Deeper Than the Grave

by Tina Whittle

  “Ninety-six percent. He got dinged for sloppy packaging once. You can see that in the buyer’s remarks. Otherwise he’s very reliable.”

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. Back in Savannah, if you wanted illegal pharmaceuticals, you had to find some guy living in his mother’s basement or brave the hopped-up crazies over on the Westside. This was sanitized and simple and downright pleasant. Except that it was also the frontier, the Wild West, the Shadow Net. No rules, no tracing, no regulation. And I had one of its denizens a click away from me.

  I pointed to an icon of the Confederate Battle Flag. “So is that you? Rebel Yell?”

  Kenny nodded. “That shows I’m live right now. Lucius used the name Dirty South.”

  I pointed to another icon, this one of a slavering snow-colored wolf, fangs bared, a red tongue in a black maw. “And that’s White Wolf? Who is also live right now?”

  Another nod from Kenny. He was mightily unhappy to be sitting there with me, but he was cooperating. I scooted closer to the screen.

  “Send him a message. Tell him you’re inquiring about a piece of merchandise.”

  Kenny typed out my words. They sat there on the page, dangling like a worm on the hook. I had only one real question for this White Wolf—his very name gave me the creeps, conjuring up images of hooded men and burning crosses—but I wasn’t sure how to ask it.

  And then a reply appeared. From White Wolf. What piece of merchandise?

  Kenny stared at it. “What do you want me to do now?”

  “Scoot over.” I moved the keyboard in front of me and typed, I have information about a recent sale. One with complications attached.

  The cursor blinked, and then White Wolf’s reply appeared. Complications for whom?

  Damn, I thought, he used “whom” correctly. Complications for both of us, I typed.

  I’m listening.

  I typed quickly. Where are the Amberdecker bones?

  I don’t know.

  Dirty South delivered them to you.

  No, he made the arrangements, but he did not deliver the merchandise. I’ve heard he ended up in a coffin not his own.

  Damn again. So much for the anonymity of the Darknet—White Wolf knew that Lucius and Dirty South were the same person. I had no leverage, no bartering chip. It suddenly occurred to me that I might be tipping this bad guy’s hand in a way I hadn’t foreseen. Too late, I told myself. The bait had been taken. Time to reel the fish in and pray it wasn’t a shark.

  I pulled the bourbon out of the drawer and slopped a fair amount into my empty coffee mug. I typed quickly. The police are asking questions.

  Not of me.

  But they will. Eventually.

  Is that a threat?

  Kenny looked like he wanted to throw up. I swatted him on the knee and kept typing.

  No, I typed. I have no way of threatening you. But if they keep asking questions, they will find your clients, and if your clients are inconvenienced, then you will be too. I want them to stop asking questions, but I need to know something to make that happen.

  The cursor blinked. Finally words started streaming again. Tell me what you need to know and I will decide.

  I took a minute to drain the last of the bourbon. Dirty South had a partner. Was it you?

  No.

  Was it the old man at Dexter’s Guns and More?

  How would I know such a thing? The transactions here in the Hole are anonymous.

  I hesitated, then typed. And yet…

  Several seconds passed. The old man was not involved in the trade. As for the killing, I do not know. I do know that I did not kill Dirty South, nor did I have him killed. Whoever did so cost me a valuable piece of merchandise. Dirty South worked alone. The location of the Amberdecker merchandise died with him. The cursor blinked. Unless you have the merchandise he failed to deliver?

  No.

  What about the other items he promised? The grouping that came with the locket?”

  I thought of the bones lying in a stainless steel bed and got a shiver. So Lucius had been trying to sell them, which meant he was most likely the one who’d stuck them in the wall, just like I’d suspected. Not that White Wolf needed to know this.

  I know nothing about them, I typed.

  That is unfortunate. Should you ever have those items, or similar ones, to offer, please contact me. I am always open to new opportunities. You know how to find me. The cursor blinked. Just as I know how to find you.

  The cursor stopped blinking, and the wolf icon vanished. White Wolf was no longer live. I looked at Kenny, who was as gray as the sky outside. I pushed my glass of bourbon his way. He took a giant swallow, coughed and hacked.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Lord have mercy, Miss Tai. What have you done?”

  ***

  I gave Kenny some hot chocolate and drove him home. The wind was kicking up, fiercer now, dragging the first clouds behind it. That meant the rain was coming. Slow and steady at first, the meteorologists warned, turning to sleet and ice the second night fell. I dropped Kenny off at his apartment complex, waiting until the front door closed behind him before I drove back to the shop.

  So Lucius was the sole contact according to White Wolf. Not Dexter. Unfortunately, even White Wolf didn’t know who killed Lucius, or where the Amberdecker bones went. But he had known about the other bones, the young woman’s bones. And I’d lied to him about them.

  Damn, did I want a cigarette.

  When I got back to the shop, I opened the faucet to a dribble and duct-taped newspaper a half-inch thick around the exposed spigot in the back lot. Double-checked the security system, because I knew Trey would ask. And then I sat down at the computer, at the now empty screen. He’d ask about this too, how I’d spent my morning. And if I left out chatting online with a black market businessman, the omission would shine in my face like a bare bulb.

