Chapter 5:
The next evening, Rita picked Devon up at her apartment hotel and drove them to Night Moves for a 9.00 p.m.-1.00 a.m. shift. Rita walked through the door with a renewed commitment to conveying the dangers of the streets to these kids. She introduced Devon to the other volunteers and explained the protocol for the night: answer the hotline; assess how much, if any, danger the caller was in; use the list of phone numbers and resources to try to get the kids shelter, food, medical care, or to come in for a talk. Whatever they seemed to need most. In addition to answering the phone, Rita told Devon she could help her talk to the kids who came through the drop-in centre. She didn't want to let Devon do one-on-one counseling since she hadn't been through the centre's training, but having some back-up in trying to get through to these kids couldn't hurt.
Near the middle of the shift, three girls Rita hadn't seen at the centre before came in together. They were full of false bravado, but Rita could see that they were worn out and a bit frightened. One girl in particular seemed more anxious and less street-hardened than the other two. She looked to be about 16, and scared. Rita tilted her head and gave the girl a small smile. It was a subtle invitation to fill the empty chair beside her desk. After hesitating for a few minutes—minutes that mostly seemed to involve getting teased by her "friends"—the girl made her way over to Rita.
"Hey," Rita said easily, engaging the girl like you might a frightened horse. "Have a seat. My name's Rita." Rita stuck out her hand.
The girl looked at it for a moment, and then offered a limp handshake in return. "I'm Lacey. And that's" she tossed her head back in the direction of her friends "Liz and Tina." Liz and Tina each offered a grunted "s'up?" in Rita's general direction but made no moves toward her. They seemed to have decided the coffee and food table was the place for them.
"What brings you in tonight, Lacey?"
"Just cold. And hungry. Real hungry." Her eyes were looking everywhere but at Rita.
"Well, you're welcome to the food we've got here, and I can give you a coupon for…" Rita was glancing through the slips of papers that were donations of services and coupons she had in an envelope on her desk… "McDonald's. It's a buy one, get one deal for an 'extra value meal.' It's not much, but it's yours if you want it."
"Thanks," Lacey said, taking the coupon Rita had pulled out of the pile. She sat there for a minute, seeming unsure what to do or say next, and Rita decided this was as close as she was going to get to an invitation to find out why Lacey was on the streets. As the girl started talking, Devon came and sat down beside them.
"We got kicked out of our apartment a few months ago. After my dad lost his job he took off, and my mum stopped paying the bills. When the landlord kicked us out, she said I could stay with her at her new boyfriend's place, but he's a creep." Lacey's voice trailed off.
"Are you still going to school?"
Lacey just rolled her eyes at the question.
"How are you making money?" This time it was Devon asking.
"I sell bootleg CDs and incense and stuff down by the piers. And… whatever."
Rita and Devon could guess at a few different things "whatever" might mean, but they decided not to push it.
"It's dangerous out there, you know." Rita wanted this girl off the street. She reminded her a bit of Chloe. "If I can get you into a half-way house, would you be willing to try that?" Rita tried to keep the question light, like it didn't matter to her. But it did.
"Halfway houses are for junkies and fucked up kids. I'm not fucked up. I can take care of myself. It's just been slow in the incense business," her tone managed to be both mocking and defensive.
"I'm sure you can take care of yourself, Lacey. But there are also a lot of people out on the streets who'd be happy to hurt you…"
Lacey interrupted Rita: "You mean like what happened to Jenn?"
Now Lacey had Rita and Devon's full attention.
"Did you know Jenn?" Rita asked in a tone she hoped sounded casual.
"Kind of. We weren't, like, friends or anything. But she and Tina," here she gestured toward the shorter and prettier of the two girls she had come in with, "had been tight for awhile. They had some kind of falling out right before Jenn disappeared."
"What did you hear about what happened to Jenn?" Devon asked, trying not to go into "special agent" mode.
