by Jeff Carson
Swain raised an eyebrow. “Happy anniversary.”
She blew air from her nose and let the sound of the tires flipping over the concrete lines take over. The ocean held her attention for a few seconds, and then she turned to him again.
“What?”
“I just … I want to know what happened to your lip.” Her face went hot and the blood rushed in her ears. She felt like she’d just punched him in the face.
What the hell was her problem? Perhaps the two dead bodies and the promise of more to come.
Swain swayed in his seat. His eyes held steady on the road. “My dad did it when I was ten years old.”
Luke swallowed and watched her partner’s blue eyes scan the horizon. His hand came up and touched his lip. Anyone with an ounce of empathy could figure out he’d grown the short beard to cover the scar, but the cleft in the otherwise mink-smooth facial hair almost accentuated the disfigurement. Then again, she’d never seen his face bared.
“He was making fun of me. I used to have a gap between my teeth. He was drunk on Yukon Jack. Hundred-proof shit that tastes like turpentine.”
Luke blinked. “Yeah.”
“Anyway, he was shitfaced. Came home. Took out his knife, and put the blade between my teeth. Then he cut a slit in my lip to match the slit in my teeth. He was gone the next day. That was the last I ever saw him.”
His knuckles were white on the wheel. He turned to her, his lids heavy. “Satisfied? Wanna touch it?”
She blinked and turned to the window. “No.”
A wave of rain smattered the windshield.
“Damn it. Gonna rain all day today, too.” There was new heat in Swain’s voice.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just—”
Swain flipped a hand. “You wanted to know. It’s been eleven months and it’s been eating at you.”
She wanted to take the moment back now. Maybe it was supposed to have gone unmentioned for the entirety of their partnership, however many years that would be.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, apparently reading her mind. “I was going to tell you anyway.”
“Sorry.” But she didn’t mean it. Given the opportunity again, she’d have asked the question. Since the day she’d met him, she’d been choosing the opportunity to bring it up, and she rarely failed to accomplish something she set her mind to.
“How about you?” he asked.
“How about me, what?”
“Your father.” He peeled his eyes off the road and looked at her. “You don’t think I’ve seen the way you avoid the subject?”
“He left us, too.”
“Ah.”
For the next few minutes they traveled in silence.
The Puget Sound slipped behind the wet fortress of concrete and steel that was the Seattle skyline. It had been weeks since she’d seen Mount Rainier on the horizon behind them, white with snow among the lunging green sea of trees of the Cascade mountain range. She stared between the skyscrapers, knowing the Olympic Mountains loomed large somewhere beyond the gray mist.
“Has it really been forty-two days of rain?” she asked.
“Get used to it. The sun will come out for two days, and just when you put on your Speedo the rain will come back in for another month.”
She smiled. “Please don’t make me picture you in a Speedo ever again.”
“Not my fault you have a dirty mind.”
They laughed and she turned to her partner. “Hey. Seriously. Sorry about bringing that shit up. You have enough going on without me running my mouth off.”
Swain nodded and got back to driving.
She watched the steel ship cranes, the Space Needle, and smelled the fishy scent of the sea coming through the vents. Despite the rain, escalating crime rate, ungodly traffic, and the ever-present threat of a tsunami taking her and a million other people out some day, she was beginning to like her new home. The sports teams were decent, the nightlife atmosphere hopping—if she ever decided to go out—and the coffee was second to none.
They exited the highway and her mood darkened at the prospect of what they were about to see.
Swain turned east, passed over a thin, traffic-choked bridge that spanned an inland finger of water, then dove them into an industrial area that would have looked gloomy even if the day were sunny and mild.
Smoke stacks and weathered buildings were built close to one another, creating a tunnel-effect as they crawled over potholed roads.
They drove around a ninety-degree corner and came up on a dozen light bars coloring the gray morning.
“Looks like we’re late to the party,” Luke said.
