Fatal Secrets

by Allison Brennan

  “Could be that Cammarata killed him, dumped the body, and ran to Sonia with the story of three suspects. He didn’t give a name?”

  “No. Claims he didn’t recognize anyone at the meeting, but he was hiding.”

  “Bastard. I can just see him pulling this off. Fashions himself a vigilante, but he’s nothing but a killer. Probably thinks he’s doing Sonia a favor by killing Jones.”

  “Why?” Dean said. “He apparently wanted information from Jones.”

  “Maybe he got it. Killed him. Made up this story to divert Sonia’s attention from him, so he can slip away.”

  Dean hadn’t actually considered that Charlie Cammarata had killed Jones and the unknown victim, though his story of what he claimed happened certainly seemed incredible. The evidence should prove it one way or another.

  Sonia walked back into the room. Her face was pale, her eyes in shock. “The Vegas are dead. They were tortured and murdered in their home early this morning.”

  I’m too old to rough it in the wilderness.

  Charlie’s bones creaked and his muscles protested as he trekked out of his makeshift camp near the Pardee Reservoir outside of Mokelumne Hill, a small town with a population of less than a thousand. He’d hidden his car near Highway 49 and Electra Road, camouflaged it, hiked in to further separate himself from his vehicle in case anyone came looking for him. He watched for clues that someone else was in these deep woods, using his tracking skills to avoid a predator instead of finding one. But when it appeared no one was following him, he had time to regroup and finish what he’d set out to do.

  After leaving Sonia’s house early that morning he didn’t dare go back to his cabin on Jones’s property. Either the bad guys would kill him, or the good guys would arrest him. Neither option appealed to Charlie. So he opted to go camping. He’d certainly endured far worse conditions than one summer night in the wilderness.

  He felt shitty about scaring Sonia last night, but he hoped she’d realize that he’d risked everything to give her the information about Saturday. She was smart, she’d figure it out. She had most of the information she needed; it was a matter of trusting her instincts and taking those leaps of faith he’d tried to teach her. But those leaps often coincided with breaking the rules and the law, and Sonia wouldn’t go that far.

  And because she wouldn’t, she’d never be able to stop predators like Xavier Jones. It was a war. She had to start treating it like one.

  Charlie wasn’t heartbroken over one predator taking out another. If he could find a way to get all of them to fight and kill each other off, ICE might finally be able to make some substantial inroads into the vast enterprise of human trafficking.

  It pained him to think that Sonia thought so poorly of him. He wasn’t willing to sacrifice the girls from China, but he had to find Ashley Fox first. There was no reason he couldn’t do both. Rescuing Ashley was his job; he was focused on saving the one. He couldn’t afford to think too hard about the many who died of AIDS and syphilis and beatings and suicide. He didn’t have to think about the mistakes he’d made and how he’d hurt people he cared about because of this drive to do anything to help the weak and innocent.

  On one level, he realized that he had crossed the invisible line between right and wrong, but really, wasn’t that line arbitrary? Who decided which law to follow and which to abandon? They played fast and loose with the laws every day, it was just a matter of getting caught. This was war, and in war the rule of law could be suspended. People talked about the moral high ground, but the moral high ground meant a whole lot of nothing if you were dead.

  Charlie stopped his brisk walk through the forest and leaned against a tree, a sharp pain in his chest making him want to cry out. It wasn’t his heart, it was the pain of being unable to stop it. What he’d seen in his lifetime was enough to break anyone. The mass graves in Central America. The brothels of women and young girls all over the world. The “tourist sex trade”—predominantly men who traveled from developed countries into third-world countries where child sex laws were lenient or nonexistent. The money they spent to indulge in their perversion … Charlie harbored no guilt in stopping them, even if he’d broken not only the law but the Ten Commandments. No one else was willing to do it, and frankly, Charlie wasn’t going to wait around for Satan to claim his own. He’d send the bastards down to the pit early, maybe saving one child in the process.

  Head in hand, sitting in the dirt and pine needles, memories roared to life. The sight and stench of the dead, the dying, the desolation. There were so many, too many, and still he moved forward, doing what he could. If he did less, he couldn’t live with himself. The law didn’t matter to him. He’d paid lip service to it as a young, idealistic recruit in the former INS. He’d been in ROTC, did his time in the Marines, came into the job with the idea that he would help people and feel good about it. The only son of a man from Costa Rica with a green card and a woman from California who’d met after World War II while working in a factory. Good people who raised him to help others. He’d been an altar boy, a football player in high school, believed in the American Dream.

  The American Dream that predators used to lure those who had nothing into their deadly web.

  The sheer mountain of corruption and hate, of slavery and despair, and Charlie was a small nothing compared to all the evil in the world.

  He wasn’t sure exactly when he snapped, when he decided working within the law wasn’t helping. There had been crime scenes he would never be able to forget, that came to him not only when he slept, but when he was awake. The prostitutes with syphilis who were shot and buried in a mass grave—unmarked and unremembered. The young teenage boys kidnapped and forced to fight in wars they had no hand in creating, in countries not their own. How many of these child soldiers had Charlie buried? But the one pivotal moment, when he knew they’d lost the war, was in New Mexico on a scorching August afternoon.

