Chapter 9
Nine
Captain Diana Pritchard sauntered toward the front desk of the Boston Family Justice Center, smile dazzling as she caught sight of Cam.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Agent Hard-Ass.
” That had always been Di’s favorite nickname for him for multiple reasons.
Dressed as he was in a suit and tie, Cam had been hoping for the professional one, but by the way Di’s big brown eyes raked him over, she was definitely contemplating the less professional context, which he’d admittedly welcomed when he’d been younger, hot-to-trot, and unattached.
Then her gaze shifted to Jamie, and Cam might as well have been invisible. She pushed through the swinging counter door, whistling. “Damn, sugar, where you been hiding him?”
“In San Francisco with his husband,” Cam answered, and Jamie brandished his wedding band.
Her face fell so fast it was comical. “Well, that’s a fucking shame.”
“Di, Jameson Walker.” Cam gestured between the two. “Jamie, Diana Pritchard, Captain of BPD’s Family Justice Group.”
Jamie held out his hand, flashing his good-ole-boy smile. “Captain Pritchard.”
“Di, please,” she said. “You a fed too?”
“Former. Consultant still, on occasion.”
She shifted her assessing gaze back to Cam. “What are you doing back here? Just showing your boy around?”
When he’d worked kidnap cases for the Bureau, especially those involving missing children, Cam frequently worked with Di’s group, the matters often crossing over. As they did again now.
“Personal matter,” he said. “Looking again into some missing persons cases.”
Di’s expression softened, the mother of four coming out in her.
There was a reason she’d dedicated her career to the Family Justice Group and a reason the officers working under her were some of the most loyal and hardworking in the department.
“You going there again?” She’d found him more than once in the basement archives, combing through Erin’s file.
After enough times, she’d made him an unauthorized copy.
If you’re gonna obsess, she’d said, at least be in stumbling distance of your own bed so you don’t keep falling asleep here.
“Special request,” he told her now. “Mom’s in the hospital.”
“Oh, sugar.” She pulled him into a hug. “She gonna be okay?”
“She had a heart attack. Bypass surgery today, maybe more later this week.”
“So you’re here distracting yourself.”
“That, and she asked me—”
She raised a hand. “Say no more.” If anyone knew the lengths to which grieving parents and family members would go to find the truth, for better or worse, it was Di.
As captain of the FJG, she oversaw human trafficking, domestic violence, and crimes against children cases, many often involving runaways.
“But won’t the FBI and missing persons databases have more info? ”
“We’ve put in all the usual requests,” Jamie said. “They’re compiling files and uploading for us to review.”
With special emphasis on the names they’d relayed from his mother’s books and on any reported within the past year since Cam had been on the West Coast. “We wanted to review BPD’s files too,” Cam said. “Since missing persons are usually reported here first.”
“I got you.” She held open the swinging counter door and led them through the bullpen. Their path of travel was frequently delayed by officers interrupting to greet Cam, but they eventually reached the basement stairs. “Timing’s good,” Di said, leading them down. “Superintendent’s at headquarters.”
“He owes me a favor or ten,” Cam said.
“Don’t doubt it,” Di replied. “But now’s not a good time for feds to be poking around BPD and missing persons cases.”
“Why’s that?”
“Officer over in D-4”—she looked over her shoulder at Jamie—“that’s District Four.”
“South End,” he said with a nod.
She halted and Cam nearly ran into her. “You sound Southern and look California . . .”
“Grad school at MIT, and I spent summers here all through undergrad.” He jutted a thumb at Cam. “With this one.”
She waved a hand and continued down the steps. “Okay, you’re local. So over in South End, Officer Murphy’s daughter, Shannon, went missing day before yesterday. We’re trying to keep it in house, at least for now.”
“Randall Murphy?” Cam asked.
She shook her head. “Little brother, Billy.”
“They’re Southies,” Cam told Jamie. Then to Di, “Like you said before, the feds have more resources that can help.”
She raised both hands as they walked down the hall to archives, which took up the back half of the building’s basement. “Preaching to the choir, sugar, but they got their reasons.” She pushed open the swinging doors, and the lights automatically flipped on.
