Guilty Blood

by Rick Acker

  So, no, Brandon didn’t have the light of God in his life. In fact, Brandon preferred to think that there was no God. That was easier than believing in a God who ignored his people at best and took pleasure in torturing them at worst.

  Not that Brandon was going to say all of that to Father Vicente. The last thing he wanted was a long, painful dissection of his feelings about his father’s death, being arrested for murder, and killing Hector Garcia. Maybe he was building a shell around himself, but he needed one in a place like this. That was the only way he was going to survive.

  He liked Father Vicente and didn’t want to insult the man unnecessarily. But he did need to give a strong enough brush-off that the priest would drop the subject. Permanently.

  “No offense, but I’d rather talk about something else. I’m glad that your faith helped you, but that’s not what I’m looking for. I don’t need—or want—a crutch to get through my time in here.”

  CHAPTER 69

  August

  Jessica tried to focus on what the witness was saying. But it was hard. Almost impossible.

  Her name was Lin Liu, and she was in her late twenties. She was smart, attractive, and dressed in a way that made her look sexy but not cheap. Lin’s English was reasonably good, and she needed only occasional help from Amy on an unfamiliar word or expression. She was also ambitious—she was open to testifying on Brandon’s behalf because she was trying to set up her own escort service. That meant she wouldn’t have a pimp to run interference with the cops, so she would want friends in the Public Defender’s Office. She readily admitted that she’d also be happy to do favors for the DA’s Office in the right case. Jessica suspected that if nothing changed the trajectory of Lin’s life, she would probably be a lot like Jade in fifteen years.

  Because they didn’t need a translator, Jade wasn’t there. Which was a relief. Jessica still needed time to process what Nate had told her, and being in the same room with Jade would have been hard.

  For a quarter of a century, Jessica had thought she knew Nate. But she had been wrong. In her mind, there had been a line—no, a chasm—between men like Nate Daniels and men like Linc Thomas. And yet they had each used prostitutes. They had each supported the international trafficking and victimization of girls and young women in their own ways—Linc as an accomplice of traffickers and Nate as a customer. She felt sick every time she thought about it.

  Sofia caught Jessica’s eye and looked down at her notepad. Jessica nodded and tried to remember what Lin had just said. Something about safe houses. She scribbled safe houses on the notepad and did her best to listen.

  “They rent new place at least one time each year,” Lin was saying. “If they stay one place too long, police find them. One of my johns sometimes drive for them. He showed me houses they use.”

  “Wait—one of your johns works for Lan Long?” Sofia asked.

  Lin shook her head. “No. I don’t want say who he work for, but not Lan Long. They don’t have people here. They sell girls from boat, then deliver and leave. No Lan Long boys here to get arrested.”

  “You know this personally?” Sofia asked.

  “Yes. I one time helped madam buy a Lan Long girl. Not from them, but from . . .” She paused, her perfectly plucked brows knit together in concentration. She spoke to Amy in Chinese for a moment. “Middlemen. Madam buy the girl from middlemen. They buy from Lan Long.”

  “Wait—you helped buy a girl?” Sofia asked. “Even though you were bought yourself?”

  “Oh, sure,” Lin said nonchalantly. “I do her favor. Madam treats us pretty good. Much better than other girls I hear about. Some girls bought to be slaves in big houses out in San Ramon, Dublin, Pleasanton, places like that. They work all time and get locked in closet at night.”

  Jessica felt sick to her stomach. That was where she lived. She had always thought of human trafficking and modern slavery as something that happened in dirty urban places where no one spoke English. Like the gritty part of Chinatown where they had interviewed the girl behind the screen. It never occurred to her that it could be going on in her own backyard. How many of those immaculate million-dollar homes were kept clean by a slave girl living in a closet? Which of the massage boutiques in her hometown’s charming downtown had back rooms holding frightened young women who had been forced into prostitution? How many of the respectable, successful, outwardly honorable men she knew had secrets like Nate’s?