  The big rig had been left by the side of the road when it broke down on Highway 10. It was a refrigerated rig that had air holes drilled into each corner because the truck wasn’t being used to transport food. It held thirty-six women, young and old, who had been left in the hot sun while the driver fled because he’d brought them into the country illegally to work in a sweatshop in Southern California. Charlie knew that because he’d tracked down the driver and extracted the information from him.

  When the truck broke down, so did the cooling system. The compartment became an oven. Eighteen hours in a slow cooker. The coroner said they’d suffered for eight to twelve hours before dying. While alive they endured heat stroke, their core body temperatures quickly rose to over 110 degrees, at which point they suffered brain damage and hallucinations, and severe—fatal—dehydration.

  The hot, moist environment sped up the rate of decomposition and insect activity. Their bodies were fully bloated with bacteria and gases, and the skin had begun to slough off.

  The cop who opened the back of the truck and first witnessed the morbidity quit that day.

  Charlie couldn’t stop them, and when he thought about the masses of people who were bought, sold, tortured, abused, and murdered each and every day, he couldn’t breathe. So many times he had wanted to kill himself, moments when the burden of memory stripped him of all sanity.

  Then he’d think of Sonia.

  She had escaped. One of the few, she had fought back and won. She was a survivor, refused to be a victim. She turned around and became part of the solution, using her knowledge and skills to take down those who traded in human lives.

  If Charlie focused on saving individual victims, he could make it through each day. Ashley Fox had become his salvation. If only he could find her, reunite her with her mother, he’d be a hero to two people. He could point to Ashley as someone he’d saved. He could put her pretty face in his mind when the dead and dying haunted him. Like he’d done with Sonia until he’d hurt her.

  “I didn’t mean for any of it to happen, Sonia,” he whispered, his voice raw
and dry. “I never wanted you to be hurt. Please believe me. Please understand why I had to do it.”

  He’d saved hundreds—thousands—of people over the years, but it all blended together. The bloodshed still outweighed the souls he’d salvaged. He was drowning in it.

  Charlie slowly rose to his feet. He drank half a water bottle and ate a tasteless protein bar. Then he started the hike back to his car.

  He was close to breaking the code in Jones’s journal. He just needed some time at the library. The main library in downtown Sacramento was large enough to have the information he needed, and discreet enough that he didn’t worry about anyone paying him any attention. He’d put on a long-sleeved shirt to hide his recognizable tattoo, and he looked average enough that no one should remember him. As soon as he had it all figured out, he’d give Sonia the rest of the information.

  And if he didn’t figure it out, he’d still tell her where the girls were being exchanged. He’d lied to her last night, but it hadn’t been the first time.

  He had indeed recognized one of the killers last night: Sun Ling, a Chinese American who Charlie knew to be a player. Ling was a vicious killer who could snap a man’s neck in two without expending much effort or showing any remorse. Charlie had gone up against Ling in the past and the bastard had slipped away. But Ling was always the number two. An enforcer. Charlie hadn’t recognized the man who had shot Jones, though he was confident this was the man in charge. Jones had said he was a major player who controlled more than half the trafficking out of southern Mexico, Central America, and South America. He operated from a little place south of Acapulco. But Charlie didn’t know his name or nationality or anything else about the prick.

  But the information was in Jones’s journal, Charlie was certain of it. By the time this was over, he planned on killing both of them. First, he needed to find Ashley.

  Focus on the goal.

  A few hours at the library and he would have the answers he needed.

  When he shared those answers with Sonia, maybe she’d forgive him.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  The Vegas’ sprawling, secluded ranch-style house was located in the farming community of Galt, on the Sacramento-San Joaquin County border. The privacy probably made the Vegas feel secure, but it also gave their killers freedom to kill.

  Torture and kill, Sonia thought as she stared at the bodies.

  Kendra Vega had been tied to a straight-back chair that had been pushed onto its side. By the look of the blood spatter, she’d been on the ground when she was shot in the head.

  Compared to her husband, her suffering had been mercifully short. Greg Vega had been grossly tortured and beaten. Blood had soaked his entire shirt so none of the original color showed. The deputy coroner—a tall, slender woman in her fifties—said that he’d likely bled to death from the stab wound in his abdomen.

  “The autopsy can confirm, but it took him several minutes to die. The hilt of the knife kept some pressure on the wound to prevent rapid blood loss, but the internal body damage is severe.”

  “You can tell how long he was alive?” Sonia asked.

  “We’ll have a scientifically sound estimate, but it’s still a guess. He probably went into shock after a few minutes and then his body would begin to shut down. The whole process could take three minutes or an hour, depending on a variety of factors. He wouldn’t have been conscious the entire time.”

  Sonia touched Dean’s arm to whisper something. His muscles were taut, his entire body tense.

  “What?” she asked.

  “They shot his pregnant wife first. Made him watch her die, then stabbed him and left him to slowly die.”

  “They couldn’t be certain he’d die from the wound,” Sonia said.

  The deputy coroner disagreed. “I think they probably could—there would be no surviving this without immediate medical attention. Immediate meaning within minutes. Even then, I doubt he’d make it to surgery.”

