Fatal Secrets f-2

by Allison Brennan

“I should have killed him when Father died.”

  Mr. Ling bowed in agreement, though both men knew that Noel wouldn’t have done it at the time. His father had asked him to spare Tobias. And Noel had genuine affection for the brilliant man. After traveling throughout South America for years, Johan Marchand settled farther north, in Mexico, and turned a small brothel into a thriving international organization of prostitution. Because Noel had the charm, good looks, and ability to lie as smoothly as he killed, he went on the road most of his early adulthood, recruiting or kidnapping young women to feed the business. It was lucrative and satisfied the wanderlust of his youth.

  Women were good for not much outside of sex, and most of them couldn’t even do that right. So when Tobias killed for the first time, when he was fifteen and screwing one of the whores their father had given him as a birthday present, Johan finally admitted what Noel had known from the beginning: Tobias was not right in the head. Not just dumb as an ox, Tobias had been killing animals from when he was young not for sport or pleasure, but just because, as he once told Noel, he liked to hear their bones break.

  Johan had allowed Tobias an occasional whore. Four out of five ended up dead, and Noel had had to clean up after him, until Noel convinced his father he was a better recruiter. Johan agreed and taught Tobias to clean up after himself when Noel traveled.

  Obviously, the lessons hadn’t stuck. Noel could no longer afford to spare his brother’s life. His father would understand. Hadn’t Noel risked enough by letting Tobias play? It was over.

  “Where is he?”

  “In his room.”

  “Watch him. I don’t trust anyone else. I’ll come up with a plan, but he won’t be returning to Mexico with us.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Send a team to retrieve the body.”

  “They’re already on their way. She was left in a potentially exposed place.”

  “What the fuck did he do?”

  “He dumped her in the river, but her arm got caught on a bush and he didn’t want to get wet.”

  Tobias couldn’t swim. Noel should drown him. Would serve him right.

  Have mercy on him, son. Tobias doesn’t have full mental faculties.

  Noel would live up to the promise he made his father for mercy. He’d put a bullet in his brother’s head before he weighted him down and tossed him into the river. By the time his body surfaced, Noel would be long gone, and he had no plans to return to the States. Ever.

  “Four days,” Noel said. “Four days was all I needed and he screws up in less than six hours.”

  “And Jones?”

  “We’ll see to him tonight. In the meantime, I want full backgrounds on all his employees-”

  “You have that, and-”

  “Go deeper. I want to know who they’ve talked to and where they’ve been in the last two months. I want to know who tipped off the FBI about Jones, and how much they know about me. I don’t give a fuck what happens to Jones, but I’m not going to let them take me down with him.”

  And at this point Noel would prefer to just kill everyone involved in Jones’s operation. Unfortunately, in the States, the murder or disappearance of a couple dozen people would cause more than a small ripple in the landscape.

  “Give me everyone who has any hand in our business, and everyone who’s just window dressing. We’ll pick and choose, decide who stays and goes. Start building a list of people I can trust to do their job right.”

  Noel would find out who tipped off the FBI and make a clear statement. No one would dare turn against him.

  Not that it would matter. In four days he’d be back home, safe, far away from the long arm of American law enforcement. They’d need an army to get him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sonia could have taken half a day personal time after working through the night, but she had too much on her plate to even think about sleeping. And if she did stop home for a couple hours of downtime, she feared that seeing Charlie again would trigger the nightmares she’d buried long ago.

  She had to get this part over with.

  She dialed the assistant special agent in charge of the San Francisco Regional ICE office-based in Oakland.

  Toni Warner supervised all field offices in the large, multistate territory. Sonia had met her nearly ten years ago when she was transferred from Texas to the San Francisco office, and though they butted heads as often as not, there was no one in the business Sonia had more respect and admiration for. Toni was smart, savvy, chic, and ruthless.

  “Warner.”

  “It’s Sonia. I have news.”

  “You have Jones in custody and a solid case to turn over to the DOJ.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Please don’t tell me to turn on the television.”

