Fatal Secrets

by Allison Brennan

  “I’ll confront him and get him to talk, haul him into custody if I have to,” Sonia told her boss.

  “Bring backup, Sonia. You can’t trust him.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Dean had been so busy working on coordinating DNA testing of Sonia’s rape victim that he didn’t notice it was well after three in the afternoon. He’d talked to Quantico and they would expedite the tests, with results sometime next week. With their current workload, that was the best Dean could hope for. He also contacted local authorities and arranged for some of the evidence to be shipped overnight to Virginia. And when put on hold during numerous calls, he had time to update his charts on Xavier Jones’s businesses.

  He was concentrating on an updated printout of his spreadsheet when Sam Callahan escorted Sonia into the small conference room Dean had taken over when he arrived three weeks ago.

  “How’s the victim?” Dean asked Sonia after Sam excused himself to finish up paperwork from the warrant last night.

  Sonia shook her head. “She’s in bad shape, but alive. She has a chance. Maybe not a good chance, but so far she’s holding her own. I may have to run if the hospital calls. I want to be there when they take the GPS chip out of her neck.”

  “Excuse me? GPS chip?”

  “Human trafficking has heralded in the twenty-first century with even more innovative ways to keep their victims captive.” She glanced around the conference room, her hazel eyes taking in Dean’s charts, diagrams, and extensive printouts. “This is all Jones?”

  “Taxes, corporate filings, Fair Political Practices reports, SEC filings, any public information.”

  She flipped through one of Jones’s tax returns, her brow furrowed. “Math isn’t my strength.”

  “We all have our talents. Sit down.” He pulled out a chair and she sat heavily. Dean doubted she’d slept since the stakeout. “Where do you want to start?”

  “I want to know how you started looking at Jones and why you didn’t notify anyone.”

  Dean bristled, but then realized Sonia hadn’t intended to be insulting. “Fair enough. Do you remember a criminal named Thomas Daniels, aka Smitty?”

  She arched her narrow brows. “Of course I remember him. The FBI went after him on money laundering and racketeering. He was killed trying to avoid arrest.”

  “I’m the one who shot him,” Dean said. His cool tone belied his mixed emotions in being forced to fire on a suspect.

  Her expression softened in understanding. “I’m sorry.”

  Dean had looked at Sonia’s record, knew she’d used lethal force in the past as well. It wasn’t something to take lightly, and unfortunately the movies often portrayed law enforcement as trigger-happy, gun-wielding vigilantes, when in reality it came down to reluctant but necessary use of force.

  “When we went through his records, we put together his money-laundering scheme. Quite brilliant in its simplicity. Understanding the process helped us close other investigations where we didn’t have the evidence because we hadn’t yet caught up to the new systems criminals employed. We’ve been ahead of the curve for a while now—taking down nearly everyone we’ve targeted these past four years. Except Jones. He’s been eluding me for too long.”

  “Did Smitty give Jones up?”

  “No, he never talked to us. Everything we learned came from his records, which were disorganized. It took over a year of painstakingly analyzing his cryptic notes to discover that Smitty had a business association with Jones. I never figured out it was human trafficking—” He shrugged in frustration. “But we were close. I’d thought prostitution.”

  She nodded. “Smitty was a competitor. He specialized in runaways. Jones works with coyotes—human smugglers—south of the border, all the way to South America. But while Jones can bring in more merchandise, his expenses are higher than Smitty’s. He makes his money on volume, while Smitty lured young runaways off the street and then relocated them all over the continent where they couldn’t easily get out if they wanted to. Many of the girls he manipulated had been sexually and physically abused as children and felt they deserved what ever happened to them. Smitty was really good at spotting the damaged teens.”

  “You worked on his case, too?” Dean asked, surprised she knew so many details but he hadn’t worked with her on the case.

  She shook her head. “He was dead before I transferred to Sacramento, but I knew him as one of the players. Unfortunately, he was out of my squad’s charter. My job has always been international trafficking, and after nine-eleven it’s included a focus on potential terrorist trafficking, specifically disbanding hidden cells throughout the country.”

  “But your heart isn’t in it.”

  “My heart is with the victims. I’ve done my fair share to prevent terrorism, but it’s hard to focus on that when hundreds of thousands of innocent young people are lured or kidnapped into prostitution or labor camps.”

  Dean watched Sonia closely. She was impassioned, but also a realist. There was little they could do to stop these horrendous crimes, but she was determined to do everything possible to thwart their opponents. He admired her drive, her dedication, her passion for her job and the people she helped, as well as the people she put in prison. Sonia wasn’t a woman who would ever stay on the sidelines. Like him, Dean doubted she had much of a life outside the job.

  Sonia asked, “What did you find that put Jones on your radar?”

  “A thin file. Nothing I could use in court. We originally went after Daniels for racketeering because he was working with major drug smugglers out of Stockton. He was responsible for laundering their money, and had a scam of claiming income from property rentals that didn’t exist. It took time to catch on, but the banks involved alerted us after he changed his deposit habits, and we launched a grand jury investigation to figure out exactly where his money was coming from. It took a few months and physically viewing the properties to realize what his scam was.

