Page 23

Chapter

Twenty-Three

GRACE

I t was a scant fifteen minutes, if that, before Voodoo stepped out to call me. Goblin and I hadn’t gone that far. The morning was cool, but sunny. Fat, poofy white clouds decorated the vivid blue of the sky. I’d been soaking up the sun and drinking my coffee.

Some of the tension Voodoo had melted away the night before and this morning corded around me. He waited for me at the door and his expression gentled. “It’s not that bad.”

His soft words actually made me smile.

“I hope it’s not.” Goblin darted up the two steps and passed Voodoo to get inside. “Not even sure what bad is at this point.”

“That’s fair,” he told me, stepping back to let me in. The combination of rich scents of coffee, bacon, potatoes, and, oh, biscuits surrounded me like a welcoming hug. Bones was at the table with Alphabet. They had plates piled high with food. Lunchbox set out another plate, most likely for Voodoo, before he set up his own.

A rich glass bowl of yogurt with side dishes of granola and fresh fruit waited in front of the empty seat next to Alphabet. My smile grew. “Thank you,” I said to Lunchbox.

He nodded once. “I have extras of everything else if you’re still hungry.”

I appreciated it. Sliding into my seat, I reached for the spoon and set my coffee down. The first bite was welcome. I added the granola and fruit to the mix.

Voodoo settled in front of the plate of food in front of the chair to Bones’ right. Alphabet sat to Bones’ left where he occupied the seat at the head of the table. That left the chair directly opposite me for Lunchbox.

Conversation waited for Lunchbox to sit. Once we were all there, Alphabet leaned back in his seat and turned his attention to Bones. Lunchbox and Voodoo both flicked their attention to him as well.

After a swallow of coffee, Bones leaned forward. “Alphabet. Report.”

“Currently, digital searches haven’t turned up anything on Amorette Black.” Alphabet slid a look to me, the apology in his blue eyes. “Expanded sweeps haven’t found her at any legitimate border crossings or via any CCTV at airports.”

My stomach sank, but I made myself keep eating. That wasn’t unexpected. Alphabet had already told me he hadn’t turned up anything new.

“The law firm is still being cagey. We’ve had no luck in getting any answers out of them. Even when we’ve played clients…” He sighed. “I dug into some of their servers, just surface skimming. But they’ve taken her name off everything in the firm. Sorry, Gracie. We’ve reached out to another hacker—one we trust—to do his own deeper dive to see what he can find.”

I nodded with a sigh. “Thank you… I mean that. Thank you. She represented women primarily. So I don’t think they’ll buy that a man is one of her clients.” The fact they’d stripped her name off everything. “If we could get her client list, I could try talking to them directly. But I am guessing we can’t get that if they removed her name.”

Alphabet shot her a sorrowful look. “No information is really ever gone. You’d need to delete and overwrite at least seven to ten times. Even then, data can be reconstructed. I don’t know if they’ve taken that kind of time.”

They’d clearly taken some time. “Even if they remove her from the firm, she had court cases. Based on what I remember from Amorette, you have to file with the court to withdraw as counsel. You don’t get to just ditch and say hey, I don’t feel like repping these people anymore.”

“But if her firm is still representing those people?” Lunchbox said.

“She’d still be an attorney of record. To change that, she’d have to file or the attorneys in her firm would. It wouldn’t matter how much overwriting they are doing at the firm itself. The courts are entirely different and if the judge or judges don’t sign off on it, then she could be facing fines or censure or something.”

“So, we hack the courts—” Alphabet muttered. “See what cases she’s tied to and what papers were filed. I can do that. I’ll get started on that as soon as the debrief is done.”

“If you find the names of her clients, I can call them…” It may or may not help. I disliked intensely that her firm seemed to erase her. “Did you find her so-called resignation letter?”

“No,” Alphabet said. “Any file detailing hers had been archived. I could see the names, but not content, and I couldn’t open them without getting into their archive.”

I really hated that. I scraped the last bite of yogurt out of the bowl.

“On that note,” Bones said and it forced me to focus on him. His expression was steel, though he didn’t seem angry. “The operation you were rescued from was an independent contractor with links to everything from South American cartels to Eastern European syndicates and a few operations right here in the States.”

That… was unsettling. “Independent?”

“Independent,” he confirmed. “We didn’t have anyone to question. Our allies, including Doc, are funneling any information they can turn up on these people to us but it doesn’t look like they were the ones who took you in the first place.”

I didn’t scream. I wanted to scream. But I didn’t.

“One of the reasons we want to get into your sister’s cases is to see if the reason she was marked had anything to do with those.”

My stomach sank.

“That said, we can’t discount that you two weren’t targeted because of who you are.” Voodoo met my gaze and I could almost feel the edge of regret. “You already told me about the yachting parties—the bidding. The guys who wanted to pay you for your time.”

The icy heat shifted as it seemed to glide over my skin. “You think because I said no, they decided to force my hand?” Did that fit with the man I’d woken up to? The one who’d said he’d waited for me?

He hadn’t been remotely familiar.

“It’s a possibility we can’t ignore,” Lunchbox said. “Human trafficking is a multi-tiered, multi-national, multi-sourced enterprise that basically deals in human slavery whether it’s commercial, sexual, or worse.”

I frowned. “What’s worse than commercial or sexual?”

“Big game hunting,” Bones answered and I pushed the bowl away from me. The yogurt and fruit sat like a lead weight in my stomach. “Research. There are others… none good.”

No, I supposed not. “Are there any reports of me being missing?”

“No,” Alphabet said. “Another cause for concern, because someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to erase both of you.”

Erase.

I clasped my hands together to try and keep them from shaking.

