In Too Deep

by Lynn H. Blackburn

That did seem like good motivation. “We’re doing our part right now,” he said. “This is as important as getting the warrants and running the raids. We’ve been planning this for two days, which isn’t a long time, but it’s long enough. Ryan knows what he’s doing and I’m not going to lie—I’d love to be with him right now. But the longer we dance, the longer we keep the guilty parties partying, the better the odds of success. We don’t want to lose lives because we wanted to be part of the action.”

  He was right. Annoyingly right.

  “Look,” he said. “Adam and Anissa are chatting it up with the man of the hour.”

  Sure enough, Adam and Anissa were deep in conversation with Barclay Campbell. She studied them as they talked. The way Anissa smiled. The way Adam nodded. Even knowing what she knew, she couldn’t see any sign that they were faking it. They seemed to be enjoying the conversation.

  “How do they do that?”

  “Lots of practice.” Gabe had been undercover for years.

  “How did you do it?”

  Gabe frowned.

  “I’m sorry. That was an inappropriate question, wasn’t it? I should’ve known.” Dumb. Would she ever learn?

  “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s hard to explain. Usually it involves becoming another person. Like being a character actor. It wasn’t me anymore. It was someone else.”

  He nodded toward Adam and Anissa. “In their case, it’s about remembering the long-term goal. You remember you don’t want the short-term satisfaction that would come from slugging him more than the long-term satisfaction of seeing him go to jail for what he’s done.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “Not for long, but it will get you by until you can get away from the creep.”

  That made her laugh.

  She felt the vibration of a phone in Gabe’s tux pocket. He winked at her and reached for the phone without missing a step.

  “Chavez.”

  There was a pause. A smile flitted across his face. “Okay.”

  He put the phone back into his pocket. “Get ready, señorita. Things are about to get very interesting.”

  He danced them toward Adam and Anissa, who were back on the floor. They met in the middle, and in one fluid motion she found herself back in Adam’s arms.

  “Gabe says soon. Someone called him.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Have you noticed the servers aren’t coming back from the kitchen?”

  She hadn’t, but now that he mentioned it . . . where there had been ten or fifteen black-clad servers milling around at all times with platters of champagne and trays of finger foods, she didn’t see one anywhere.

  Oh, Father, please let them be safe. Let them all be safe.

  Adam’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, then pulled her close so she could read it.

  Rescues made from:

  The kitchens and the shacks behind The Porterhouse - the staff there is helping us make sure everyone is accounted for.

  Senator Carson’s house

  Gus Johnson’s yacht

  The Back Door was empty, but the staff is at The Porterhouse and all are accounted for.

  The cleaning crews were at three different offices downtown. We have them all.

  The h/t investigators have support staff coming from Raleigh.

  The captain should be there any moment.

  If everything went as planned, the Carrington County Sheriff’s Office would be called in to seal the exterior doors. No one would be able to leave the gala tonight until they’d been cleared. And the big fish would be arrested on the spot.

  Sabrina leaned against Adam. His arms tightened around her. “It’s okay, Bri. They’re free and they have advocates who will fight for them to be sure they’re treated fairly. Why are you crying?”

  Was she?

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed her face. She had to get control of her emotions. This was ridiculous.

  But when the captain appeared at the edge of the dance floor, flanked by a handful of deputies on each side, and marched through the crowd straight to Senator Carson and Barclay Campbell, she couldn’t stop a few more rogue tears from escaping.

  There was no sleep for any of them that night.

  Anissa couldn’t do anything in an official capacity, but she stayed with Sabrina. Adam went to the sheriff’s office with the others. Of course everyone who had been arrested lawyered up immediately, but the evidence was overwhelming. There were real, live people who’d been informed of their rights and who were more than happy to testify against their captors.

  Some of the victims were so traumatized they wouldn’t speak to anyone, but some of them had been ready for this for a while. They’d known it was wrong. They’d known there should be a way out, but they hadn’t been able to figure out how to get out without endangering the others.

  So they’d stayed.

  Sabrina would never get over the level of sacrificial love on display in the face of depravity and inhumanity.

  Art and Abby opened their own hotels—currently in the low season so not at capacity—to house the victims. Families were reunited. Husbands with wives. Mothers with sons. Fathers with daughters.

  There were tears and laughter and rage and anger.

  Because not everyone was enjoying the reunions. Ten women—three of whom didn’t appear to be over sixteen years old—had been taken to the hospital for treatment. They’d been found in a basement room at the Van Storbers’ spa, and the officers who’d found them would probably need therapy after what they’d seen. The women would need counseling and treatment for a long time.

  Sabrina walked among the newly freed in one of the huge Campbell hotel ballrooms. She smiled and answered questions and held a couple of babies and listened to the stories. Each one different. Each one the same.

  They’d saved and borrowed to come to America. But when they’d arrived, they’d been told they would have to work off their debt first. Families were divided and shuffled from one place to the other. No one stayed in any location for more than a few months before their captors moved them to a different one. No one knew where their families were—until someone messed up and put some cousins together at The Back Door.