  My phone rang. Trey. I breathed a silent bit of gratitude that he couldn’t read people over the phone.

  I put it to my ear. “Hey, I was about to—”

  “Stay there. I’m on my way.”

  “Why?”

  “I have sandbags for your car. And chains of some kind. Garrity sent them. Have you finished at the shop?”

  “I have, but—”

  “Good. I’ll see you in seven…No, eight minutes. We’ll drive in together. But I have to tell you something first.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get there. It’s very…something. I’ll have to show you.”

  And then he hung up. I sat back in my chair, watching a clump of dirty snow fall from the roof and splatter on the gravel. Two hours until sundown.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Trey blazed into the shop eight minutes later on the dot, his coat billowing, snow rushing in behind him. He clutched an armload of file folders to his chest, and I barely had time to stand before he unloaded everything on the counter. I caught one notebook before it toppled to the floor.

  “Trey! What in the—”

  “Sorry. It’s a long story, and I’m a little…something.” He shook snow from his hair. “First I have to tell you why I was wrong. Of course I was right too, but that came later.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He started sorting the folders into piles. “The detergent thefts. The Sinaloa cartel. The distribution networks. We were looking for a traditional organizational structure—discrete branches stemming from a single source. We could never find it. Now I know why.”

  He was amped, almost hyper. I’d seen him get frustrated—that was when the pacing started—and I’d seen him overwhelmed—that was when the wall came up—but I’d never seen him quite so manic.

  “Trey? Are you okay?”

  His head snapped up. “What?”

  “You�
�re dialed to eleven, boyfriend.”

  “Oh. Right.” He jabbed his chin toward the tea station. “I suspect the Lapsang souchong you purchased was not decaffeinated.

  I snatched up the box. The label was a string of indecipherable characters featuring a serene white teacup pillowed on a cloud bank. “But I got it on Buford Highway! From a real old Chinese man! He said—”

  “He lied. Or was wrong. I haven’t had caffeine in years, not since I joined the sniper team, because I never knew when I’d get a call-out, and zeroing a rifle is extremely difficult with caffeine in your system. Not your system, mine, I mean. Not that I have to zero rifles anymore, but—”

  “Trey. You’re babbling. Stop it.” I put my hand over his heart; it was racing like a hamster on a wheel. “Maybe you should take some of Gabriella’s herb thingies to neutralize this.”

  “I took the last of them. They didn’t work.” He blew out a sharp breath. “It’s rather disconcerting. Nonetheless, it does quicken the mental processing, it certainly does. Which brings us back here, to our detergent theft problem.”

  He tapped the papers emphatically. His eyes were twin blazes, as sharp and blue as pilot lights. “We were all stuck—Major Crimes, SWAT, all of us—because the investigation would reveal different networks, but they seemed to be self-contained. We’d make the arrests, charge the offenders, send them to prison. But we couldn’t link them to the larger network.”

  I paged through one of the folders as he spoke. It was thick with arrest records, most of them for misdemeanor shoplifting. I saw his name on a few of the reports, read the lines in the dispassionate language all cops wrote reports in—clipped, precise, without an ounce of descriptive lingo.

  Trey stood at my shoulder. “When Garrity moved to Major Crimes, one of his first assignments involved tracking the movement of illegal drugs from the 75/85 corridor into the communities. Distribution networks. He discovered one particularly effective unit under the Sinaloa cartel, but he could never figure out how they moved the currency.”

  I was confused. “How does this involve laundry detergent?”

  “I’m getting to that.” He handed me another file. “I told you about the multiple arrests we made involving laundry detergent—always one size, always one brand. We found a stockpile of such at the Sinaloa stash house. I knew it had to be drug-related—maybe an ingredient in the drug-making process, maybe scent-masking—but I never figured it out. Until now.” He paused to let the next words sink in. “The detergent was the currency.”

  “The what?”

  Trey spread the materials out for me to see. “Street currency. A single one-hundred-and-fifty-ounce bottle of premium laundry detergent was worth ten dollars in illegal drugs. Customers paid street-level dealers with the detergent. The dealers then traded it back to cooperative local markets, most small grocery stores, where it was then returned to the shelves. It was the ideal street currency—untraceable, easily stolen, easily funneled back into the legitimate market, and not illegal to possess.” He pushed the pieces of paper into the center. “See for yourself.”

  I looked where he was pointing. I saw a jumble of columns, a list of names. “They were laundering money with laundry detergent?”

  He thought about that. “Yes.”

  It all came together in my head. “The skate shop. It was the delivery spot. People brought in detergent, took out drugs.”

  Trey exhaled in satisfaction. “Exactly. Which is what…the person with the tattoo…”

  “Fishbone?”

  Trey pointed his pen at me. “Right. Fishbone. That’s exactly what Fishbone was explaining to Garrity this morning. In return for reduced charges, of course. And protection.”

  “Protection?”

