17. Xander
Xander
The men didn’t bother with pleasantries as they walked into the living room where Andrie was sitting, wide-eyed and braced for whatever news they brought with them.
“We took a look around your office,” Shade started without preamble. “And you were right. There’s no way that break-in wasn’t done by a professional.”
“But they torched my laptop,” Andrie’s protest was half-hearted.
Shade snorted. “That’s because you had the smallest, thinnest floor safe I’ve ever seen. There’s barely room for a piece of paper between that shell of a computer and the door.”
Whisp, who hadn’t spoken a word, simply took up a stance along the corner of the room and grunted his agreement.
“But you got it?” she asked.
My brow furrowed in confusion as Shade nodded and reached for his pocket, but she only shook her head. “Keep it at the clubhouse. I’ll pick up a new one as a decoy and start bringing my daily logs home on a flash drive I can keep hidden. Vik can bring them whenever he goes.”
“You could keep the daily session notes at A.T. as well,” Shade pointed out. “It would keep you from having to transport them. And with the break-in, you can bet some of the important players will be going to the A.T. building anyway, sooner rather than later.”
“You think they were after the military patients I have or the black ops ones?” she asked, looking between the three of us.
“Military,” Whisp said. “Or a pro looking for your files for the pro-bono cases. If they did any sort of surveillance, they’d know you wouldn’t have our case files in that office, assuming they realize you see operatives like us at all.
Other than Lessia, or an emergency case, you see the rest of us off-site.
” He tilted his head as if in thought. “How many of your patients are pro-bono?” he asked, referring to her rape, trafficked, or forced prostitution cases.
“Umm.” She scrunched her brow in thought.
“Right now, before starting with my A.T. clients, roughly forty percent are military or their families, fifteen percent are y’all, and the rest are mostly women and children.
But,” she hesitated. “Some of them I only see a few times. Until they move on. Others—the ones settled in this area or live here—I see more often. But, still, depending on their comfort level and need, I might see a patient several times a week or once every few months. To give you a number on current patients is … difficult.”
“You think someone is after one of her patients?” I asked Whisp.
He shrugged, but Shade answered. “We know someone’s out there looking for one of two women who were helped out of the city by an older woman who has since died.
Natural causes,” he added hastily at Andrie’s gasp.
“But we—nor the men after them—have been able to find them. Whisp and I were talking things over and wondering if maybe someone started grasping at straws. Andrie’s name is hard to find, but it’s there if they know who to talk to and where to look.
She takes on the tough cases and has the connections to the underground channels when it comes to getting women out of the city. ”
“But even my files don’t always contain someone’s real name. How would they even know—”
“They wouldn’t know that until they get into the files,” Shade interrupted. “They might have thought a quick break-in would yield the results they needed without involving you directly. But they botched the job and didn’t get what they wanted.”
I turned to her, cluing into what wasn’t said. “You need to be careful.”
At her blank expression, I elaborated. “They didn’t get what they wanted doing things the easy way. Next, they might come after you.”
The men left shortly after I dropped that bomb on Andrie. I lingered a little longer, but the mood had clearly been broken and, after checking all her doors and windows to ensure they were locked, I let her practically push me out of the house.
I’d planned on going to the bar that night, but I didn’t feel comfortable anymore leaving her entirely. I sent Vik a quick text, letting him know I’d catch up with him when he got home, then let myself into the house.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Grimm making himself at home, a beer dangling from his hand. “I take it you’re caught up?” Walking past him, I grabbed a beer of my own.
“I stopped by to make sure you had the background on what Andrie might be in the middle of. Not that we have solid proof, mind you. We don’t know the old woman’s contacts, nor did we have much interaction, so we don’t know anyone in her network to reach out to.
Trying to track the women down using our resources has yielded nothing, and other than knowing someone’s looking for them, we aren’t sure what they know or even which one of the two women is in danger.
” His phone pinged, and he looked down at the screen, frowning.
“Come on,” he said, after typing back a reply and setting his beer bottle down. “We’ve got a meeting at the clubhouse.”
