Chapter 1
Three weeks at New Mercy House and Candice still slept with her back against the wall.
Not because she was scared of the women in the house because she wasn’t they were her people now her tribe without a ceremony or a handshake just a shared understanding that survival is its own kind of blood oath. No she slept with her back against the wall because her body hadn’t gotten the memo yet that she was safe. Her body still thought it was on Flatbush. Her body still flinched at doors.
Ms. Gloria noticed. Ms. Gloria noticed everything.
She knocked on Candice door one Tuesday morning before the sun had fully committed to rising and said come on down baby I made tea and I need to show you something and Candice knew by the way she said it that this was not a social visit.
Downstairs at the kitchen table Detective Monroe was already sitting there in her off duty clothes jeans and a puffer vest and a look on her face that said this just got bigger than both of us. She had a laptop open and a coffee she hadn’t touched and when Candice sat down across from her she turned the screen around slow like she was giving her a chance to brace herself first.
Luther was on the screen.
But not the Luther Candice knew. Not the Luther with the long coat and the smooth talk and the little block he ran like it was his kingdom. This Luther was in a photograph she had never seen standing next to a man in a tailored suit outside what looked like a midtown building all glass and steel and money and the man in the suit was smiling with his whole face like a man who had never missed a meal a day in his life.
Who is that Candice said.
Detective Monroe closed the laptop halfway and leaned back and said his name is Garrison Webb. And Candice felt that name land somewhere in her chest like a stone dropped in still water.
Garrison Webb was not a street name.
Garrison Webb was a name you saw on donation plaques at hospitals and on the back of charity dinner programs and in the Page Six section of the Post standing next to politicians and record label executives and the kind of women who look like they were assembled in a factory somewhere that only made beautiful things. He had a foundation. He had a building in Downtown Brooklyn with his name on it in brushed gold letters. He had a smile that had been photographed a thousand times and never once looked like what it was.
Detective Monroe slid a folder across the table the same way she did in the hospital room and by now Candice knew that when this woman slid a folder across a table your whole world was about to tilt.
Luther wasn’t running his operation alone Candice she said. Luther was a lieutenant. Has been for eleven years. Webb supplies the financing the locations the legal cover through shell companies and Luther and three other men like him supply the women. They move them through what looks on paper like a talent management company called Meridian Group LLC. They got girls in Manhattan the Bronx and two spots in Jersey.
Candice stared at the folder but didn’t open it this time.
How many women she asked.
Monroe looked at her steady and said we think close to forty.
The kitchen got so quiet you could hear Ms. Gloria’s wind chimes on the back porch talking to each other in the November air.
Forty Candice said again like maybe she heard it wrong.
Forty Monroe confirmed and her voice didn’t waver even though something behind her eyes did. Candice that’s why I need you to understand that what you saw what you lived through is not the bottom of this thing. You might actually be the top. The thread we pull that unravels all of it. But Webb has lawyers and judges and a city councilman in his pocket and the moment we move on him without everything airtight he walks and every one of those women disappears into a system we can’t find them in.
Ms. Gloria set a cup of tea in front of Candice and rested her hand on her shoulder for just a second. Just long enough.
Candice opened the folder.
Tamera took it different.
When Candice called her that afternoon and told her what Detective Monroe said Tamera got quiet in a way that Tamera never gets quiet and that silence was louder than anything she could have said out loud. Tamera quiet meant Tamera was already calculating. Already moving pieces on a board that nobody else could see.
She showed up at New Mercy House that evening with Dominique who everybody called Dom who had gone to Tilden with both of them back in the day and now worked at a law firm in Manhattan as a paralegal and knew things about how money hides itself that would make your head spin.
They sat in the little room on the second floor and Dom spread papers across Candice bed like a professor and said ok so Meridian Group LLC is registered in Delaware which is where you go when you want your business to be invisible. But Delaware still has to file and when you know what to look for you can follow the money back like breadcrumbs and it leads right back to a holding company called WG Capital which is Garrison Webb’s initials and his wife’s maiden name which is Garrison because yes that man was so arrogant he named his shell company after himself just rearranged slightly. These men always think they are so much smarter than everyone around them.
So we can prove it Dom? Candice asked.
Dom looked up from the papers. On paper? Already halfway there. In a courtroom? We need someone on the inside who can corroborate the financial flow with testimony.
All three women looked at each other.
And Tamera said I know somebody.
His name was Marcus and he had worked as a driver for Meridian Group for going on three years before he realized what exactly he was driving and by then he was in too deep to just walk away and too scared to go to the police because the police in this story were not always the good guys and Marcus knew that better than most.
Tamera had known Marcus since they were teenagers on the same block and she trusted him the way you trust somebody who you have seen be afraid and do the right thing anyway because that is the truest test of a person’s character not what they do when everything is fine but what they do when everything is on fire.
He met them at a diner on Utica Ave on a Thursday morning and he came in looking over his shoulder twice before he even sat down and ordered coffee he wasn’t going to drink and said to Candice before he said anything else I heard what he did to you and I’m sorry. I should have said something a long time ago. I knew about you. I knew about the others. And I drove the car anyway and I gotta live with that.
Candice looked at him across the table and said are you ready to not live with it anymore.
Marcus wrapped both hands around the coffee cup and stared at the table for a long moment. Then he looked up and said what do you need.
