by Kay Bigelow
“You can tell her I did it this way to prove to you I have nothing to hide from you.”
Leah made a very undignified sound that sounded like a snort and a laugh rolled into one unpleasant sound.
“And on that note, I’m going to get dressed and we can copy the search warrants in Camryn’s office as soon as they arrive.”
Dani turned and walked at a very dignified pace into the house. Leah watched her go and admired the strong, muscled back, the tight ass, and the long legs of the woman who had just asked for her hand in marriage. Am I not the luckiest woman in the galaxy? If I am, why didn’t I answer her? Because, in truth, she didn’t exactly propose marriage to me, did she? Didn’t she? She wants to spend the rest of her life with me, isn’t that the essence of any marriage proposal? She didn’t say she wanted to spend the rest of her life with me. She said she wanted me to make her breakfast burritos for the rest of her life, which is much less romantic and much less than a lifetime commitment.
“Oh, do stop overthinking everything the woman says to you,” she mumbled out loud.
Chapter Eighteen
On their way to the big house, neither Leah nor Dani said a word. At first the silence was comfortable, but as it grew longer Leah began to sense that Dani was upset. Had she hurt her by not answering her proposal?
When they got to the big house, Dani started up the sidewalk without waiting for Leah.
“Dani, wait. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. It wasn’t intentional.”
Dani stopped and turned, her expression a mix of sadness and resignation. “I asked you to marry me, something I’ve never done with any other person. You didn’t respond. What am I supposed to think?”
“You didn’t ask me to marry you. You asked me to make you breakfast burritos for the rest of our lives. That’s not exactly a marriage proposal, is it?”
“Maybe not by your standards, but it was the best I could do.”
“It sounds like you’re not sure about marrying me if you can’t even say the words.”
“I said the words in my own way.”
“I don’t want to fight with you about this, Dani,” Leah said, feeling her anger rising. Before it could spill over and she said something she’d regret the rest of her life, Leah brushed past Dani and stalked up the sidewalk. Over her shoulder, she said, “Call your grandmother and ask her what she thinks of your proposal.”
As she walked into the lobby, she heard a voice call out, “Hey, you! I demand you release my yacht now.”
Leah kept walking. Before she’d taken two more steps, she felt a hand grab her by her shoulder. She rounded on Anabel Cooper and said in a voice laced with ice and menace, “Take your hand off me.”
Cooper must have felt the danger because she jerked her hand way before Leah finished her sentence. “You need to release my yacht.”
“I need to do no such thing.”
“When will you give me back my ship?”
“When I’ve concluded my investigation,” Leah said as she turned to continue her progress toward Camryn’s office.
“You’ll hear from my lawyers,” Cooper yelled.
Twenty seconds later, Leah heard Cooper say, “You need to tell your girlfriend to back off, Bensington, or this will be my last visit to this damned planet.”
“That’s a good idea, Cooper.”
When Leah entered Camryn’s office, it was crowded with people. Stanhope stood in a corner, Peony and Alex had their heads together over a computer, Sojourner was looking out one of the windows, and Camryn was trying to look like she was working and hoping no one would see her.
“We need to borrow your office again, Camryn.”
“No problem,” she said, but made no move to leave the room.
“We’re having a private meeting, Cam,” Dani said.
With a long, drawn-out exhalation, Camryn got up and huffed out the door.
“What’s up, Boss,” Peony asked.
“Run a scan,” Leah said.
Without a word, both Peony and Alex rose from their chairs and quickly scanned the entire room. They found one listening device attached to the bottom of Camryn’s center desk drawer. They disengaged it and put it into an evidence bag.
When Peony and Alex returned to their seats, Leah began the meeting. “We have requests in for search warrants to search Cooper’s bungalow and her ship. Until they arrive, we’re pretty much at a standstill. When we get the warrants, Stanhope, I want you to lead the team searching the ship. I want you looking for any evidence of human trafficking. I want any physical records of whatever kind taken into evidence. Don’t forget to scour every surface for fingerprints. Let’s see who’s been traveling with her.”
There was a knock on the door, and Dani opened it. The doctor walked in, apologizing for being late.
“Doctor, we are going to be searching Anabel Cooper’s bungalow and ship. I want you to accompany the team going to the bungalow,” Leah said. “Sojourner, I want you to accompany me. I want your team with us as well, but I want them keeping everyone out of the house until we’ve completed the search. Stanhope, I want you to do the same with your team. Make sure they understand that no one, especially Cooper, has access to the ship until we release it.”
“What if we find victims of human trafficking?” Alex asked.
“The lieutenant will arrest Cooper for kidnapping and human trafficking. We need more evidence to attach murder to the list of offenses she’ll be charged with. Cooper will be transported to Xing to await trial.”
“Wow,” Alex murmured to Peony. “What will I be doing?”
“You’ll go with Peony and confiscate any electronic evidence you two find.” Leah paused and looked around the room. “Any questions?”
“What will I be doing,” Dani asked.
“You’ll be with me,” Leah said.
Dani nodded as if this wasn’t the first time she’d be going into danger in an effort to arrest a woman responsible for the death of a child.
