by Dale Mayer
“I don’t see any other reason for it, unless you’ve found something.”
“No, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t missed something,” Keane said. “She’s pissed off a lot of companies and a lot of people.”
“The GA group has,” she said, turning to look at him. “Sure, I’ve been part of the group’s voice for a while but much less this last six months or more. Feels like much longer. If this had happened a year ago, when I was much more visible, then I would have understood it. But to happen now, it doesn’t make as much sense.”
“But still, for the Australian human trafficking group to have gotten a hold of you would have been something they only learned about recently, right? Like you said, Joshua, you were compromised recently.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “It’s possible the Australian traffickers had their suspicions a while ago. I knew about the Australian link, but I didn’t have any details until recently. It was just one of those countries that we knew would be connected, but we hadn’t found it yet.”
“Right,” Nico said. “So it’s possible but just not necessarily for sure.”
“Exactly. And the thing is, she didn’t want to go to Australia, so that would be a nebulous connection too,” Keane added.
“Except her assistant insisted,” Nico said. “So let’s think about this. You, Joshua, know there’s a connection to Australia, and Australia knows that you’re an up-and-coming player in the entire trafficking empire, and they get suspicious and start investigating you. And how would they have found Charlotte?”
“Well, that’s the problem,” Joshua said. “Not only that but that would have been … how long ago? Charlotte, when did you agree to go to this Australian rally?” he asked, turning to his sister.
“Well, the organizers were telling everybody that I was coming, but I hadn’t agreed to go. So there was a big mess-up. I only ended up deciding to go within the last few days.”
“But they had your name up on the promos on the website?”
She nodded. “For a few weeks anyway, I think.” She looked over at Nico and said, “But that’s something that needs to be checked out.”
“I checked on a guy who quit the GA group, who is from Australia, Steve Darwin. It was his fault that your name was there. He thought you were going, and then, when it all blew up, they came back to him, but he’s been fighting cancer this last year,” Nico said. “So he wasn’t exactly capable of going to the rally or making the speech, and the organizers went back after you again, hoping that you would come.”
“Why would he offer my name?” she asked, puzzled.
“Because, when you and he were last active, you were quite visible and doing trips like this, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “I was doing all of them.” Then she winced. “Right. And, of course, once he got cancer and fought for his life, everything would have changed, and he would have been out of the loop. He wouldn’t have known I had stepped back so much this last six months.”
“Exactly. But I don’t know if that timeline works for Joshua’s group to have been alerted.”
“Depends,” Joshua said, thinking out loud. “If the Australian group had their suspicions about me for a few weeks, it’s possible. But I didn’t learn of this confirmation that we had this leak until only a little bit ago.”
“And it would have been awfully convenient for them to have found out that your sister would be over there.”
“And yet I wasn’t really,” she said.
“But then you decided to go, right?”
She nodded. “But again that was Maggie’s push.”
“So maybe we need to find if Maggie has any ties to Australia.”
“Well, I can tell you right now she does,” Charlotte said. “But I don’t remember how long ago.”
“What kind of ties?”
“I think she has family, but I don’t remember.”
“And how long has she been over here in the States?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
Nico got exasperated. “Now we’re back to the fact that we don’t know anything about Maggie. While you guys sit here and reminisce, I’ll go to her house and see what I can find.”
“What? You’ll just walk in and say, Hi, I’m Nico. I’m investigating your life to see if you had something to do with your boss’s kidnapping?”
He stared at her for a moment. “You know what? That’s not a half-bad idea. Maybe I’ll get the cops to pull her in for questioning.”
“Hey, you can’t do that,” she protested.
“Maybe I should though,” he said. “Because all we’re doing is operating blind, and we don’t have enough answers. We need answers.”
She groaned. “Fine, but I don’t want you scaring her. Why don’t I instead call and invite her over?”
“Except we don’t want to let her know that you’re home. Remember?”
She threw up her hands. “Fine. She doesn’t live far from here. You can walk there and back easily enough.”
“Right,” he said. As he walked out the door, he turned to look at her and said, “She lives alone, right?”
Her lips met in a line as she said, “As I don’t seem to know anything else about her, I can’t answer that for sure. But my understanding is she does live alone, yes.”
He nodded and said, “Back soon.” And he turned, and he walked out. He was at Maggie’s house quickly, as it was only a ten-minute walk away. But no lights were on, and no vehicles were in the driveway. He snuck around to the back and found the rear kitchen door unlocked. As he entered, the house had an emptiness to it, something that he’d already figured out. She’d likely left.
If she’d been involved in Charlotte’s kidnapping, Maggie had booked it.
Nico stepped inside the kitchen through to the living room and the dining room, finding a single bathroom on the main floor. But an empty coldness remained, as if nobody had lived here for a while. He frowned at that and headed to the fridge only to have it confirmed. It was completely empty, and so were the cupboards. He raced up the stairs, but the bedrooms were completely empty too. If this woman had ever lived here, it had been a while ago, and maybe she’d moved out in a very short time. Why? He quickly sent a text to both his Mavericks chat box and to Keane.