  That had been the first mistake, but it hadn’t been the fatal blow.

  Lisa Palmer had been.

  She’d found the group at The Porterhouse. Gotten names and descriptions of loved ones and found them at The Back Door and at the Van Storbers’ spa. She’d told them what was going on. She’d given them hope. They’d made a plan.

  Then she’d died and they’d been sure it was all over. That someone would come and kill them all. Now, they wanted to let their families back home know they were alive.

  Sabrina made a few phone calls, and a deputy arrived thirty minutes later with her laptop and another for Anissa. Abby provided them with the hotel’s Wi-Fi password and they went to work.

  Sabrina and Anissa asked each family for their names and if there was someone they wanted to contact. They looked up phone numbers and emails and even managed to get a few people on the phone in the dead of night.

  The work of restoring these families would take months. Years. But it had begun.

  23

  Adam poured another cup of coffee. He’d lost count of how many he’d had. He probably wouldn’t be able to sleep for another twenty-four hours.

  The press had gotten wind of Friday night’s events and descended overnight on the sheriff’s office in far greater numbers than was typical.

  But no one was talking.

  The sheriff hadn’t been thrilled he’d been left out of the loop until the warrants were already being served, but he understood the need to run the operation as tightly as possible. And to his credit, he’d put a gag order on everyone associated with the case.

  “No one’s going to benefit from these people’s suffering,” he said. “I will tolerate no grandstanding or political posturing. That this went on as long as it did—right under our noses—is a tragedy
. A stain on our county and on our law enforcement community. We’ll have plenty of time in the weeks ahead to discuss how this happened, where we dropped the ball, and what we can do to ensure nothing like this ever happens again, but for now our focus is undivided. We’ll see that the victims are protected and given everything they need to start their lives fresh. And we’ll see that the men and women who perpetrated these heinous crimes pay for their actions.” The sheriff then threatened to fire anyone caught talking to the press and told them to get back to work.

  At five in the morning, Adam was in the observation room watching the captain and Gabe interview Barclay Campbell. Barclay’s lawyer had arrived at the sheriff’s office before Barclay did. Barclay had been processed first and even though his lawyer was demanding he be sent home immediately, Barclay had the look of a man who knew he was going down.

  He wasn’t going to make it easy on them, but he knew.

  A deputy peered into the room. “Investigator Campbell?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s a woman downstairs who says she wants to speak to you and only you.”

  “Who is she?”

  “It’s Mrs. Van Storber.”

  Five minutes later, Adam sat across the table from Mrs. Van Storber. She’d been at the gala and was a person of interest, but there was no proof she knew what was going on.

  “You wanted to speak to me, ma’am?”

  “You were at the gala tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew this was going to happen.” She didn’t say it as a question.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss the specifics of the investigation,” he said. The truth was, he hadn’t known at all. If they hadn’t found those shacks occupied and the people ready to talk, none of this would have happened.

  “Well, I’m here to tell you that you haven’t looked far enough. Not yet. You’ve only scratched the surface.”

  “Are you telling me you knew about the women in the basement of your spa?”

  She twitched in her seat. “There was nothing I could do.”

  “You could have come to the police. You could have made an anonymous phone call.”

  Her eyes widened at his words.

  “It was you,” he said. “You’re the source of the tip about the girls at Barclay’s spa last year.”

  She didn’t confirm it, but she didn’t deny it either.

  “Why would you try to get those girls free and not the ones on your own property?”

  She snorted. “It isn’t my property.”

  “You’re his wife.”

  “He bought me.”

  Adam’s mouth went dry. Oh, Father. No.

  “We have children. Four of them. They are my life. I couldn’t risk it. He would’ve had me killed, and then he would’ve raised my sons to be just like him. No.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t take that chance.”

  “Mrs. Van Storber—”

  “Please. Call me Greta.”

  Somehow he got the feeling this was more about her wanting to avoid hearing Van Storber’s name than about her trying to achieve any sort of familiarity.

  “Greta, you’re going to need an attorney. A good one. Because unless you have proof . . .”

  She stood and turned her back to him. She reached behind her and lifted her shirt.

  Bile rose in Adam’s throat. Her back was covered in scars . . . and fresh stripes.

  She lowered her shirt and turned around. “I have proof.”

  Adam still couldn’t speak. How could he tell her the physical beating—while horrific—wouldn’t stand up in court unless she could somehow prove her husband had done it.

  “Mr. Campbell, Lisa Palmer trusted you. She’d done her research. She said you were the one who would be able to see this through. She told me if anything happened to her, you were the one I should talk to.”

  She removed her watch and slid it across the table to Adam. “It’s in there.”

  Adam studied the timepiece. The hands weren’t moving. He turned it over and opened the back.

  One microSD card rested where the watch gears had been.

  “I need to leave before my husband finds out I was here,” she said. “I trust you won’t tell him where you found this.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But, Greta, take your children and leave. Now. Don’t stay there another hour.”

