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THE STARLIGHT ROOM

English. Born in northern Mongolia at a time when the country was still under Soviet influence, she’d learned Russian in school—until the Soviet empire collapsed and Mongolia’s prime minister declared English the landlocked nation’s official second language.

Looking for adventure and the proverbial better way of life, she won a student visa and emigrated to the United States in 2001. Her first thought upon landing at Los Angeles International Airport that summer was that Americans were awfully fat, but when she got out into the city she was more impressed; she enjoyed beautiful people, and L.A. was filled with them.

After one semester at a community college in Torrance, she moved to the Bay Area and got her green card. Now she was attending classes at Peralta College in Oakland, paying her rent and tuition by dishing ice cream at Fenton’s Creamery.

Liz seemed strangely delighted to learn that Tea spoke Russian. The twins bought her a drink and then suggested they continue the party with some friends at their hotel four blocks away. It was after midnight when they got to Chris Aragon’s suite at the luxe Clift Hotel near Union Square. Chris was relaxing there; Tea was struck at once by how handsome he was. He seemed interested in her as well, particularly after the twins mentioned that Tea knew Russian. Joined by two of Chris’s female employees, they opened some booze and hung out until the small hours of the morning, when the girls all left to go to their own rooms and Tea crashed in Chris’s for the night.

She was still shaking off sleep the next morning when the room became a hive of activity. Liz and a handful of other attractive young women—all alert and cleanly scrubbed after their night of partying—began popping in and out, receiving envelopes and cryptic instructions from Chris.*

* Liz was one of Chris Aragon’s cashers, but there’s no evidence that her sister Michelle was involved.