With a Twist (Last Call #4)(3)
Simon Keyes is my main target-my objective in this sting.
He owns The Platinum Club, along with a variety of other semi-legitimate businesses. A pawnshop that actually fronts stolen goods, a Western union franchise that cashes forged welfare checks for a cut of the proceeds, and a bakery that fronts as a meth operation. None of those businesses interests me, the Raleigh PD, or the FBI though.
No, the business we have our eye on is one that is very covert and has taken me quite some time to inch my way in on. That's because if Simon is ever busted for what I'm looking at him for, he's going away forever, and so, he's very picky as to who he brings into his circle of trust.
Simon Keyes is in the sex-slave trade. He came upon the FBI's radar about two years ago when they investigated a woman's claim from out in Denver, who showed up at the police station. Her name is Laney Tellar, and her story was that she had been abducted and sold into sexual slavery. She had no clue where she was being held, stating that it was on a private estate in a nondescript neighborhood. She was never out of chains for the entire time of her captivity, so she never even knew what state she was in. However, her owner-Master as she was told to call him-apparently couldn't be separated from her and insisted she go on a business trip with him to Denver. He kept her in chains there too, drugged and gagged when he was away, right in the posh hotel room he had booked for three days.
His mistake was in leaving the key to the cuffs on the nightstand while he went to take a shower one evening, and she made a quick break for it. By the time the police had gotten her statement and sent units to the hotel, the man was long gone. He had, of course, checked in under an alias and no trace of him could be found. Laney reported it took them approximately six hours to reach Denver by stretch limo from wherever she was being held, so the geographical radius of her prison could be ascertained but not much else.
The one thing Laney did know, however, was that she was abducted from Raleigh, North Carolina, where she had been living since dropping out of college at the age of nineteen. By age twenty, she had been dancing at The Platinum Club and was hooked on cocaine. Her last clear memories of North Carolina were going to bed at night in her little dingy apartment on Cowell Street in downtown. She woke up gagged with her hands and feet tied, rolling around the back of a cargo van.
She met her Master two days after that, enduring nearly two months of almost daily rapes before she was able to escape.
There was nothing to tie The Platinum Club or Simon Keyes to the abduction. He was known to the police and had done a few stints in prison for his various crimes, but other than his shady past, there wasn't one solid lead to tie Simon to the abduction. The only thing that kept the FBI's eye on him was the fact that over the past two years, numerous dancers who worked there would mysteriously go missing. They just wouldn't show up for work and turnover was abnormally high for this industry, which usually provided these women with more money than they could ever dream of. Down-on-their-luck women just didn't walk away from that type of cash.
The police and FBI knew the turnover was high because they had a man on the inside. He was just a bouncer and never stood a chance to make it into the circle of trust, because that wasn't his job. He was instructed to just watch and report, and that is what he did for almost eighteen months, alerting the investigators to the abnormally large amount of women that just never showed up for work as scheduled. The police would surreptitiously move in for follow up, trying to track down the women, but they could never be found. Their apartments were as if they had just left for a walk around the neighborhood. All of their clothes and personal effects were still there, including their wallets and identification. They had clearly been kidnapped. Even in the three months I've been here, two more of the dancers have gone missing. The sad part is that there's never anyone to claim them as missing. No family … no friends. The women had clearly been targeted as members of society that no one will ever miss.
Based on industry averages, of which the FBI has a statistic for about everything you could ever want to know, and the fact that when these women simply vanished, they had become convinced that the strip club, and more importantly, Simon Keyes, was very much involved in something nefarious.
The hypothesis was the sex-slave trade, and they needed solid proof tying him to it. They needed someone on the inside to bring it down and save these women.
My journey into the circle of trust was rocky. Getting the job was easy enough. The FBI provided me with a rock-solid alias as Charles "Razor" Hawkins. I was a man that had served time in the pen for drug dealing, getting the name "Razor" for my handiwork with … well … you guessed it, a razor. I came to Simon Keyes highly recommended by an FBI informant who was still active in the criminal underworld and did favors for the government in exchange for certain favors they would bestow upon him. Said informant knew Simon Keyes well and had some minor ties to the mafia, so his word was pretty solid.