“Be careful. We don’t know what we’ll be walking into there. You veterans know what to look for. Rookies, let the veterans lead the way. Let’s leave in ones and twos, we don’t want to be Pied Pipers and lead a crowd to Cooper’s bungalow.”
Leah paused, and then added, “Let’s stay safe out there,” as she had every time she’d put her team in harm’s way as a cop.
As her team paired up and began leaving the room, Leah felt the familiar twinge of adrenaline course through her body. She knew they were so close to solving the murder of the as-yet-unidentified girl. She also knew anything could go wrong. This has been too easy and too fast. What am I missing?
She and Dani were the last to leave the room. She was surprised Camryn wasn’t standing outside the door waiting to reclaim her office. Perhaps there was another crisis with her temperamental chef.
Before Stanhope could get away, Leah called her over.
“Yeah, Boss?”
“When Camryn travels from here, what does she use?”
“She usually uses the company’s shuttles. Occasionally, she’s left with a guest going in the direction she wanted to travel.”
“Has she left with the same guest more than once?”
“During the last year or so, she’s left with Cooper two or three times. She’s never gone long, maybe two or three days, never more than a week.”
“Make sure she doesn’t leave without my explicit permission.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And assign someone to keep an eye on Cooper. Hopefully, we’ll be able to arrest her soon, but in the meantime, I want to know if she meets with any other guests or with Camryn. Instruct the officer you assign to her that she’s to make no move on Cooper. Tell her to make a note of who she meets with and how long she spends with that person. Also, see if you can find out who Cooper had breakfast with on June twentieth hopefully without alerting Camryn that you’re asking. There was an envelope given to Cooper at that breakfast.”
“Yes, ma’am
.” Stanhope continued on her way to the front door while Leah returned to Dani. As they passed the front desk, the clerk said, “Pardon me, Dr. Samuels. There’s a note for you.”
Not now, we’re on our way to rescue two or three girls and arrest a murderer. Come on, you can spare a moment to read a note.
“Thank you,” she told the young woman, whose name tag said “Renata,” with a smile as she took the note from her.
“Anytime,” Renata said to her with a little too much emphasis.
“I think Renata is taken with you,” Dani said, laughing softly.
Leah’s phone dinged, indicating a text had arrived. She dug it out of her bag. “Got it,” Leah said.
“Got what?” Dani asked.
“The search warrants. And for good measure, the judge included arrest warrants for both Cooper and Camryn. I wonder how Cots convinced her to do that for us. The judge’s clerk sent them to Sojourner. She and her team are at the jail, so she’ll get copies made of the warrants in case Cooper is at her bungalow.
Leah called Stanhope. “It’s a go. Be thorough.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As Dani and Leah exited the building, Leah noted their hover-car was sitting right in front. “Do you have your own valet who parks and fetches your car for you?”
“No, I don’t. But being the owner of the planet does have its privileges, one of which is I can park wherever I want. With the exception of the chef’s garden, of course, because she has knives, lots of knives.”
Leah laughed out loud because she could picture the rather rotund chef waving her knives at Dani for parking in the garden. She had no sooner gotten into the car than her computer began dinging wildly. She dug it out of her bag and opened it. She read Cots’s note. She wrote her thanks to him for the update and told him they were on their way to rescue the girls they thought were being held in the bungalow and arrest Cooper for something.
“Cots?” Dani asked when Leah closed her computer.
“Yes. He’s reporting an anomaly in the woods near Cooper’s bungalow. He didn’t know what it might be, but he is digging deeper and will let me know. I told him we’re on our way to arrest Cooper for something.”
“For something?”
“I don’t have any evidence she’s responsible for the death of the girl in the woods. And until I talk to the girls she might be holding in a cage, I can’t even touch her for human trafficking. So over the next few minutes I’ve got to come up with something legitimate I can charge her with.”
“Ah. Maybe she’ll assault you again,” Dani said.
Leah’s phone dinged. Leah thumbed it on.
“Boss, Stanhope here. A superficial search netted us nothing related to this case. We’re going to have to go deeper. Do you want us to tear the ship apart? Or confiscate computers, et cetera?”
“No. Do a thorough search, gather whatever evidence you can find, including fingerprints, and leave.”
“Boss, my two people assigned to watch Cooper and Camryn I can’t find them. They’ve searched the logical places. Short of doing the equivalent of a door-to-door search, they’ve disappeared off the planet.”
“Please tell me no ships have left the planet.”
“Not to our knowledge. Nothing shows up on the cameras trained on the docks. It’s like they disappeared into thin air.”
“Keep looking for them. They have to still be on the planet, and we need to find them now.”
“You got it, Boss.”
“What’s going on?” Dani asked as she drove them toward Cooper’s bungalow.
Leah filled her in on what Stanhope had reported.
“What does it mean?” Dani asked. “Cooper and Camryn can’t have just vanished. And, why are you so interested in fingerprints in the shuttle?”
