Chapter 6
“So, let me get this straight,” said Smith that afternoon over lunch. “Not only is this ritual killing shit for real, but the symbol on that coin might tie the UNSUB to some kind of cult?”
“Williams totally called it,” Jones reminded them, using a set of chopsticks to bite into an egg roll.
On the table in front of them three monitors displayed footage from a convenience store, a boutique, and a pizza place.
All three sat in close proximity to Solstice and had cameras facing its exterior.
They’d spent the afternoon going over the videos Jones and Smith had recovered from the few businesses that had been willing to surrender them without a court order.
The footage went by on the monitors at twice the normal speed, each of them glued to the one in front of them.
So far, they had found nothing out of the ordinary—just hours of deliveries and maintenance workers coming and going during the day and clubbers filing in and out at night.
Still, Mateo wasn’t ready to give up. There was still a stack of tapes on the table between them.
“Yes, a gold star for Williams,” Mateo grumbled around a mouthful of fried rice.
“Thank you, sir,” Williams said with a half smile.
“So, what now?” Jones pressed. “Even if we find any useful information on the cult, we still have no way of knowing who the UNSUB might be. There’s no hard evidence tying anyone to the scenes.”
“We have the profile,” Mateo argued. “And we have Solstice. Williams, any word from Little Rock on the identity of their victim?”
“Nothing useful, sir. Twenty-one years old, lived in the area, and had a record for possession and solicitation. Same as the others.”
Donovan called for Mateo from the doorway to Darcy’s office. The urgency in his eyes had Mateo across the room in seconds.
“What happened?”
“Darcy got a hit on our New Orleans victim. The profile seemed typical at first, but then she found something.”
Mateo shouldered past him and into the dark room, glancing over Darcy’s shoulder at the monitors. Taking off her headphones, she swiveled one of the screens so he could see it better.
“Our victim is one, Kacey Mills. Twenty-four years old, three stints in court-ordered rehab, and four arrests for prostitution. But here’s where it gets interesting.”
She clicked her mouse a few times and pulled up a copy of a police report filed six months ago.
“On her last arrest, Kacey told the cops that she was being pimped out by some prick who calls himself Suede. Well, I did a little digging and turned this up.”
A few more mouse clicks, and Mateo was staring at a mugshot of a Black male who looked to be in his thirties. He glared into the camera, brows furrowed. A dark tattoo was etched across his throat—words Mateo couldn’t read.
“Meet Tariq Lavon Hayes, born in 1993. New Orleans native and resident troublemaker. Done a few stints for assault and battery, promoting prostitution, and—oh my God, ew—exposing himself to a minor. But get this … in her statement, Kacey claims to have been bought and sold out of a back room at guess what swanky nightclub?”
Mateo fought to remain stoic as the possibilities of what this all meant swirled through his mind. “Solstice. Any information yet on ownership?”
Darcy spun back to her screens, fingers moving over the keys.
“Still working on that one, Boss. So far, all I can tell you is that Solstice is owned by an asset management firm called Valemont Holdings, LLC. Along with Solstice, the company owns multiple luxury real estate properties across the country. There’s also some money tied up in art and antiquities imports and a nonprofit organization—but the financials indicate that the monies raised are used to line the pockets of various political campaigns and city officials. ”
“What about the owner of Valemont? Any info?”
Darcy snorted and tossed her pink and purple stained hair over one shoulder.
“Yeah, the listed owner of the company and its assets are so obviously fake. The name on the paperwork is Jonathan Blake, but my inquiries into him turn up almost no digital footprint. It’s fishy as fuck.
I’ll dig deeper to find the real owner, but that will take some time. ”
Mateo dragged a hand through his hair. There were more pieces to this puzzle now than he’d had upon his arrival in New Orleans. He couldn’t quite see how they fit together, the space between them uneven and blurred.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Donovan said, bracing a hand on Darcy’s chair and peering at the screens over her shoulder. “How do the UNSUB, the cult, and the club connect? Or … do they connect at all?”
Mateo was already turning the question over in his mind. “If nothing else, the murdered women could be connected to the club. If Suede was using back rooms to sell girls, and the owner of the club is a shell corporation, we could be looking at organized crime here. Specifically, human trafficking.”
“Maybe the UNSUB’s connection to all of this is just a coincidence,” Darcy argued.
“The guy has been all over the country. He happens to come to New Orleans and finds Kacey, and makes her his next kill. That she happened to be a victim of a trafficking ring running out of Solstice could be a coincidence.”
“It can only be a coincidence if the other victims turn out to have no connection to the trafficking ring.”
He strode back through the doorway and approached his team, who were finishing off their lunch while continuing to monitor the video feeds.
“Put a pin in this for now,” he said, lifting the box of their case files from another table and offering it to Smith.
“I need the three of you to go back over everything we have on the victims except Mari. I specifically want information on their previous arrests and any statements given to law enforcement. Anything that might indicate that these women weren’t just streetwalkers.
The finances and business structure of Solstice may indicate an involvement in human trafficking. ”
Williams wrinkled her brow in disbelief. “The UNSUB is a trafficker? That doesn’t fit with the profile.”
Mateo wanted to be irritated with her for pointing that out, but as always, Williams was right.
A criminal peddling human flesh was altogether a different animal than one who raped, mutilated, and murdered.
