Chapter 12
EVELYN
“Charlie team is still on the Peterson contract, right?” Alexander asked.
We were sitting in his office, going over schedules for the next few months.
It was like putting together an elaborate puzzle.
A puzzle that had only gotten harder now that we had more contracts and not enough teams. We had already placed a halt on new contracts for a few weeks, but we still had a flood of recently signed contracts to organize first.
I checked my tablet. “Yes, through the end of next week. I don’t anticipate Peterson extending the contract either.”
“Okay, can we pull Delta team to the Keenan contract?”
“No,” I said. “Delta team leader just had a baby, so he’s on paternity leave. And we promised them a break, so they’ll be out for at least a week. Echo team can start the Keenan contract, though, and Delta can take over halfway through?”
Alexander rubbed his chin. “I don’t really like switching teams out halfway through, but we might have to in this case. Where are we at with hiring additional teams?” He leaned closer to his computer as if he could magically make more teams appear on our roster.
“Gamma team is set to complete training in three weeks. We’re vetting the other applicants loosely, so at least another week or so before we can finish deep dives on each of them.”
“It’s a good problem to have,” Alexander said. “I just hate the timing here. We need to have some teams free in case Kingfisher strikes again.”
I hummed but didn’t respond. We had already had this argument. I wanted to keep SDS out of this as much as possible. Kingfisher was coming after the Archers, not SDS, and the less they were a target, the better.
“I know you disagree,” Alexander said, leaning back from his computer and locking eyes with me. “But I would let this whole company fall apart if it wasn’t useful to us right now. Our teams are trained. We can handle Kingfisher.”
I sighed. Marcus had echoed similar sentiments yesterday, but I still wasn’t convinced. “This is your company, your livelihood. Kingfisher already has a target on your backs; why make it bigger?”
“Do you really think that SDS wouldn’t have gotten involved eventually with everything going on?” Alexander arched an eyebrow at me. “There’s no way we would have let human trafficking slide in our city. It was inevitable that we would get involved. This way, we had a heads up.”
He was right. At the first whiff of something wrong in the city, Alexander would have gotten SDS involved.
Their morals wouldn’t have let them stand by while people got hurt.
That still didn’t mean I liked that they were involved.
Kingfisher was gunning for me and the Archers, and I had a feeling I would be facing him directly at some point in the future.
My phone vibrated on his desk. I turned it over and saw Liam’s name on the screen.
“Hey, what’s up?” I asked.
Liam was working from Maya’s house today on Archers’ tasks. We had made a good dent in the profile yesterday, and Dominic was still working on it today, but a million other tasks had piled up, so Liam was tackling some of those today.
“I was able to track the truck that brought the girls to the rail yard to a five-block radius on the eastside of the city.” Liam got straight to the point.
“I’ve narrowed it down to a ten-by-ten block area, but there aren’t enough traffic cameras inside that radius for me to narrow it down any further.
I think we need to put surveillance inside that area and search building by building to see what turns up. ”
“Okay,” I said, my mind racing with logistics. “Let me conference Izzy in.”
I put the phone on speaker and conferenced Izzy in. When she answered, Liam explained what he had found to her and Alexander, who was now listening in as well.
“Who do we have who can do this discreetly?” I asked.
We had gone to ground with most of our operations, but we should be able to spare a couple of people.
“The best would be Danny and his team,” Izzy said. “I know he doesn’t want to leave Grace, but we need him back for this.”
“I can send a few SDS people to guard the hospital,” Alexander offered. “We can post someone outside her room as well.” We had a group of SDS employees who weren’t on a team but instead did individual work.
I chewed on my bottom lip. “If we can spare a couple, that would be great. Then Danny can round up a few on his team and start narrowing the search grid. However,” I stressed.
“This is surveillance only. They are not to engage if they see anything. Survey and report back their findings. That’s it.
” I didn’t need anyone else getting hurt, and if we were closing in on the Kingfisher, he was likely to lash out.
“Copy that. I’ll convey the details to Danny and his team.”
“I’ll send you over the area and where the cameras are,” Liam said. “I’ll put it together in one of our standard surveillance packets.”
“I’ll send people to the hospital now,” Alexander said.
Izzy and Liam ended the call, and I rubbed my temples.
Finding where the truck originated would be great, especially if we found more girls or could get clues to where they might be.
But every move now felt like a carefully coordinated dance where one wrong step could be the one we didn’t come back from.
“Hey,” Alexander said. “This is good news. We’re a step closer.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just worried.”
“I know,” he said. If there was anyone who understood the weight of leadership, it was Alexander.
There was a knock on the door. Sebastian opened the door and poked his head in. “Got a second?” he asked.
“Sure,” Alexander said. “What do you have?”
“Hey, darling,” Sebastian said, ignoring Alexander’s question. He placed a quick kiss on my lips, then took the chair next to me. “So I was going through the emails we downloaded from the judge’s burner email, and I think there’s a light pattern here for shipments.”
“A pattern like, you know when the next shipment is coming in?” Alexander asked, leaning his elbows on the desk.
“Not conclusively,” Sebastian said. “But I was able to find a couple of things in there that leads me to think there will be another shipment through the rail yard in the next couple of weeks.”
“That’s if it still comes through,” I pointed out. “Kingfisher could have moved operations.”
“He could have,” Sebastian agreed. “But I don’t think he will. This is a lucrative business for him, and there’s something interesting about this rail yard I found during my research.”
“What’s that?” Alexander asked.
“This rail yard is a pass-through point or an access point for at least eighty percent of the railway in the Midwest. So the freight trains that come through go all over the country. I don’t think he can afford to stop using the rail yard.”
“I agree,” Alexander said. “Let’s put a person from the tech department on the rail yard feed for the next couple of weeks. I know Liam’s monitoring it, but an extra set of eyes wouldn’t hurt.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
If there really was another shipment, we should be able to track it through the cameras Nathaniel Drake gave us access to. It was another step closer and a small win, but it still felt like we were running out of time.