They parked and stepped out into air smelling of fish, sewage, and wet concrete.
Luke walked around a wide puddle and passed a cop car. She did a double take at the sight of a kneeling woman dressed in a suit and raincoat, talking up to a teenaged girl with disheveled hair and a dirty face. The girl’s cheeks were wet with tears.
A second car had both rear doors open, and she saw two more teenagers sitting in back: the near one a white boy, the other a black girl. They looked scared and their clothes had seen better days.
“Ready?” Swain stood watching her.
“Yeah.”
She followed Swain through the maze of vehicles toward a warehouse made of red brick and filthy windows.
They flashed their badges at an officer with a clipboard.
“Swain and Luke. Snohomish field office. SSA Earnshaw should have called it in.”
The officer nodded and waved them forward.
Inside, two cameras clicked and whirred, illuminating the interior in short, horrific flashes. She knew who the Chung Do were—infamous human traffickers who ran a sex-slave ring. They passed county lines and had ventured up into Everett more than plenty of times, but she’d never been in one of their dens.
“Shit.” Swain put a hand to his nose.
The place was stagnant with human misery. A dozen or more oriental rugs lay on the concrete floor. On each, filthy mattresses sat strewn with tousled, stained bedding.
She followed Swain, keeping her rubber-soled lace-ups on the concrete, grateful to walk in the wake of his cheap cologne. The salt air of Seattle was a distant memory once again.
Cageless cages, she thought as she studied a rug littered with a burnt spoon and two overused syringes.
On one of the carpets stood a waste basket filled with putrid milk cartons. She decided to hold her breath for the remainder of the walk.
Moments later they reached the main event for the photographers, and the smell changed from misery to death.
“Hello. Special Agent Marks.” A portly man wearing a fed-blue suit walked up to them and nodded.
“Swain.”
“Luke.”
“What do we have?” Swain asked, eyeing the line of corpses on the ground.
“Eight dead. Shot execution style in the back of the head, as you can see. All bear the Chung Do tattoo on their arms.”
“Would you look at the brains.” A crime-scene technician shook his head and brought the camera back to his eye.
She’d met some screwed-up techs in her fifteen years in the Bureau, but these Seattle people seemed to have a whole new level of warped.
“We’re looking at them, thank you,” she said.
The guy chuckled and clicked off some more pictures, lighting up the gruesome detail of the massacre in front of her.
Flash.
The corpse nearest her glowed for an instant, and the spilled insides of the dead man’s skull glistened on an oriental rug that had been laid over the wooden floor. Yes, she’d be looking at those brains for quite some time.
“I’m going over here for a second.” Luke left without waiting for a response.
“You all right?” Swain asked.
She held up a thumb and walked over to a bank of square windows.
Grime painted the hundred-year-old glass panes that had served as windows to a factory, then fi
sh-gutting plant, and the sex-slave den it was now. Rain pattered outside and dark streaks slid down like pulsing blood.
One of the windows was open and she flared her nostrils, catching a whiff of the salt air streaming in.
Luke had been born and raised in Colorado. Her first years with the FBI had been in Chicago, but she’d spent most of her life sucking in the thin air of the Rocky Mountains. Despite the density here in Seattle, she liked the salt-rich oxygen. When she jogged her daily five miles before sunrise she felt like a bionic woman. A breeze fluttered inside and a drop of rain hit her earlobe.
“Luke!”
She opened her eyes and turned, seeking Swain among the suits and forensics team. She walked back over.
“You all right?”
“Yep.”
“Take a look at this.” Swain stood next to the farthest corpse, staring at a spot on the ground.
“Another dead guy in a line of eight dead guys, shot in the back of the head. Nice.”
“No.” He bent down and pointed at a sliver of white protruding from underneath the man’s splayed arm.
The cop in her finally pushed aside the human and she bent down close, ignoring the stench. “Looks like a playing card.”
“Hey, Meat,” Swain called to the tech with the camera, “you get this?”