  “We didn’t go after him right away because we wanted to build a case against the entire organization. Our profilers said he wouldn’t rat anyone out—he was former military and extremely disciplined. So we began surveillance and Jones turned up in one of our photos. Because Jones was a well-known philanthropist, we didn’t make him a priority, but after Daniels was killed, I found a memo that mentioned Jones and a bill of sale for property in Amador County. Nothing on the surface seemed illegal, and after looking into the property we couldn’t find anything wrong with the sale. Callahan went out and interviewed Jones and his answers raised no flags. It went on the back burner until we closed out the Daniels case. But while logging in evidence months later we found another photograph of Daniels, Jones, and some others taken years ago in Mexico—analysts identified the area as Laguna Tres Palos, outside Acapulco. It made Jones’s statement to Callahan that he was only an acquaintance of Thomas Daniels suspect. I started looking closer at Jones’s business—maybe he was now laundering money for drug smugglers since Daniels was gone. I pulled his tax returns and saw that he had ample wealth with no major red flags, but after talking to specialists with the IRS, it seemed that Jones made a lot of money very quickly. He was paying his taxes, but his earnings far exceeded the normal range for companies like his. We looked at his businesses. Everything looked in order … but the association with Daniels bugged me, so I pulled together everything I could get my hands on. When I had the minimum information I needed, I launched the grand jury investigation.”

  Dean saw that Sonia was absorbing all the information. “Wow,” she said, eyes wide and sparkling. “And you got a warrant on that? Vague gut instinct?”

  “No, that was just the beginning.”

  “So you don’t have an informant?”

  “No. I wish I did. We discreetly approached some of Jones’s people and determined they aren’t willing to talk or they don’t know enough to help.”

  “And how did you get the warrant you executed last night? They’re not easy to come by.”


  “On a wing and a prayer,” Dean mumbled.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Full disclosure: I don’t have a case. But I have a terrific assistant U.S. attorney who put together a solid argument with legal precedent. I have strong hints of a case, I know in my gut that Jones is corrupt—his lobbying firm charges his clients more than any other state or federal registered lobbyist. But I can’t get anyone to talk, and because Jones is meticulous about his filings, there’s nothing, not even an error, I can nail him on. If his clients are willing to pay, what can we do? Is it extortion? Bribery? We’re looking into possible political corruption—that’s Sam’s primary focus, at least until I arrived—but we can’t find anything there, either.”

  “It’s hard for that many people to keep a secret that long. Politicians may be scumbags, but they’re not usually murderers or involved in human trafficking.”

  Dean cracked a wry grin. “True, but there have been exceptions. Did you know that back in the 1920s a legislator shot his chief of staff in a lover’s triangle involving the secretary?”

  “You’re a font of murderous trivia,” Sonia said with a smile. “I haven’t really looked at Jones’s lobbying other than a cursory examination—do you think something’s there? Or that he’s using the business to pass through his trafficking profit?”

  “I’ve looked, but I don’t see how he’s doing it. Every dollar he gets from clients is reported, we’ve verified with the clients’ own reporting, and everything matches up. So if Client A pays twenty thousand dollars for consulting services, Jones is reporting twenty thousand dollars—not thirty or forty thousand as I’d expect if he were washing illegal dollars.”

  Dean continued. “When you look at his two primary businesses—the lobbying and the security business—they’re very lucrative. More lucrative than similar businesses. I want to take another pass through the companies, the staff, the clients. That was what I was in the middle of when we decided to shake Jones up.”

  “That’s all this exercise was about? Shaking Jones up?”

  “I just wanted to see what he would do. So far, he’s holding to schedule. I checked his calendar and he showed at his meetings today. I’ll track him tomorrow as well, see if he’s changing any of his plans. He didn’t like me stopping by his lunch date this afternoon.”

  “Date?” She raised an eyebrow.

  Dean waved his hand. “Just an expression. It was a meeting—him and two clients, men—businessmen, possibly his Indian gaming clients. Sam is running their photographs through the database. We know the fourth man, who arrived late, is his chief of staff at the lobbying firm, Craig Gleason. We took a surface look at him at the beginning, nothing popped, but we’re digging deeper into his background. I have a pair of agents staking out his plane, and if he attempts to leave we’ll take him into custody.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Attempted flight to flee prosecution.”

  “But you don’t have that.”

  “No, but it’ll stop him from leaving for forty-eight hours and I’ll get it.”

  “And here people think Homeland Security has loose rules.”

  “I follow the rules,” Dean said firmly, “I just make the most of them. There are more rules protecting criminals than defending our right to pursue them. I’m not trampling on any of his rights, but I’m going to make damn sure he doesn’t leave the country. I have his passport flagged as well. If he tries to use it, the FBI will be notified and he won’t be allowed to board the plane.”

  “Do you really think Jones is running his human trafficking profits through his businesses?” Sonia asked, somewhat skeptical. Dean understood her confusion—white-collar crimes were a far cry from anything she’d worked on.

  “Yes, but how? See, small-time drug dealers make their illegal money selling drugs; then they invest that money in a legitimate business, and over time, that business is in the clear. The statute of limitations is five years. If they stay clean for five years, and we don’t catch wind of their activities, they’ve won.”