With a complete search of the place done, he took several photographs and then slipped out the back door. There, he stopped and took several looks around. Maggie’s place was like a townhome duplex with another one on the other side attached, but only sharing the garage. As he stood here looking, his hands on his hips, the curtain moved at a window on the duplex on the other side and dropped back into place. He studied that for a long moment before it occurred to him that he possibly had the wrong address. He quickly asked Keane in a text, but Keane confirmed it was the right address. And then Nico asked for who lived in the one beside it and gave the duplex number. The answer came back with a company name.
A rental?
Yes.
Interesting. He turned and walked away, not having any reason to suspect the other house closest to it except for the fact that somebody had looked outside. But then again, if it had been his place, he would have looked out too. As he got back to Charlotte’s, he walked up to the front door and entered. She looked at him, and he could see the fear in the back of her eyes.
He smiled and said, “Well, I don’t know who this Maggie person is, but maybe you should try to contact her because I just went through her house, and it’s completely empty. Nobody’s lived there for quite a while.”
She slowly sagged into the chair and stared up at him. Then she snatched her phone and pulled up Maggie’s contact information and dialed.
It rang and rang and rang, and he knew there wouldn’t be any answer.
Chapter 11
Charlotte overheard the men talking about how Maggie had moved to the top of the suspect list again.
“Have you ever been to her place?” Nico asked.
Charlotte
shook her head. “Originally I just met her at the coffee shop all the time,” she said. “And then I hired her, and she started working here.”
“Are you sure she doesn’t have another address?”
“Of course I’m not sure,” she said.
Keane punched away on this laptop. “She doesn’t have another address,” he said. “Her passport was checked leaving the country the same day you left.”
She looked at him in shock. “Seriously?”
He nodded. “She went to Australia too.”
At that, she sagged in place. “So she’s involved? I can’t believe it.”
“She is apparently, yes,” Keane said. “Or it’s mighty suspicious that she left at the same time you did. Not only left but completely cleaned out her place?”
Nico nodded. “I’ve got the team contacting the owner of the duplex to see if they have any idea if she handed in a notice or not.”
Just then Miles responded on the chat window and typed, Maggie’s rent is paid up until the end of the month. They had no idea the house was vacated.
“So she left without giving notice. But the lease is up at the end of the month.”
“Perfect timing on her part.”
“If she’s involved,” Charlotte said.
“How long ago was she working for you?” Nico asked.
“It was a while ago. Months at least.”
“Like eight weeks?” Joshua asked.
She stared at him. “She’s worked for me for the last six months.” she said.
“And that would make sense too,” Joshua said as he sat down at a chair. “We had what we thought was maybe a breach about six months ago. But everybody decided that nothing had been stolen. In the meantime, we lost two of our agents.”
“Wow,” Keane said, “that can’t be random.”
“I don’t know,” Joshua noted. “Those two were a little more visible. Only two other names were on that list, but nothing else appeared to happen.”
“Unless this is a long con,” Nico said. “But it wasn’t to take you out as much as to watch what you were doing.”
“It’s possible,” Joshua agreed, “but I would hate to think that all the raids that are going down right now will end up with zero results because of this.”
“Or it’s just the Australian side that’s dealing with that raid issue?” Keane asked.
“It’s possible,” Joshua said with a sigh.
“I don’t know what to think right now,” Nico stated. “But it does line up with the bugs placed here in Charlotte’s house within that six-month time frame. And Maggie’s access to Charlotte’s house makes it that much easier for her to do that. Joshua, can you get any information on how the raids are going?”
He frowned and then nodded and pulled out his phone and sent a text. “If they can tell me anything, they will but most won’t be public information and as I’m now compromised and out of the game, they won’t volunteer the information.”
“Right.” Nico shook his head.
“So again we’re in a waiting game,” Keane pointed out.
“I’m not terribly impressed with this waiting game,” she said. “In fact, it sucks.”
“Of course nobody likes the waiting part,” Nico said. “It does suck. But we also don’t know, for sure, that Maggie is involved, so keep the faith.”
“No,” she said. “She walked away from me too, so I’m back to looking for a new assistant.”
“You just said that you wouldn’t get another assistant,” Nico said.
“Right,” she said with a groan. “You guys are making me nuts. What we have here is the potential for Joshua’s undercover sting to have been found out a long time ago, and that’s why my kidnapping happened, and they’re just now working on the blackmail scheme part. Or it’s completely unrelated.”
“I don’t know,” Joshua said. “Like I said, we had two men disappear, and no other bodies were ever found.”
She stared at him. “Well, I sure hope you get out of this business. It sounds very dangerous.”
