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  Startling me.

  Except the more accurate description, instead of startled, would have been: made me jump and shriek with my hands flying in the air sending my clutch in one direction and my gun in the other. Disarming and dis-positioning me in one move.

  Which about brings me to now. . .

  3

  Reed – One Week Before

  ONE WEEK BEFORE

  “Roberts, you and Murphy track this down, see if it has any bite to it.”

  The FBI director drops a file on my desk, a huge “Confidential” stamped in red letters on the front. I flip open the front cover and skim the overview and the pages that follow.

  Human trafficking, otherwise known as HT.

  Makes me sick.

  These fucks who have little to no value for human life. And will profit off whatever they can. I’d kill them all if I could. Slowly, while extracting great pain.

  Mack Murphy, my partner, a cup of fresh coffee in each hand, takes a seat across from me, his chair groaning in protest. Our desks butt up against one another, so we are facing each other as we work. In theory, we take turns getting coffee refills, but damn if Mack doesn’t make a helluva good cup of joe. I don’t know how he does it. I mean, the little single-serving cup goes in the machine the same way for everyone, but his always tastes better. And he agrees with my assessment, so it’s not like I’m blowing smoke up his ass just to get him to fetch me coffee.

  “Thanks, man.” I nod at him, then toss the file over so he can look.

  “What have we got?”

  “HT. Looks like all women.”

  He sighs and leans back in his chair, propping his biker boot clad feet up on his desk. Coffee in one hand, he opens the file now resting on his thighs and begins skimming the contents the same way I did. “Jesus, they’re using a dating app?”

  “Not just one app, it looks like all the apps. And the profiles are one and done. Profile goes up, the guy gets a date, profile comes down, moving on. Another date, another app, another girl, another dollar.”

  Mack rubs the back of his neck while he peruses the file. I’ve figured out it’s his tell when he’s stressed; he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. Murmurs of disgust escape him as he turns the pages. It’s a new file and there’s not a lot to go on yet, but what’s there is disturbing.

  “So, it could be anyone, anywhere anytime. Fuck me.” He closes the file and brings his feet back to the floor with a thud. His massive forearms come to a rest on his desk, torso spanning the entire width. “I hate these fucking cases. How did we get this intel?”

  “Girl woke up in a room full of drugged, tied up women and escaped the house before they got to her. She ran, doesn’t remember which direction or how far, and doesn’t know where she was or who took her. Just that she met the guy on an app.”

  “Shit. Not a lot to go on, is there?”

  “No,” I agree. “Even if we got a couple undercover agents posing as dates, what’re the chances we’d get one of the people involved? We don’t know how many there are or when they strike, if there’s a type of girl they prefer, nothing.”

  “We need to start cross referencing with missing persons.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking too. I’ll draft a CRRFSR now.” A cross reference record filing system request (CRRFSR) is the easiest way for us to get information from multiple databases at the same time to show trends and or commonalities in current and past cases. We just list the parameters we’re looking for. The form itself is simple, the acronym not so much. “Single, actively dating, lives alone or with multiple housemates—”

  “Under thirty,” Mack adds.

  I raise a brow in question.

  “Stronger likelihood of finding someone with no kids and younger brings ‘em a bigger bang for their buck.”

  I snicker at him, even though it’s not funny. Maybe morbidly funny. I never thought my sense of humor would develop to where I’d find such a thing humorous. Yet here it is, rearing its ugly head again. File it under the things we do to cope with the ugliness we see day in and day out.

  “Do you think they’re going underage?” I ask.

  He thinks on it for a minute. “I say no for now. If we don’t get a hit in the eighteen to thirty range, we can always expand to under eighteen.”

  I feel a small amount of relief at the thought of not having minors involved even though it’s uncertain. Modern day slavery situations are bad enough, but somehow it chips away at my soul more when kids’ lives are at stake.

  We spitball a few more ideas, adding income, education, and religion to our CRRFSR. Basing that information on profiles from other HT cases in the past and what seems to be the most plausible. I send it off to research and records, then settle in to read the file again, this time in greater detail. Meanwhile, Mack peruses other cases to see if they used dating apps in the past to lure women into trafficking traps and what we might be able to glean from them.

  Situations like this, we rarely have a lot to go on considering we only get data on cases when we catch the traffickers and/or rescue the women. There are thousands of women that go missing every year and whose abductions never return valuable prevention intel. Once these girls go missing, it’s doubtful we’ll ever find them.

  One of the last pages in the file is an artist’s rendering of what the suspect may have looked like. Since his profile disappeared off the dating app’s site, the girl had nothing else to go back on aside from memory. I’ll have to requisition warrants to search the archives for the dating site they used and hope for remnants of the deleted profile. I make a few copies of the artist’s depiction and slide one over to Mack.

  “You know this looks like your friend, the one that’s getting married,” he says.

  “David?” I look at the sketch. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Man, it absolutely does. If you couldn’t vouch for him as your best friend, I’d bring him in based on this alone.”