“I’d sure like to arrest—or have arrested—the women who bought the girls Cooper has been selling. I’m hoping there will be prints in the shuttle of women Cooper’s done business with in the past so Cots can do searches on them. Maybe we’ll get lucky and when the police take her fellow travelers into custody, one of them will turn on the others.”
“What happens if no one knows who the others are?” Dani asked.
“It’s unlikely that no one will know any of the other women. People who are into buying and selling children generally know others of their kind. They also know if they’re caught, they have a nearly zero chance of surviving incarceration. So they may turn on the other women in order to get a deal and stay out of prison.”
“Is that likely?”
“What? That they’ll cooperate with the DA’s office or that they’ll get a lighter sentence?” Leah asked.
“Both. I think we’ll find at least one woman who will turn on the others for immunity from prosecution. We may even have others who will want to. But the only one who’ll be considered for immunity is the first one to volunteer to work with the DA’s office. I hope the district attorney won’t give anyone immunity. If they don’t, then the volunteer will undoubtedly try to negotiate a lighter sentence,” Leah said.
“I’m with you. Will Cooper be convicted?”
“I’m not sure yet. If she was tried right now, she’d probably go free. We don’t have enough evidence against her. We can’t get a conviction on anything just because she’s a miserable human being. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find something at Cooper’s place. We need to keep gathering all the evidence, no matter how insignificant, to build a solid case against her,” Leah said. “I know this thing can go faster than a stroll through the park.”
Dani pressed on the accelerator and had them at Cooper’s bungalow within a few minutes. Leah noted that Sojourner had deployed her team in pairs. Since she was nowhere to be seen, Leah assumed she was inside the house.
As Dani parked the car, she heard someone shout, “The boss is here.”
Sojourner came out of the house and down the stairs toward Leah and Dani. She wore a fierce frown. Her eyes were blazing with anger.
“There’s nothing in there.”
“What do you mean?” Dani asked before Leah could.
“There’s no evidence of the cage, there’s no evidence of more than one person having been in the house, and, in fact, there’s no evidence of Cooper either. She’s scrubbed that house clean with disinfectant, you can still smell it. It’s faint to be sure, but the odor lingers.”
“What the phuc?” Leah said. “Someone must have warned her we were coming to get her.”
“Yeah, but who?” Dani and Sojourner asked in unison.
“There’s only your three and my two and Stanhope’s four. That’s a possible nine people who could have leaked the info to her,” Leah said.
“Plus us three, so a total of a dozen people.”
“Did someone say something this morning before we arrived?” Leah asked.
Sojourner looked at her as if she was replaying the time between when they had arrived and when Leah and Dani arrived. “I don’t think so. There were groups of two or three talking quietly. Those who were closest to Camryn were Alex and Peony and my two, Treat and Lucy.”
“You ask your people what they were talking about, and I’ll ask my two. I doubt any of the team members said something on purpose, but in any case, we should have told them all to be careful. Maybe whoever warned Cooper figured out that with this many law enforcement people gathered in one place on Wild that something was about to go down.”
“Maybe we missed a listening device?” Sojourner asked.
“While that’s unlikely. I rather think it’s true than to think one of the team is playing for the other side.”
“Did you just use a sports metaphor?” Dani murmured, grinning.
“You think I don’t know sports?”
“Yes.”
“Lieutenant!” someone from inside the building yelled. “We found something.”
Sojourner went rushing to the bungalow, took the steps two at a time, and disappeared into the house.
“Let’s go s
ee what they found,” Dani said as she turned to follow Sojourner.
“Dani, wait. Considering the conversation we overheard yesterday between Camryn and Cooper, don’t you think the leaker could be Camryn?”
“God, I hope not. But it sounded like they were in cahoots over something, didn’t it?”
“Cahoots?”
“You know, working together.”
“Ah. Yeah, it did sound that way. But how did Camryn know we were closing in on Cooper? And for what?”
“I have no idea…unless she got the bugs replaced in our bungalow. We didn’t stop to search for bugs last night,” Leah said with a smile.
Leah pulled out her phone and texted Cots. “Dig deep and fast to find a connection between Camryn McDonald and Anabel Cooper,” she wrote. “Anything on the anomaly in the woods? There’s no evidence thus far of anything inside either Cooper’s ship or her bungalow.”
Cooper had to have left something behind in that house. She’s not clever enough not to have done so. Who’s working with her? Camryn? Another of Dani’s workforce? We’ve got to be careful. I don’t want Cooper to escape justice because we make a mistake.
Chapter Nineteen
Sojourner came out of the house and waved them toward her. Leah and Dani headed for the front door. They paused, gave the young woman guarding the door their names, and put on booties and gloves before entering the house.
“We may have found something. One of my young cops noticed something on the floor and got down on all fours and has found what may have something to do with the cage. It’s a post that wasn’t sawed off flush with the floor. Your techno guru is scanning it and will have a report momentarily.”
Leah stayed far enough away so she wouldn’t be in the way of the team working. While they waited for the women going over the floor to finish collecting evidence of the cage, Stanhope joined Leah and Dani.
“We didn’t find anything except the ship’s manifest with what looks like altered destinations. We bagged it and brought it along for your people to examine. What’s going on here?”