Hank Minor had taken to throwing me department jobs whenever he could, and I was grateful.
    Someone brought me coffee. I hardly noticed, I was so focused on staying motionless. Hank worked for the Port Chester Police Department. Just after my divorce a year earlier, he and I had also been lovers. Our break-up had coincided with his ex-wife’s remarriage. Hank took it hard. Somehow, we had managed to remain friends, and recently, he’d started dating a new woman, someone who wanted the couple of kids and Saturdays in the yard that my gypsy heart feared. In the meantime, I had finished both of my master’s degrees—one in social work and one in poetry—and started my own therapy practice. My own therapy practice. I still loved saying it.
    Yes, I was supervised and would be for a couple more years, so I wasn’t completely independent, but I was responsible. It’s what I’d wanted for a long time. My supervisor, Maxine Whittaker, was a prominent psychiatrist, a colleague of my ex-husband the neurosurgeon. We worked well together, and she not only provided me with opportunities to learn and good advice, but was also becoming a good friend.
    Forty-five minutes later, Hank and Marita began the interviews with one of the older girls, twelve-year-old Valeska, and Clancy took over my vigil. Through the department’s translator, Mercedes, Valeska told them that the girls had been brought in from Bosnia and other Eastern European countries. “I thought I was going to be adopted. Our mothers,” she tipped her head toward the door, perhaps to indicate the other girls, “mostly they are dead. No one wanted us.”
Their second interview, nine-year-old Iryna, told them she had come to America to sing. “Orphanage Matron said that we would be part of a famous children’s choir in a famous church in New York City. But when we got off the plane, men took us to the house where you came.”
    “The men, what did they look like?” Marita asked. I was a little surprised at her gentleness, given how sour she’d always been with me.
    Iryna shook her head, looked down at the table. Her hands clenched and unclenched in her lap. I felt pity and then was ashamed that pity allowed me to feel separate, superior. I’d been so lucky, and that privilege put up a barrier: I didn’t know if a girl damaged so young could come out of this whole.

    “Malgorzata thought she was going to be a model,” she offered, perhaps hoping to distract them. Even though the interview was being recorded, Marita noted something on the pad in front of her.
    “When you arrived in New York,” Hank asked, “what happened?” He had shifted slightly in his chair so he could meet my eyes, but he’d only flashed me a look once, and that only to indicate that I should move slightly so he could watch me. I wasn’t sure what he wanted. Was I to monitor their reactions? Or did he want to monitor mine?
    “Men met us at the plane.”
    “How many men?”
    “Two.”
    “How many of you were there?”
    “Three.”
    “Did you girls know each other?”
    She shook her head.
    “Did anyone travel with you on the plane?”
    “A lady. She said we should say she was our aunt.”
    “Do you know her name?”
    She shrugged, the universal child gesture of avoidance fused with a terror so complete that her bony shoulders could barely rise and fall. Again, the two detectives let it go.
    “What happened next?”
    “The lady gave us to the two men. They took us to a house.”
    “What happened then?”
    “We… worked for them.”
    “Worked how?” Marita’s voice had gentled even further.
    “We slept with men. All night. Different ones.” We could barely hear her.
    “That house—is it the one where we found you tonight?”
    She nodded, fists still clenching and unclenching.
    “Can you tell us anything about how to find the men who brought you here?”
    She shrank back in the chair, ducked her face behind the long, unwashed strands of her hair. “No,” she whispered.

    They nodded, and by some psychic ability given to long-term partners, agreed to conclude the interview. Marita gestured to the officer by the door that she could take the girl out. “Thank you for helping us,” she said, but Iryna refused to look at her.
    It was the oldest, a thirteen-year-old named Svetlana from Moldova with black hair butchered into short spikes and scars from cigarette burns on her arms, that finally gave them information they could use.
    “They told us we couldn’t trust you.” She had folded her arms across her budding chest, pulling tight the scratchy wool sweater they’d found for her. Defiance seeped through the language barrier like blood under a door. “They said you would arrest us as criminals, throw us in jail and leave us there, just like it used to be in our country. They said they paid you to keep away.”
    Hank’s face turned rigid and white, a plaster cast of itself. “If we had taken money from your captors,” he said, “we wouldn’t have come to get you out.”
    “They said you might, that if you did it was because you wanted us for yourselves. But that we wouldn’t even have a house, we would be like zoo animals, behind bars for all to see.” She began to shiver. I moved, I couldn’t help it, but Hank’s eyes warned me back.