  Mack looks like he’s all brawn, but the man is scary intelligent. Reminiscent of the actor Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) in his physique and appearance, except with hair on his face and head. He’s rarely wrong when he has a hunch, so I look at the sketch from a few different angles, trying to see what he does in it, but I can’t.

  “I don’t see it. Sorry.”

  He pulls up a random picture of David online and flips his screen around so I can see it. The resemblance is uncanny. In my mind, there were zero similarities between the man in the sketch and David. But seeing them side-by-side in print, I can’t deny it.

  Could be a coincidence. I just need to prove it. Which gives me an idea I should have thought of before now.

  “I’ll bring this over to research and records and see if they can run facial recognition on the sketch and match it to anything in any of the databases.”

  “Good idea. After that I say we go talk to the girl, review her story one more time. On, and tell Jenny I said hi.”

  Jenny works the intake desk in research and records, and she has a bit of a crush on Mack. Most women do. He shamelessly feeds into it with every single one of them, even though he’s not interested. And they eat it up.

  I nod in response and head down the hall to the elevators. Research and records takes up the entire space, a few floors above us in the building. While the bulk of our records are electronic, there are still originals of files dating back fifty years or more that we haven’t digitized. Partly because we’re a smaller branch office and don’t have the manpower to do so, and partly because the government moves slow with most things.

  I took Jenny out a couple times last year, but nothing came of it. For a few reasons: one, she doesn’t really do it for me. Two, since she has a crush on Mack, I don’t really do it for her. Three, I don’t like to date. Hookups and one-night stands? Sure. But dating is tough since most women don’t understand the lifestyle—long hours, canceled plans, secret phone calls and trips, little explanation on my whereabouts. My guess is its hard for anyone to stay t
rusting under such circumstances.

  And the fourth reason, the one I hate admitting to myself and that I’ve never admit to anyone else, I’ve got a crush on Quinn, the ex of my best friend, David. But even if I liked to date, I could never date her because of David. It would weird him out, I’m sure. And if they ever slept together, it would creep me out even more.

  Mack had a solid relationship with a woman named Daria for a while, but they broke it off after a year. She owns a bar in town, and we have lunch there often. Multiple times a week. He won’t admit it, but I think he still loves her, which is why he’s not interested in anyone else.

  “Jenny, how’s it going?” I call out to her as I reach her desk. She looks up at me with a smile, we parted as friends and on good terms, but I also think she’s friendly toward me so I’ll put in a good word for her with Mack.

  “Hey, Reed. It’s all good here, how are you?”

  “Can’t complain. Mack said to tell you hello.”

  “He’s so sweet.” She sighs. “Tell him I said hi, back.”

  “I’ll do that. Hey, we need your help on something.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “Can we run facial recognition in multiple databases at the same time?”

  “Sure, it’ll take longer, but I can do it.”

  “Great, can you add this to my earlier request and target NCIC, CODIS, and NDIS? Let me know when you get anything back?”

  “Will do.”

  I slap my hand down on her desk. “You’re the best, Jenny. I owe you one.” I point back at her as I walk back to the elevators.

  “You owe me like twenty,” she calls after me.

  “I’m good for it!” I yell back as the elevator doors close.

  Mack and I head out to talk to the victim, the woman who made the report which started the investigation. He drives while I recap a synopsis from the file. Like with the coffee, in theory we trade off driving, but really Mack does most of it. Unlike with the coffee, it’s not because he’s a better driver, it’s because I don’t mind being a passenger.

  “Paula Nelson, age twenty-three, works as a hair stylist, not the first time she’d used the app, but it was her first date with this guy. According to her, he was normal, they had a good time, nothing too out of the ordinary. One minute she’s in his car to go from the bar to dinner, and the next minute she’s waking up in a strange room with a bunch of tied up, drugged up girls.”

  “So, guy number one does the date pick up and the drugged drop off—he must have roofied her or something similar. And probably someone else maintains the girls and the house.” He looks at me when he talks then back at the road again.

  “That would be my guess. Then once at the house, the girls get hit with something more dependency friendly, maybe a little H? Get ‘em high out of their minds, they won’t care much about what’s going on.”

  “Where was she found?”

  “By her own account, she’d been walking for hours, but who knows how the aftereffects of what he gave her the first time affected her memory or ability to gauge time. They picked her up over by where route five and sixty-seventh avenue intersect. Not a lot out there.” I shrug. “Says she thinks it was a house she ran from and not a commercial building.”

  “Residential brothel?” Murphy asks.

  “Probably.”

  We’re silent the rest of the trip until pulling onto the street where Paula Nelson lives. An upper middle-class neighborhood with larger tract homes, lush green lawns filled with holiday decor, towering oak trees, and well-maintained roads and sidewalks.

  “It should be that bluish house here on the right.” I point out the house to Mack and he parks on the street in front of a “Caution: Reindeer Crossing” sign. Only a couple of cars on the street, not surprising with just a few days to go before Christmas.

