Shards Page 16

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  Carol and my mom began calling cancer hospitals in LA but no one acknowledged having me as a patient. Carol thought I might have used an assumed name, so she had long, detailed conversations with all sorts of facilities. But for obvious reasons, the cancer story never held up. There were no medical records anywhere to confirm it.

  After speaking to my sister, Keawe called Erin, and they went into my Maui apartment to do a thorough search. They found my ice pipes and the sex tape that my dealer had made. They also found the dealer’s name and address. They had no way of knowing he was a drug dealer, but when they background-checked him, they did find the restraining order filed by his ex-wife, so they were concerned. MPD began an official missing persons investigation and put Detective Keopu in charge of it.

  Around this time, my mom received a phone call from my landlady looking for the rent, which I hadn’t paid in a couple of months. My mom flew to Maui, and when she got to my apartment, she was shocked to see the blue investigative gloves everywhere. Meeting with Keawe and Erin, she learned for the first time that Keawe was my boyfriend, something he was still concealing from Detective Keopu and the rest of MPD. Everyone now knew about the drugs. Together with Detective Keopu, my mom contacted the Everett Police Department and asked them to send an officer to the dealer’s house for a welfare check.

  The dealer had spent a lot of time telling me that my mother hated me, that Keawe hated me, so when that officer showed up at the door—a female from EPD—I learned for the first time that my family was looking for me.

  “I’m here to see Miss Allison Moore,” the officer said. “Are you Allison Moore?”

  “Yes, she is,” the dealer said. I was hovering in the background, not sure if he wanted me there or not.

  Upstairs, the cats howled.

  “Is that a—baby?” asked the officer.

  “Just some cats,” the dealer said, and the officer nodded.

  “I need to ask Miss Moore a few questions,” she said.

  “Sure,” the dealer said. I moved toward him, and the three of us stood outside the front door.

  “Your mother is concerned about you, Miss Moore,” the officer said. “Are you okay? Do you want to leave?”

  “Of course not,” I said. I was shocked that my mom was concerned. I thought she hated me. I didn’t want to leave—I thought I had it pretty good here. The dealer was the only one who loved me, the only one taking care of me. If I left, where would I go?

  The dealer laughed. “That’s crazy,” he said.

  “I’d like to hear it from Miss Moore, please,” the officer said.

  “My mom,” I said. “She can be a little . . . a little dramatic. If I haven’t called her in a few days she thinks I’ve been kidnapped.” I laughed nervously.

  “So you are not being held against your will?” the officer said.

  I looked at the dealer out of the corner of my eye.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “So tell me, why haven’t you called your mother?” the officer asked, adopting a chattier, let’s-be-friends tone.

  “She’s an adult, ma’am,” the dealer said. “Her mother doesn’t need to keep tabs on her.”

  The officer shook her head. “I’m just doing my job.” She had no way of knowing he was a drug dealer, of course, and even if she had a search warrant, she would never have found anything in that house. He kept everything so well hidden that even I couldn’t find his drugs. Believe me, I had tried.

  The officer turned to me. “So there’s no problem?” she asked. “You’re fine?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and she left. She had only been there a few minutes and had never even gone inside the house. She didn’t separate the two of us like I was trained to do in a domestic case, and I was too terrified to say anything against the dealer in his presence.

  The officer would report back to MPD and my mom that I appeared to be “adult and well.” She believed me to be at the dealer’s house voluntarily, and in a way I was.

  In a way I was.

  “Your mother’s a fucking mental case,” the dealer said, once the officer was gone.

  “You told me she didn’t want to see me,” I said. “If she’s looking for me, obviously she does.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I better call her.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said. “She hates you.”

  I went upstairs, walking quickly by the door to the cat room. Sometimes the dealer would threaten to put me in the room with the cats in the dark. It felt silly to be so scared of baby cats, but I was. I knew they would attack me, claw me, and I wouldn’t be able to catch them. It was all I could think about when I passed that room.

  I found my bag in the bedroom and started looking through it. I couldn’t find my phone.

  “Where’s my phone?” I called downstairs to the dealer.

  “How should I know?”

  “I can’t find it. What did you do with it?”

  “I didn’t do anything with it. You probably lost it.”

  “Bullshit. I didn’t lose it.”

  “You can’t keep track of anything,” he said.

  I searched through my bag over and over again, and in doing so realized that my badge and ID were also missing. “Where did you—” I started to yell to him, but he cut me off.

  “Come down and get me a drink, will you?” he yelled up the stairs.

  I went downstairs and fixed him a drink just as he liked it—five ice cubes, vodka poured to exactly an inch below the top of the glass—and brought it to him in the shop.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “Your vodka.”

  “I didn’t want this,” he said, throwing the drink on the floor.

  “You just asked for it,” I said.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “You can’t get anything right. Clean up this mess.”

