Chapter 34: Leo Yu
"You!"
There was no mistaking the look of mingled rage and fury and fear in Leo Yu's eyes as he stared at the quiet young woman who stepped into the interrogation room.
"Yes. Me." Cam showed no outward sign of what she must have been feeling at facing, for the first time as a free adult, the man who arranged for her captivity for three years as a child. "Surprised?"
"You're—you're supposed to be dead!" Yu howled.
"Oh come now. Did you really believe that or did you just tell yourself that when you saw the newspaper clipping after the fire and the clipping said there were only two bodies in the rubble?" Cam smiled thinly. "I'll bet you knew I didn't die." She leaned across the table, her face inches from Yu's. "You knew I wasn't dead. I'll bet you thought one of your clients decided he wanted me all to himself and set fire to the cabin just to steal your property. Me." She circled him, and the man definitely had the look of a wounded gazelle watching a circling lioness. His eyes followed her, and Alex noticed that he seemed to want to keep his shoulders facing Cam; all body language signs that Alex knew, from sparring with Shana and learning self-defense moves, meant that Yu definitely saw Cam as a possible physical threat. Cam was rattling him. Good, hopefully that meant they'd get something positive out of this.
Cam tossed the ledger, now packed in a plastic evidence bag, on the table. "I don't know if you ever saw this or not. My Aunt and Uncle kept a ledger. It has names, dates, what activity the clients paid them to be able to do to me, what they liked, what they didn't like. They knew which activities I hated the most and they also kept track of what I hated so much I couldn't 'be a good girl' for the client. They kept track of what they punished me for and how they punished me." She leaned forward across the table again and smiled, and it wasn't a nice smile either. "I also know they sent you pictures. Did you keep those pictures?"
Yu's eyes flicked from side to side, quickly.
Cam stood back from the table. "He still has them. Tell the other detectives to look for child porn. He'll have them somewhere at home, probably in the bedroom." She smiled again, more like a wolf baring her teeth in a snarl. "In close reach of his night table. After all, he never could find a woman who looked young enough to please him." She looked at Alex. "I'll come back and talk to him once your detectives are done tossing his apartment. In the meantime, get me out of this room before I kill the piece of filth."
Alex couldn't get the interrogation room door open fast enough.
Don Cragen looked up as his office door opened and Alex and the female soldier walked in. Before she could say anything, he held up a hand. "Let's adjourn to one of the conference rooms. I don't think my office is big enough for all of us."
Once he, Alex, John, Fin, Cam, Ettienne, and Charlie were seated in the conference room, he pinned Alex with an expectant look. "Now. Care to tell me what's going on?"
Alex extracted the ledger from the evidence bag and handed it across the table to him. As he picked it up and started to leaf through it, she started to tell him the story. About Cam, about her childhood at Osan, her father's death, her coming to live in New York with her Aunt and Uncle. John broke in briefly to speak, quietly, about the investigation he'd spearheaded eight years before that he'd ultimately had to abandon because Cam had been too scared to tell him what was going on, and then Alex picked up the thread of the story. She detailed the slow withdrawal and deterioration of Cam's outer support system—school and dance classes—and the isolation that finally and ultimately led to her captivity in the mountain cabin in Western New York. "The ledger you're looking at is a list of the clients who came to 'rent' the cabin, some of them procured through the travel agent sitting in your interrogation room. There's a list of names, descriptions of what they wanted to do with Cam, and how much they paid her Aunt and Uncle and Leo Yu for the privilege of molesting her."
Don stared at the ledger, looking revolted and disgusted. "And we're just now getting around to this?"
"I spent three years there. By the end of those three years I didn't care if I lived or died anymore." Cam's soft words fell heavily in the silent room. "I got free of the shackles one night and grabbed a gas can from the garage, then doused the place with it and set fire to the cabin. I didn't try to escape—it was never in my mind. Where, after all, would I go? I just," she swallowed hard, "I just wanted to make sure they couldn't hurt anyone, ever again. The fire was still raging when the floor collapsed and I fell through and when I woke up I found I'd survived. I was pretty badly burned, the fire took most of my skin between my knees and my chest, but I survived and I wandered by accident onto the Iroquois reservation and they took me in, took care of me. While I was recovering they figured out who I was and where I'd come from, and they backtracked and found what was left of the burned cabin. The ledger and all the paperwork were being held by the Iroquois tribe who found me, and I only acquired it over the summer and realized what it was."