“Meat?”
Swain ignored her and lifted the edge of the corpse’s black leather coat, revealing a Hoyle ace of spades.
“Did I get this?” The tech came over. “No. Not yet. I’m on dead Asian dude number five. If you’d left our crime scene alone, I would have got this though.”
Swain pulled back his hand and looked up at the tech.
Meat was of Asian descent, just like the eight black-clad corpses oozing body fluids at their feet. His eyes were calm pools of oil between taut eyelids. “Ace High West,” he said. “They left another card under dead dude four.”
Swain stood to his full height, towering over Meat. “When were you going to tell us about that?”
The smaller man’s forensic suit swished as he stepped around Swain and bent down. He bounced on his heels, steadied himself, and snapped off a stream of pictures. “Ace High West gang comes in and executes everyone in the place?” Meat stood and looked around. “But why let the products go? Why not steal them?”
“The products?” Luke’s question was louder than she’d intended.
“Hey, don’t get mad at me. That’s what these guys do. You know that. They treat these kids as products. Frickin’ profit-making sex robots that—”
“Okay, thanks, Meat. Why don’t you go back to dead dude five and leave us to talk?”
“Yeah, okay.” Meat backed away.
“What’s that over there?” Swain pointed to the other side of the warehouse. A large bookcase-like piece of furniture stood swung open like a door, revealing an opening in the wall.
“You want me to leave you two to talk or answer the question?”
“Answer the question,” Swain said.
“Place was wired with security cameras. There’s a media room behind those shelves.”
Swain took off through the maze of bedding. Luke followed close, grateful to leave the dead bodies.
They reached a bank of metal shelving as tall as her and about four feet wide.
Two special agents from the Snohomish FO, Chambers and Grossnickel, stood near the opening.
“What is this?” Swain asked, poking his head inside, then disappearing into the wall.
“Security room,” Chambers said, following him in.
Grossnickel eyed Luke up and down, then went red in the face as he noticed she’d seen. “Hey, Luke.”
“Grossnickel.” She bent down and pushed into the room ahead of him.
The room was spacious, the size of a modest bedroom, and well-lit by two hanging bulbs dangling from the ceiling. Four flat-screen monitors, big enough to make a sports enthusiast drool, hung on the wall. Each monitor was split into four sections displaying one of the beds outside, and for the first time Luke realized there had been sixteen captives. No, she corrected herself. There were two more angles: one showing the eight dead men in the clearing at the front of the warehouse, the other showing the office just inside the entrance.
Two more special agents came in and nodded.
“Hey, I’m Leroy. This is VanZant.” The special agent nodded toward a desk.
VanZant looked up from studying a piece of electronic equipment. He wore glasses and eyed them with indifference behind his lenses.
“Looks like the jackpot to me.” Grossnickel stood shoulder to shoulder with Luke. “Chung Do guy shoots Hooper last night. The same night, a bunch of Chung Do get lined up and executed? All their captives set free? Looks like we’ll get some answers with this video.”
VanZant had his face next to what Luke recognized as a digital recorder.
“There’s an Ace High West calling card out there,” said Swain to Chambers. “Two of them.”
“Ace High West?” Grossnickel blew air from his lips. “Rival-gang revenge shooting. Makes sense. Real question is why’s Hooper dead out on that beach?” Grossnickel failed to catch the heat from Swain’s glare.
“Tell me you’ve got something, VZ,” Leroy said.
VanZant looked up. “No. There’s nothing in the memory. There’s no hard drive inside. It’s all removable storage, and it’s been removed. Obviously, we’ll take it in and make sure, but unless they’ve started making a different model of this recorder, which they haven’t, then we have nothing.”
“Shit,” Chambers said.
“If Ace High West comes into a Chung Do warehouse and offs eight of them, why would they put all the kids in the office? Wouldn’t they take them?” Grossnickel asked the room.
