26. Chapter 26
Morales appeared on the laptop screen at eight forty-five in the morning from a federal conference room in Seattle. She was wearing what looked like a brand new blazer.
Maren had set the laptop at the kitchen table.
Jace was at the counter with his hand on the rim of a coffee mug the way Jace stood at counters when he didn't want to crowd her at her table.
Elena was in and out of the kitchen with a loaf of bread that was going to come out of the oven in twenty-two minutes.
She had the look of a woman who had been up since four, coffee going and had put the blazer on for the Zoom and wasn't going to remember to take it off for a day.
“Ms. Palmer.”
“Agent Morales.”
Morales gave her a brief smile. “You look good.”
“I feel good.”
“I'm sorry I can't fly out this month. We’re deep in pretrial. But I wanted to tell you this in person.”
“I understand.”
Morales pulled a page from a folder.
“We recovered seventeen women from a facility in Portland last Tuesday. Four more from a transit house in Tacoma on Friday. Your archive matched exactly. Routes, shell companies, port dates. The task force has been hitting the network at three points a week since the warrants started dropping.”
Maren nodded.
“We're still looking. Best estimate from the last lieutenant who cooperated is another thirty women somewhere in the distribution chain. We'll find them.”
“Okay.”
“Charges. The tally stands at thirty-four counts. Trafficking, federal conspiracy, witness retaliation, murder-for-hire count we added after the pre-dawn raid. Brock's attorneys are still filing motions. They're not winning any of them.”
“Read me every count when it's filed. All thirty-four.”
“It's not fabricated.”
“No. And you're going to say that. On the stand. Under oath. And the jury is going to look at your face when you say it, and they're going to believe you.”
Maren didn't answer that because she didn't have to. Morales wasn't asking a question.
“Trial date holds. Opening statements the morning of April fourteenth.”
“We'll be there.”
“I'll meet you at the witness prep room. I'll walk you through what to expect. Ms. Palmer.”
“Yes.”
“Your father did something very few people in my line of work ever get to see done. He built a complete case on a criminal he worked for. By himself, under his own name without a badge. He put it in a box for his daughter to hand to a federal agent. Did everything but put the damn bow on top.”
Maren nodded with a bittersweet smile. “He did good.”
Her eyes didn't fill. She had stopped doing that with her dad's name three weeks ago. The pride was there in the place it had gone to at the storage-unit floor.
“Like father, like daughter,” Morales said, and gave her a proud look.
Morales's mouth quirked up a small bit the way a federal agent's mouth did when the significant other of a witness had said the right sentence at the right second and the agent had heard it at three hundred miles away through a laptop screen.
“Mr. Holbrook.”
“Agent.”
“See you in court.”
She cut the call.
Maren closed the laptop.
Sat with her hand resting on the lid for a second. Then, quiet, to the closed laptop: “If I freeze.”
Jace heard her. He came up behind the chair, set his hand at her nape, held it until her shoulders eased a quarter inch.
“You won't,” he answered. “If you do, I'm in the gallery. I'll breathe for both of us until you start again.”
Jace put his coffee down.
“Walk with me.”
“Yeah.”
The compound at nine thirty on a sunny April morning was a compound that started to return to itself.
Patrols were still up but the threat of crisis had loosened. Kids had returned to the clearing to play. A toddler rode on a sled his mother pulled at a slow walking pace. Two other adults in human form lingered at the edge of the clearing, chatting as they watched a group of pups play.
Maren and Jace walked through the clearing.
Past the training yard. Kira was there with Brennan running knife drills. Kira looked up at Maren and gave her the nod she gave her now, which was the nod of a woman who stopped putting her on the snow because she stopped needing to.
Past the woodpile. Tyler was there with an axe in his hands that he knew how to swing now. He saw Maren and raised the axe an inch off his shoulder in a wave and brought it back down.
They walked through the east path and under the pines toward the tree line.
Maren stopped.
Jace stopped beside her.
“Jace.”
“Yeah.”
“I finally feel free.”
He took that in.
“Yeah.”
She looked at the trees. Then she looked at him.
“Then I'm ready.”
He had been about to say something else and didn't say it.
“Ready.”
“Yeah.”
Jace's face did the slow thing it did when he was understanding something that his body had understood first and his head was catching up. A beat. Another beat. His mouth did a small shape that wasn't quite a smile and then was a smile and then was a grin.
“Yeah,” she said again, laughing now at how long the math was taking him.
She didn't have time to say anything else because he had picked her up off her feet.
She was over his shoulder before she'd registered that he was moving.
Maren laughed.
She hadn't laughed like that, from the middle of her body, without anything pulling on it, since she had been a kid in a meadow behind her father's cabin when she'd been eight years old and her father had blown on her thumb until she'd laughed.
Jace ran with her.
Across the clearing. Past the training yard where Kira saw them and laughed out loud for the first time Maren had ever heard her laugh. Past Tyler who stopped mid-swing and then grinned. Past Elena who shook her head in the kitchen window without stopping what she was doing.
Past Cade who had been walking toward the lodge and raised both hands in surrender and got out of their way.
Jace ran the rest of the way to his cabin. To their cabin.
The door slammed behind them.
Outside in the yard, wolves went back to what they had been doing. Kira went back to the drill. Tyler went back to the wood. Elena went back to her dough. The pups went back to the sled.
Nobody was pretending not to notice.
Nobody was pretending not to smile.