  She lurched to her feet. “I’m sorry. I . . . I need to use the restroom.”

  She hurried to the back of the nearly deserted Starbucks where they were conducting the interview and pushed through the bathroom door. Thankfully, the restroom was empty. She shut herself in a stall, put her head in her hands, and cried.

  The waking-nightmare feeling overwhelmed her again. People she knew and loved were really monsters. Favorite places were shadowed with evil and menace. Innocent young men were sent to jail for murder so killers could walk free.

  She wanted to run away, to find someplace clean and safe and hide there forever. But there wasn’t any place like that. And even if she could run away, Brandon couldn’t.

  Brandon. She pictured him sitting in his cell, trapped. Growing old in there. She couldn’t let that happen. No matter what it took.

  She stopped crying and sat up. A mixture of weariness, disappointment, and resignation filled her soul like a cold smog. But she would persevere. She had to. She would keep pushing forward and hope that someday she would break through into the sunlight again.

  Jessica took a deep breath, stood, and opened the stall door. The mirror was in front of her, and she instantly realized she couldn’t go back out there without doing some repair work. Red nose, blotchy face, raccoon eyes.

  Oh, well. No one ever cried prettily except in the movies. Fortunately, she had reflexively taken her purse with her, and she had mascara and eyeliner in it. She went over to the sink, turned on the hot water, and went to work.

  She heard popping noises over the sound of the running faucet, but didn’t think much of it. Then someone screamed.

  Her eyes turned into saucers in the mirror and her mouth gaped open. Those popping noises had been gunshots. She dropped to the floor and pushed herself underneath the sink, hoping that it might offer some protection from bullets that could come crashing through the door.

  The water thundered like a waterfall two inches over her head, drowning out all other sounds. What if someone came in, looking for her? All they would need to do was look down, and there she would be.

  Long seconds crawled by. She prayed, desperately and repetitively. The pipe under the sink grew hot, burning into her shoulder.

  The seconds turned to minutes. No one came in. She realized that someone out there might need her help.

  She crawled over to the door and put her ear to it. Nothing.

  She pushed it open a crack and peeked out. A woman’s legs sprawled awkwardly from behind a wall. They weren’t moving. She heard a moan and a bubbling gasp.

  It belatedly occurred to her that her cell phone was in her purse. She grabbed the purse from the counter, pulled out the phone, and dialed 911.

  “What is the nature of your emergency?” asked a female voice.

  “I’m in the Starbucks at Twenty-Seventh and Mission,” she whispered into the phone. “There’s been a shooting. People are hurt, maybe dead.”

  “Are you injured, ma’am?”

  “No. I’m hiding in the bathroom.”

  “All right, I need you to stay there until the police arrive.”

  “But people are hurt,” Jessica said, remembering the moan and the labored breathing. “They might die if I don’t—”

  “Stay where you are,” the 911 operator said firmly. “The police are on their way. They’ll be there any minute.”

  Sirens wailed in the distance, growing rapidly louder. She risked another look out the door. The woman’s legs hadn’t moved, but they were now bathed in strobing red and blue light.

  “I
think they’re here,” she said. “I’m going out.”

  Without waiting for a response, she clicked off the phone and pushed open the door. A police car squealed to a halt at the curb outside, but Jessica was only peripherally aware of it. Her eyes were on the table where she had been sitting ten minutes before. Lin slumped back in her chair, eyes staring sightlessly into the distance. Amy lay motionless on the floor in a pool of blood, holes in her forehead and chest. Her right hand still gripped her gun. Sofia was curled in a ball under the table, a bright-red stain covering the left side of her cream-colored blouse. But she was still breathing.

  Jessica knelt next to Sofia just as police burst through the door, guns drawn. “Over here,” Jessica called. “She needs help.”

  One of the officers holstered his gun and ran over to Sofia. Jessica backed away to give him room.

