by Elle Gray
“Just wrap it up with a bandage. It’ll be fine,” she shrugs. “No, I don’t need stitches.”
“Yeah, you do. And that’s an order.”
Burton groans as he starts to wake up. I help Astra to her feet and we both reach down, grabbing hold of him. It takes a little doing, but we manage to get him up on his feet. I look around and notice that a couple of the other people in the room are sitting up, looking at us, still high but half-interested, with a dash of annoyance.
“Dude,” one of them calls over. “Can you take that outside? You’re killin’ my buzz, dude.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. We’re gone,” I tell him.
“Hey,” says another, her voice slow and thick. “Can you give us what he’s got in his pockets before you go?”
I roll my eyes and turn away. Astra and I head downstairs to put him in the car and take her to the hospital to get patched up.
Nineteen
Interrogation Suite Alpha-2; Seattle Field Office
“So, who am I looking at?” Rosie asks.
“That is Sergeant Leonard Burton,” I tell her. “Otherwise known as Crackhead Burton to the residents of Capitol Hill.”
We’re standing in the observation pod, looking into the interrogation suite. The tech is sitting at the board, checking her instruments, making sure everything is functioning properly. She looks back at me.
“We’re good to go here,” she says. “Whenever you’re ready, Agent Wilder.”
“Thanks, Toni.”
“How is Astra?” Rosie asks.
“A few stitches,” I say. “I sent her home and told her to take tomorrow off.”
“Yeah? How’d she take that?”
I grimace. “About as well as you’d expect.”
“Do I need to blackball her at the gates?”
I laugh softly, remembering that Rosie had literally deactivated my badge, preventing me from getting into the field office, while I was recovering from being attacked in my own home.
“No, I think deep down she’s looking forward to spending a day off with Benjamin,” I tell her.
“So, what’s the story with Burton?” she asks.
I fill her in on what we’ve found to this point, and I see her expression darken. She frowns and purses her lips, suddenly looking concerned. In her place, I’d probably feel the same way. I wouldn’t want to have to give that sort of status report to Congresswoman Hedlund. She runs a hand through her hair and blows out a loud breath.
“So, I guess Selene isn’t on a beach somewhere, huh?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Unfortunately, no,” I say. “It’s looking as if there’s a strong possibility she was snatched and then trafficked.”
“My God. What am I going to tell Kathryn?”
“Nothing yet. It’s not a certainty,” I say. “We’re still in the middle of our investigation. There are still a lot of moving parts that could break a dozen different ways.”
She turns to me, her expression hard. “What does your gut tell you?”
I frown. “My gut tells me she was trafficked. But I still have a lot of questions. There are still a bunch of things that aren’t adding up,” I say. “So, if Hedlund is pressing you for a status report, I’d just tell her we’re working the case and a lot of things are still in flux.”
“She’s not going to accept that.”
I shrug. “She’s going to have to,” I tell her. “I mean, there’s no use in getting her all bunched up and then having things break differently. I think she’d crucify us more for that than if we tell her the case is still in progress.”
She looks in at Burton again and seems to be thinking about it. She finally nods, then turns back to me.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” she says.
“You want to come in and talk to Burton with me?”
Rosie shakes her head. “No, I need to get to a meeting. I’ll read the transcripts later,” she says. “Squeeze him hard, Blake. Do what you have to do to get him to give it up.”
“I will.”
Rosie heads out of the pod, leaving me alone, staring through the window at Burton. I’m not quite sure how to approach him just yet, so I’m hesitating. He’s sitting at the table, a chain running from a bolt in the middle of the table attached to the shackles around his wrists. His head is lowered and he’s muttering to himself, but it’s too low for me to make out the words. He might not even be speaking English for all I know.
The man is clearly unstable; I have no idea what I’m going to get out of him. Or if it’s even going to be useful at all. But I need to try. I need to see if I can get through that drug-induced haze and the layers of psychosis to pull something—anything—out of him. Gritting my teeth, I push open the door and step from the pod into the interrogation suite, then close the door behind me.
