Ridley Pearson - The First Victim

With the camera’s viewfinder indicating too little light, Melissa nonetheless recorded the oppressive conditions below-emaciated women, their heads shaved bare, towering bales of fabric enclosing them like walls, the air clouded with a hazy dust, the room’s only light coming from small, dim bulbs fixed to the sewing machines. The Asian women worked furiously, some sewing, others at cutting tables, still others gathering the finished product into bundles. Two Chinese males patrolled the floor carrying what looked like nightsticks-gang members probably. Another wave of fear overcame her: The Chinese gangs were notoriously ruthless.

She zoomed in, hoping that she could capture the feeling of the place. Exhausted faces drenched in sweat; the frantic pace; the tension of the guards’ presence.

Through the lens she followed a leg chain from where it was bolted to a sewing machine which was in turn bolted to a blood-raw ankle. She moved station-to-station, woman-to-woman; not all were chained, but enough to know the lengths to which the guards went to prevent escapes or ensure discipline. Like slaves, she thought.

If they shackled their own seamstresses, what would they do to an uninvited nosy journalist? Perhaps she should turn back now. She already had some incredible images.

But she did not yet have the story. She wanted on-camera interviews with the illegals, pictures of the deplorable living conditions she felt certain she would find with a little more digging. She was a journalist not a cameraperson. And this was a career-defining moment.

She went ahead as planned and removed the camera’s tape in order to hide it well enough so that no one would find it before she could come back and get it. She then worked her way farther along the catwalk that hung over the huge room, finally entering a long passageway that descended by steep metal stairs toward the sound of running water.

She felt her way to a steel door, its handle removed to prevent its use, to trap the inhabitants on the other side. But as she put her eye to the hole left behind by this missing hardware, she understood its other purpose as well-it offered the guards a peephole into a shower room.

She counted five women in all, naked and shaved of all body hair. The room might have once been used for storage-no drains or faucets, just garden hose and plastic showerheads secured to, and hanging from, the overhead pipes. The women-girls, really-stood clustered together, shivering under the limp stream of water, their faint whispers in the foreign tongue barely audible. Melissa craned to one side and spotted a sixth woman who stood sentry. Melissa’s side of the metal door was fastened shut with two oversized dead bolts. One eye to the hole in the door, Melissa waited for her chance to enter. She could interview these women, thanks to her Chinese. And then a more devious thought occurred: What if she were to become one of them? Live with them? Work with them? What if she could spend a whole day and a night here? Who would notice one more Chinese woman among the hundreds? She grinned a grin of satisfaction, her attention no longer on the women showering but on a bar of soap and the pink plastic razor teetering on the ledge directly across from her, and the knowledge of what had to be done.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 181 DAY MISSING

By midnight that Tuesday night Stevie McNeal began to worry. A late-night person, she often didn’t go to bed until after the start of the new day, giving up the reruns and reading herself to sleep. Melissa, by contrast, was a morning person and, as such, went to bed early on all but the rarest occasions. Melissa had not called the night before as promised. She wasn’t answering at the apartment, nor on her cellphone, which led Stevie to believe she was out conducting the surveillance, just the idea of which made Stevie anxious and worried.

She blamed the woman’s silence on her own bossy attitude during the meeting with the state auditor, and the fact that with the two women knowing each other as well as they did, Melissa could easily have interpreted Stevie’s attitude as a signal for her to deliver. For the past three years she had pushed her ‘‘little sister’’ to take the job offer she had arranged with the station, to take a regular paycheck rather than wallowing in misplaced pride and the unpaid bills of a freelancer. But Melissa declined the offered hand, in part because it came from Stevie and in part because of a refusal to compromise her work with a lot of worthless puff pieces ordered by an editor desperate to fill the time between ads. Stevie secretly admired the woman’s nobility-in retrospect she had compromised her own career far too quickly by always taking the first job offered-but it did little to appease her present anxieties.

At one in the morning she called both numbers again, now taking to pacing while she thought this all out. Another aspect of Melissa’s native pride was her professional secrecy; she had once worked on an independent environmental piece for three weeks before finally letting Stevie in on its subject matter-salmon poaching by Native Americans-as if by being let in on it Stevie would have sent a camera crew out on the story. In the week since the auditor had leaked the LSO information, Stevie’s only real knowledge of what Melissa was up to involved the surveillance of Gwen Klein. Beyond that and the financial information they had collected on the couple, she had few other leads to follow if needed.

Stevie finally fell asleep out of the exhaustion of being consumed in worry. When she awakened, she immediately called Melissa’s numbers from bed, but only to hear that awful sound of endless ringing. She skipped the Nordic Trak, skipped the lazy morning routine of four newspaper subscriptions and the audio wallpaper of continuous CNN that typically occupied the first few hours of any day, and headed directly to Melissa’s apartment in Pioneer Square, an apartment for which she had co-signed the lease, an apartment for which she held a spare set of keys warm in her hand.

The apartment offered nothing. She rang the buzzer on the ground floor, then let herself into the building, then knocked on the door to 5B and opened it when Melissa failed to answer. A modest one bedroom with a small living/dining area, it offered a poor view of a side alley and no cross-ventilation had the windows been open, which they weren’t. It was, in fact, the slightly stale scent of the place that told Stevie Melissa hadn’t been there recently. Melissa lived for fresh air; this contradiction spoke volumes. She found fresh food in the refrigerator and a garbage can filled to overflowing.

It felt dangerous all of a sudden, like realizing the noise downstairs is not the dog at all because the dog is lying by the bed. This was not merely an empty apartment, it was an apartment that had not been visited in recent hours. The bed was unmade-Melissa in her usual hurry. A toothbrush stood in the drinking glass on the sink and alarmed Stevie almost more than anything else about the empty apartment. Melissa was obsessed with clean teeth. The discovery of the toothbrush meant she had not taken a planned trip.

Her stomach clenched painfully in a combination of remorse and guilt, she left the apartment in something of a daze, her imagination running wild with possibility. At what point did she react publicly to the woman’s silence? At what point did she go to the police or Brian Coughlie at the INS and seek help? At what point did she simply relax and take a deep breath, trusting that Melissa was on to a hot story and didn’t have the opportunity to call? She left with that sickening feeling still plaguing her.

Stevie climbed back into the saddle, the anchor desk chair bouncing slightly as she sat. She scanned the pink pages of script for the N4@5 news hour, but somehow she couldn’t focus and she kept losing her place.