  Sonia cringed. Last year, she’d been caught on film in an unfortunate situation taken completely out of context. She’d led the raid of a sweatshop that “employed” illegal aliens. Only these illegals were indentured servants-not only smuggled into the country but held against their will making a dollar an hour, half of which went toward their room and board. When she’d burst in, one of the supervisors had cracked a whip across the back of a minor, a twelve-year-old boy Sonia later learned had been working there since he was seven. Sonia had seized the whip and snapped it toward the asshole who abused children. It cut across his face-she had never intended to actually hit him, only scare him. When she escorted him out in cuffs, she still had the whip and the press filmed them-highlighting the bastard’s split face.

  Sonia wouldn’t have changed anything-she’d wanted to do so much more when she saw the squalid conditions in which these people lived and worked-except in hindsight, she should have put a bag over his head and handed the whip to Trace.

  “I saw Charlie Cammarata this morning.”

  Toni was silent. Sonia squirmed uneasily, speaking quickly. “He’s driving for Xavier Jones. I saw him get out of the Escalade with Jones early this morning while surveilling the house. He’s up to something.” She dreaded asking, but had to. “Has he been reinstated? Without telling me? I understand, but I should have-”

  Toni interrupted. “Charlie hasn’t been reinstated, at least to my knowledge, but I’ll find out. I can’t imagine ICE bringing him back, but stranger things have happened.”

  “Is he working undercover for another agency? The FBI maybe?”

  “The FBI?”

  “They served a warrant on Jones this morning. Tax evasion or money laundering, I didn’t see the papers, but I’m meeting with the head agent this afternoon.”

  “Did Cammarata see you?”

  “No. The last time I heard from him was four years ago, when he called me from Mexico about the container ship going through Panama with captives from eastern South America. You know that.” And Sonia had had nightmares for months after just hearing his voice. She’d felt weak and stupid for letting the past hurt her. Why couldn’t she just forget? But seeing Charlie today was already stirring up the awful memories. Ten years was a long time; it should be enough time to get over nearly dying.

  It’s not as simple as death.

  “I didn’t know the FBI had an open investigation on Jones.” Toni sounded as ticked off about it as Sonia had been when she first saw the Fibbies roll on scene.

  “Neither did I, but I think this goes way high up the ladder. The agent in charge is Dean Hooper.”

  “Assistant Director Dean Hooper?”

  “The one and only, and Sam Callahan-he’s the SSA in charge of white-collar crimes-he’s answering to Hooper. Not only is it highly unusual, I don’t remember ever hearing about an A.D. in the field serving warrants.”

  “Hooper’s an anomaly,” Toni said. “We have jurisdiction here. Do you want me to knock heads together and find out what’s going on?”

  “I’d love it, but that’s not going to help nail Jones. I’m going to find out what Hooper has. If Jones has been playing with his books and we can prove it, maybe that’ll give me the l
everage to make a deal. Names, routes, places. We can do heavy damage to the human trafficking business in the western U.S. if I can entice Jones to cooperate.” Sonia didn’t want to cut any deals with that bastard, but she had to look at the bigger picture. Either way, Jones would go to prison.

  “I like it. You have my support.”

  “What I’m really worried about,” Sonia continued, “are the Fibbies coming in wanting to make a big splash. The economy sucks, and politicians are always looking for scapegoats. Taking down a rich tax evader like Jones gives them headlines and crowing rights. And you know damn well the FBI wants those headlines to justify their existence and their budget.” Homeland Security, and ICE as a major investigative agency, took care of potentially deadly situations quietly and out of the prying eyes of the media. The public knew little of what ICE and other agencies had thwarted not only now, after 9/11, but before.

  “I’ll make some calls-about Hooper’s investigation and about Cammarata. Quietly. No need to get feathers ruffled unless we are prepared to pluck them.”

  “I’ll let you know what Hooper has and we’ll go from there.”

  “I’ll back you up, Sonia, but let me be the bad guy. You know I love you and you’re my favorite agent, but you’re impulsive, and your temper is going to get you in trouble.” Again.

