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.
Simon hired me on the spot after an impromptu interview, while we sat at the edge of the main stage one afternoon and watched tits and ass gyrating all over the place.
Starting as a bouncer, I soon proved my worth. I constantly accepted small “assignments” from Simon that I’m sure were illegal, but he didn’t trust me enough to tell me the details. It may have been “picking up a package” from an associate to “delivering a briefcase full of money” to another associate. I never asked questions, did my job well, and proved to Simon that I was loyal and could keep my mouth shut. Within two months, I was promoted to General Manager.
My first major breakthrough in gaining Simon’s criminal trust had to do with the prostitution that was rampant within the club. I had been told ahead of time during my debriefing that the club had been busted a time or two for it. It was small potatoes and nothing that could bring Simon Keyes down. But it gave me an in with him. It didn’t take me very long to figure out it was pervasive and that most of the women were in on it. Watching footage of the cameras that were installed in the VIP rooms confirmed it for me.
So I made my move.
“Simon… got a minute?” I had asked as I knocked on his office door one night after closing.
Despite the fact that this guy was a complete scum, you’d never know it by outward appearances. He was a good-looking guy at age forty-two with stylish, dark hair, thousand-dollar suits, and a cultured air of civility about him.
“Sure… come on in, Raze,” he told me as he closed a ledger book on his desk and then stood up from his chair. I walked in, shut the door, and watched as he opened up a safe behind his desk. After he stowed the ledger in there and shut the door, he turned around and sat back down, directing me with a sweep of his hand to take a chair opposite his desk.
“What’s up?” he asked as he steepled his hands in front of his face.
“Listen… I’ve been watching things carefully, and I think you got a problem. The girls are fucking the customers for extra money in the VIP rooms.”
I watched him carefully for his reaction, but I really didn’t need it to confirm what I already knew. That Simon Keyes was very much aware that this was going on in his club. The man never missed a thing and because he got a portion of the girl’s tips each night, he knew exactly where they were making that type of dough.
“Oh, really?” he said neutrally. “That’s not good.”