  We head up the front walk between rows of fake candy canes lining either side. An older woman with graying hair opens the door before we knock. She’s dressed in a robe and slippers despite the eleven o’clock hour. Not that I’m judging, sleeping until eleven in the morning sounds great, if I could do it. My body won’t let me go past six in the morning at the latest.

  “You looking for Paula?” she asks.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I pull out my badge to show her. “I’m Agent Roberts and this is my partner, Agent Murphy. We’re following up on a report that Miss Nelson made recently and we're hoping to have a quick word with her. Might that be possible?”

  “Call her Paula, that’s her name, she hates the Miss and Ms. stuff. She’s in the shower. But you all can come in and wait, I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”

  We follow her into the house, and she offers us a seat in the living room while she goes to get the coffee. The house is spacious with a lot of natural lighting. A huge Christmas tree sits in the corner with a pile of wrapped presents beneath it. The smell of cinnamon pinecones fills the air.

  “Nice place,” I tell Murphy.

  He nods in agreement.

  The woman returns, balancing three mugs of coffee between her two hands. Mack stands to help, taking two from her. She makes a point of setting out coasters on the coffee table between us, so I use mine.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, how are you acquainted with Paula, ma’am? Mrs. . . . ?” I pause, waiting for her to tell me her last name.

  “Nelson. I’m Mrs. Nelson. Paula is my daughter. She came to stay with me after all this transpired.”

  “Do you know much about what happened?” Mack asks while my phone dings with an incoming notification from research and records:

  MESSAGE: It’s Jenny. Call in when you get a second. Got a match on your sketch. You’re not gonna like it.

  I interrupt Mack to show him the message, then excuse myself to make my call.

  4

  Quinn

  “This is exactly what best friends do for one another,” I tell Daria from my perch on the other side of the bar.

  “I love you like a sister, you know that,” she says, her Russian accent slipping in as she talks. She’s been wiping at the same spot on the bar top for a few minutes. “But, sweetie, you would explode up my whole operation, and I can’t afford for that to happen.”

  “I would blow up your whole operation.”

  “I know, that’s what I just said.”

  “The word is blow, not explode.”

  She waves her arm at me in response.

  “You have no faith in me.” I frown and try to give her my wounded puppy-dog look.

  “Don’t make that look at me,” she says, pausing for a moment before continuing. “Okay, fine. Prove me wrong.”

  “Yay! How?”

  “Carry a tray of beer from here to the holiday tree and back.”

  “Pfft. No problem.” The bar isn’t even busy at this time of day, so it will be easy to do. “And it’s a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree.”

  “Ha! That is not me getting one of your American words wrong. I don’t discriminate the holidays. That’s not just a Christmas tree, it’s an everything tree.” She spreads her arms as though encompassing everything in the bar. “And you can’t spill the beer.”

  I give her my best bring it on look. She sets a tray on the counter along with six pint glasses which she fills with water, not beer, from the beverage gun behind the counter.

  I grab it with both hands.

  “One-handed.”

  “It’s too heavy for one-handed,” I complain.

  She takes it from me, and pretty much spins it in the air like pizza dough, lifting it overhead by the tips of her fingers, then walks back and forth behind the bar a couple times.

  “Well, sure, easy for you to do, you’re the pro.”

  “All my girls can do that.” She brings the tray back down to the counter; I examine it carefully to make sure nothing spilled.

  It didn’t.

  I huff loudly and roll my eyes, then slide off my bar stool, take the tray and hoist it over my head, careful to balance my pal
m directly in the center. Then I begin a slow and measured walk to the other side of the bar. The tray wobbles precariously above me and I keep my other hand up and at the ready in case it falls.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  I count my steps, watching the floor to make sure I don’t trip over anything. It’s reminiscent of when I was a kid trying to balance a library book on top of my head and walk. When I reach the other side, I place the tray down on a tall table and raise my fists in air, bouncing in place. “Woot!”

  Daria raises one brow at me. “Now come back and wind your way through all the tables.”

  I take a minute, but I do it, and with barely a spillover on the tray.

  Daria nods, impressed.

  “You didn’t think I could do it,” I taunt.

  “True. Now, you do that same walk in one-tenth the time when the bar is filled to capacity with a basket of burgers in your other hand, and then we’ll talk.”

  Or, maybe not impressed.

  “Daria!” I whine.

  “Quinn!” she mocks.

  “Fine. Let me do the other thing.”

  “There is no other thing.”

  “Yes, there is, come on.”

  She stays silent.

  “It’s either that or I borrow money again.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” I say, doing a happy dance in little circles. “Why is it so much easier for you to let me kill a bad guy than it is to serve some drinks and burgers?”

  She shrugs. “I can send backup to take care of it when you fail an assassination. But here, at the bar, so many more bad things can happen. Broken glass, spilled beer, bad cocktails, cold food, wrong orders, unhappy customers . . .” She trails a hand in the air showing the list goes on.

  “I could somehow make all those things happen while I was out trying to kill someone too you know.” I smirk.