  More police cars roared up, disgorging more officers, some of them in body armor and carrying what looked like military rifles. They blocked the roads and fanned out around the building, but Jessica’s instincts told her that the killer or killers were long gone. They had been in a hurry—otherwise they would have taken a minute to search the coffee shop, and they would have found her cowering under the bathroom sink.

  If Lan Long was behind this—and Jessica couldn’t think of anyone else who would be—they probably were focused on what they viewed as the biggest threats: Sofia and Lin. Amy was dead because she tried to interfere. The assassins doubtless would have killed Jessica too if she had been at the table, but she wasn’t worth hunting down if they didn’t have time.

  Why didn’t the killers have time? Was it just that they wanted to leave before the police arrived? Or did they have someplace else that they needed to be? Something else they needed to do?

  Nate would be a big threat to Lan Long too. So would Kevin. They were at least as threatening to Lan Long as Sofia and Lin were.

  An officer came up to Jessica and took her by the arm. “Move!” he ordered, hustling her through a cordon of blue uniforms and out onto the street. Two other officers took her from there and hustled her behind a police truck. One of them started talking to her, but she was focused on her phone, which she still held clutched in her hand.

  “Other people are in danger,” she said. She dialed Nate’s number.

  He didn’t answer.

  CHAPTER 70

  Nate wished he could have taken Jessica’s call. But he couldn’t. He was trapped in a partnership meeting and Peggy was talking. Whenever she opened her mouth in a meeting, she thought everyone should pay rapt attention to her. Even having his phone buzz on the table in front of him had earned an annoyed glance from her. He quickly silenced it and dropped it into his pocket.

  Peggy turned back to the graph she was using to explain the changes in the way B&B would calculate partner income going forward. Since everyone in the room was a partner, it actually wasn’t unreasonable for her to expect them to be giving her their full focus. She’d had Nate’s too, until Jessica called.

  They hadn’t spoken since he told her about Jade. He wasn’t going to call her, of course. Not after the look on her face when they last parted. But he had been half hoping—and half fearing—that she would call him.

  He wasn’t looking forward to talking to her, but he needed to know where he stood with her. Were they still friends? Was she going to cut off all ties with him? Or would she try for something in the middle—a sort of safe, professional cordiality with no risk of getting too close? That would be his preference, he decided. It might be hers too now. She probably still wanted him to help Sofia represent Brandon, which he was happy to do. But she would give up on trying to get past his barriers now that she knew what lay on the other side. That obviously would be for the best. But he still needed to know.

  The meeting finally ended. The receptionist flagged him down as he passed through the lobby. “Mr. Daniels, this was delivered for you,” she said. “They look delicious, don’t they?” She pointed to a brightly painted bucket that held an arrangement of chocolate-covered strawberries on sticks, each of which was stuck into a large block of green foam rubber in the bucket. A slightly taller stick held a typewritten card that read, Thank you for your hard work.—Jessica.

  He nodded. The card was chillier than he had hoped and the strawberries were a surprise, but the message was what he had expected: their relationship wasn’t over and she was grateful for everything he was doing for Brandon. But things had changed. It was for the best, he told himself again.

  It was almost lunchtime, and his mouth watered at the sight of the strawberries, but his mother had drilled into his head half a century ago that a gift wasn’t his until he said thank you. He pulled out his phone to call Jessica. He would say something blandly polite, but that she would understand—Thank you for the strawberries. I’m deeply grateful for the gesture, for example.

  Then he saw the text message she had sent him twenty minutes ago: Sofia amy witness all shot be careful. Five minutes after that, she had texted, Please call.

  This wasn’t the kind of call he could make in the middle of the lobby, so he started walking toward his office.

  “Don’t forget your strawberries,” the receptionist called after him. “They’ll just tempt me if you leave them up here.”

  “Uh, go ahead and have some, Sandy,” he said.

  She smiled and mouthed “Thank you” as she picked up a ringing phone.

  Nate hurried to his office and dialed Jessica as he shut the door.

