More than simply functioning as backup, the patrol officers had good local knowledge. Preston Court was a down and dirty industrial zone, a partially unpaved, two-lane alley lined on either side by low-rise weathered brick and concrete warehouses, mounded quarry materials, and metal-scrap lots bordered by chain link and razor wire. The spice distributor sat a hundred yards east between a tire recycler and a boiler-system repair company. The ranking uni, a sergeant, said all the business on that stretch of Preston loaded their materials in and out the front doors, so there was only a narrow service track running behind the buildings, an easy route to plug with a patrol car on each end. Heat told the sergeant she liked his plan and dispatched him and the other team to the back, keeping one of the uniforms to go in the front door with her and Rook.
On the drive up the block, they passed a flatbed stacked with hollow automobile bodies in front of a crusher yard. Next door, outside a vacant hulk with a red and white sign advertising thirty thousand square feet for lease, a handful of young Latinos crouched with cupped hands around their smokes as if the hurricane were a minor inconvenience. When they made the undercover cop car, they ran in all directions. Pulling up to Marco Polo Worldwide Spice Distributors, Rook scoffed at the sign. “If this isn’t a front for something, I’ll eat a tablespoon of cayenne.” Indeed, the sad building looked anything but international, a double-height box of exposed concrete blocks topped by rusty corrugated steel panels.
The front door was unlocked, either through sloppiness or thanks to the smokers, and the three entered. They found the reception area unattended. Clearly it got no walk-in customers. Dingy framed photos of herbs drying on foreign hillsides graced Masonite paneling straight out of a Khrushchev-era basement bomb shelter. Inside the dust-caked display cases, bowls of dead and decayed spices were laced with cobwebs. From their pallid color and texture, they might have been delivered by Marco Polo himself.
The door to the side of the counter opened, and an imposing guy ripped with muscles stepped in, hastening to pull it closed behind him. “Help you?” he said in a voice an octave higher than anyone expected from his roided body.
“Interested in some spices,” said Rook. “I’m just mad about saffron.”
Both the officer and the muscleman gave him strange looks. Heat’s focus stayed on the hard body, whom she saw stuff something in his back pocket and cover it with his untucked shirt tail. “I’d like to speak to the manager. Is that you?”
“We’re closed.”
“The door was open.” She parted her coat to show some tin and Sig Sauer. “Are you the manager?”
“No.”
“Who is?”
“You have a warrant?” As soon as he asked it, the inner door behind him opened wide. A slender Asian man holding an unlit cigarette and a disposable lighter stood in it. Behind him they could see a portion of a large, open warehouse with about a dozen foreign men, women, and children off-loading garbage bags from a box truck. Muscle Man gave the guy with the cig a shove back inside and pulled the door shut.
“Won’t be needing a warrant. I just happened to observe illegal activity. That girl I just saw is working in violation of child labor laws,” said Heat, approaching him. “And you are under arrest for carrying an illegal weapon.” She reached in his back pocket and pulled out a telescoping billy club. While the uniform frisked and cuffed him, she said, “I think I’d like my tour now.”
An hour later, still handcuffed, but seated in a stained executive chair in the middle of the warehouse, the muscleman, Mitch Dougherty watched glumly as his workforce of forty-six illegals called him names in foreign tongues as they filed past to be processed by Social Services. SSD personnel had braved the weather and arrived with two buses to transport the dozens of abused and malnourished aliens to emergency shelters and to get a health assessment.
To use the term Heat had heard from FiFi Figueroa, Mitch was only one of the bulls, an enforcer. But he was inside, and that meant he must know who ran the business. And what a business it turned out to be.
Ana, a young woman from Honduras who spoke excellent English, approached Nikki on behalf of the other workers, desperate to share the story of their plight. “I am like most of these women. We have been abducted from our hometowns and brought here against our will.”