Chapter 12 #4
Jack’s phone buzzed three times in rapid succession as the files came through. He handed me the phone and pulled out of the lot, and I read Margot’s findings aloud as he drove.
“Fourteen properties,” I said, scrolling through the data. “Fourteen properties in King George County tied to Stavros through shell companies, holding companies, and a nonprofit that claims to support maritime heritage preservation.”
“Maritime heritage,” Jack repeated.
“Three of them are in the dock district. Two warehouses and a decommissioned fish processing plant. All three had major structural renovation in the last five years, including foundation and subterranean access modifications.”
“That’s our tunnel network.”
“The shell companies are layered deep. Three, four levels in some cases, each one registered to a different state with a different name on the paperwork.” I kept scrolling, scanning the corporate names, and then my finger stopped moving. “Jack.”
He heard it in my voice. “What?”
“One of the shell companies, filed under a holding company called Dockside Ventures.” I looked up from the phone. “Tidewater Logistics.”
I watched the muscle in Jack’s jaw flex twice before he spoke.
“The work shirt Harold Pruitt saw. Send Derby a text from my phone and let him know a witness gave us the name of Tidewater Logistics. Tell him to cross-reference the name with vehicle registrations. If that company owns or leases a navy blue Ford Transit, I want to know.”
I typed the message and sent it, and then I scrolled through the rest of Margot’s findings while Jack drove.
The scope of what she’d uncovered in a matter of hours was staggering.
Stavros had built his network the way a spider builds a web, each strand connected to every other strand through a series of nodes that looked independent until you mapped the whole structure.
Property holdings, commercial leases, payroll records for companies that existed only on paper, bank accounts that moved money in circles designed to make its origin disappear.
It was elegant in the way that complex criminal enterprises often were, the kind of man who understood that the best way to hide something was to bury it under layers of things that looked perfectly ordinary.
“Jack,” I said, still reading. “Margot’s flagged three judges in the county who have financial connections to entities in Stavros’s network. Campaign donations, property transactions, business relationships.” I looked up from the phone. “Calloway is one of them.”
Jack didn’t react. Not visibly. But his hands went still on the wheel in a way that told me the confirmation of something he’d suspected hit different than the suspicion itself.
“What kind of connection?” he asked.
“Campaign donations from two of the shell companies over the last three election cycles. And his wife’s real estate firm handled the sale of one of the dock district warehouses to Dockside Ventures four years ago.
” I set the phone in the console. “It could be coincidence. Small county, small circles, everybody does business with everybody.”
“It’s not coincidence.”
“No,” I said. “It’s probably not.”
This wasn’t an underground fight ring anymore. This was infrastructure.
We drove in silence for a moment, the weight of it settling between us.
A judge on Stavros’s payroll explained the dragging feet, the delayed warrants, the bureaucratic friction that had slowed every legal step of this investigation.
It also meant that every warrant Calloway had signed was potentially compromised, every piece of evidence gathered under his authority vulnerable to challenge by a defense attorney who knew where to look.
“Judge Martha Aldridge,” Jack said finally. “She’s been on the bench in King George for twenty-five years without an ethics complaint, and her name isn’t anywhere in Margot’s findings. No donations, no property connections, no business ties. She’s clean.” He looked at me. “I’ll call her tonight.”
“She’ll have to move fast,” I said. “Those coordinates in T-Bone’s shoe have tomorrow’s date. If there’s a fight happening tomorrow night and we’re sitting on the location—”
“I know.” His eyes were steady and sharp. “We’ll make sure she has plenty of evidence to sign off on them. We’ll hit that location Saturday night while the fight is in progress. Fighters, organizers, money, whoever Stavros has running the operation on the ground. One shot.”
“And if the leak tips them off?”
“Margot’s tracing the burner phone network tonight.
If someone in my department is talking to Stavros’s people, there’s a digital trail.
” He turned onto Catherine of Aragon and the funeral home appeared at the end of the block, dark and quiet in the early evening, the elm trees throwing long shadows across the front lawn.
“Tomorrow morning I’ll handpick a team I trust and debrief.
But the tunnel location and the tactical plan stay with me, you, and Doug until the last minute. ”
“Home?” I asked.
“And food. The lemon bars aren’t cutting it for me anymore. I need protein.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” I said.