  “They probably waited for him to die,” Dean said.

  The deputy coroner was still examining the body. She frowned when she looked into his mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Sonia asked.

  “Someone cut out his tongue.”

  Sonia’s stomach rolled and she became light-headed. Dean grabbed her arm. “Let’s go outside.”

  It wasn’t the crime scene itself that disturbed Sonia so much—she’d seen other death scenes that were more grotesque. But she’d been responsible for the Vegas.

  “Oh God, Dean. This is my fault. I should have—”

  “You are not to blame,” Dean interrupted. He found a semi-private spot on the back patio.

  “How did Jones find out—” she stopped. “But Jones is dead. The Vegas weren’t killed before midnight.”

  “It’s looking more and more like Cammarata was right,” Dean said. “There’s no sign of Jones at home, his offices, or his known haunts. His Escalade is in the garage and his plane is in the hangar.”

  “Did the killers think Jones was going to turn state’s evidence?” Sonia thought out loud.

  “Or the murders had to do with a territory battle and not Vega’s agreement with you.”

  “They cut out his tongue! They knew he’d talked to the authorities.”

  Dean didn’t respond. He was looking beyond her into the house as if trying to recall something important.

  “You know I’m right,” she said.

  He turned to her, his dark eyes more intense than she’d ever seen them. “You’re in danger.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He told them. Everything they wanted to know.”

  “He had no reason to—he had to know they’d kill him either way.”

  “Vega’s pregnant wife was tied to a chair not ten feet from him. He watched her suffer, he saw her fear—you think he wasn’t going to tell them everything?”

  Sonia swallowed uneasily. “But there’s no reason for them to go after me. If they thought I knew something that could lead to an arrest, they’d also be smart enough to know that my boss would know, there’d be reports and documentation.”

  She wasn’t concerned for her own safety. She was a cop, and while she had no death wish, she understood and accepted the risks inherent with her position.

  “I appreciate your concern, really, but what we need to figure out is their next step. We assume Vega told them everything he told me, but would that change their plans? They killed Vega because he was an informant, but why Jones? Jones was a big player in this business. Taking him out, and his chief lieutenant, will cause a huge void in the western United States. Are they seeking to fill it? With who? Jones’s team? Their own people? Where are they coming from?”

  Dean said, “All good questions, but do not minimize their vendetta. They may have thought Jones was part of Vega’s deal. Or that Jones was losing control. Either way, they are ruthless, and just because you’re a cop isn’t going to stop them from going after you. They are old school.” He waved his hand toward the Vega house. “Restraints. Torture. Executions. Cutting out his tongue. Hell, I’d think they were old-style gangsters. And we have no idea if Jones was killed by the same people or not.”

  “There’s an easy way to find out,” Sonia said. “Ballistics.”

  “You need a body first.”

  “We have one. The first victim they dragged out of the river.”

  Dean rubbed his temple. “Okay. I’ll pull every string I have to expedite ballistics. The sheriff’s department has been great in sharing jurisdiction.”

  “Because state and local government dollars are scarce. They’re happy to share the credit and have the feds foot the bill. But it works in our favor most of the time,” Sonia said. “I think we should pull in every known Jones associate for questioning in his disappearance and Greg Vega’s murder.”

  “Arrest them? On what grounds?”

  “Not at first. Just to ask questions. Last time they saw Jones, last time they saw Vega, wh
at they know about Omega Shipping and a shipment that was supposed to arrive this week.”

  Dean nodded, excited about the prospect. “You know, this might work. They don’t know what evidence we have. We play them up, see where the questioning goes, follow anyone who isn’t cooperating. I think we can pull it off. I’ll call it in, get S.A.C. Richardson to free up some agents, talk to the sheriff’s department about a few plainclothes.”

  Deputy Sheriff Azevedo approached them. “The killers did a mighty fine job of destroying the victim’s office. Computers, papers, books—the damage is extensive, and probably permanent.”

  Dean asked, “Would you mind if the FBI’s Evidence Response Team came by to process the office?”

  “Not at all. We can use whatever help you can offer.”

  “I appreciate it. And as I just told Agent Knight, I can help expedite ballistics, at least on the national database end.”

  “Fantastic. I’ll let the coroner’s office know. Thought you might be interested in this.” He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside was a tiny metal circle that looked like the battery for a garage door opener or other small device. But it wasn’t.

  “A bug?” Dean and Sonia said simultaneously.

  “Where’d you find it?” Sonia asked. “I know Vega swept the place regularly.”

  “His wife’s cell phone. There was another just laying on the table. I thought maybe it was the victim’s, until we found this.”

  “Why were you looking for a bug?”

  “I wouldn’t have been, except for the one we found in plain sight. Then I thought maybe we should sweep the place. This was the only one we found so far, and we neutralized it.”

  “Now we know how they figured out Vega was an informant,” Dean said. “I’ll bet Kendra Vega talked to someone. It could have been as innocuous as asking about a school district in Georgia. Anything that implied leaving Sacramento would make Jones nervous.”

  “But Jones is dead. Who else was listening?”