Ettienne took up the thread of the story; as the ranking military officer there, it was his duty after all. "We went on a mission a few weeks ago to the Congo with a team of ten to find some witnesses for the ICC that had gone missing when rogue militia raided the village," he said succinctly. "We did manage to successfully rescue the witnesses, all of whom were children," and Fin grimaced in disgust, "But in the process one of our soldiers, a friend named Shana O'Hara, was captured by the rogues. We managed to trace her progress through the DRC to a port on the Congo River as she was sold by the rogues to human traffickers, but lost them when they bypassed the port in Angola and we had no idea what other ports they might choose to put in at, so we had no choice but to come home. Now, during the progress of the mission we did capture the rogue leader and interrogate him," he wisely didn't mention who had actually done the interrogating, "And learned through a combination of the information he gave and some of Cam's knowledge as a former victim of human trafficking herself that Shana would be taken to Amsterdam to be sold because it would be too dangerous for the slavers to sell her in Africa, she's too distinctive.
"We tried talking to the FBI, of which Shana, though an Army officer, is a member of and maintains her clearance with; however, our efforts to go through official channels to find her have been hampered by the somewhat negative viewpoint Homeland Security has of her capture. Their position is that she has possibly defected and that her training and skills make her a potential threat should she choose to offer those skills to an organization or group whose interests run counter to the US or its allies."
Don snorted. "Like that's likely." This brought a faint ghost of a smile to Cam's face.
"So the reason why we're pursuing this now is that one, Mr. Yu has gotten away with this long enough. We brought back one of his clients, a man named Maxwell Stuart. Mr. Stuart exited the office just before John walked in it and we heard enough of the conversation to suspect that Mr. Yu had arranged a trip overseas for the purpose of underage sex tourism. He's now cooling his heels in jail." Alex smiled, and it wasn't a nice one, but she sobered immediately. "The other reason we moved on him now is because he is 'in' on the human trafficking trade. Since we've given up on finding Shana through official channels, we're going to try now to find her through unofficial ones. That plan involves inserting Cam into the slave trade underground so she can move around, find Shana, and signal us for a retrieval. But in order to do that we need to have Mr. Yu's cooperation to insert Cam. The only way to get in is through someone already in, I believe that's how Cam put it." Cam nodded slightly.
Don put the ledger down, looked at it for long moments. "I can't say that I'm entirely happy with it, but I also remember," he nodded to Cam, "What you said about it being a win-win situation. I don't think so; I can see a hundred ways for this to go wrong and a lot of them aren't pretty, and in the end I think this is going to cost you a lot more than you expect it will now." Cam started to say something, but he held up his hand for silence. "Let me finish. I can see you're a very stubborn young woman, and having been through this once I believe that you know, better than anyone else here, what going undercover like this is going to involve. I also believe that you believe that your plan is the best one, and for that, I guess I'm willing to go with my detectives and my ADA on this one." He stopped speaking as they heard a tap on the door. "Come in."
It was Amanda Rollins' blond head that poked in around the doorframe. "I was looking for—o=h, there you are, Alex," she said. "I'm sorry to disturb—"
"Not at all, we're all friends here and we're all interested in the same thing," Alex said quickly before anyone else could reply. "What did you find out?"
"I want to scrub my brain," Rollins said with a face that spoke eloquently of her disgust. "We found shoeboxes full of photographs, photo albums with pictures, and the Computer Crimes section is going through his computer pulling a huge library of violent child porn off his hard drive. I haven't been here long but I have to say that definitely has to qualify among the biggest stashes of child porn I've ever seen." Her eyes roved over the assembled people and stopped short as she looked at Cam. Disgust turned to horror as she croaked, "It was you. You were in the movies and pictures."
"I knew he kept pictures. He had movies too?"
"The movies were stored on his hard drive." Rollins said, her face going slightly pale.
"My aunt and uncle kept me captive in an upstate New York mountain cabin that Mr. Yu owned. Then he arranged for clients to pay to come and molest me." Cam's voice was flat, even. "It was a long time ago and there is nothing that can be done now. But at least you have him and you can get him on trafficking and porn charges."
"Do we want to go talk to Mr. Yu again, now that he knows we've got him beyond a reasonable doubt?"
Cam rose from her seat, flashing Alex a nasty, cold smile. "Yes, let's go talk to him."
Mr. Yu looked up from his sitting position at the table in the interrogation room. One look at Alex's icy eyes and Cam's cold smile seemed to alert him that something was wrong, because he suddenly looked a little apprehensive.
"Oh, nervous, are we?" Cam leaned forward and Alex sat back, willing to let Cam take the lead, as she had when they had interrogated Zimurinda the second time in the Congo. "The detectives just got done tossing your place. Found some photo albums with very interesting pictures in it…really interesting. Quite the collector, aren't you?" She made a face. "How many pictures of me got out there on the internet? How many movies did my Aunt and Uncle send you of what those monsters did to me? You sick son of a bitch, how the hell could you sit there and watch that? I was fifteen!"
Her display of anger seemed to unnerve Leo Yu a little more. Alex had to admire her courage and her ability to read people. If they'd remained calm, he wouldn't have looked that nervous, but seeing her furious face, hearing the anger in her voice, and the realization that somewhere down there he did deserve her yelling at him all seemed to combine to make him a bit more anxious.
