Power and Empire

Callahan glanced back down at the 302. “Your trooper made the traffic stop south of Mansfield. Blanca says a pimp named Parrot took her and Magdalena to work a party with a bunch of other girls south of Dallas last night. Eddie Feng was there. He gives us the address of that party and we’ll have a search line between there and the Mansfield traffic stop.”

“That’s still a lot of open ground,” Bourke said.

Callahan scrolled through the columns of numbers, looking for anything that might give her an address. “It’s all we’ve got right now. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Feng will know where the mansion is, the sick bastard.”

Two desks away, FBI Special Agent John Olson pitched his cell phone onto a stack of paperwork and slumped in his chair, rubbing his eyes.

Callahan looked up at him. “I sincerely hope you’re about to tell me Fort Worth PD has Parrot Villanueva in custody.”

Olson shook his head. “I wish. His apartment’s empty and he’s in the wind. We have an APB out for him, but unless he gets jammed up over a broken taillight or something…”

Callahan stood and used the flat of her hand to pound on her Vietnam War — era metal desk. The noise echoed off the high ceiling of the spacious hangar. She did this at least twice a week, and everyone on her team knew what it meant. A new turd had floated to the surface of their little world, and he was now their priority. Six police officers from four different municipalities and two sheriff’s departments, three Texas Department of Public Safety investigators, three special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and three from the FBI Dallas Field Office all peered around their computers, ready to receive marching orders. Some were relatively new, others had been on the task force for a couple years. But all the CAC Task Force members had so much experience rescuing kids that they’d accumulated a deep and abiding hatred for the men and women they hunted. It was controlled hatred, hatred that Callahan made sure they kept within the bounds of the law, but it was hatred nonetheless. Callahan banging on her desk was like the horn to a foxhound. Every member of the team sat poised, twitching to channel their hatred into the hunt.

“Okay, listen up! There’s a thirteen-year-old girl out there named Magdalena Rojas who needs our help. Right now, our best chance at finding her is a worthless little creeper named Eddie Feng.” She threw the last name like an expletive. “Not sure if it’s Edward or Eddie. He speaks English, but judging from the scant information we have, he may be Chinese.”

Joe Rice, a detective working off a federal grant from the Waxahachie Police Department, raised his pen. He was in his fifties, with thinning blond hair and a drooping mustache he’d probably not shaved since his first days in the police academy thirty years before. A new grandfather and a deacon in the Waxahachie First Baptist Church, he was the reason Callahan didn’t curse as much as she would have liked to.

“Do we got a photo of Eddie Feng?”

“We will as soon as you get me one, Joe,” Callahan said.

She’d conducted the interview with Blanca Limón, so she had a general physical description. “Our only witness is another thirteen-year-old girl named Blanca who was being forced to turn tricks with Magdalena. Blanca describes Feng as being in his mid-thirties, around five-feet-eight, slender build, with glasses. She says he downs energy drinks like they’re going out of style… and he’s sporting a fauxhawk.”

“Of course he is,” Olson said, still rubbing his eyes.

“I’ve got him on Facebook,” an African American detective named Jermaine Armstrong said. The Dallas PD detective was a dedicated gym rat and wore the sleeves of his gunmetal T-shirt rolled up over biceps the size of cantaloupes. He also possessed the uncanny ability to sell anything to anyone — especially online. He turned his laptop around to show Eddie Feng’s profile pic, complete with a can of Red Bull and the fauxhawk. Once Callahan had seen it, Armstrong turned the computer back and began to peck at the keys again. Callahan hit an icon on her desktop and pulled up an image of the detective’s screen on the whiteboard behind her.

Armstrong peered over the top of his computer. “Our little friend Sugar just sent him a friend request. According to Messenger, he’s online right now. He should be getting back to her shortly if he likes what he sees.”

“Sugar” was the name of a computer-generated image of a twelve-year-old girl who could have been a Hispanic or Filipina. The avatar allowed law enforcement to pose and talk to men under her identity without using the image of an actual human child. Sugar was dressed innocently enough in a pair of pink shorts and simple white T-shirt. Sadly, that innocence was the hook for a great many men.