Chapter 27
It took ages to fall asleep last night. Waiting up for Rio to return from the the Monarch Hills offices was my aim, but at some point after my last look at the clock at one am, I fell into sleep and when I heard the door click at four am, it was him leaving again, not returning.
After the sound of the door woke me, I lay there in the dark for a moment, listening to the silence settle back around me.
It had been a rough night after he went back to the ranch office. My heart was in a rampant tennis match between the aching feeling that I was falling for someone I couldn't have, and the sick one that we were getting closer to the monsters around us.
Deciding sleep was important, I tried to snooze again in the morning but I only tossed and turned for a couple more hours.
When I finally open the front door at six fifteen to let Tina out, one of the security team is waiting on the porch.
Vance, as he introduces himself, has instructions to walk me to the offices when I’m ready. He isn't overbearing — just present, a quiet fact of the morning.
I appreciate it.
The grounds are still quite dark, the mountains just a suggestion of mass against the navy sky, my breath fogging in the cold air as we cross the property.
Tina is at my heel, nose twitching at everything, and Vance is patient with the vast number of wees I need to let her do if she was to be civilized in the offices.
Eventually, we reach the outbuilding, floor-to-ceiling windows already glowing on the second floor, the light sharp against the dark.
When I step inside, Ava is at her setup — three monitors running, a ceramic mug near her right hand, and two empty ones pushed to the edge of the desk like casualties.
Her red hair is twisted up with a pen through it, oversized flannel shirt, bare feet tucked under her on the chair, Doc Martens parked at the side of her desk.
How long has she been here?
Rio is in the far corner with Gabriel and Anton. I try not to look at him and fail immediately.
He's wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a Carhartt jacket, looking every inch the ranch boy he once was. But the jacket pulls across a body no longer solely focused on horses. It strains across shoulders that are broad, dark and devastating in the most inconvenient way possible.
It hits me deep thinking of him as a son, a brother, an uncle, because beneath it all, the tough exterior, that's what he is. And damn good at it, too.
Staring at his masculine profile, I think about how today he's walking into a bar in Sacramento to sit across from a man who has every reason to destroy him. He's doing it because of me. Because of two women he's never met.
He glances up and finds me staring at him.
I should look away.
I don't.
He holds my gaze across the room. His expression settles as if seeing me there, standing in his building at six thirty in the morning, is a relief.
Then Anton says something to him, and he looks back down at some papers they have spread out on the table in the middle.
Ava glances over at me, and the smile she gives me is so immediate and so genuinely warm that some of the tightness in my chest loosens.
She doesn't get up but waves me over. "Come sit. I'm glad you came early. I think you're going to have useful stuff for us."
"I don't know how useful I'll actually be," I say, crossing toward her. "You're clearly already hours ahead of anything I could contribute."
Not to mention, I’m pretty sure this woman is a certifiable genius. Good thing Enzo is an honest man, because I bet it’s impossible to keep a secret from her.
"You grew up inside Iron Covenant," she replies. "You know things that aren't in any record anywhere." She pulls up something on the center screen and glances at Tina, who is already conducting a thorough investigation of the floor. "She's very cute."
"She's very nosy," I say, sitting down.
Enzo sits at his own desk nearby, glasses on, deeply concentrating on his screen.
I turn back to Ava. "What do you have so far?"
Ava folds her hands on the desk. "I took their passport photos last night and used our facial recognition tool.
It's a generation ahead of anything the FBI has and–“ She pauses, a mixture of triumph and hesitation in her eyes.
"You brought something important to light, Delilah.
The women are both up for sale on a private broker network. "
"What?” My stomach is tight. This can’t be true. “Like they're up for sale online? I thought selling people online was an urban legend?"
Ava explains. "It’s not true the way people talk about it.
There's not some website somewhere, not really.
But there are invite-only private broker networks in the criminal world.
As you can imagine, trust runs thin among criminals, so there aren't many of these networks.
Maybe a dozen in the world. Possibly a few more we haven't found yet.
