That’s when the panic really took over. There was no pain anymore, no sound of him choking—just overwhelming fear. It was worse than any nightmare he could imagine, because this was real. It was happening in the back room of his own gin mill in Philly.

Eddie didn’t even know that the water had stopped at first. The white guy tilted his head to the side, pulled out the screwdriver, and let him hack it out for a minute. It felt as if he were going to cough up a lung.

“Most people last a couple of minutes before they cave. Of course, these are soldiers I’m talking about.” One of them patted him on the belly. “That doesn’t quite describe you, Ed. So let me ask you again. Do you know where Johnny is?”

Eddie could barely talk, but he choked out a fast answer. “I’ll find him. I swear to God I will!”

“See, this is what I hate about the mob.” The voice came a little closer to his left ear. “You people just say whatever you need to say, whenever you need to say it. There’s no integrity. Nothing you can depend on.”

“Give me a chance! I’m begging you!”

“You don’t get it, Ed. This is your chance. You either know where Johnny is or you don’t. Now, which is it?”

“I don’t know!” He was blubbering, half out of his mind. “Please… I don’t know.”

They broke a couple of teeth getting the screwdriver back in his mouth. Eddie clenched his jaw and thrashed and begged for his life, but only until the torrent of water cut him off again. It didn’t take long before he was right back where he’d been a minute ago, absolutely convinced he was about to die.

And this time he was right.

Chapter 12

THE BIZARRE MURDER case was spreading out like spidery legs around me, but one question hung over the rest: Were there others who had died like Caroline? Was that a possibility? A probability?

Obtaining a credible account of missing persons in DC is harder than it might seem. After speaking with someone at the Youth Investigations Bureau, which has a centralized database, I had to go district by district, personally talking with detectives all over the city. Incident reports are public information, but what I needed were PD252s, which are private case notes.

That’s where I could start to filter for students, runaways, and above all, anyone with a known or suspected history of prostitution.

I brought home the files I’d gathered and took them to my office in the attic after dinner. I cleared off one entire wall and started tacking up everything—pictures of the missing, index cards with case vitals that I’d written up. Plus a DC street map, flagged everywhere that victims had last been seen.

When all that was done, I stood back and stared, looking for some kind of pattern to reveal itself.

There was Jasmine Arenas, nineteen, two priors for solicitation. She worked Fourth and K, where she’d last been seen getting into a blue Beemer around two a.m. on October 12 of last year.