Burton looks up and seems to be having trouble remembering who I am as I take the seat across the table from him. He looks exhausted. Wrung out. He looks like a man who’s had the life squeezed out of him. His bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes are a dull shade of blue. His iron-gray hair is limp and greasy, his cheeks sunken, his skin sallow.
I believe he was once a proud man—a soldier. But now he looks like a man who’s utterly defeated. He looks like a man who’s had the pride—and the life—beaten out of him, leaving him a hollowed-out shell of a human being. And as I look at the man, my heart goes out to him.
“Sergeant Burton, I am Blake Wilder with the FBI,” I start. “I know this must be a little confusing and disorienting for you and I apologize for that. But I have some questions to ask, and I need you to answer them for me. Can you do that, Sergeant?”
He stares at me with vacant, lifeless eyes. Burton doesn’t say a word. I honestly don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t want to or if he’s incapable of understanding me. I frown and look down at the table for a moment, giving myself a second to collect my thoughts.
“Sergeant Burton, we know you’ve been withdrawing money from accounts that aren’t yours,” I continue. “That’s fraud. And fraud is a serious felony, Sergeant Burton. You could be charged not just with state crimes, but federal crimes as well.”
He still doesn’t say anything. He just sits across the table from me with that dead-eyed stare. I look deeply into his eyes and don’t see anything happening beyond them. He just seems totally checked out of reality.
“Sergeant Burton, I want to help you. I really do. I know you were only doing what you were asked to do. Only doing what you could to make a little money,” I press. “Tell me who the man in the hoodie is. Tell me the name of the man who put you up to it. Tell me that and I can help you. We can work something out so perhaps you don’t have to go to jail. We can get you some help. Get you into a facility.”
We sit in silence for several long minutes. I’m not getting through to him at all. Whether it’s because he’s still strung out on his dope, or his mental issues are preventing him from engaging, I don’t know. All I do know is that this is pointless right now. I’d have a better chance of getting through to a brick wall.
My cell phone buzzes with an incoming text, so I turn it over and see that it’s from Mo in the shop. I call up my texts and quickly scan it.
Need you in the shop, ASAP. 911.
I close my phone and look up at Burton again. He hasn’t moved a muscle. I’m not sure he’s even blinked the entire time we’ve been sitting here.
“Okay, Sergeant Burton, I’m going to give you a little time to think about things,” I say, just in case there’s some brain activity happening inside. “And I do need you to think about what I said. I need you to take this seriously.”
I give him a moment, then get to my feet and walk back into the pod, closing the door behind me.
“Toni, I have to get down to my shop. Can you please call Wagner and have him take Burton down to a holding cell? We’ll leave him there overnight,” I say. “Let him get some rest and sleep it off. Hopefully, he’ll be a little chattier next time I see
him.”
“You got it,” she nods.
“Thanks, Toni.”
I walk out of the pod and head down the corridor toward the elevators, moving as quickly as I can. Mo wouldn’t text me 911 unless it was important, which piques my curiosity. I make my way through the warren of corridors, then down to the basement floors to the CDAU.
The doors open with a pneumatic hiss as I step through to find Mo and Rick standing at her workstation with Burton’s bag opened and spread out on the desk in front of them. I step over and look at what they’ve pulled out of the bag. There are some dirty clothes, some books that are dog-eared and have torn covers. He’s got some magazines and a few other assorted odds and ends, but nothing I see seems very important.
“What’s the 911 about, Mo?” I ask.
She and Rick exchange an uneasy glance, and then she hands me a plastic evidence bag. I take it from her and look at the contents and frown, not sure what the emergency is.
“All right. So, Burton had more ATM cards than we thought,” I say.
“That’s twenty-one ATM cards,” she explains. “Twenty-two, if you add in Selene Hedlund’s card.”