    Marita said, “Do you want a blanket?”
    The girl looked at her. “Women are no better. They lured us here.” I looked at the translator. Lure? An adult word for a 13-year old. I wondered what word Svetlana had used in her own language. The night was taking its toll on Mercedes. With each interview, she held herself more tightly, a lightning rod absorbing and neutralizing pain.
    Hank said, “I’ve told you that you can trust us, but I can’t prove we’re trustworthy until you take a chance and let me do the right thing by you.” He turned from her then, shrugged off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair. As he turned back, his eyes brushed across mine. I’ll make it OK. You can trust me, too.
The girl sat and watched him, ignored Marita. The detectives let the silence build. A minute went by, then two minutes. Marita doodled in her notebook. Hank played with his pen, sipped coffee, smiled at her.
    “The men were hairless,” the girl said finally in the kind of cold flat voice used for body counts, “and wore brown leather coats. They forced us to have sex with lots of men. We had to smile, dress sexy, pretend to like it, or we were beaten. If the guards thought we weren’t nice enough to the customers, we were beaten. If we made too much noise, we were beaten. If we complained about one of the customers, we were beaten. If we cried or begged to be released, we were beaten. We ate once a day, we were locked in when the guards were absent, and sometimes the guards raped us to amuse themselves. We worked fourteen to fifteen hours a day and stayed at that house for 30 days. I knew if could count the days,” she told them, “I was still part of the world outside.”
    Marita indicated the burn marks on the girl’s arms. “And these?” Softly, so softly.
    “When the beating didn’t work. I was a problem. If you hadn’t come, eventually they would have killed me.”
The room had died by the time she stopped speaking, silence as heavy around us as damp wool.
    Hank nodded at her. “Thank you for trusting me. I will make these men pay for what they did to you.”
    She simply stared back at him, her eyes dark and tentative.
    Hank and Marita left the girls to me then. Somehow I had to explain the hospital exam in such a way that the girls would cooperate. Clancy came in, holding the youngest child’s hand.
    The girl stood by the chair, rigid against its dark grey metal length. She had a wide, Slavic face, and large, dark eyes. Her long, black hair was matted at the back of her head. Her legs were covered with bruises, especially along her thighs, and her wrists looked scraped, just where handcuffs would rub if they were left on a long time. One wrist also had the perfect circular wound of a cigarette burn. She wore a large T-shirt with “Port Chester Police Softball League” on it, the blanket still draped around her shoulders in a horrifying parody of a little girl playing princess. Her feet were bare, nails dirty and ragged. Her eyes looked slightly glazed, whether from exhaustion or fear or a combination I didn’t know. I wanted so badly to hold her in my arms and reassure her, but I was afraid that any touch right now would only terrify her further.
    “My name is Stella Morris,” I said. “I’m a social worker. That means that I help people who are in trouble or scared or sad. Can you tell me your name?”
Mercedes translated.
    “Evelina,” she whispered, pushing tightly against the chair’s edge.
    “That’s a pretty name,” I said. “I’m thirty-four years old. How old are you?”
    “Eight.” I almost couldn’t bear her answer.
    I said, “Evelina, you’re safe now. We’re going to take care of you, and the men that hurt you aren’t going to hurt you anymore. Do you understand?”
    She looked at the translator while Mercedes spoke, and then she nodded. I said, “OK, that’s good. The next thing that’s going to happen is that we’re going to take you to a doctor to make sure you’re healthy. I would like to go with you, so you won’t be alone with the doctor. Is it all right if I go with you?”
    When Mercedes finished, Evelina nodded again.
    “My mom and dad live in Chicago. That’s in the middle of the United States. Where are your parents?”
    “I have no mother. My father is in Romania,” she said. The voice was a little above a whisper now. Was it steadier? I couldn’t quite tell.
    “I have a brother, Carson. Do you have brothers and sisters?”
    She nodded. “Two sisters and three brothers.”
    “My parents are teachers.” College professor seemed beyond Evelina’s comprehension. “What does your father do?”
    “He has a farm.”
    “Do your brothers and sisters work on the farm?”
    “Only my brothers. My sisters were all given away, like me. It is a very small farm. My father said …there wasn’t enough.”
    She must have seen my horror. She backed away from me a little, pushing at the chair. It scraped the floor and she jumped. She shifted behind the chair, keeping its bars between us.