Standing among the four wooden worktables, Cam eyed the rolling racks of files stretching endlessly the opposite direction. A sad sight in and of itself—so many cases—but the very files he needed access to.
“You remember where everything is?” Di asked.
“Yep, other than the coffeemaker.” He’d noticed it missing from the kitchenette.
“Upgrade.” Waggling her brows, she opened a cabinet door to reveal a single-serve espresso machine.
“Look at you,” Cam teased. “Gettin’ all fancy.”
“Was the least I could do for the archives and evidence clerks.” Always taking care of her people. “You in town for a while?”
“To be determined.”
“All right, just don’t fall asleep down here. Lights go out automatically now.” She gave him a wink as she stepped past him toward the doors. “You boys let me know if you need anything.”
The doors swung closed behind her and Cam sat at the table by the window, picking at the nick his own fingernail had carved there over the years.
“How’s it feel to be back?” Jamie asked, claiming the chair across from him.
“Better than it should,” he admitted, and that was a problem.
The first time Nic visited “mobile command,” it had been a bright spring morning, right at the start of this mess with Vaughn.
Five months later, they were meeting under the cover of darkness and Aidan, rather than Mel, stood on the deck of the yacht with Irish and American flags flying from its stern.
“I see I’m late for the party,” Nic said, climbing aboard.
“Nah, I just got here myself.” Aidan gestured for him to follow and headed toward the deck stairs. “You heard from Cam today?”
“Not yet. He has the night shift with his mom, so usually later.”
Aidan glanced back, smirking. “You know his schedule.”
Nic pushed him down a step, and Aidan chuckled. A throat cleared from across the living area, and Nic looked up to find a reproachful Mel leaning out of what should have been the bedroom. “Lauren’s got something,” she said, then vanished back inside, muttering “children” under her breath.
“Into mobile command we go,” Nic said with a grin.
Aidan held a finger up to his lips, half shushing him, half holding back his laughter.
It was an accurate description, though. Befitting a Chief of Security for a major shipping company, and bounty hunter on the side, Mel had retrofitted the main cabin with a wall of monitors and high-speed computers, satellite connections that ran up to the roof, police band radios, and an AmSec 8000 safe, courtesy of their heist crew case.
Who knew what was behind that armored door.
Even with all the gear and four people, the area was relatively spacious. “Moore’s key worked?” Nic asked Lauren, who was working at the bank of computers.
“Like a charm.” Her glittery red nails flew across the keyboard, and the screens filled with PDFs. “We’ve now got the full FBI files on your father and on Duncan Vaughn.”
Nic grabbed one of the rolling chairs and kicked the other over to Aidan. “Do I need to bring you up to speed?”
“Saved you the trouble,” Mel answered instead.
As easy as that, and Aidan was still here, still willing to help. His surprise must have shown. Sighing, Aidan clasped his forearm, squeezing. “For the last fucking time, Dominic, you’re family.”
Still hard to believe, given his limited knowledge of the same, but it was getting harder and harder to deny. And Nic didn’t want to. “All right, then,” he said with a nod. Then to Lauren, “Anything in Dad’s file we didn’t know about already?”
“There’s an outlier account. Neither Vaughn nor your father’s other lenders seem to know about it.”
“Curtis has been careful with this one,” Mel interjected. “All we’ve got so far are records of microtransactions. Small, non-triggering amounts being taken out of other accounts and deposited into this cloaked offshore one regularly.”
“How regularly?” Nic asked.
“Every month for over ten years until last April.”
Exactly when the Unknown calls had started. Because the payments had stopped?
“You’re thinking about the calls,” Mel said, as if reading his mind.
He nodded. “I have someone in Navy admin looking into them.”
“Could be related,” Mel said. “But that’s an awfully convoluted path to get five thousand to someone in North Carolina.”
“Five thousand total?” Those were microtransactions.
“Five thousand a month,” Lauren corrected.
Aidan whistled. “That’s over half a million by now.”
Not so micro, but in his dad’s investment heyday, five thousand a month was Curtis’s dining-out budget.
“For what?” Nic said. “Or for whom?” He made the least sense where Curtis was concerned. “That’s a decent-size rainy-day fund he’s kept hidden.”
“Assuming no one’s tapped it already,” Aidan said. “Do we know that yet?”
