30. Mila
30
“What do you have for us?” asks Reaper.
Scrapper sits on one of the couches in the common room and pulls me onto his lap. Apparently Jupiter remembers me, because as soon as we sit down, he jumps up next to me and lays his head on my thigh, looking up at me with big hopeful eyes. So obviously I give him a scratch behind the ears. Eagle-eye is nowhere to be seen, but I wouldn't put it past him to have heard me down here and let the dog out of his office.
Snark pulls the flash drive from his pocket and tosses it my way. Jupiter perks up in case it’s a treat, but I’m faster. “Alright, I've hit paydirt on both the phone number and the chat logs on the flash drive.”
I don't stop scratching Jupiter's ears, but I sit up, curious and eager for something that can help us get these guys off my back, and hopefully keep Danny safe in the process.
“Tracking this down was a lot harder than I expected. Had to bounce through all sorts of telecom nodes, bust some ICE, trace some actual physical wire?—”
“Stop making shit up and give us the deets,” Reaper cuts him off.
With a grin like he's not sorry at all, Snark continues, “Fine, but I'm not joking when I say this was buried deep. But the phone number, once I bounced my way through the system, was provided by the office of a Judge Royce Kincaid. Familiar?”
“Motherfucker,” growls Mack. “I knew that guy was crooked.”
“Or someone in his office is,” says Snark. “I couldn't trace it to him specifically. Just that someone at city hall, based in his office, managed to have that number created and has been managing it. It could just mean that whoever you're after is an infiltrator.”
Scrapper frowns. “Still, that means there’s a connection between Mullerby and Kincaid’s office, and we don’t have to assume everyone’s innocent until proven guilty. If you ask me, he’s our man.”
“And you would be right to think that,” continues Snark, and his grin widens even further if that's even possible, “Because the chat logs from Mila's flash drive were, chef’s kiss. Good job digging these up. Also, that pudding porn was something, huh? I don’t get it, but I don’t not get it, you know?”
All three of my guys blink. “Pudding porn?” asks Reaper, sounding really, really confused.
“Not important for the case. I'm sure Mila can tell you about it.”
Reaper turns to me. “Pudding porn?”
I shake my head. “Later. Come on, Snark, what did you find?”
“I think Mullerby knew he was expendable and wanted some insurance—for all the good it did him. These chat logs are between him and…” He does a drumroll on his thighs. “Royce Kincaid. Looks like Mullerby used some sort of third party thing to record the chats, because this app usually deletes them as soon as they're seen. I’m pretty sure it goes deeper than that as well, there are a lot of files I haven’t figured out yet, but we have the first two rails on the ladder. Just goes to show, don't trust anyone not to leave a digital trail.”
Mack nods. “Not when you're on the case, for sure. Excuse me while I go delete everything off my phone.”
“Too late. I see all. I know all,” Snark chants.
Scrapper flips him off. “Fuck off. Tell us what's in the logs.”
“Mullerby was a greedy motherfucker. Kincaid picked his mole well. Guess when you've been overlooked for promotions for years, you don't seem to be going anywhere and you're not making as much dough as you'd like, it's easy to say yes to throwing the occasional case under the bus. Fuck, he wasn't even good at the cases where he tried. No wonder he was at the bottom of the totem pole. Anyway, I've got chat logs over the span of almost ten years. Took a while just to go through them all, even if they didn't communicate openly. And decrypting all the files was a fucking bear, let me tell ya.” He looks at Scrapper. “You owe me a whiskey, by the way.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Scrapper waves him off. “I'll get you two fucking bottles. Just stop drip feeding this shit and give us the info that we need.”
“I can say with real high confidence that there's enough incriminating evidence in these logs to put Kincaid away for a long time.”
Reaper looks over at me. “Sounds perfect for an exposé, doesn't it?”
Just the thought has me tingling. Actual evidence, actual content that I can make public to get the system that screwed my brother exposed to the whole world. But that leads to one really big problem. “That's great, but what about Danny? If I go public with this—and I'll have to, because the cops are just going to bury it rather than arrest the judge—then the threat is pretty clear. That video…” I can't even finish the thought.
“We're gonna figure it out,” says Mack with more confidence than I have. Let's start with getting the evidence together, and you let the boys and me worry about some of the details. Snark, can you get all this to us in a format we understand? I wouldn't know the first thing about how to deal with these encrypted files of yours.”
“Of course.”
Something occurs to me. “Didn’t Mullerby claim he didn’t know who it was? If he had these logs?—”
“The motherfucker lied. He musta been scared something fierce to keep lying after the treatment we gave him.” Scrapper shakes his head.
Mack draws breath to say something more when his phone rings. He looks at it. “Huh. Once shit starts happening, it's happening all at once.” He taps the button. “Hellfire, talk to me.”
I don't know who Hellfire is or why it's important, but the boys seem to think it is, so I wait impatiently for the call to finish.
When Mack hangs up, he's smiling like a lion baring his teeth before jumping an antelope. “I got names. I got a connection. You can say a lot about Hellfire and his boys, but they know what the fuck they're doing.”
“Worth the money?” asks Reaper.
“Oh fucking yes.”
Okay, enough. “What's going on?”
“Remember those fuckers who beat you up?” asks Scrapper. I nod. They're hard to forget. “Well, we now know who they are.”
Mack adds, “And we know who hired them. Or rather, which phone number they communicate to their boss with.”
“It wouldn't be a phone number we're already familiar with, is it?” asks Snark with a laugh.
“Funny you should ask.” Mack drives his fist into his palm and twists it. “It does seem vaguely familiar, but I'm pretty sure we're gonna have to have a talk with these boys to make sure we're on the right track.”
“Need a hand?” Snark sounds almost gleefully eager.
Reaper glances over at me and his expression turns darker than a storm cloud. His voice is so steely it's giving me chills. “No, I think we've got this. We've got a little bit of unfinished business that requires a personal touch. We don't know where to find them yet, but it's a start.”
With how gentle the guys can be with me, it's easy to forget that they're dangerous men. But there's nothing gentle about them now.
“Mila,” Mack says. “Work with Snark and Faith. Get all the info together and start building your case and turning it into media. We're gonna need it to kick off the party later. Talk to your contact at Channel 7. What was her name?”
“Ella.” I nod. This isn’t going the way I thought it would for school, but this isn’t about my senior project anymore. We're setting things in motion, and it feels so much better than doing nothing.
“Good. Get her on board. I've got a plan coming and?—”
A new, gravelly voice cuts in. “Plotting and planning under my roof, holding my fucking dog hostage, and I'm not even fucking invited to the damn party?” Eagle-eye stands over us, his bulging arms crossed over his barrel chest. “What's going on?”
“Just the man we wanted to talk to, actually,” says Reaper. “We need to move fast. Are your people ready to put Mila’s brother somewhere safe until this plays out?”
“Of course.”
By the time we're done meeting, there's the bare bones of a plan in place. But for me, most importantly, I have to get the evidence together and make it presentable. The cops in this town are less than useless, and I don’t know who we can trust. The only way to do it safely, is to point a light right at the rot, so that the authorities have no choice but to react.