    I reassured her. “I’m just sad you had to leave home. We’re going to find you a new one. Would you like

that?”
    Detective Salazar opened the door. “Stella, can I see you a sec?”
    Marita and I had met previously under less-than-amenable circumstances. At the time, she had been interviewing me as a suspect in the murder of Madeline Horton, the Vice President of Hausenberg College where I had been studying as a graduate student. She still didn’t like me—because I was too close to her partner?—and she didn’t seem particularly pleased to have me in the middle of her investigation again.
    “You can’t make promises like that,” she hissed at me, the moment I stepped into the hall. “I have no idea what we’re going to do with all these kids!”
    “You can’t persuade CPS to place them temporarily?”
    “They have no status as citizens. They’re illegal. Technically, we’re supposed to have them on the first plane home to their parents—or whoever—who will sell them all over again, and they may not get found this time, which might be better than staying in a community that will treat them as outcasts. They’ll die of a drug overdose or AIDs, which half of them have probably already contracted… don’t get me started.” She waved her hand futilely at the air.
    “Marita, she’s eight years old. What am I supposed to tell her?”
    She took a step toward me, her hand up, poised to chop. I forced myself not to flinch or step back. “Nothing. You tell her nothing. All we want from you is to get these girls through the night and the doctor’s exam in a semi-coherent state.”
    “Then I’m just supposed to leave and forget them? Is that what you do?”
    She dropped her hand and leaned back against the wall, her legs splayed. “Shit.” She bent her head forward and massaged her neck. “I don’t know what we do.” The sound of footsteps made her straighten up. A woman was walking toward us.
    She addressed Marita. “Detective Minor says I’m free to go after I’ve talked to some shrink. Do you know where she is?” She used a peremptory tone to accent what I was sure she considered a commanding manner.
    Marita gestured toward me. “The mother lode,” she said and grinned wickedly. She stalked off.
    “Wait a minute,” I said to her receding back. “I still have a girl in there. What do you want me to do?”
    “Have Mercedes take her down to the holding area, while you talk to Ms. Lancia here. You can pick up with the girl when you’re done. And don’t forget who you’re working for.” She tossed it over her shoulder, not missing a step.
    Irritated, I took a moment to compose myself. I’d just begun to gain Evelina’s trust. Did Marita think the girl was a machine—just hit pause and come back when you’re ready? For god’s sake, I couldn’t undo the child’s trauma in fifteen minutes—especially not when the girl had to be comfortable enough to survive a medical exam! I forced a smile at Ms. Lancia as told her I would be right back, took a deep breath to calm myself and stepped into the interview room.
    “Evelina, I have been asked to talk to a lady for a few minutes. Would you wait downstairs with Mercedes while I talk to her? I promise I won’t be too long.” I smiled.
    Mercedes translated, gesturing at herself as the guide who would be with Evelina. The girl nodded, but her eyes were fearful. Mercedes rose and gave Evelina her hand. Evelina took it, watching me to be sure it was OK. I squatted at her level and reached out my hand, being careful not to touch her, offering it as a gesture of good will. She reached for me, touched my face, very gently. An old woman’s gesture. Then she walked out the door with Mercedes, glancing over her shoulder as she left.
I couldn’t even allow myself the liberty of a breath before I turned my attention to my new customer.

    Amy Lancia stood six foot, give or take, in four-inch red patent leather heels. Shining salon-blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail so long it could have belonged to an actual pony. Her figure was lean, except for the breasts, whose voluptuous fullness spilled from scoop-necked red spandex designed to advertise them fully. Low-rider Calvin Klein jeans snugged the limbs between shoes and shirt. I guessed her age at around 27 or 28, no wedding ring—on the older side, I judged, for a club dancer, even if she did look terrific.
    I invited her to sit down and introduced myself, wondering what Hank wanted me to do with her. Was I supposed to comfort? Get additional information out of her? A little better communication here would be really useful. For the moment, I decided I’d better stick with Marita’s directive to work for the police department.
    “Detective Minor says I’m supposed to talk to you about what happened at the club tonight. I was the informant.” Her pose was defiant and upright, back straight against the chair, shoulders down, legs crossed—as if she were at a society dinner, not in a police station. Before I could ask anything, she spoke.
    “You told the police about the girls?”
    “That’s what I said.”
    She was a mix of defenses and bravado, shifting between personas from moment to moment. “What do you do at the club?”