  “That’s if they aren’t still committing crimes,” Sonia said.

  “Exactly. And there’s Jones’s property.” Dean crossed the room and flipped over a whiteboard. On the back was a map of the greater Sacramento area with two dozen color-coded dots. “Each dot represents land or a business Jones owns. The red dots are vacant or unimproved land. The blue dots are occupied—he owns several properties where some of his employees live, plus his residence, and an apartment building. The green dots represent businesses. So far, everything is legit—unlike Smitty, these people actually exist. We’ve looked into their finances, thinking maybe he’s paying his employees cash, but so far everyone seems to be living within their means.”

  Sonia stared at his map.

  “Do any of these dots mean anything to you?” he asked her. “I haven’t found a pattern yet.”

  “I don’t know,” Sonia admitted. “Have you been to all these properties?”

  “Between Callahan’s team and myself, we’ve visually inspected every one.”

  “Have you run them against local crimes?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Murder, for example.”

  “There wasn’t a need to.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “What would that prove?”

  “I don’t know. But here”—she pointed to the foothills where Jones had extensive holdings—“is a good place to hide bodies. Or people.”

  “Have you looked at his property as part of your investigation?”

  “My investigation is new.”

  “But you said this morning that you’ve been after Jones for years.”

  She turned to him, looking sheepish. Dean bristled. He didn’t like being lied to, especially when he’d been up front since the beginning. “I have been after Jones for years,” she said, “but I didn’t launch my investigation officially until one of his top people came to me wanting witness protection in exchange for testifying against him.”

  Dean’s voice was low. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t have time last night,” she snapped and rubbed her eyes.

  “This is important, Sonia. You should have told me right off.”

  “I did tell you I had an informant,” she replied. “I wasn’t going to risk him by going into the details in front of everyone and their brother.”

  “Everyone? You think that one of my people is leaking information?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You implied it.”

  “Even my office doesn’t know who the informant is. Only my partner, Trace, and my boss. And the U.S. marshals who are putting together their witness-protection package.”

  “Their?”

  “My informant is married. His wife is pregnant. He came to me when it became clear to him that he couldn’t walk away with his life. He was worried about his wife, and I believed him. I don’t have to like him, or what he’s done.”

  “And you still don’t have enough to get Jones?”

  “This man has killed on Jones’s orders, has transported sex slaves, and has named some of the players—but there is no proof. It’s his word against Jones’s, and the lawyers felt that we didn’t have even a fifty percent chance of making it to trial against a well-known philanthropist who gives more than a million dollars annually to local charities. My guy can’t be wired because Jones has an elaborate security system. Jones randomly searches people who work for him. He sweeps his house, phones, and offices regularly for bugs. But my informant confirmed everything I suspected. I just need hard evidence!” She slammed her fist on the table.

  “Together we’re going to nail him,” he vowed.

  “I’m counting on it.” When she looked at him, Dean was surprised at the vulnerability behind her determined expression.

  “It’s Greg Vega, Jones’s head security chief. He’s been with Jones for years.”

  Dean appreciated Sonia’s revelation. The admission
had been hard, and Dean respected the trust she’d placed in him. “I’d like to talk to your informant.”

  Sonia balked. “You can’t.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “It’s not you, it’s the system. The fewer people who know about Vega, the better chance he stays alive.”

  “He might have information you don’t know to ask about.”

  She stiffened as if he’d offended her. “I know my job.”

  “And I know about racketeering. I need to know how Jones is laundering his money. I can’t imagine he’s smuggling people in and out of America for fun. He’s getting paid well for it.”

  “True, but—”

  “We took down Al Capone for tax evasion. We have better laws now to stop criminals like Xavier Jones. I just need the money trail, and then I can nail him. Protect your informant. I don’t want anything to happen to Vega or his family. Trust me, Sonia.”

  Sonia saw that Dean meant every word he said. She had no doubt he would do everything in his considerable power to protect the Vegas. She wanted to trust Dean. Why was it so hard to give him that one olive branch? Trust was the most important thing between partners—and that was the crux of the problem. Charlie had not only betrayed their partnership, but he had also destroyed the trust inside of her. It had taken her years to rebuild her confidence in others.

  Silence hung between them, and Dean’s entreaty turned to anger. “I see.”

  He didn’t see; he couldn’t know what had happened. Not everything. And she couldn’t tell him like this, she didn’t talk about it. Ever. But she didn’t want this riff, she liked Dean, she needed him to take down Jones. Time was critical. She had to share something, so he understood why she was hesitant. She released a long, frustrated sigh. Dean turned from her, but she grabbed his arm to pull him back, her fingers gripping rock-hard muscle beneath his expensive tailored shirt.

  “I lost an informant nearly four years ago,” Sonia said. “Before I was transferred here. A nineteen-year-old prostitute from Argentina. I was born in Argentina and I used everything in my arsenal to bring her on board. I pleaded with her, I threatened her, I guilted her into it. She was scared to death, but she knew what happened to the younger girls, girls who had become her sisters and friends. She wanted it to stop.”