  I bent down to scoop up the ice cubes, and his boot came crashing down on my head. My ears rang from the pain, but as he lifted the boot up again, I was able to get to my feet and run toward the stairs. I had a head start because he was coming from a seated position. I made it to the bathroom, where I closed the door and locked it, hoping he would calm down and then I could come out.

  Things became very quiet. He wasn’t yelling, he wasn’t calling my name, but suddenly I heard the key turn in the lock and he was there in the bathroom, pushing me down, forcing my head into the toilet bowl and holding it there.

  I had a mouth full of water and was sputtering, trying to get my head up.

  I’m dead, I thought.

  Good.

  Abruptly, he let go of my head, and I lifted it up, gasping, while he turned and walked away.

  “I know you hid my phone somewhere,” I yelled, as soon as I could talk again.

  With my ID, my badge, and my phone all gone, I had nothing to connect me to the world outside that house. Nothing to prove I even existed.

  If there was nothing to prove I was alive, I might as well be dead.

  21

  It was at this point that I decided to use his gun to shoot myself.

  But him first.

  When I couldn’t find the bullets for the revolver, when he found me in the shop with it, he grabbed the gun and said, “What the fuck were you going to do with that?”

  I dissolved. I could barely speak. “I just want to die,” I said quietly. “Why won’t you let me die? Please let me die.”

  He said nothing. He turned and walked away.

  Over the next few hours, I waited for a beatdown. I tried to be very nice—Can I get you a drink, can I iron your clothes?—thinking he might go gentle with me. I also tried to think of other ways to kill myself.

  I thought about using a kitchen knife, but by this time he had taken away all the sharp knives in the house. I looked for tools in the shop. I thought about getting up on the roof and diving headfirst into the concrete. Would the fall be enough to kill me?

 
; The beating never came.

  He found another way to punish me.

  The following day, his friend Joe was over, and the three of us smoked a lot of dope together. I never wanted Joe to leave because I knew afterward I would pay for looking at Joe or talking to him about something I shouldn’t have. But this time, Joe left and nothing happened.

  Then another guy appeared, a guy I’d never seen at the house before.

  “I’m going out,” the dealer said. That’s what he always said when he went to do a deal or work a job and didn’t take me. I didn’t pay any attention. I was wandering around the house high, not giving any thought to this guy. The dealer almost always left me with someone when he went out. Usually Tiffany or Joe, but sometimes just a random babysitter who would make sure I didn’t leave. This guy was fat and middle-aged, in polyester pants and a buttoned-down shirt that was too tight for him. He looked like he had come straight from work. He wore a stupid-looking tie and a wedding ring.

  I walked into the kitchen, and the next thing I knew I was fighting this guy off!

  “Get off me, you fucker!” I yelled. He attacked even more savagely.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. He was shoving me, slapping me, ripping at my clothes. I gave him one big shove and sprinted up the stairs to the bedroom. I hid in the shower, holding the handle shut, but when he found me, he was stronger and able to pull me out of there.

  He threw me on the bed while I fought as hard as I could to get him off me. He pinned me down. He was a big man, fat, greasy. He had a very hairy chest and a horrible smell. I was aware he was raping me, but I was focusing on his sweat dripping on my face. It was disgusting, and I struggled to turn my head to the side to get away from his sweat. He grabbed me by the hair on top of my head and made me look at him.

  “I like your flesh,” he said. Not skin. Flesh.

  As soon as he finished and got off me, I ran for the bathroom and hid in the shower. The guy stayed in the house afterward, and when the dealer came home he found me still in the shower, crying.

  “That asshole raped me,” I said. I was sure the dealer was going to kill the guy, but he just looked at me and said, “I thought you liked rough sex with Keawe.”

  The guy walked up behind him then, and they just kind of laughed at me.

  Then two hours later, another man. This time the dealer took the handle off the glass shower door so I couldn’t hide in there anymore.

  The men kept coming, and finally I realized I should stop fighting. That’s what they were paying for, that’s what they wanted. It wasn’t much fun for them when I just lay there.

  I have no idea how many men there were. I detached myself from what was happening and waited for my punishment to be over.

  The second-to-last guy—he couldn’t go through with it. He looked in my eyes, and I could tell he lost his nerve.

  “Jesus,” he said. “What the fuck am I doing?” He let me go and sat on the side of the bed. He lit a cigarette and offered me one.

  “No, thanks,” I said, thinking, This man is so nice, I just want him to take me home.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just not into this.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “Listen, I need to get out of here. Can you take me with you?”

  “Can’t do that,” he said.

  “Please,” I said. “I’ll do anything. You can do anything you want.”

  He shook his head.

  “Please take me with you.”

  “I’ve got a family,” he said, and walked out of the room. He couldn’t rape me, but he wouldn’t rescue me either.

  The next guy, the last guy, he was the roughest. After slapping me around a bit and raping me, he started to choke me. I felt like I was about to pass out, and I tried to remember what they taught us at recruit school to try to make your neck as tight as you can. I struggled to get my fingers under his hands, and then I blacked out. When I woke up—I’m sure I was only out for a second—my dealer was beating the guy.