  “Understood. Thanks, Toni. And let me know what you learn about Charlie as soon as possible. If he’s in this on his own, I have to get him out. He could screw up our investigation big-time.”

  “You certainly don’t have to tell me Cammarata is dangerous. Are you prepared to arrest him?”

  The pastry she’d scarfed down on her way to the office swam uncomfortably in the pool of coffee sloshing in her stomach. “Absolutely. I’ll do anything to protect the integrity of this case. I’m not about to let Jones walk free on a technicality.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At FBI headquarters Dean Hooper coordinated the organization of evidence they’d seized from Xavier Jones’s house that morning. He had nearly the entire white-collar crimes team working on analyzing every piece of paper and computer file, but he took the one thing he really wanted back to his desk. With everyone else on his team in the conference room or out in the field, he was alone.

  Dean turned the day planner over in his hands. It was a half-size seven-ring executive planner, one day per page, covered in black leather. Pages could be removed or inserted as needed. It was in the seemingly innocuous details of Jones’s daily activities that Dean would find the path leading to hard evidence and, ultimately, a conviction. Everything he had now was circumstantial. Dean needed solid proof.

  Jones was meticulous, and judging from how he reacted to agents going through his things, he was likely obsessive-compulsive. He practically had a coronary when Dean moved a vase an inch off-center. Jones strode over to the table and put the vase back dead center, perfectly symmetrical.

  Oh, yeah, the guy was anal to the nth degree.

  Technically, Dean didn’t have a warrant for the day planner, but when he looked through it at the house he noted that Jones listed all his bank account numbers and meetings he had with his accountant. That put the planner under “financial” in Dean’s book, so he seized it.

  Jones wouldn’t be so dumb as to write down anything blatantly illegal, but he would have a schedule of his meetings and within the meetings, and the empty spaces, there would be a pattern. Next, he would check the planner against Jones’s known whereabouts and determine if there were any codes in the seemingly innocuous content. In addition, if specific meetings coincided with seemingly legitimate bank deposits or withdrawals, Dean could look at those entities to see if he had cause to get a warrant for their records.

  Criminals had become extremely sophisticated over the last decade, and money laundering increasingly complex. While many bad guys use the tried-and-true methods-such as putting their cash into small, legitimate businesses to clean it-with the sheer amount of illegal money changing hands, criminals had to develop new and innovative ways to wash large amounts of money and get it circulating.

  Dean could have delegated this rather mundane task of inputting Jones’s schedule into a database, but he had better luck identifying patterns and anomalies when he was the one typing the information. His mind processed it differently, he supposed, or maybe it was simply that how he wanted the information logged maximized his ability to recognize patterns. His database was easily sorted by date, dollar amount, entity, account number, or any other field, but Dean preferred analyzing the raw data by date. He’d found that while criminals tried to randomize their activities to avoid detection, they usually set meetings or bank deposits on a regular day or time. Dean had taken down Thomas “Smitty” Daniels because he cleaned his money on the first Monday of every month.

  Daniels’s scam was good. Dean wouldn’t have figured it out so quickly without the specific time frame. Daniels was a landlord purported to own dozens of rentals. He deposited rent-in cash-on the first Monday of every month. That was a big red flag. How many landlords had all their tenants pay on time? Dean scoured the property records and found that Daniels was claiming to own property that he, in fact, didn’t own, and collecting “rent” from people who didn’t exist. He wouldn’t have been caught if he hadn’t had to increase the deposits, which alerted the FBI to a change in deposit history. By law, all banking transactions over $10,000 were reported to the FBI. Most were legitimate and, in real estate, substantial deposits and withdrawals were common. But Daniels had gone from deposits of between forty and fifty thousand a month to deposits of ninety thousand.

  When Dean looked at the records, all deposited at the same time of the month, all cash, he launched the grand jury investigation. He didn’t know how Daniels was making his illegal money-he had wrongly assumed drugs, which accounted for an estimated ninety percent of laundered money in the United States. It didn’t take long to learn that Daniels was involved in sex crimes, specifically kidnapping minor female runaways for Internet pornography.

