past the laid off part without choking up. My hand dropped to my lap. I went outside, sat in my car, stared through the windshield. Watched people jostle passed one another on the sidewalk across the street totally unaware of what just had happened to me. Looking at them was the same as watching a foreign film without subtitles. Nothing made sense. After a while, I started the engine and drove to meet Jenetta. * * * I had made this appointment with Jenetta just the day before. A parole officer I knew told me about her. She had been his client and he thought a feature story might help her overcome some bureaucratic hurdles that were preventing her from receiving disability. For 17 months in 2007 a 39-year-old San Francisco prostitute, Jenetta Howell, is kept in a room in Mexico and raped, etc., my source wrote me in an email. Meanwhile, her jewelry was found by U.S. cops on the body of a girl chopped to pieces in Phoenix. This body is misidentified as the prostitute and sent to the family and the family buries her. Later the prostitute shows up rescued. She has to learn to read and write again because of physical trauma to her head. Because of her criminal past she’s not eligible for disability and now lives with her father unable to work. How’s this sound? It sounded pretty good but I soon learned the story had problems. I called the Phoenix P.D. but they had no reports of a body hacked to bits. I then called some Phoenix reporters and they had not heard of anything like that either. I contacted my source and told him no one knew anything about a dead woman chopped to pieces. She was likely tortured and killed by an associate of the drug dealing boyfriend, he told me. If the Phoenix P.D. say they don’t know about it, they either aren’t talking or the Feds are handling it, and then they really aren’t talking. You’re probably up against a brick wall. Too bad. Good story. Yeah, I said. I asked him for Jenetta’s phone number anyway and called her. * * * After I introduced myself, I told Jenetta I was interested in her story but could not promise anything since no one could confirm the existence of the dead girl. The story, I thought, hinged on that. Without a body, I would only
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