“So, he’s been bleeding people for a while. I’m still not seeing the emergency here, Mo.”
She turns to Rick. “You want to tell her?”
Rick lets out a deep breath. “We ran the names on the cards,” he says, brandishing a sheet of paper. “Every single name on each of those twenty-one debit cards corresponds to a girl who’s turned up missing over the last five years.”
I stare at them both for a long moment, my eyes growing wide as the realization of what they’re saying sinks into my brain.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
Rick hands me the sheet of paper and I read it over, picking cards out of the evidence bag at random and matching them up against the list Rick put together. When I get to the end of the stack of cards, I set the sheet down and put the cards back into the bag, giving myself a moment to process it all.
“Twenty-one missing girls,” I say softly.
“Twenty-two, if you count Selene,” Mo says.
“Jesus,” I groan. “What is going on here?”
“Bad stuff, boss,” Mo says. “A lot of very bad stuff.”
Twenty
Wilder Residence; The Emerald Pines Luxury Apartments, Downtown Seattle
I’m sitting at the desk in my living room, my laptop open, sipping from a glass of Chardonnay as the guitar acrobatics of Django Reinhardt wash over me. I’ve been doing some research on the twenty-one missing girls. Obsessing over them, really. Ever since Mo and Rick dropped that on me yesterday, I haven’t been able to get them out of my head. The fact that Burton had the debit cards of twenty-one—no, twenty-two—missing girls, seems to reinforce the human trafficking theory.
I’ve gone over the list a thousand times already, digging up all the information about the missing girls I can find. I’ve looked up their socials and read every newspaper article I could get my hands on. I looked into the police reports about their disappearances, but there wasn’t much to see. I don’t even know how vigorously their cases were pursued, honestly. But none of them was very high-profile, so knowing the SPD as I do, I’d guess the officers who caught the cases didn’t expend a whole lot of energy.
I’ve been looking for some nexus between them and Selene, and other than Burton, I haven’t found anything. They all just vanished without a trace. And apparently, Burton has been bleeding their accounts—presumably on the orders of the man in the hoodie. But who in the hell is he? That’s the question that needs to be answered. That guy is going to be the key to all of this. If we can track him down, I have a feeling we’ll be able to crack this case wide open.
I take a sip of my wine and sit back in my chair, closing my eyes and letting the music soothe me. My shoulders are tight with tension and I’m having trouble relaxing. This case is really getting under my skin. I’ve gone from thinking that it was a case of a spoiled rich kid jetting off on an impromptu vacation to thinking it’s something bigger. And something much, much darker.
The knock on the door startles me, and I jump up, very nearly spilling my glass of wine. I set the glass down on my desk, grab the holster I’d set down next to my laptop, and slide my weapon out. I wasn’t expecting anybody tonight. As I said, a little paranoia is a good thing. Keeps you healthy and above ground.
Holding my weapon down at my side, I make my way to the door and look at the monitor that displays the picture from the doorbell camera I had installed, and freeze. An ice-cold chill sweeps through me when I see Mark—or whatever his real name is—standing on the other side of my door. I give brief thought to simply not answering, but I just get the feeling he knows I’m home. After all, what kind of spy would he be if he didn’t know, or couldn’t get, basic information like that?
With a sigh, I unlock the door and open it to him, trying to put on the best smile I can muster. There’s a strained tension in the air between us. He shuffles his feet.
“Hey,” I finally say.
He gives me a warm smile. “Hey yourself.”
We remain where we are on opposite sides of the doorway, staring at each other for a long, awkward moment before he chuckles softly.
“So, are we just going to stand here gawking at each other all night, or may I come in?” he asks. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Ummm…” I hesitate. “Yeah, sure. Sorry. Of course.”
I open the door wide and let him pass by. I know I need to pretend that everything is fine. That I don’t know he’s a fraud, somebody whose job is to get into my life and make me fall in love with him. All for the sole purpose of getting into my head. Keeping tabs on me. And reporting back to the puppet master who’s pulling his strings—and is trying to pull mine.