  She stood. “You make it sound easy. There’s nothing easy about this. Even from a jail cell, he still owns me. I’m not here for my own freedom. I’m here for theirs. Take care of that, Mr. Campbell. People died to get it to you.”

  “Wait.”

  She paused at Adam’s word.

  “Do you know who killed Lisa?”

  “Some men who work for my husband, but I don’t know their names. But I know they didn’t mean to kill her. At least not right away. They didn’t know she was sick. They waterboarded her . . . and she died.”

  That explained the drowning.

  “The men who were torturing her panicked when she died before she gave them what they needed. They tried to make it look like a suicide and hoped it would just go away. One of them drove the car into the lake and put her behind the wheel and swam out. Then they went to her house and took her computers. They went back to the lake Sunday morning and realized the car was visible, so they pulled her out of the water.” A small sob escaped Mrs. Van Storber, but she pressed on. “They pulled her out and one of the men pretended to be a hero.”

  “How do you know all this?” Adam asked.

  “My husband was furious when he found out. There was a lot of yelling. It wasn’t hard to put it all together.” She shrugged. “If they had told him what they’d done, he would have disposed of her body himself. But he was out of town, and by the time he found out, her body had been discovered and the police were already searching her house. That’s when he decided to blow up her house. He didn’t know she’d left the insurance policy with me. If he ever finds out, I’ll be next.”

  She walked out the door and he let her go. He couldn’t hold her, and he feared if he tried to and her husband got wind of it, he’d have one of his men beat her. Or worse.

  He called Sabrina.

  “Hey.” Her voice was filled with fatigue.

  “Any chance you could come here or I could meet you at your lab?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “New evidence. A microSD card.”

  “Have you looked at it yet?”

  “Are you kidding me?” He knew better than that. “I haven’t even touched it yet.”

  She laughed. “Good. Can you meet me at my lab around six thirty?”

  “Yes. And Sabrina, make sure someone comes with you. I don’t want you driving alone.”

  “Why? We got them.”

  “I know. Humor me?”

  “Fine. I’m sure Anissa won’t mind.”

  By 7:00 a.m., Sabrina had made a copy of the memory card and gone to work. It took her no time at all to find the files. None of them were encrypted. Lisa Palmer had laid it all out there for them.

  Most of it they’d already figured out. Mr. Van Storber had been the ringleader. He had the connections with the recruiters who actually took the money and got the people to the States.

  Barclay Campbell had gotten involved after some late-night poker games went south a few too many times. But once he was in, he was all in. He’d gone from a reluctant participant to a full-fledged supporter. He’d been influential in bringing in Senator Carson. They’d been friends for a long time. He’d convinced him it would be an easy way to save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Of course, it also meant they now had him over a barrel.

  Lisa’s notes told them things they hadn’t known. That the Sullivans owed so much money that they were about to go under and the senator had made the connections that brought The Porterhouse into the mix.

  That FreedomForAll wasn’t a dirty charity after all, but that the traffickers had been intentional abo
ut volunteering with the organization so they would be able to deflect suspicion away from the worst offenders.

  That Mrs. Johnson had no idea her yacht staff were slaves.

  The group had stuck with labor trafficking until last year, when they’d ventured into sex trafficking. The women who had been sex trafficked had been kept separate from the other victims and had either died or been sold to their abusers, who had then taken them out of state.

  The information went on and on. Some of it wouldn’t hold up in court, but it was more than enough to get all the search warrants they could handle. Assets were frozen. Homes and offices and everything in them were sealed.

  As Mrs. Van Storber had said, it was far bigger than they’d realized. They would be working this case for months. Maybe years. It was complicated and messy and the kind of thing that left Adam wishing he could somehow bleach his brain and get all the evil images out of it.

  Adam’s phone rang. It was Gabe. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re not going to believe what they found in the Dumpster at Barclay Campbell’s office.”

  “You sound happy, so I’m going to assume it wasn’t a body.”

  “Nope. Sabrina’s phone.”

  “Hang on. I’m going to put this on speaker so Sabrina can hear.” He tapped the button and set the phone on the desk. “Say that again, Gabe.”

  “We found Sabrina’s phone in the Dumpster behind Barclay Campbell’s office.”

  “You’re kidding.” Sabrina shook her head in disbelief.

  “Nope. He’s not talking to anybody about anything. Refuses to answer any questions at all. But the phone was in his Dumpster. And it was last emptied on Saturday, so the timing works.”

  “Yeah.” The timing worked, but Adam couldn’t make it make sense.

  “Guess what else we found in there.” Gabe was clearly enjoying dragging out his story.

  “What?” Sabrina still looked stunned.

  “A piece of an RPG launcher.”

  “A piece?” Something was very off about this whole situation, but Adam couldn’t put his finger on why he felt that way.

  “Yeah. Just one. I’m guessing they disassembled it and dumped it in different places around town.”