Page 25 of Wild (Chicago Underground 4)
The girl at the party, the one we’d left behind in the hotel room. The reporter had made no mention of a dead hooker, which was certainly newsworthy if only for the salacious appeal. She had probably bailed shortly after we did, I assured myself. “Is she okay?” I asked.
Jade snorted. “How should I know? Maybe, maybe not. Henri knows it was you, and she makes him money, so why would he hurt her?”
“Great,” I said faintly.
“She start maybe three years before you.”
“Jenny? I guess. She was pretty far in when I started, but she isn’t the type to pull rank.”
She seemed not to hear me. “Her mother was a nurse, gone during the day. Jenny started getting high, so her mom kicked her out. Tough love, they say. Jenny quit school and moved in with her boyfriend. A common story.”
“Mmm-hmm.” It was a common story. The kind that made Jade’s business possible. So I wasn’t sure why Jade was telling me this, but conversations with her were often circuitous. Once she had talked for fifteen minutes about her kidney stones before segueing into telling me about Marguerite and the women’s shelter she ran, concluding they were both a pain in her side. At least this seemed more relevant.
Jade flipped through a Vogue magazine and pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping. She slid it across the glass coffee table toward me. It appeared to be a small inner-page article titled “Dead End in Drug-Related Shooting.” The piece explained that a twenty-three-year-old male had been found shot dead in his apartment. Due to his previous history of dealing charges and the circumstances of the break-in, police assumed the hit was drug related. Rumors indicated that the victim had poached the territory of a well-known dealer in the city, Henri Denikin, but there was insufficient evidence to link him to the shooting. A chill ran through me.
The last paragraph remarked that the only possible witness, the victim’s seventeen-year-old live-in girlfriend, had been missing since the shooting. Her name was Jennifer Ponds. There was a grainy black-and-white photograph of a girl who looked about nine years old, dressed up for her school picture. A younger, happier version of the Jenny I knew, one who couldn’t imagine the indignities that would be visited on her body.
Beneath the photo was a number for the missing-persons hotline. With a jerky motion, I threw the clipping back on the coffee table, but it caught on the air and floated to my feet. My fingers had black smudges left from the ink.
“What is this?” I asked. “What does this have to do with me?”
Jade shrugged. “Maybe nothing.”
Unaccountably, I felt angry. “This is from the original paper, not a printout. So you knew about this at the time. Did you call this number? Did Jenny even have a chance?”
“Call them?” she asked scornfully. “What for, call them?”
I shook my head, throat tight. Her words replayed in my head: “What for, call them?” That wasn’t how this worked; I knew that. Every one of these girls had a story. Every one of us had a story, and it didn’t matter. I had a story. Don’t think about it. What for?
“Hey,” Jade chastised. “Did the rich bastard fuck you so hard your brains are broken, huh? You want to save your skin, or the girl you have, then pay attention.”
I looked down, feeling properly chastised. Of course Jade was helping me. My gut told me this was important, and I would never have found it without her.
Focus on Jenny. On Ella. This wasn’t about me.
I picked up the clipping again and stared at her bright smile. Was this the most recent picture her mother had owned of her daughter?
“Yesterday Henri had those men shot in retaliation. The same thing he did before, with her dealer boyfriend.”
Jade shook her head. “You are determined not to see truth.”
“It could be a pattern,” I said more gently. “Maybe those guys at the party had done something to Henri. Cheated him.”
She gave me a look not unlike the one she’d used on the customers earlier. Idiot.
Okay, then. “So if it’s not that… That’s how he acquired Jenny. It wasn’t random. Maybe it was even a little bit of revenge, to whore out the girlfriend of a man who screwed him over.”
She looked approving, if that was what the retreat of her scowl meant.
I continued, “And if that’s how he acquired Ella too, then it explains why she was so clueless about it. It also explains why he doesn’t want to give her up.”
“Face,” Jade said curtly.
Everything was face with her. Face meant a man’s reputation, his respect, his ruthlessness. If Ella represented some sort of revenge to Henri, he wouldn’t let her slip away so easily. Killing the men and framing her for the murder might have been the most convenient way of finding her in the large city.
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“If you hand over the girl, Henri will owe you.” At my shocked look, she raised her eyebrow. “Maybe owe you enough to let you go.”