  “Thank God you’re alive,” she said, her voice shaking. “I was afraid they killed you too. Are you someplace safe?”

  “Yes, I’m in my office. What happened?”

  “Are you sure that’s safe?”

  “Absolutely,” he assured her. “They’d have to get through building security downstairs, and our receptionist checks everyone who comes up. She has a button under her desk that calls the police station two blocks away, and . . .” A disturbing thought popped into his head. “Did you send me chocolate-covered strawberries?”

  “No.”

  He yanked open his door and ran toward the lobby. “Sandy, don’t—” he shouted as he neared the lobby, but the explosion cut him off. It knocked him backward and he nearly fell.

  Acrid smoke surrounded him. He staggered the last few feet, rounded a corner, and entered the lobby. The reception desk was a blackened, smoldering ruin.

  CHAPTER 71

  Kevin had made a mistake. He knew it the instant his computer screen switched from a hard-fought game of The Elder Scrolls: Legends to the view from the camera in his mother’s favorite pink rosebush. It showed two men wearing black ski masks and carrying guns. They were crouched over, staying in the shadows and below the redwood fence, but they were moving fast toward his parents’ back door.

  Kevin had thought that he would have plenty of warning. He had been monitoring the email accounts of the Lan Long operatives he found in China. Maybe Lan Long had found out that he had compromised their security, or maybe they just got lucky. Either way, it was clear that they had gone old school like Kevin’s dad, who still used a dumb phone and paper maps. And as a result, Kevin had no idea they were coming until they were already at the house.

  The men were there looking for him, but they wouldn’t find him at the house. He was at Inklings, working on his third lavender latte while he battled online. He sat under the portrait of J. R. R. Tolkien, which always seemed to help him focus better. He wished he had been here when he had been setting up his security protocols. Maybe he would have spotted the flaw in his thinking and come up with a way to fix it. But it was too late now.

  He clicked the button on his screen that would make an automatic 911 call notifying the police of an emergency at his home. Then he grabbed his phone out of his backpack and called his father.

  The phone rang and rang. Kevin watched on the screen as the men crept closer to the door. They reached it and started doing something to the lock.

  Finally, on
the seventh ring, his father picked up. “Hello, who is this?” he said.

  “It’s Kevin. Dad, there are men outside the back door! They have guns!”

  “Kevin? Where . . .” His father’s voice became indistinct and he heard rustling noises.

  “Dad, I can’t hear you! Speak into the phone!”

  “Sorry,” his father said, audible again. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Inklings. Are you and Mom at home? If you are, you have to get out now!”

  His father’s voice faded out again. At the same time, the men on the screen opened the door and slipped inside.

  “Dad, they’re inside now!” he shouted, hoping his father could hear him.

  Gunshots.

  “DAD!”

  No response.

  He ran out to his bike. He dialed the combination with shaking fingers, got it wrong, and tried again. The lock popped open. He left it on the ground and pulled his bike out of the rack.

  He cycled home as fast as he could, ignoring stop signs and almost getting hit twice. By the time he got home, he was gasping for breath and his legs felt like Jell-O.

  The police were already there. Two cars and an ambulance were at the curb. The front door to the house stood open, despite the fact that Kevin’s mother always insisted that it be shut so the cat wouldn’t get out.

  He rode his bike between the police cars and onto the lawn, then jumped off and ran into the house. There were bodies on the floor and a puddle of some dark liquid Kevin guessed was blood.

  A policeman grabbed him by the arm as he went through the door. “Hold it,” he ordered. “This is a crime scene. You can’t go in there.”

  “But my mom! My dad!” Kevin said frantically.

  “It’s okay, Kevin,” his father called from the kitchen.

  Kevin looked through the kitchen door and saw his parents sitting at the table with two police officers. A woman with an EMT patch on her shoulder crouched next to his father, swabbing a ragged cut a few inches below the Special Forces tattoo on his right shoulder.