  “Yes, for him and his brother both. Because even though the skate shop operation is very small, the online criminal network Lucius connected it to is very…” Trey braced himself against the table with both arms. “Very…”

  “Huge?”

  “Yes. Enormous. More so than we ever suspected, more so than Fishbone and his brother wanted.” He nodded toward the countertop. “See for yourself.”

  I scanned the collection of police reports, press releases, newspaper articles. It was a record of the Atlanta Metro Major Offenders Task Force doing exactly what it was supposed to do—connect local criminals with their larger organizational support system and bring both down in the process. And now there was a fresh series of indictments, the first series of charges against a confederation of former Gulag prisoners with disturbingly familiar nationalities—Ukrainian, Armenian, Latvian, a veritable encyclopedia listing of the former Soviet states, plus a smattering of Polish and Romanian names.

  My head went swimmy. “Oh hell. It really is the Russian mafia. Just like Kenny said.”

  Trey looked like Christmas morning with a pony under the tree. “The specifics are redacted until the search warrant is unsealed, but you can see the pattern regardless. The information has been right there, but we never had the…the …”

  “Key?”

  “Correct. But now we do. Now it’s a multi-national investigation with the FBI, the Justice Department, felony indictments at the corporate level. Because now we understand its structure.”

  “Which is?”

  He pulled the cap off the pen with his teeth. Instead of a flowchart, he drew a circle. Then he surrounded that with a second circle, and that with a third, like he was drawing a target.

  “Each small drug operation, like the skate shop, was a circle. A single line made up of many single points—many single criminals—connected on that circle. Follow the line, and only that line, and it goes around and around. You begin where you end. No links to the larger organization. No way to get to the center.” He picked up one more folder. “The black market antiquities trade. Another circle. What Garrity discovered from Fishbone is that the key isn’t going around the perimeter of the circle. It’s finding the point on the circle that takes you to the next circle.”

  He drew lines across the circles, creating what looking like a spiderweb. And then he put a dot in the very center, at the intersection of all the lines.

  I stared. “The spider at the center of the web.”

  Trey tossed the pen onto the drawing. “Garrity’s words exactly.”

  “But how does Lucius fit in?”

  “That’s what Garrity and I were trying to figure out this morning. He suspects Lucius’ murderer is on one of these circles, the point where the drug trade and the antiquities market intersect. We haven’t found that point yet, but when we do…” Trey looked at me, eyes bright. “It will exonerate your uncle entirely, I am sure of it.”

  And then I saw it. The name. But not just the name, the translation of the name. I got a chill.

  “Trey? What is this?”

  He followed my pointing finger. “Known accessories in a particular Eastern European network. Some are in prison, others out of extradition, others at large.”

  “What about this one? Belovuk.”

  Trey nodded. “Serbian given name. It means—”

  “White Wolf, I see that.” I was shaking now. “He’s the link, the point on the black market antiquities circle that connects to the drug circle that connects to the larger organization. He was Lucius’ contact, the one who traded him drugs for whatever he could steal. Including bones.”

  Trey’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know this?”

  I sighed. “Are you sure you don’t have any more of those herbal thingies?”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  So I explained. Trey refused to sit—he stood as rigid as a marble column, arms folded—and listened as I told him about Kenny’s visit, and my web-message conversation with White Wolf, and what I’d learned about Lucius and Dexter and the whole sordid affair. When I was finished, he set his jaw and stared at me.

  “This is what you
did this morning?”

  “It is. Yes.”

  His voice stayed soft, but his eyes hardened. “What made you decide this was a good idea?”

  I felt the first prickle of annoyance. “You should be happy. I put the final puzzle piece in your big damn unsolved case.”

  “By consorting with a known criminal.”

  I folded my arms to match his. “I exchanged information, that’s all. Cops do it every day.”

  “You’re not a cop.”

  “Neither are you.”

  His head snapped back, and I immediately regretted the words. He turned away from me and began gathering up the paperwork from the counter.

  I reached out to touch his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  He avoided my hand with a neat sidestep. “No need to apologize. It’s the truth. But it doesn’t change the fact that you quite possibly jeopardized the entire investigation and endangered your own safety.”

  “I thought this White Wolf was just some libertarian nut job! I didn’t know he was a freaking Russian mobster!”

  “If you had suspicions, you should have talked to the authorities.”

  “You mean the ones who have been trying to blame me for this whole mess? The ones staking out my shop as we speak?”

  “Their job is to find the truth.”

  “Their job is to close the case.”

  He looked annoyed. “That’s the same thing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  His expression hardened to match his eyes. “We operate under the rule of law.”

  “Well, I operate somewhere a little fuzzier with, yes, known criminals. My family tree is crawling with known criminals. Smugglers, moonshiners, thieves—”

  “Yes, I know. One of them kidnapped me and then assaulted me and then locked me in the hold of a boat four months ago.” He flung a finger at the computer. “This criminal, however, is not related to you and will kill you without hesitation if you get in his way, which is probably what happened to Lucius, which is probably why he’s dead. And now you’ve…you’ve…”