The little insight from the crime scenes painted the picture of a narcissist too drunk on his own power and cleverness to work with others.
Human trafficking took coordination and cooperation.
The coordination, this UNSUB was surely good at.
How else could he manage to kill in so many states without leaving a trace of concrete evidence?
But, the cooperation bit. Had Mateo misjudged this UNSUB?
Had he been too confident in his profile?
“You’re right, it doesn’t fit,” he admitted.
“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t follow this lead.
If it reveals anything new about the victims or the UNSUB, it’s something.
If nothing else, we have a fresh case for the organized crime division.
If it turns out to be a dead end, we’ll hand it over. ”
“What about the cult stuff?” Smith asked while passing out case files.
“Darcy is still gathering intel on that. Our source was right … The Veil is obscure. So obscure that almost nothing exists about it online. But, if there’s a connection, we’ll find it.
Keep going through those case files and have Darcy dig into anything that requires closer inspection. Keep me updated.”
Mateo turned to leave, finding that the room had grown too stifling. The air inside was stale, pungent with the odors of old coffee, ink and paper, and leftover Chinese food. It wasn’t until he had stepped out into the sweltering humidity of the outdoors that he realized Donovan had followed him.
The man stood beside him on the front steps of the field office, having removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He slipped a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on, the lenses reflecting the image of the cloudy sky.
“You good?” he asked.
Despite the sunglasses, Mateo could feel Donovan’s eyes on him. Their close scrutiny was even more unnerving behind the shades, with Mateo unable to determine what he might be thinking.
“Fine. Why?”
“You’ve been on this case a hell of a long time. From what I gathered from the files, the investigation had been at a standstill since…”
Mateo’s nostrils flared as Donovan winced, seeming to realize what he’d been about to say. “Since that motherfucker murdered my wife.”
“I was sorry to have to read her file. No one deserves to die that way.”
He wondered if Donovan had grown sick to his stomach at the sight of the pentagram carved into Mari’s belly—so deep that the fascia protecting her organs had been exposed.
He wondered if the man had counted the fractures and breaks of Mariana’s bones—her wrists, her ribs, her fingers.
Had he shed tears like Mateo had at the evidence that she had literally been broken to pieces while fighting for her life?
Had he retched into the toilet until he felt as if he would heave up his spleen at the images of the bruises on her inner thighs, the violence of rape painted across her skin in a mingling of purple and black?
He still felt Donovan’s gaze burning into him but refused to acknowledge it.
He respected Donovan, felt he might even come to like the man.
He had spent some time reading the other agent’s personnel file and found himself highly impressed.
A West Point graduate who had spent the first years of his career in military intelligence, Donovan had joined the bureau only four years ago.
To date, he was the youngest agent to ever receive the FBI director’s Citation for Exceptional Service.
He had proven to be so good at his job that he’d been hurtled to his position as a Special Agent years ahead of the typical timeline.
His jacket was full of reports on extraordinary capabilities that made it difficult to forget the guy’s young age.
A career like his was practically unheard of.
Squeezing his eyes closed, Mateo drew in a deep, slow breath. He couldn’t succumb to the rage boiling in his blood, heating him from the inside until he felt like a furnace roared in his belly. His teeth ground together, his jaw winding painfully tight.
“Okay,” Donovan said when Mateo merely stood there seething. “Message received. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
God damn it. Now, he liked Donovan even more.
“It’s fine,” he ground out, even though it was most certainly not fine.
He had been so immersed in untangling the threads connecting the Seal of Azrael to his UNSUB, which might also connect him to Solstice and a potential human trafficking ring, that the mention of Mari and the unspeakable things that had been done to her seemed to come out of nowhere.
He felt as if someone had punched him in the gut, hard enough to send the fist clear out his back, allowing all his grief and pain and wrath to pour out of him in rivers of red-black blood.
“What are you doing tonight?”
Donovan’s question hit him like a cold dash of water in his face. The abrupt change of subject was welcome, though, so Mateo latched onto it.
“Nothing. Probably going over more of the surveillance footage from outside Solstice. Why?”
“I was thinking … we may not have any new leads to go on until tomorrow. But if you’re anything like me—and our limited interactions lead me to believe you are—you’re not going to want to sit around waiting until then. So, let’s check out Solstice tonight.”
Mateo groaned. “I haven’t been to a club in … fuck, I don’t even want to say how long.”
Donovan laughed and nudged Mateo with his elbow. “Oh, my bad. You probably have an early bedtime or something. I know how important sleep is when you’re in your—”
“I will push you down these steps,” Mateo growled, though his voice was laced with humor.
“Think you can manage to stay awake long enough to help me do some recon? We can get a sense for who hangs out in the club. Might even see something useful.”
Mateo gritted his teeth. After a long and trying couple of days, the last thing he wanted was to hang around some nightclub full of drunk tourists and rowdy college kids.
A solitary evening in his hotel room with a fresh bottle of Scotch had already been on his agenda.
But then, his mind would never allow him to sit still.
Every piece of new information that had been uncovered the last two days were like marbles in his brain, rolling around and knocking into each other and setting off ripples of ideas and assumptions that filled him from corner to corner.
He would never be able to relax. Never be able to enjoy his Scotch.
Never be able to find any kind of peace in sleep now that the case had been injected with new life.
His need to know how it all fit together superseded his desire to be left the fuck alone.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “I’ll meet you there at ten.”