Nobody answered because nobody wanted to speak to Grossnickel directly, but Luke thought it was a valid point and worth exploring.
“They’re not beyond human trafficking. Sex slavery.”
The room remained silent.
“And, again: why the hell was Hooper involved in this?”
“Hey, Grossnickel,” Swain said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s 10:30 a.m. and we’ve all had a morning. These are good questions, and we’ll come up with the answers. Just not right now. Got it?”
Grossnickel eyed the room and nodded. “Yeah, all right.”
“I’m getting out of here,” Luke said.
Swain nodded. “Let’s go.”
She liked the way he did that. Sometimes he was a chauvinistic prat like the majority of the other men in the FO, but other times he was a loyal, good partner, and she was grateful for that. As the smell of Grossnickel’s BO hit her, she figured things could have been much worse.
Chapter 3
“No need to have an ops meeting at all, you ask me.”
Luke leaned sideways to see past Special Agent Denninger, who sipped his coffee in the entrance to the kitchen, complaining to anyone who’d listen.
“Seems pretty self-explanatory: we canvass the piers, the park, surrounding neighborhoods. Instead they got us packed in here. Hooper would have wanted us out there, kicking some ass, not here—”
“Hey, why don’t you shut up and take your coffee out to your desk?” Special Agent Hobbs, who stood a foot taller and wider than Denninger, leaned up against the counter and swiped his phone.
Denninger looked like he’d been urinated on by the man. “Yeah, okay, Hobbs.” He pushed past Luke and disappeared into the crowd of suits in the squad room.
Both coffee machines had dripped to three-quarters full, both brews in the carafes looking less dark than she preferred, and there were seven people waiting in line before her with large aluminum to-go mugs.
“Luke, how’s Swain holding up?” Hobbs asked her, looking up from his phone screen.
“Good.” Her watch told her she had fifteen minutes to spare, so she turned and left the room.
“Good conversation,” Hobbs called after her.
She waved and swerved between the clusters of agents conversing about Hooper, his Chinese assassin, and the kids freed from the warehouse.
She made her way through the sea of fifty-seven agents, all present to show their solidarity and mourn their fallen colleague, and went to where Swain sat on the edge of his desk, talking to Special Agent Staten.
“Hey.” Luke nodded at Staten. “How are you holding up?”
Staten shrugged. “Don’t lose your partner every day.”
She nodded, unsure of how to expound on that point. “Listen. I’m going across the street for a latte. You want anything?”
“I’ll take one,” Staten said. “Triple shot.”
Staten was a son of a bitch. Had been since her first day in the field office. The thick, muscular agent pushed other people around because he knew they’d never stand up to him. He smelled like body odor, and his eyes always got erections when they latched onto her. Right now, he stared at her breasts through the gap between the buttons at the top of her shirt and made no effort to hide it. But he was mourning his dead partner so she said, “Sure thing. You?”
“No, thanks,” Swain said.
She nodded and backed away. As she turned toward the reception windows, she slowed. A kid on the other side of the glass stared right at her.
He was late teens, skinny, wearing a dirty hooded sweatshirt pulled over a greasy head of curly blond hair. His face, frozen in a jaw-dropped expression, wore a craggy yellow beard.
She leaned sideways and checked behind her to see what he was looking at. Swain and Staten were back in conversation, paying her and the visitor no attention.
She turned to the windows again. The kid was on his way out, walking at a fast clip to the lobby door.
They rarely received walk-ins, especially on a day like today, so her curiosity was piqued. And there was the way he’d looked at her.
She upped her pace, pushing past the last of the agents on their way in and made her way to the large, windowed ante-room that served as the building’s lobby.
Shantel, a receptionist that Luke had bonded with over the past few months, talked on the phone on the other side of a half-moon desk.
The kid was gone, out the front door and nowhere in sight through the ground-level exterior windows, but he wouldn’t have gotten past Shantel without notice.