    “Dance.” She jiggled one red patent leather clad foot nervously.
    “How long have you been dancing?”
    “Not long. I’m a writer, really. This is just a gig until I get back together with my boyfriend.” She shrugged. “He’s a documentary filmmaker.” Her eyes shifted as she said it, gauging the confines of the room, its color, its cold cementedness. Something about the boyfriend was uncomfortable.
    I nodded. “What do you write?”
    “Poetry mostly, but scripts, too. That’s what I was doing with Taylor, writing the narrations for his documentaries.”
    “Taylor is your boyfriend?”
    She flashed a look of anger at me from under long, fake lashes. “Was.” She spat it, the hardened street girl persona back in control.
    I nodded, unsure of what I was reading. It was more like she couldn’t decide what face she wanted to present to the world, so she kept shifting in and out of different versions of herself. Was she aware of what she was doing?
    I said, “I’m a poet, too. Competitive world.”
    “Yea.” She shrugged again, but interest glimmered in her eyes, a chink of light in the wall. I let the silence stretch for a moment to see if she would go anywhere with it.
    “What kinds of stuff do you write?” she asked.
    “Lyric poetry,” I said. “Free verse mostly, but an occasional sonnet or villanelle. I’m not so good at meter. You?” I held my breath, hoping she’d go for it.
    She nodded. “The same. I do a bit of narrative poetry, though. I guess I’m a storyteller. It’s what attracted me to documentaries—the artistic connection between the world and the way we tell about what we see. Taylor got that—my ex,” she rolled her eyes, “and then he didn’t.”
    “It’s good to find someone who gets you—even for a short time. That can be hard for artists—women especially—to find.”
    “Whatever.”
    So much for bonding as women. “What made you decide to tell the police what was going on?”
    “Oh, god.” She leaned forward, touching my knee, back in her dinner party persona. “Those kids, they were just babies.” She stared past me, remembering, sudden, real pain in her eyes. “At first, I didn’t get what was going on. I mean, the club thing was just kind of a hoot—some backwater place where no one I knew would see me, easy money, tide-me-over kind of thing. You know.” She glanced at me to be sure I was paying attention, for confirmation.
    I nodded, relieved she’d opened up.
    “Anyway, a couple of weeks in, I’m there pretty late, around 3 a.m. One of the bouncers and I had hit it off, and well, you know.” Again that look for confirmation, her child-like need to have her choices validated. “I see this guy coming in the back door with all these little girls. At first, I don’t get it, you know? I mean, what’s a club like that doing with all those little girls? Two seconds later, it hits me. When I look at my friend, I see he knows. It’s that sort of not-happy-about-it knowing, too. He wouldn’t let me talk about it, but then he couldn’t stop talking about it. Told me way more than I wanted to know. Told me to pretend I’d never seen it or heard what he said, suggested I find a job somewhere else. Another state, if you can, he said. Another state! He totally freaked me out.” The red patent leather shoe continued to jiggle nervously. Her eyes went back to roaming the confines of the room, as if she would get up and leave if she only knew where to go.
    “I mean, do you think he’s right?” She ran her hand over her hair, smoothing it down fretfully. Then she went on, as if she didn’t want to know the answer, as if she knew the answer and didn’t want to hear it.
    As she talked, I studied her. Underneath the attitude, I heard a more refined and educated voice. Poetry and scriptwriting were usually the provinces of the well-educated. Despite the suggestive clothing, she was pretty and carried herself with a confidence I would expect of someone who knew her own worth—at least as much as any of us know our own worth. Suddenly, she had found herself in a place where her education meant nothing, where people lived by rules that had nothing to do with the rules of civilized society, and she was afraid and unsure.
    “Those little girls put me in a sort of a bind. I was doing this gig in the first place as a way to find a story that might interest Taylor. The last thing we did together was a film on prison riots. Before that, a piece on nuclear waste. He’s into ‘hard-hitting journalism.’” She put the quotes in with her fingers, shook her head in disbelief as if she herself didn’t understand why she pursued him.

    She continued, “I thought maybe the sex industry would provide a story. And shit,” she blew out a breath, “it has. I just don’t know what to do with it.”
    “Will your bouncer friend figure out that you told the cops? And if he does, will he pass on the information?”
