Chapter 25 #2
Crap. He’d forgotten about that. “We had intel that Ahmed Shah, the number one asshole on our deck of cards, was running shit through there. He had links to a village in the tribals.” Even now, he was sweating like he would have in that shit valley.
“Kunar is a, pack multiple lunches and way more water than you need kinda ruck, so we were playing a long game. Give him some conditional awareness of helos, troops, going down that route day after day, and nobody ever chasing the fucker.”
“That’s a hell of a long game,” Gunnar said. “But it still doesn’t explain why the no ties?”
“Because the last time a team went in there and fucked around with Shah, he fucked with their families right back and started sending death threats. Families were moved onto base, and to safe houses for years. No family, no leverage for Shah to exploit. Direct orders came down the chain of command for the task force; one of the reqs was operators with no ties or family connections.”
Gunnar’s eyes narrowed. “Then why the fuck didn’t Sullivan pull him?”
Tyrone stilled. “What?”
“Jennings told his CO he no longer met the selection criteria for the task force. Sullivan knew he had a woman and a newborn at home. If the threat to families was serious enough that command specifically selected operators without ties. Why didn’t Sullivan replace him?”
Shit.
“Got something,” Jorja’s voice snapped across the war-room before Tyrone could decide which part of Gunnar’s question he wanted to tear apart first. Every head turned toward her.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard, windows opening and disappearing faster than Tyrone could follow.
“The cousin isn’t our guy. He’s a bridge.
Name’s Eric Palmer. Forty-three, Portland.
On paper, he works for a logistics company called WestBridge Freight Solutions. ”
“On paper?” Gunnar asked.
“Company exists, pays taxes, files everything it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t move enough freight to justify the money running through its accounts.
” Jorja enlarged a web of transactions on the main screen.
“WestBridge has received payments from three companies we already flagged while we were dismantling White Shadow. Different names, different countries, same beneficial ownership buried under enough layers to make most investigators give up before breakfast.”
Tyrone stared at the screen. Numbers. Dates. Companies he’d never heard of. None of it looked like Kelsey. “Where’s the foster family?” His patience was hanging by a fucking thread. “You said they were connected.”
“I’m getting there.”
“Get there faster.”
“Tyrone.” Gunnar’s warning barely registered.
Jorja didn’t even look offended. “Palmer’s mother and Kelsey’s foster mother are sisters.”
There it was. Finally, something he could fucking understand.
Glenna’s fingers tightened around his. “Did they know?” Her voice sounded so small that Tyrone wanted to put his fist through something. “The people she was living with. Did they know what was going to happen to her?”
“We don’t know yet,” Remi answered, gentler than Tyrone had ever heard him speak. “I’m not going to tell you they did unless we can prove it.”
“Then what can you prove?” Tyrone demanded.
Remi tapped his screen. “That Kelsey shouldn’t have been placed with them.”
Glenna went rigid. Tyrone turned toward her, but her eyes were locked on Remi. “What does that mean?”
“It means there were three approved foster homes closer to where Kelsey was removed from you. Two had openings the day she was taken into care. Both were passed over.” Remi brought another document onto the screen.
“Someone manually changed the placement recommendation six hours after Kelsey entered the system.”
“Who?”
“Case supervisor named Lauren Vickers.”
Glenna made a strangled sound, and Tyrone’s head snapped toward her. “You know her?”
“She was there.” The room went still as Glenna stared at the name on the screen as though it had reached through the months of devastation and wrapped a hand around her throat.
“Not when they first took Kelsey. Later. At the hearing when they told me I wasn’t doing enough.
She sat behind the social worker.” Her brow furrowed.
“I remember because she never looked at me. Everyone else did, even if they looked at me like I was something they’d scraped off their shoe, but she wouldn’t. ”
“Glens.”
“She had a red folder.” Glenna’s breathing accelerated. “Kelsey’s name was on it. She took it when they left.”
Jorja was already typing.
Tyrone didn’t know if the red folder meant a fucking thing, but judging by the way Remi leaned toward his screen, something did.
“Jesus Christ.”
“What?” Tyrone barked.
Remi threw another document onto the main display, listing three names: Lauren Vickers, Eric Palmer, and a third name Tyrone didn’t recognize.
Beneath them was a series of transactions.
“Vickers left DHS seven weeks after Kelsey disappeared,” Remi said.
“Resigned without notice. She sold her house two months later and moved to Arizona.”
“Follow the money,” Mojo said quietly.
“Already did.” Jorja enlarged one transaction. “Twenty-five thousand dollars hit an account belonging to Vickers eleven days before Kelsey was moved into that foster home.”