What they needed took six more weeks to put together and in those six weeks three things happened.
Luther got arrested on a separate charge a parole violation out of Rikers from 2019 that Detective Monroe had quietly flagged and he was sitting in central booking which meant he was contained which meant Candice could breathe at a slightly different altitude than she had been.
Garrison Webb held a fundraiser at a venue in Dumbo for a youth literacy program and his face was in the Daily News the next morning and Candice saw it on her phone while she was eating breakfast and just sat there looking at his smile for a full minute before she turned the phone face down on the table.
And Candice started writing in the journal. Not just one word this time. Pages. She wrote about Fulton Street and her mother and the first time she ran away at fifteen and how Luther had found her at the bus stop on Atlantic Ave with a bag and nowhere to go and how he had looked at her like she was the answer to a question he had been asking and how she had felt seen for the first time in her life and how that feeling had been the most expensive thing she would ever be given for free.
She wrote it all down. Every room. Every rule. Every night she tried to disappear inside herself to survive what was happening to her body while she kept her mind somewhere else somewhere safe somewhere back on Fulton Street before everything got complicated.
Ms. Gloria read none of it because Ms. Gloria respected the privacy of the page. But one evening she sat on the edge of Candice bed and said you have a voice baby. Always have. Don’t let none of what happened to you take that from you. They took enough.
The morning Detective Monroe moved on Garrison Webb the city was doing that thing again where the sky couldn’t pick a feeling.
Marcus had given them three months of testimony. Dom had traced the money through four shell companies and two offshore accounts back to WG Capital back to Garrison Webb’s personal signature on wire transfers that were disguised as talent development fees. Fees for what Monroe had said when she first saw them. For what exactly.
For us Candice had answered quietly. We were the product.
They didn’t tell Candice the exact day Monroe was moving because Monroe knew Candice and Tamera well enough by now to know that if they knew the day they might want to be present and present was not safe and safe was the whole point of all of this.
Candice found out the same way the rest of Brooklyn found out. A notification on her phone. Breaking news. Brooklyn philanthropist and businessman Garrison Webb taken into federal custody this morning on charges including sex trafficking conspiracy money laundering and racketeering. Webb whose Meridian Group LLC has been under federal investigation for several months was arrested at his Cobble Hill residence early this morning.
Candice read it three times.
Then she sat down on the floor of her little room at New Mercy House with her back against the bed and her knees pulled to her chest and she cried. Not the kind of crying that comes from fear or pain but the kind that comes when something that has been pressed down inside you for so long finally gets permission to rise.
The other women in the house heard it. They didn’t come running. They understood. They let her have it.
Ms. Gloria knocked softly after a while and opened the door just enough to look in and said you ok in there.
Candice wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked up and said yeah. I think for the first time in a long time yeah I actually am.
Ms. Gloria nodded once slow and knowing and said good. Now come eat. I got oxtail.
Three months later Candice sat in a federal courthouse on Cadman Plaza in a navy blue blazer that Dom had helped her pick out and she held her hands still in her lap the way Ms. Gloria had taught her and she looked straight ahead and she told the truth.
Every word of it.
The courtroom was quiet in that specific way courtrooms get quiet when the person on the stand is saying something that cannot be unsaid. She talked for two hours and forty minutes. She did not cry until the very end and when she did she let it happen because Monroe had told her don’t fight your own emotions on that stand baby let them see what this cost you. Let them see it all.
Garrison Webb sat at the defense table in his suit that probably cost more than a month of rent on any block in Flatbush and he looked straight ahead and his face was a wall and Candice thought about what Tamera had said when all this began.
Either way lil sis he is got.
After she stepped down from the stand she walked past the defense table and she did not look at Webb. Not because she was afraid of him. But because she had decided he did not deserve another second of her eyes on him. He had already taken enough of her time.
Tamera was in the gallery in the third row and when Candice came through the gate Tamera stood up and hugged her so hard Candice felt it in her still-healing ribs and neither one of them cared.
New Mercy House got a garden in the spring.
Candice was the one who planted it. Ms. Gloria had given her a little plot in the back yard and she had gone to the nursery on Flatbush Ave and stood in the aisle for a long time looking at seed packets with pictures of things that hadn’t grown yet. Things that were still possible. And she had bought tomatoes and sunflowers and something called sage that the woman at the counter said smelled like healing and Candice had put it in her basket without another thought.
She was enrolled in community college come September. Criminal justice. Because Monroe had told her once over coffee that the system needs people inside it who actually understand what these women go through and Candice had thought about that every day since.
Luther pled out. Twenty two years.
Garrison Webb went to trial and lost and lost badly and the judge looked at him at sentencing like the judge had something personal she had been waiting to say and she said it. Thirty one years federal. No parole. His name got taken off the building in Downtown Brooklyn before the week was out.
Candice heard that last part from Dom who sent her a picture of the blank space on the building where the letters used to be. Just brushed gold shadows in the shape of a name that didn’t mean anything anymore.
She showed it to Ms. Gloria who looked at it and said hmph. Funny how that works. Build your whole empire on the backs of women and in the end all you left is a shadow.
Candice looked at the picture one more time then put her phone in her pocket and went out back to check on her garden.
The sage was already coming in strong.