“The number of attempts to reacquire you also leads us to believe that you were the primary target, at least for one of these groups of traffickers.” Little emotion seemed to touch Bones’ voice. “The death of your manager, agent—that also suggests that whoever wants you doesn’t want anyone looking for you.”

Eleanor wouldn’t have stopped. Neither would Amorette. It seemed almost wild that of all the people I had contact with and knew, that those two had been specifically targeted…

Coincidence didn’t come with such a stretchy waist. Her going missing right around when I was taken and her firm acting like she quit? No police reports? Nothing? She was just gone.

“There’s more,” Voodoo said, pushing his own plate away and focusing on me. “Bones confirmed this morning that there is a bounty out for you. It’s being floated through some areas that we have access to. The accounts where the money is being floated will be back traced and drained. We’ll use their own tools against them.”

“Already working on it,” Alphabet said and he bumped my clasped hands with his gentle fist. “No one is going to take you, Gracie.”

“No one,” Lunchbox confirmed and Voodoo nodded.

“We won’t let anyone touch you. But we can and will tear this apart to find out who and why. ” Voodoo’s promise wasn’t as reassuring as it could be, but I believed him. I believed them. That helped.

“How? You want to dig into court cases, check out these accounts, and keep looking, but what about Amorette? Is there a chance we can still find her? Is she still here in the States? Or in one of those other places?” Because that was the real fear. What if she disappeared into the ether? What if I never saw her again?

I raised my clasped hands and bowed my head, pressing my lips to the knuckles of my index fingers. These were not outcomes I even wanted to consider.

“What about law enforcement? What if we report this? I don’t know how much of what you do is illegal… I can report it without involving you…” No sooner did I make the suggestion than I sighed. “But how would I explain any of it without involving you.”

“If it were just a matter of using our names to get you into the right hands, Grace,” Bones said in a rock-steady voice, “we’d have already done it. Talking to law enforcement might help here in the States, but you’d have to get into it with Interpol, or other agencies for the global search and we don’t have enough to direct anyone to a possible where.”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I battled back the tears. I did not want them to fall. Period.

“As for the rest, we’re not taking you back because we don’t think Homeland or the FBI or one of the others wouldn’t look… we’re not releasing you because we don’t know that they could protect you.” A harsh, if blunt reality and Bones didn’t soften it.

“What he’s saying,” Lunchbox said, picking up, “is we don’t know if they don’t have people on their payrolls. These types of operations are incredibly sophisticated. Whether they are moving one person or a dozen. You shut down one conduit, another opens. It’s just as likely that you would go into their custody, nothing happens for a few days, maybe a few weeks, they send you back to your life and the ones who were waiting just scoop you up then.”

That was horrifying.

“Or worse, you get someone on a protection detail with a gambling debt or underwater financially and they take a bribe or a payment to look the other way. Corruption isn’t always about evil,” Alphabet said. “We like to think of the world as a balance of good versus bad, but… it’s not that simple. Some things? Yeah, some are absolutely heinous. So the demarcation is clear. But not everything.”

“This is why you’ve kept me all this time and didn’t want to answer my questions?” I focused on Alphabet.

“Yes. And no. I know that’s not as clear-cut as you would like it. My instincts said you needed to stay with us especially after the attack at your apartment.”

“Agreed,” Lunchbox said. “My instincts said the same.”

“Mine too,” Voodoo admitted. “It’s why we brought you here where we could see anyone coming and we know the lay of the land. No one is getting near you.”

“At the same time, we also had other jobs that could not wait. They had to be completed and as frustrating as that is for you, Grace,” Bones said, his cool tones helping to tamp down some of the wilder bits of frustration. “We’ve done what we can for those at the moment.”

“So, you don’t have any other jobs?”

“We have the job to find your sister, and find out who is targeting you.” Voodoo offered me a small smile. “We know you are still a target because we received another call this morning.”

Honestly, I wasn’t sure my heart could sink any further.

“It could be connected.” Alphabet put a hand over my clenched ones as I lowered them back to the table. “At the moment, we don’t have confirmation.”

“What?”

I searched their faces. It had to be something. Or they wouldn’t be this intense. Right?

“There was a plane crash late last week, a private flight headed for Europe, crashed somewhere in Nova Scotia not that long after takeoff. Mechanical failure is being investigated.” Bones' expression was utterly unreadable. “It may not be connected, but the coincidence would be a little far-fetched.”

“Who was on the flight?”

“Jock Giardan and Lloyd White as well as two assistants, a hair stylist, and…”

He kept talking but the roar in my ears drowned out his words. Jock and Lloyd. I’d known them forever. They were fantastic photographers and genuinely gifted. I knew their stylists and their assistants.

“…at the time, there were no survivors.” The words fell like heavy stones.

“It may have nothing to do with you, Gracie,” Alphabet said.

“But you don’t believe that.” They were dead.

"I don’t know what to believe yet,” he qualified. “But Bones is right about coincidence being unlikely. Your agent and manager being eliminated makes a certain amount of twisted sense. This could be exactly what it looks like. An accident.”

Could be. Maybe. But we didn’t know.

“So, people who know me are dying… might not want to hang onto me, guys.” It sounded as hollow to my ears as it did to my heart.

“I fucking dare them to come at you or us,” Lunchbox said, reaching across the table to lay his hand over mine. Alphabet added his to it and Voodoo stretched to place his there as well.

“No one is taking you, Firecracker. No one.”

For some reason, I looked at Boney Boy. The hardass. He’d been the harshest so far. “Not making you promises,” he said and that seemed fair. “Save one. They’re right. No one is taking you or touching you. Period.”