Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
In time, the numbers would tell the truth.
The Diamond Ward
Dragon Heights, Wyoming
With the help of a herd of bankers, accountants, and a handful of FBI agents, we tore through the boxes of financial information in search of anything that might guide us to the traffickers.
If we located the traffickers, we stood a good chance of finding the victims. The problem would be taking millions of transactions and translating them into viable information.
Even Pascal worried about the volume of data we needed to process, most of which had not yet been transcribed digitally due to age.
In good news for Madam Merorie’s victims, it didn’t take long for Pascal to identify a few key patterns in her files that might help us get down to the bottom of the case.
First, all her businesses appeared to be fronts for her trafficking operations.
Second, as far as he could tell, there was someone still accepting payments for victims.
We even had sufficient evidence to acquire a warrant and plan a sting operation, assuming we could find the location of the accomplice. That would prove to be a challenge, however.
The employees of the businesses had no idea that Madam Merorie had owned the businesses.
The brute of a dragon that Erik’s mother eliminated had managed all the businesses, and nobody had realized he was a mercury dragon.
The FBI, in an effort to bust the ring, had sent numerous agents out to question everyone associated with the businesses, and they’d armed themselves with black dragons.
According to Pascal, nobody hated traffickers more than Enzo Acri and his clan, and they would stop at nothing to bring them to justice.
Once upon a time, Enzo had lost a sister to trafficking. That she’d been trafficked hundreds of years ago changed nothing for him and his family.
Unlike Madam Merorie’s slain victims, his clan still longed for closure, closure they doubted would ever come.
In reality, his sister had likely died centuries ago, lost to time with nothing but her family’s memory remaining.
If she had survived, she likely had no idea she was an Acri dragon, and there was a possibility she had no idea she was a black dragon at all.
She had been stolen at three years old, and the Acri clan only understood her fate through questioning someone who had been involved with her sale.
With no physical evidence, without knowing precisely when and where, not even chrome dragons could help the black dragons locate the woman, assuming she still lived. I would need more time than I had to process the Acri clan’s motivations and attempt to imagine their anguish.
The Acri clan’s involvement in the mercury dragon case might cause us problems, but I would accept the trouble with a grim smile. Their efforts wouldn’t bring their lost family member back, but they might help heal other broken families.
I couldn’t understand their pain, but I could understand their motivations. Only the woman’s recovery—or confirmation of her fate—could offer them the closure the Acri clan needed, but helping other families be restored would help fill in some of the cracks. Not all of them, but some.
Of Madam Merorie’s operations, the used bookstore likely held the key to unveiling her full trafficking operations.
The investigating agents, upon examining the wares, confirmed that the place stocked a suspicious number of titles priced between four hundred and seven hundred dollars, the ideal range for selling trafficking victims. With the help of an appraiser, the FBI determined that while the books were valuable, all the titles in the price range should have been priced closer to a hundred to two hundred dollars.
Pascal believed two books sold equaled one payment for a victim, and judging from the number of transactions, each victim bagged the mercury dragons a minimum of four payments.
In time, the numbers would tell the truth.
The traffickers had made the mistake of spacing each payment twelve business days apart rather reliably, with the store handling payments for four to six victims at a time. Each payment varied within ten dollars, which made it simple enough for Pascal to group them together.
The brilliance of the scheme astounded me.
“You look ready to throw your laptop across the room,” the black dragon commented without looking up from his papers, which consisted of the shop’s transactions for the past forty-five days. “Talk me through the problem.”
“It’s not really a problem. I am piecing together how they’ve trafficked the victims. Are the bookstore employees in on it?”
“Very probably. I’m getting text updates, and they’ll be arresting all the employees; they’re just getting a full employee list along with their residences first. Once they have the residences, they’ll apprehend everyone involved. We have sufficient evidence to make the arrests now.”
I wondered what the FBI had found out that Pascal wasn’t telling me. “Are we getting the financials from the store?”
“We are.” He pointed at the pile we were using to stash Madam Merorie’s business activities at the bookstore.
“I feel that’s where we might find the traffickers.
The store’s debit transactions ended up in her business account—a business account that wasn’t actually associated with the business.
We already have confirmation that the transactions were not registered as business sales with the government.
We suspect she was listing the sales as hobby income or miscellaneous sales.
We’re already tracing the funds to their originating accounts.
But, and here’s the big but: it’s probable there’s a middleman.
We’ll need to identify the middleman and connect the trafficking ring with the mercury dragons. ”
“That sounds par for the course,” I replied, grabbing the offensive stack, checking over his most recent work.
Following Pascal’s method, which involved groups of four to twelve payments per trafficked person, up from the original four he’d initially estimated, we feared there were around ten thousand victims needing justice.
If my fears proved to be reality, most would be women torn from their families.
Worse, some might have been children when kidnapped and sold, much like Enzo’s sister had been stolen and sold to the highest bidder.
Grabbing my laptop, I referred to the spreadsheet of victims, sorted by age, and read through it, a chill sweeping through me.
There were no girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen and very few between the ages of nine and thirteen.
I created a pivot table that listed victims by age at time of death and gender before turning the screen so Pascal could see it.
“If we go by the deceased victim list, she was selling teen girls.”
Pascal checked over my numbers, and his expression turned rather stony. “And she was selling them for cheap, because if my guess on the payment method is correct, she was undercutting the market to make certain she had consistent buyers. How many boys of that age were murdered?”
“Only fifty-two,” I replied after checking the pivot table.
“She was probably selling the boys, too, after she cherry picked the ones she wanted for her experiments.”
“We’re missing a lot of bodies, aren’t we?”
“I fear so. The math doesn’t lie, and if she has potentially ten thousand trafficking victims, earning well over forty million for them, she likely has even more corpses.
But they wouldn’t all be from Dragon Heights.
She would have been importing victims from other cities, using the same methodology. ”
A thought occurred to me, so brutal and efficient it sickened me. “What if the traffickers were unloading unwanted people that couldn’t be used as part of their operations as part of the payment for the girls? Or paying Madam Merorie to make certain those people disappeared? Could it be a mix?”
According to Pascal’s wince, the thought hadn’t occurred to him, and he disliked the idea as much as I did.
“That is a possibility, and it’s a rather disturbing one.
If she was doing this, it would bring the value of the girls closer to standard.
If Madam Merorie is making the evidence disappear, the traffickers would be happy with the arrangement.
And they might still be unloading live bodies, unaware that the operation has collapsed due to the Merorie clan’s death.
If we can figure out where they’re trading victims, we might be able to bust them. ”
“That’s a big if. If these traffickers were relying on Madam Merorie to get rid of their unwanted victims, there might be a surge of bodies turning up elsewhere, right?”
“That is a possibility, and the volume might be enough for us to get good leads.” The FBI agent tapped at his laptop, making thoughtful noises.
“In reality, while ten thousand seems like a huge number, it’s only a drop in an ocean compared to the number of underage girls that go missing every year in the United States alone.
In the grand scheme, Madam Merorie is a small fish in a huge school of sharks. ”
Miami had been a hotbed of kidnappings involving adults and children alike, resulting in the establishment of an entire unit dedicated to rescue and investigation.
As I had worked the homicide circuit, I lacked the practical knowledge to understand just how small a fish Madam Merorie was in the industry.
“All right. Hit me with it. What are the current yearly statistics?”