“Have a seat,” I say.
As he sits down on the long sofa, he notices the weapon in my hand as I slide it into the holster. He arches an eyebrow at me.
“Expecting trouble?”
“I wasn’t expecting anybody,” I tell him.
“Well, given everything you’ve gone through, I suppose it’s understandable that you’d be a little keyed up.”
Everything I’ve gone through? No, it’s everything I’m still going through. But I let the words turn to ash on my tongue. I drop down into the chair across from him and cross my legs, folding my hands in my lap. The air between us is tense and strained. A host of emotions is swirling through his eyes.
“It’s been a while,” he says.
He says it with what sounds like genuine hurt in his voice. Mark, for lack of an actual name to call him, is a very talented actor. I know I need to keep my cool. I need to keep pretending that everything is fine and there are no problems here. I’m conscious that my apartment is actively being surveilled as well. I don’t doubt they have people breaking in regularly— just to maintain the illusion, I move things around my war room and move things around to make it look as though I’m still investigating but not getting anywhere new.
That’s the simple part. The window dressing. When it comes to dealing with people, face-to-face contact, I’ve never been a very good liar and I’m definitely not an actor. Pretending that everything is just hunky-dory when it’s not isn’t really in my repertoire. I have to learn how to do it on the fly, though, or risk tipping my hand. And I really don’t want to see what happens if Mark or the Thirteen find out how close I’m actually getting to them.
“Yeah, I’ve been busy. I’m working on a missing persons case that just turned into something much bigger,” I tell him. “I haven’t had much time for social events.”
“I can tell,” he replies, looking at me closely. “Are you all right?”
I run a hand through my hair and nod. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, knowing I need to give him more just to throw him off my scent. “When this case started, I was dead certain it was one thing—a spoiled rich kid running off to the Bahamas or something. I was positive.”
/>
“But it’s not,” he says.
I shake my head and do my best to sound abashed. “Not even close. I was just so wrong from the jump, and I’m scared that I cost this girl her life because I was following the wrong path—the path my own biases and prejudices led me down.”
Mark looks at me with an inscrutable expression. He seems to be trying to probe me and see into my depth to determine if I’m telling the truth. It helps that that part of the story is actually true. I don’t actually believe I cost Selene her life. By the time Hedlund brought us the case, the chances were good that Selene either was already dead or was actively being trafficked and only wishing she were dead. But I’m still kicking myself for letting my biases cloud my judgment.
“That’s rough,” he says. “But I think you’re taking too much of it onto your shoulders. You always do. You personalize everything, Blake.”
“I think that’s one of the things that makes me good at my job.”
“Perhaps,” he replies. “It’s also one of the things that leads to a heart attack and an early grave if you’re not careful.”
We both fall quiet again, and the tension in the air between us only seems to be growing thicker. I don’t know if he’s buying my excuse or not, so I know I need to divert the subject and get us talking about something else. Anything to draw his scrutiny away.
“So, what brought you by tonight?”
A small smirk curls the corners of his mouth. “Other than the fact that I haven’t seen or heard from you in a couple of weeks?” he asks. “It almost feels as though you’re ghosting me. But I thought we…” he pauses. “I thought we were beyond that.”
“I’m not ghosting you,” I tell him. “Things have just been really crazy at work. The missing girl I’m looking for? She’s Representative Kathryn Hedlund’s daughter. So, it’s been an all-hands-on-deck sort of thing.”
He nods and looks at me as if he understands. And maybe on some level, he does. I don’t know. I can barely look at him. The very sight of him is making me sick to my stomach. To think that I shared so much of myself and my life with this man, only to have him turn out to be a spy ordered to keep tabs on me, makes me want to throw up. And I’m having a really tough time trying to keep that sentiment out of my expressions and my voice.