    She looked at me in shock. “Oh god. I didn’t think... I just couldn’t take… feeling sick anymore.” Her composure started to fray at the edges. Fingers tapped the chair arms in a mimic of the jiggling foot; she leaned forward, then back again. “I mean, guys were coming in and out of there constantly during my shift. They’d hit the stairs and be back down again in 20 minutes. I started to lose focus in my dancing. Even the boss noticed. You think M—, uh, my friend would turn me in?” She rocked forward over her knees, wrapping her arms around her torso as if she were suddenly cold or nauseous.
    I watched her, thinking that I knew how lonely it felt to be suddenly without options or people you could trust. It was the kind of loneliness I’d felt last year when my sister was murdered. “Did you tell the detectives about this bouncer?”
    “They asked about the girls and how they got there, who the men were, descriptions, that kind of thing. I didn’t mention my friend because, well, you know, it was private.” The defiance crept back.
    “We need to tell the detectives. He might have more information. Then you need to tell me how I can help you.” Maybe I could persuade Hank to put her into a safe house or get her some emergency cash. It was unlikely—department resources were always so slim—but I could try. There had to be something I could do.
    She unfolded herself. “You? What could you do? No. I need to get out of here.” She looked desperately around, as if the room could tell her where she should go. “He’s right. Another state would be a very good idea.”
    Her disdain stung, even though I knew it had nothing to do with me. The terror bound her so completely that I doubted she was even aware she’d used the tone.

    “Have the police said anything to you about sticking around to testify or in case they need to talk to you again?”
    “Yeah. But I’d rather be alive than dead, you know?”
    “They can provide protection, a place for you to stay.”
    She shrugged. Maybe she knew how unlikely that was.
    “You need to stick around.” My voice was harsh, and she flinched.
    “You don’t get it.” Her breathing quickened. “These guys are mean. Grey eyes like gun barrels. You knew looking at them that they were killing little girls when they were still teenagers.” She started to rock back and forth over her knees, her arms again wrapped tightly around her torso.
    “Come down the hall with me and tell Detective Minor about your bouncer friend. The more they know, the more likely it will be that they won’t need to bring you into the case.”
    “No, I can’t. They’ll kill me.” Her breathing got faster still. “No, no, no.” She shook her head repeatedly, muttering it almost to herself, caught inside her own fear. “No, no, no. They’ll kill me. No, no, no.”
    “Amy!” My voice startled her, and her chair scratched back abruptly on the hard floor. Her eyes stared at me, wide with the internal terror of whatever scene was running on her mind’s movie screen.
    “You need to snap out of it,” I said, more loudly than was perhaps necessary. “Your fear has total control of you, but it’s not about your fear. It’s about the lives of little girls being used for sex. You have information, the cops need it. Then they’re going to need your testimony to be sure they can make their case, so no more little girls get hurt.” As I spoke, I leaned over and gripped the arm of her chair for emphasis.
    I saw nothing shift behind her eyes, but she said the right thing. “Sure, sure. Anything to get those bastards.” Her breathing had slowed, but I wasn’t convinced.
    “Detective Minor is going to want an address where he can find you.”
    “Sure, sure. No problem.” Her stare was cold. She smoothed her hair again and stood up. “Some social worker you are,” I heard her mutter quietly under her breath.

    Hank, as I’d predicted, took her information, cautioned her to stay where he could reach her, and promised that he would have the beat cops check on her regularly. He couldn’t post 24-hour security because she hadn’t been threatened, but he would do the best he could. She looked at me as he said it as if to say, I told you so, but remained silent, her hands pushed into the pockets of her jeans, one hip slung out to the right. I watched her walk away, feeling dissatisfied with myself.
    After she left, I went back to interviewing frightened little girls. In the chaos of trying to do right by them in the complex intersection of INS, social services and justice, Amy Lancia receded to the back of my memory until a few days later when, in passing, Hank mentioned he couldn’t find her. She wasn’t answering her phone or her door, and the landlord said he hadn’t seen her in several days, even though her stuff was still there.
    “Was it voluntary?” I asked.
    “Why? Did you say something to her?”
    “Like tell her she should run away?” I snapped.
    He shrugged. “No need to get defensive. I was just asking.”
    “So, was it voluntary?”
    “Nothing to indicate it was,” he said. “Nothing to indicate it wasn’t.”
    My stomach turned with fear.
    A week later, the bouncer was found dead, all the fingers of his right hand missing, cigarette burn marks all over his face, and a red patent leather shoe stuffed into his mouth. The cops had no leads.
    And that was that. For three months.