GhostEye has spent years mapping them through federal intelligence sharing and previous cases. "
“If you know this exists, how can it even exist anymore?” I ask.
She lights up as if impressed. “Good question. We know they exist. That doesn't mean we can touch them and we can’t monitor everything on the internet simultaneously. Plus, we’re a private firm.
Everything I find on the dark web is legally worthless without a federal warrant behind it.
In other words, if the Feds haven’t asked me to find it, they aren’t going after it.
But what we can do right now is build enough of a picture and maybe find a crack.
Maybe there are other warrants out that we can exploit for this case.
We can always reverse engineer what we do today. ”
What I think she means is that they dig now, messily, illegally, and sweep it all into a neat legal pile later.
She pulls up another window on her PC. "Anyway, sadly, there is a black market, and you can buy anything on it. Including people."
“Let me see if I get this. Someone invited my father to one of these networks?”
I thought the riders at IC were bad. My dad is rubbing shoulders with far worse. But I should have known.
Ava points to exactly the potential connection. "It's likely that your dad's heroin supplier led him to this particular network."
A knot forms in my throat. How can I come from a man who sells heroin, meth and women? A battle takes place inside me, an inner war to expel that part of me. I hate him.
Ava pulls up another screen — columns of transactions, wallet addresses, shell company names.
Holy shit. She did all this overnight? I mean, I know they were already aware of my dad’s illegal network, but still.
She acts as though it’s just another day in the office.
"We're still working on it, but there are several shell companies registered to two of the addresses David found.
One of them is the house where Beatriz is being held.
Having traced some of the crypto payments to these shell companies, it seems like the operation goes back about a year. "
My pulse quickens. "My father has been trafficking for a year?"
Ava is quiet for a moment. She can see this is hard for me, but doesn’t shelter me from the facts. “There may be some previous transactions, too, but I think that's as far back as it goes. Let’s hope.”
From across the room, Rio's voice breaks through the tsunami of information I’m now drowning in — thank God for him.
Thank God that man didn't get rid of me on the spot.
I now realize the power he has. The tools he has.
He could have made me disappear back in San Francisco.
I'm sure of it. And yet he didn’t dismiss what I brought him — not when there was a chance it was true.
Emotion seeps into every inch of my body. He's so fucking good. So much better than he thinks he is. We might save these women.
Because of him.
She pulls up a new screen. "Have you seen this woman? At Diamond Dolls?"
I lean forward and concentrate on the image before me.
The woman staring back at me is laughing in the shot, head tilted back, like whoever took the photo caught her mid-real-laugh rather than a posed one. Behind her is the heavy blue velvet curtain in the club where they take promotional photos of the dancers.
I remember her.
A feature dancer. Nobody told me her name or where she was from, but I remember her long acrylic nails — curved and immaculate, painted a deep coral. I remember thinking she was beautiful. And when she ordered a drink, she had a thick Spanish accent.
I go very still.
Ava notices before I say anything. She just waits.
"I think she might have been Chilean too," I say, not sure why, but the detail seems important.
"Yes," Ava says quietly. "I'm pretty sure that's the operation.
We think Iron Covenant specifically chose to groom Chilean women because they don't need a visa for tourist entry.
No complicated paperwork. No flags at the border.
They come in clean on legitimate visitor status, and by the time anyone might think to look for them—"
"They're already gone," I finish.
"Yes."
I sit with that for a moment.
I remember my dad asking me to make them comfortable. To take Beatriz and Isabel shopping. To sit with them at the club and make them think it was a safe place full of safe people.
Admitting my part to Ava takes courage. I hate that I was a part of this, but I have to understand. "Why did my dad involve me? To make them comfortable? What's the point?"
"First," the intention in her gaze is more serious than I've seen her, "If he hadn't involved you, we wouldn't be this close to closing down a trafficking ring, so think of it as a necessary evil."
I know it's her way of pardoning me, but self-forgiveness will be hard to reach.
"Second, there's a big grooming element to these human trafficking operations. I'm confident we'll find the women had their tickets paid, hotels…"
"My dad told me to take them shopping…"