Glenna stopped breathing beside him. Tyrone knew because he couldn’t hear her anymore, and he reached for her hand.
“Where did it come from?” Gunnar asked.
“WestBridge.”
The fucking cousin.
Tyrone’s vision narrowed. “That’s not enough.” He heard himself say it and hated the desperation behind the words. “That’s still not Sullivan.”
“No.” Mojo turned his laptop around. “This is.” A bank statement filled the screen, and John Sullivan’s name sat at the top.
Mojo highlighted a transaction, then another, and another. “A few years ago, Sullivan was in deep with an online bookmaking operation running out of Tashkent. I traced the ownership through four shell companies before I hit a name we’ve seen before. White Shadow.”
“How deep?” Gunnar asked.
“At its worst?” Mojo’s mouth flattened. “Three hundred and eighty-seven grand.”
“Fuck me,” Colt muttered.
Tyrone couldn’t speak.
Mojo continued. “Then something interesting happens. Sullivan’s balance drops by a hundred grand overnight. No payment from any account I can find. No asset sale. No loan. Nothing.”
“When?” Tyrone managed.
“Three days after the mission where Dwight was killed.” Mojo pulled up yet another transaction. “The balance was cleared within a week of Kelsey moving to that foster home.”
I’m understanding that wrong.
I fucking have to be.
There is no fucking way Sullivan sold my team down the goddamn pipe.
The room seemed to tilt, and Glenna’s hand disappeared from his. He turned toward her, and she had both hands pressed over her mouth.
“No.”
“Glenna.”
“No.” She shook her head violently. “No, you’re saying he...”
“We’re saying the timing matches,” Remi said carefully.
“I don’t give a fuck about timing.” Tyrone rounded on Mojo. “Can you prove it?”
“Not yet.”
“Then fucking prove it.”
“Rone.”
He ignored Gunnar. “Don’t sit there and tell her that bastard not only traded her child but maybe is the reason Dwight died for a fucking gambling debt unless you can prove it.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then find me something that does.”
“We are.”
“Not fast enough.” The silence after the words was brutal.
Tyrone dragged both hands over his face.
Dwight was dead, and Kelsey was out there waiting for him to come find her.
While they were digging through bank accounts and dead men’s emails, his girl was out there with the same fucking monsters who had already stolen years of her life.
Dwight’s girl.
My girl now, too.
There wasn’t even a flicker of resistance to the words this time.
Fuck Dwight. Fuck guilt. Fuck every reason he’d given himself for keeping that tiny piece of distance between them.
Kelsey was his. Maybe not by blood. Maybe not on a piece of paper.
Maybe not in any way a court would give a shit about.
But she was his in every way that mattered inside his chest. And someone had taken her. Again.
“I want Caius on the phone.”
Remi looked up.
“Get him on the phone.”
“What are you thinking?” Gunnar asked.
“He bought her the last time.”
Glenna flinched, and Tyrone hated the words the moment they left his mouth, but there wasn’t a softer version that changed what had happened.
“Caius bought Kelsey, Ember, and Jules from whoever had the fuckers who had them in France. We keep trying to work this from Oregon forward. Work it from France backward.”
Remi was already reaching for his phone. “On it.”
It took less than thirty seconds. “Mercier.”
“Caius, it’s Remi. You’re on speaker. I’m here with Gunnar, Tyrone, and Glenna.”
There was a pause, then Caius’s voice changed. “What’s happened?”
“Kelsey’s been taken.”
“What the hell? When?”
“We need you to remember the first time,” Tyrone said. “Everything. Who contacted you? Who brought her? Who you paid? Anything you saw that didn’t mean shit at the time.”
They could hear movement on the other end of the call as if Caius were walking, then they heard the sound of a door closing. “I was contacted through an intermediary.”
“Name.”
“I never had one.”
“Male? Female?”
“Male. Eastern European accent. We did not meet. Everything was arranged electronically until the exchange.”
“Where?”
“Outside Marseille.”
Remi’s fingers started moving.
“Who brought Kelsey?”
There was another pause before Caius answered, “A man and a woman.”
“Would you recognize them?”
“The woman, perhaps. The man, certainly.”
Tyrone’s pulse kicked. “Why?”
“Because I nearly killed him.” Nobody spoke as Caius continued, his voice flat. “Kelsey was crying. He grabbed her by the back of her neck and told her to shut up. I objected.”
Knowing Caius, objected probably meant he’d introduced the fucker’s face to a wall.
“Remi,” Tyrone said.