Lauren shook her head, strands coming loose from her pencil bun. “Like Mel said, it’s cloaked. We’re still trying to find it. We’ve just got the withdrawals going to the same place. We have to pull back the cloak and find the account.”
“Keep digging,” Nic said, then moved on to the more immediate problem. “What more have we learned about Vaughn?”
Lauren pinged a few keys, and FBI documents on Vaughn zoomed forward on the screens. “He’s connected to half a dozen arsons and at least two murders. Not to mention all the extortion cases he’s suspected of being involved in.”
Nic rolled closer, squinting at the screens. “How has he not been charged?” Aidan asked.
“It’s all hearsay,” Nic answered, catching on fast to the pattern of evidence before him. “No one’s caught him in the act.”
“He’s threatened you.”
“Me, an interested party. Just like every other person he’s pressured into not testifying or answering the feds’ questions.”
“But you’re not like all those other people, are you?” Mel tried and failed to hide her smile.
“No, I’m not, but I need more than this”—he pointed at the screens—“to charge him. Bowers will never move on Vaughn based on my word alone.”
Lauren spun in her chair, facing him. “You do realize who’s the prosecutor who stalls us out all the time, right?”
“Oh, I realize, but I need a paper trail Bowers—or the Deputy AG, if I go over his head—can’t refute.”
“We think we’ve found the start of one.” Mel waved him over to the metal desk running the length of the opposite wall.
She spread a stack of bank statements out in front of him.
“Your father’s assistant has been most helpful.
” She tapped a French-tipped nail by the payor’s name on the first sheet.
“This is the account that paid off his bank home loan.” She tapped at the second.
“The same payor also paid off the subordinate lenders on your father’s building in Burlingame. One of Vaughn’s entities.”
Nic gestured at the other sheets. “And who do all these other accounts belong to?”
“Federal employees.”
Nic’s mouth went dry, and Aidan gasped behind him. “Vaughn’s got that many people on payroll?”
“Do any of them trace back to Bowers?” Nic asked.
“We isolated his accounts first, and no,” Lauren said, clearly disappointed. “We’re working on the others.”
Nic glanced at Aidan. “Only a handful of people have been on each case and would know where I was.”
Aidan nodded. “We’ll run the list as soon as we get it.”
It was a break, a better one than they’d had in months, but it still involved exerting pressure on pawns Vaughn already had under his control. Nic, however, had a direct path to Vaughn if he chose to play the queen on the board. “There might be another avenue open to us.”
Mel crossed one leg over the other, heel bouncing. “What’s that?”
“Vaughn approached me at the brewery Saturday night.”
Lauren slumped back in her chair, staring open-mouthed at the ceiling. “And y’all complain about me always hiding the ball.”
Nic would’ve laughed if Aidan didn’t look like he was about to spit nails.
At him. “That’s what you wouldn’t tell me last night.”
“I’m sorry,” Nic said. “Won’t happen again.”
“What did he say?” Mel asked, calm and assessing. This was a friendly team-up meeting and yet Nic still felt like she was interrogating him.
“He made certain . . .”
“Threats?” Aidan supplied.
“Overtures.”
“To what, come work for him?”
“Not exactly.” His cringe must have given him away, because Lauren’s blue eyes went round as saucers and her mouth fell open in a silent Oh.
“You want to use yourself as bait,” Mel likewise surmised.
“If I can get him to actually confess on record . . .”
“By seducing him.” Aidan, very not calm, shot out of his chair, sending it slamming back into the metal table. “You’re walking a thin line of entrapment.”
“Entrapment requires I induce him to commit a crime he wouldn’t otherwise commit. He’s gonna commit a crime. I’m not talking him into anything.”
“No,” Aidan said, pacing in front of him. “It’s just you talking yourself into an early grave.”
Nic stood, squaring off against him. He wasn’t angry or upset. He was actually humbled by Aidan’s concern, by his commitment to protecting his family, including him.
But the same held true for Nic. “Vaughn’s gunning for me, my livelihood, and my family.
” He punctuated the last word with a significant glance around the room at the members of his family gathered here.
“If I don’t start talking soon—if I can’t find a different song to sing—then I’m going to be dead anyway.
And I refuse to take any of my family to the grave with me. ”