"I—I just looked at the stuff they gave me—I put it out there for the clients, they pay a lot of money for those videos—and it wasn't my fault, I didn't make those movies, your aunt and uncle did so it's their fault, not mine. I swear." He sounded truly frightened. "I'm sorry—I'm sorry."
"Seriously. You're sorry?" Cam laid her hands flat on the tabletop, pinned him with a hard stare. "Prove it. One of my friends has been kidnapped by human traffickers and is on her way to the Amsterdam slave market from Africa. I need you to get me in."
The man's jaw dropped. "In? You want to go into the slave markets to get her out?" A crafty look came to his eye. "So I get to take you to Amsterdam in cuffs and chains in exchange for my freedom?"
"Absolutely not," Alex cut in. "There will be no freedom for you, Mr. Yu, no matter what you do. It's simply not possible. But I will cut a deal with you, if you help us out I'll reduce the sentence I'll ask the courts for cooperation—and I'll recommend leniency from the federal court."
"No federal court."
It took a moment for that to sink in, and then Alex exploded. "What?"
"No federal court." He looked like a crocodile who had just swallowed a large, tasty meal. "No federal court."
"Hey, I haven't even told you want I want you to do," Cam snapped after a slashing glance at Alex. "Two of my other friends will pose as handlers for a mythical master, taking me to the Amsterdam market to sell me because he's tired of me. The only thing we want from you is letters of introduction, documents that will prove their identity and provide a cover for their entry into the market. You're not leaving jail. Not once. I know there are more children out there than just me, I know there's probably a lot of victims out there like me and they aren't all here in this country. And not many of them will be as lucky to escape as I was. So take it."
"I want federal immunity." He was smiling now, a cocky, smug, self-assured smile that Alex had to suppress the urge to slap off his face. "You arrested me on tax fraud and human trafficking. Those are federal crimes. You grant me federal immunity and I'll help you out, that way I only face State child porn charges, I'll be out in four years. That's the maximum penalty, isn't it?" he grinned.
Alex took a breath to say something, but Cam put a hand on her arm. "Alex can't make that kind of decision, she has to consult with her boss first."
"I'll get back to you tomorrow." Alex snapped, and then steered Cam out of the room.
She didn't say anything to the younger woman until they were back in Don's office, then she burst out, "Son of a bitch. He had this planned. He knew exactly what to do if he was ever caught, he knew exactly what he was going to say and how he was going to weasel out of this!"
"Is what he said true? Can you give him immunity and make sure the Feds don't prosecute him?"
"Yes, I can, but Cam, that's not the point!" Alex was furious; her eyes turned to blue fire and her cheeks flamed. "I can't do it. Doing this will only give him four years in jail for you, for the pain and suffering you went through, all the pain and suffering he's caused countless victims all over the world. I can't let him off that easy, Cam, I can't! I believe in honor and justice and fairness, and this is not honorable, just, or fair!"
"Shana is your friend too!" Cam lost her temper. "Shana is your friend too, you knew her longer than you've known me. Where is the honor and fairness and justice for her? Without him we might as well just hold a funeral now for her and get a death certificate! This plan is the only way we're going to get her back. You really think those DHS suits are going to put any effort into finding her at all? If you think that, then—"
"Ladies!" Don Cragen's voice thundered through the room, effectively ending the argument between the two. Cam had never heard Don get angry, so for her it was unexpected—Alex had heard him get angry before, but never like this. "Let's put him in a holding cell and cool him down, you can talk to him in Central Booking later. In fact, let me recommend that you talk to him tomorrow, give both of you time to cool off and regroup. Gunnery Sergeant, I recommend that you take your people back to your base before you're caught out after curfew; I know it's getting late, and you don't want to get in trouble. Besides, having this many soldiers in my squadroom is drawing more attention than I really want to have to deal with right now." His tone brooked no argument.
Alex was about to follow the soldiers out of the room but Cragen stopped her. "Alex. This is going to rest with you, I'm pretty sure that DA Cutter is going to leave it up to your discretion. You're reserve military, you've worked with and served with these soldiers, even went on a couple of missions with them if I'm not mistaken, so you have a better idea what their capabilities are than even I would have. So, in your opinion, if you think they really can pull this off, then go ahead and do what you think you have to."
"I don't want to do this, Don." Alex said, unable to hide the frustrated tone of her voice from Don Cragen, the man who had been a surrogate father since she'd joined the SVU over a decade ago. "I don't want to give him a free pass!"
"Then don't. Find a loophole. You are the best there is at what you do, and I trust that you're going to be able to make this work."
His confidence in her and her abilities made her smile. "I wish I had that much confidence in me, Don."
"Then you need to think better of yourself, Alex. Because I always have." She took his smile with her as she reluctantly left.