Hesitating as we walked out the door, I couldn’t help but look over to Andrie’s house next door. Grimm saw me pause. “Whisp has her. She’ll be safe while we’re gone.”
I nodded, relieved he was taking it as seriously as I was, before following his bike through the streets. At the clubhouse, I waved to Jasper, who was manning the gatehouse, before he shut the gates behind us.
Without a word, Grimm strode through the clubhouse entrance.
But instead of heading down the back hall to his office, he went straight to the back wall, pushing something I couldn’t see and revealing a panel that contained a palm and retinal scanner in addition to what sounded like a ten-digit code.
Eyebrows up to my hairline at the thought of what might need that sort of security, I couldn’t help my curiosity when, with a final push of a button, a section of the wall next to him opened.
The cavernous room was easily as large as the main room we’d just left, with a bank of computers and monitors covering one section of the space.
Another section of the room appeared to be an armory, and several cots and a small kitchenette were neatly tucked in another corner.
As a safe room, it was barebones, but all the necessities were there.
One by one, the large screens on the wall started lighting up, but instead of a clear picture of the person on the other side, most were shadowed.
Clearly, I wasn’t privy to identities for all the players, but I didn’t mind.
I didn’t care if I knew everyone’s faces as long as I was allowed to hear the information they had.
Three screens stayed dark, but two flickered to reveal Lessia and Brody in what looked like an office and Matteo in a room similar to this one.
“Ares, online.” Matteo said, clearly starting the meeting.
“Enyo and Mars are online.” Lessia was next.
“Cyber, times three, online,” a woman said from one of the shadowed screens, her bubbling personality shining through the computer-altered tone.
“Grimm and Rev are online,” Grimm spoke for us both.
“Eris, online,” a smoky-sounding woman’s voice drifted from one of the blacked-out screens.
“Thoth, online,” the last voice, which was even more gravelly than mine, sounded out from one of the blacked-out screens. “Is Revenant up to date?”
Grimm shook his head. “Only partly. He knows about the possible immediate threat, but not how the women are connected to players Cyber’s looking for.”
Lessia jumped in before anyone else could.
“Mike Tomelson and Stan Pritchard, now deceased, both seemed to have kept women unwillingly. One we think was trafficked at some point into the United States, the other might have been born here. Both women had fake identities, which pointed back to a well-known forger who sells identities for ‘bought’ women and children. Unfortunately, the women were aided by someone who was well known in these circles for helping victims disappear, and she died after arranging for transport for both women.”
After taking a breath, she continued, “Tomelson blamed my brother, Gideon, for the loss of not only a job opportunity into Accardi Tactical but losing his girlfriend, and he kidnapped my niece in retaliation. He didn’t survive the standoff with officers.
” She paused, glancing somewhere on her screen, before continuing, “He was the illegitimate son of Les Stanton, who’s a rival of A.T.
, and connected to an international human trafficking ring our organization has been trying to unravel for years.
Eris is undercover in his office while we gather enough information to bring down the entire ring.
Stanton was an ADA here and was killed while trying to attack Claire Harden—“
“The ice cream lady?” I asked, knowing I was interrupting but too surprised to stay quiet.
Lessia smirked. “Yes. It was her grandmother who actually transported the women, but she has no idea where they ended up, nor did she actually see or even know anyone else in that group that we could reach out to. Anyway, Stan apparently was the godson of either the leader or someone high up in that ring, and he alluded to that person having connections in several layers of government here in the United States, even though they’re abroad.
As Stan’s father isn’t known, we’re having a hard time tracking down who this godfather of his could be. ”
“Someone besides us,” the chirpy woman said, “is still looking for them. We’ve seen waves on the dark web and are still hearing whispers from our human contacts, but we aren’t sure why or who is looking for them, nor do we know if they’re looking for one in particular or if, like us, they just know they were picked up and taken out of town together and aren’t sure which woman they’re actually looking for. ”
“And you think the person looking for these women either broke in or hired someone to try to get into Andrie’s patient files,” I finished.