  My twisted thought was, Wow, he loves me. He really loves me.

  The men stopped coming after that.

  I have no idea where these men came from. Probably he found them on the Internet. I know they paid him for their privileges, but they weren’t there for the dealer’s gratification. It’s not like he had an appetite for watching men do that. He just did it to punish me. I knew the cameras were recording all the rapes, but I doubted he would watch them. The porn he enjoyed was not sadistic, though he might find ways of selling this footage to men who did enjoy rapes.

  Later, when I was sober, I began to fantasize about killing my dealer. I also thought about these men. The dealer was crazy. Barely human. A walking drug. I knew the dealer was insane, but these men—these supposedly normal men, who came into the house, did what they did to me, and left, made me more angry and infinitely more scared. These men—they went home to their wives.

  22

  It was around this time that MPD showed up: two internal affairs detectives, Keopu and Sommers. I had never met either of them until the day they appeared at the dealer’s house.

  I had been in the house only a month, but it had felt much, much longer.

  I hid upstairs when I heard the doorbell. I was now terrified when someone new came into the house, terrified of what they were there to do. But as I listened to the conversation and heard my mom’s name, Keawe’s name, and Erin’s, I moved from the bedroom and sat at the top of the stairs next to the cat room.

  One of the detectives spotted me.

  “Allison Moore?” he asked.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Can we talk to you for a moment?”

  “Why don’t you guys come in,” the dealer said. He was arrogant enough to invite them into his drug house and not worry about being caught. Arrogant but accurate: there was nothing they would see or find that would concern them. It was a normal, suburban house and he was a normal, suburban man.

  I slowly walked down the stairs and followed them into the kitchen, where we all sat around the kitchen table.

  “Do you want a beer?” the dealer asked the detectives.

  “No, thanks,” one of them replied.

  They held out their hands and introduced themselves to me. “I’m Detective Keopu,” the older one, the Hawaiian one, said. “And this is Detective Sommers.” They weren’t wearing uniforms, but both produced their badges to show me.

  “I know why you’re here,” the dealer said. “She’s an addict. Has been for a long time. Her problems started long before I met her. Back when you guys were supposed to be taking care of her. I’m just trying to get her clean.”

  “Is that true?” Detective Keopu asked. The dealer got up from the table and stood in the doorway glaring at me.

  “Yes,” I said, admitting to MPD for the first time what I should have told them almost two years ago.

  “Is it ice?” Keopu asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You know the department can get you help.”

  “I’m helping her,” the dealer said. His act made me so angry. And his confidence—he was taking control of them just as he had taken control of me.

  “Your mother would really like you to come home,” Keopu said. “Do you think you want to do that?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m good.”

  They talked to us for a long time, maybe a half hour. At one point they did try to separate us, but the dealer was too smart for that. He stood in the doorway, threatening me with his eyes. And I let him—this monster who just days before had let men come into his house and rape me. I could see he wasn’t even worried. He knew I wouldn’t say anything.

  The detectives really had no power here, and he knew it. All they could do was talk.

  I just wanted them to go so I could ask the dealer for some dope.

  Suddenly, Sommers looked right at me and said, “Do you want to leave with us? If you want to come home with us, you can come home right now.”

  I looked at the
dealer. “No,” I said, after a minute. “I’m happy here.”

  Detective Keopu, this man who didn’t even know me but cared about me because I was his sister in blue, looked very sad. He nodded his head slowly and said, “Would you at least call your mother?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “My phone—”

  “You can give her mother my phone number,” the dealer said. “We’d be happy to talk to her.”

  Pompous asshole, I thought. He was convinced he was smarter than everybody else in the room.

  After they left, I was badly punished, whipped on my bare back with a hose.

  Eight miles away, at my sister’s house in Snohomish, Keopu and Sommers were having a barbecue with my family. They were trying to strategize how to get me to leave that house. Everyone knew that I was an addict, but because I was an adult, they couldn’t force me to leave.

  “We could all be charged with kidnapping if we try to forcibly remove her,” Keopu told my mom.

  “Then what can we do?” my mom asked. “We have to get her out of there.”

  “You’re going to have to convince her to come home.”

  Keopu brokered a conversation between my mom and the dealer, and she called him a couple of days later. He talked to her for a long time and put me on the phone briefly.

  “I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming to see you and bring you home.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t come home, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m coming,” she promised. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  It wasn’t tomorrow. It was days later than that—I found out later that the dealer kept rescheduling and putting her off. Controlling the situation.

  Meanwhile, he kept doling out punishments to me. One time he came out of the cat room with a trash bag and threw it at me. I caught it instinctively. Through the plastic I could feel that I was holding two dead kittens.

  “Here’s rotten pussy,” he said. “Just like yours.”

  I don’t know what he did to them. I suppose he broke their necks. Maybe they starved to death.

  He also began to punish me by withholding dope. This was his first mistake, maybe his only mistake. I could recover from any beating, but I couldn’t live without dope.