"Just that she'd got in the car with the wrong guy and turned up raped and dead on the beach." Lacey said it like she was reading the weather report, but Rita and Devon could see the fear lurking in her eyes. She was looking at the two of them for some kind of confirmation, or maybe reassurance that it hadn't been as bad as all that.
"She got in a car?" Rita was also biting back her detective instincts, trying to sound conversational.
"That's what I heard."
"Who'd you hear that from?"
"Why? What's it matter to you?" Lacey was suddenly suspicious.
Rita's voice went up half an octave and a little more firmly than she intended she said "It matters because the creep who did this to her is still out there. And I don't want him to do anything like that to you or anyone else. So the more information we can find out about what happened to Jenn—and to Mirabella and to Chloe—the more we can tell girls like you who come here for help what to lookout for." That was true, but certainly not the whole truth of Rita's interest. At the mention of Chloe, Lacey's eyes went wide and she let out a small cry. "Chloe, too? Shit…"
"I'm sorry Lacey. Did you know her, too?"
Lacey just nodded.
"But you didn't know she'd been murdered?" Devon asked.
Lacey shook her head. "We'd had a fight a week ago, and she'd gone off to hang with some kids I don't like hanging out with."'
"And you hadn't talked to her or seen her since?"
Lacey gave her head another small shake.
"I'm sorry." Rita and Devon said, and gave the girl a minute to process the new information. Having heard Lacey cry out, Liz and Tina had started to edge closer to Rita's desk to try to eavesdrop on the conversation.
"So," Rita continued, a bit louder in case the other two decided they wanted to be useful "do you know anything about the car Jenn got into or the man she went off with?"
As Lacey was shrugging her shoulders, Tina piped up, "It was black. Shiny."
"You saw Jenn get into the car?" Rita was getting excited now. When they'd started working Jenn's case, they hadn't been able to locate anyone who'd seen her in the few hours before she disappeared. This was potentially a huge break.
"Yeah, I guess." Tina said, with no eagerness to be more helpful than absolutely necessary.
Devon took a deep breath to try to quell her impatience… "You guess?"
"I mean, I saw her get in a black car. The next day I hear she's dead. I don't know if she got into ANOTHER car after the black one. I'm just saying the last time I saw her, she was getting into a black car."
"What time was this? And where were you when she got into the car?" Rita's turn to ask questions.
"Somewhere on North Flagler, I think. I don't really remember. It might have been 10. Maybe 11."
"Did you tell anybody about this? Like the police? Or anyone?" Devon was fighting the urge to shake this girl. She couldn't tell if she was being deliberately vague, or if she was afraid of something. Or maybe she'd been high, and she really couldn't remember. And maybe that scared her, too, not knowing if the fact that she might have seen the guy meant that the guy had also seen her.
"I don't talk to cops. And I don't actually know anything. It was a black car. Shiny, like I said. Looked new. Fancy, like a Beamer or something. But I was halfway down the street when she took off with the guy. Like I said, it even coulda been another car, another guy."
"And you're sure it was a guy in the car?" Rita again.
"Yeah. He called out to her. Jenn was more willing to turn tricks than me. That shit gets you in trouble."
"What was his voice like? Old guy? Young guy?" Devon was grasping for anything now.
"He sounded like a guy. Like a guy who wanted to pay for sex with a girl." Tina was becoming increasingly petulant.
Devon and Rita decided they weren't going to get any more useful information out of her. They dedicated the next fifteen minutes to trying to impress upon the three young women how dangerous this "guy" was. By calling in every favor Rita had, they managed to get them into a shelter for two nights. And Rita wrote her mobile number on three slips of paper and handed one to each girl. "You hear anything, you remember anything, call me. Please. It's important. Day or night."
"What are you, a cop?" Liz finally decided to join the conversation.
Rita sidestepped the question. "I just want to help. I don't want any of you to end up like Jenn and Chloe."