He looked at her and smiled. “I’m not the one who got kidnapped this weekend.”
She just rolled her eyes at him. “And I still don’t understand what that was all about. I get that my assistant’s quite possibly connected because she’s the one who just now left without telling me and had gone to the same country that I was forced to be at. So what are the chances that she’s the one who wanted me there personally?”
The men sat up and stared at her. “Is there any reason why she would?”
She shrugged. “I have no clue. Apparently I don’t know anything about her. Why would she care if I go to this rally or not? I know she loves Australia but not sure if she has any ties there.”
“Let me ask you this,” Keane said. “Just for the sake of discussion and completely off-topic, did anybody ever die in one of these rallies?”
She stared at him in shock. “Yes,” she said. “We had one death a couple years back.”
“And who was it?”
She shook her head. “The name eludes me right now,” she said. “It was a young man.”
Exhaustion had taken its toll. Even with the various naps, her brain wasn’t functioning. Brain fog was a real thing, she started to realize. She just hadn’t expected it to be something to deal with when she was jet-lagged and stressed. “I can’t remember,” she murmured. “Andy something, I think. I should remember though, shouldn’t I? I should always remember those who die during something like that.” She reached up, scrubbed her face, and said, “I have it in my notes somewhere.”
“Do you know anything about his family?”
She shook her head. “No. At the time we were all devastated, but we couldn’t do anything about it.”
“How did he die?” Joshua asked, his tone gentle.
She stared at him, her mind trying to pull back to the time it had happened. “I believe there was a stampede, and, when he fell, he got trampled.”
“Why was there a stampede?”
“A series of explosions—fireworks—had gone off nearby. People panicked, and it got a little ugly.”
“A little ugly?” Nico asked. “Somebody died.”
She nodded. “And I forgot all about that. How could I forget about it?”
“Because it’s easier to forget about it than it is to remember,” Joshua said. “It’s a sanity-saving method that we all employ when we need to.”
“Maybe,” she whispered, “but it feels very much like an excuse right now.”
“No, don’t think that way. Were you at that rally?”
“I was, as were the rest of the GA group.” She frowned. “Because we were all there, I see no reason for me to have been targeted.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“No, I’m not sure about it,” she said. “I just remember being devastated that somebody had died at one of these events.”
“Did you have any contact with him?”
She nodded. “Yes, I did. I remember speaking to him earlier. It’s one of the reasons why his face but apparently not his name is something I remembered. I was talking to him about our group and what we were hoping to make happen around the world.”
“Was anybody with him?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Not only was it years ago but there was also a crush of people, and I didn’t speak to him long.”
“So he didn’t email you or have any contact with you other than that?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, looking at him puzzled. “Why?”
“Just that, if he did have contact with you versus anybody else, it would explain why you were targeted.”
“I was one of the speakers,” she said. “And my name was up with a lot of the other organizers, so it’s hard to say. Maybe because I was the only female at the time?”
“It could be something like that,” Keane nodded. “We don’t always know what happens or why somebody is chosen.”
“But there is a rea
son,” Nico said, “and that’s what we have to figure out.” He returned to the kitchen table and sat down. Joshua pulled out his phone and sent a bunch of texts.
It seemed like she was the only one completely out of the loop. “I guess this is a new avenue to explore,” she said, “but why are we giving up on the other concepts?”
“We’re not giving up on them,” Joshua said, “but the timing would be difficult, and they’re really convoluted.”
“That would be good news for you though, wouldn’t it?”
He nodded. “It would be very good news, if it wasn’t connected to me. Unfortunately it still means it’s connected to you, and that means your life is still in danger.”
She groaned. “Nice.” Needing a distraction, she looked around the kitchen and asked, “What about food?”
“Sure. What do you want to do?” Nico asked. “We can order in, or do you have anything that needs to be used up?”
It was at least something that she could do, and it would take her mind off all this. She walked over to the fridge and opened it up. She had very little in the way of fresh food because she’d gone to Australia. “I should check the freezer.” And she found some leftover spaghetti sauce that she’d made a while back, and there was a lot, about a good-sized pot of that. She brought it out and put it in the microwave to defrost and put on a pot of water for pasta.
As the men continued to talk among themselves, she only half listened. Her mind had glommed onto the kid who had died. As she thought about it, she realized that she’d gone almost into a dark mode for a week afterward. She’d pretty well stayed in bed and cried her heart out but hadn’t told anybody because she had nobody in her life to tell. She hadn’t even had an assistant back then. But just the thought of violence coming out of one of the rallies that they had been in was pretty hard to understand.
She’d given several interviews where she’d apologized profusely and had said that something like that should never have happened, and then she’d basically gone into hiding as the organizers had been blamed as zealots and hadn’t cared about the safety of those around them. And, of course, that had been a lie because she wasn’t even part of the organizers. She’d flown over for the actual rally, but she hadn’t been part of the security or the setup.