  Xavier Jones’s name had come up in the course of investigating Daniels, but there was nothing substantial in Daniels’s records implicating Jones in criminal activity. The major impetus was an old photograph of Jones and Daniels with a group of known or suspected criminals. It was primarily Dean’s gut intuition after seeing that photo that had him looking closely at Jones for the last two years.

  Dean suspected that Jones was involved with the illegal sex trade, but there was no evidence pointing directly at him, and until he learned that ICE was involved, he had assumed it was prostitution-Jones had contact with known prostitution rings. Dean knew less about the international scope of Jones’s activities than ICE agent Sonia Knight-human trafficking was primarily under the domain of Homeland Security. And while he should have known about the ICE investigation, even in this new era of sharing information, not all information trickled down-or up-to the right people.

  He wanted Sonia to look at all his information immediately. He had a feeling she’d see things he didn’t because her experience tracking the buying and selling of people was legendary.

  That Sonia Knight had been sold into slavery as a child, then escaped, was in itself an incredible story; that she’d become a decorated special agent in immigration was even more extraordinary. He hadn’t been blowing smoke up Sonia’s very attractive backside when he told her there was no one else he’d rather work with. She had a reputation for being not only a hothead, but intelligent, extremely knowledgeable, and compassionate. She took risks, probably too many, but in Dean’s experience it was only those agents willing to put their reputation and life on the line for justice who made the difference. He’d admired her from afar for years, but in all honesty he never thought he’d have a chance to work with her. DHS and the FBI were completely separate agencies; he hadn’t even known she worked from the Sacramento field office.

  If she had records of shipments in and out of the area that Jones was suspected of orchestrating, maybe adding
that information to his database would make existing information pop, and he could follow that thread to the proof he needed for the U.S. Attorney to indict.

  Tracking money wasn’t the sexiest job in the FBI. Most agents wanted to work counterterrorism or violent crimes; those who were technology savvy, like Dean, usually found themselves in cybercrimes. But white-collar crimes pulled Dean in like nothing else. It came down to trust: if you couldn’t trust your government, your small businesses, your corporations, society fell apart. Criminals reigned, and law-abiding citizens suffered financially, emotionally, and physically. Anarchy was the end result of doing nothing.

  And, frankly, crunching numbers and pattern recognition were his strengths. His father never understood. Clint Hooper had been a beat cop, working the streets of Chicago until the ravages of too many cigarettes and too much fat put him in an early grave. He’d been a good cop, had taught Dean and his younger brother, Will, right from wrong, but a cop was all he was. When Clint Hooper was home, he wanted to be out on the streets. When he went to their ball games, he was always with the other cop dads. As a result, Dean lived with cops, socialized with cops, didn’t know anything else but the life of a cop. He’d wanted something else.

  So he joined the military through the ROTC program and planned to be a career Marine. It wasn’t his first choice-he’d always excelled in math and had considered teaching or being a CPA-but the pressures of a blue-collar father thinking accounting was for wimps had him looking to prove his manhood when he really should have had nothing to prove to anyone except himself.

  He’d learned his lesson, but not before his dad died. He left the Marines, got his degree, and, because of an aptitude test, was recruited into the FBI. He ended up doing what he was good at coupled with the only thing he truly knew and understood: being a cop. Maybe it was in the blood. And that was okay with Dean. This was where he was supposed to be; there was nothing else he wanted to do.

  Sooner than he had expected, he was done inputting the information from Jones’s day planner. Nothing jumped out right away, so he looked again, for notes and odd marks. There were none. The planner was as neat and efficient as Xavier Jones’s house and physical appearance. His perfect, crisp, all-caps printing was neither too small nor too big, with little deviation-Dean had to look closely to see any differences between the same letters. Virtually every “E” looked identical. Almost impossible to do by hand, but the writing was definitely ink. All black, fine felt-tip.