Mountain Blizzard

by Cassie Miles

  “I wouldn’t mind traveling the world.” Living the life of a Gypsy held a certain romantic appeal. “Or I could settle down and live in the mountains with Aunt Hazel. The great thing about freelance writing is that I can do it anywhere. I might even move back to Denver.”

  “The city’s booming,” he said.

  “I know. You showed me.”

  Looking up at him, she saw the invitation in his eyes. If she came to Denver, that would be all right with him. And she wouldn’t mind, not a bit. She wanted to spend more time with him. Nothing serious, of course.

  “Before I forget...” Sean went to his bag. He tucked away the device he’d used to sweep the room and took out a small, metallic flashlight. “This is for you.”

  “Not sure why I need a flashlight.”

  “This baby puts out forty-five million volts.”

  He held it up to illustrate. With the flashlight beam directed at the ceiling, he hit the button. There was a loud crack and a ferocious buzz. Jagged blue electricity arced between two poles at the end. A stun gun!

  Eagerly, she reached for it. “I can’t imagine why I haven’t gotten one of these before.”

  “When you’re testing, only zap for one second or it’ll wear itself out. When you’re using it for protection, hold the electric end against the subject for four or five seconds while pushing down on the button. That ought to be enough to slow them down.”

  “What if I wanted to disable an attacker?” Hopping down from the stool, she held the flashlight like a fencing sword and lunged forward. “How long do I press down to do serious damage?”

  “Kind of missing the point,” he said. “A stun gun or, in this case, a stun flashlight is supposed to momentarily incapacitate an attacker. Much like pepper spray or Mace.”

  “Does it hurt the attacker more if I press longer?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And the place on the body where you hit him makes a difference. The chin or the cheek has more impact.”

  “Or the groin.” That was her target. A five-second zap in the groin might be worse than a bullet.

  She released the safety, aimed the flashlight beam at the coffeemaker and hit the button for one second. The loud zap and sizzle were extremely satisfying. She glanced at him over her shoulder. “I’d love to try it out on a real live subject.”

  “Forget it.”

  She hadn’t really thought he’d let her zap him, and she didn’t want to hurt him. She hooked the flashlight onto her belt where she could easily detach it if necessary. “Have you got other weapons for me?”

  “A canister of pepper spray.”

  “I’ll take it. Then I can attack two-handed. Zap with the flashlight and spritz with the pepper spray.”

  “A spritz?” He placed a small container on the counter beside her computer. “Enough with the equipment. We can get started by profiling Patrone.”

  She climbed back up on the stool. “I’ve already done research on him.”

  “You told me,” he said. “He was thirty-five, never married, lost both parents when he was nine and was raised by a family in Chinatown. Convicted of fraud, he spent three years in jail, which wasn’t enough to make him go straight. He runs a small, illegal gambling operation at a strip club near Chinatown. Do you have a picture of him?”

  She plugged a flash drive into her laptop and scanned the files until she located Roger Patrone. The photo she had was his booking picture from when he was recently arrested. A pleasant-looking man with wide-set eyes and a flat nose, he had on a suit with the tie neatly in place. His brown hair was combed. Smiling, he looked like he was posing for a corporate ID photo.

  “For a guy who’s going to spend the night in the slammer, he doesn’t seem too upset,” she said. “Does that attitude come from cockiness? Thinking he’s smarter than the cops?”

  “Maybe,” Sean said as he squinted at the picture. “Does he strike you as being narcissistic?”

  “Not really. To tell the truth, I feel sorry for him. He’s kind of a lonely guy. Doesn’t have much social life and never married. Apart from Liane Zhou, I couldn’t find a girlfriend. I only talked to one woman at the strip club, and she said he was a nice guy, always willing to help her out. In other words, Patrone was a pushover.”

  “Characteristic of low self-esteem, he’s easily manipulated,” Sean said. “But why is he smiling in his booking photo?”

  “It’s a mask,” she said. “When life is too awful to bear, Patrone puts on a mask and pretends that everything is fine.”

  When she looked over at Sean, he nodded. “Keep going.”

  “He ignored trouble while it got closer and closer. When he finally took a stand, it got him killed.”

  “That’s a possible scenario,” he said. “You’re good at reading below the surface.”

  A thrill went through her. It was comparable to the excitement she experienced when she’d written a fierce and beautiful line of poetry. “Is this profiling?”

  “Basically.”

  “I like it.”

  “We’re using broad strokes,” he said. “Our purpose is to create a sketch. Then we’ll have an idea of what we should be looking for to fill in the picture.”

  “Can I try another direction?” she asked.

  “Go for it.”

  “Abandonment issues.” She pounced on the words. “His parents left him when he was only nine. And he probably didn’t fit in very well with the kids in Chinatown. He didn’t know the customs, didn’t even speak the language.”

  “Feelings of abandonment might explain why he joined Wynter. Patrone needed a place to belong, a surrogate family.”

  “Frankie was like a brother. Patrone trusted him, believed in him,” she said. “And Frankie shot him dead.”

  What had Patrone done to deserve that cruel fate? The Wynter organization was his family, and yet there was something so important that he betrayed them.

  Sean echoed her thought. “What motivated Patrone to go against people he considered family?”

  “He mentioned seeing the children, which makes me think of human trafficking.”

  “No doubt,” he said. “The theft Morelli mentioned might be about smuggling. Wynter’s best profits come from shipping people, mostly women and children, in containers from Asia.”

  “Someone is stealing these poor souls who have already been stolen.” Disgust left a rotten taste in the back of her mouth. “There’s got to be a special place in hell for those who traffic in slavery.”

  “You’re passionate about this. I could feel it when I read the series of articles you wrote on the topic.”

  She was pleased that he’d read the articles, but she wished he hadn’t noticed her opinion. “Those were supposed to be straightforward journalism, not opinion pieces.”

  “You successfully walked that line,” he said. “Because I know you, I could hear the rage in your voice that you were trying so hard to suppress. Most people feel the way you do.”

  “Which is still not an excuse to rant or editorialize,” she said. “Anyway, I think we know what was stolen...people.”

  “Bringing us to our second profile, namely, figuring out who’s stealing from Wynter. What are the important points from your research?”

  She didn’t need to refer to a computer file to remember. “Trafficking is a thirty-two-billion—that’s billion with a b—dollar business. It’s global. Over twelve million people are used in forced labor. Prostitution is over eight times that many. Those are big numbers, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Less than two thousand cases of human trafficking ended in convictions last year.”

  She could go on and on, quoting statistics and repeating stories of sorrow and tragedy about twelve-year-old girls turned out on the street to solicit and seven-year-old
children working sixteen-hour days in factories.

  After a resigned shake of her head, she continued. “Here’s the bottom line. Wynter probably imports around a thousand people a year and scoops up three times that many off the streets. His organization has never once been successfully prosecuted for human trafficking. Mostly, this is because the victims are afraid to accuse or testify.”

  He sat on a stool beside her at the counter. “Much as I hate to be the optimistic one, I’m thinking it’s possible that the person who stole from Wynter had a noble motive.”

  “Free the victims?” She gave a short, humorless laugh. “That’s unrealistic, painfully so. The trafficking business runs on fear and brutality. These people are too terrified to escape. They’ve seen what happens to those who disobey.”

  When she first dug into the research on Wynter, she’d considered breaking the first rule of journalism about not getting involved with your subject. She’d wanted to sneak down to the piers, wait for a container to arrive and free the people inside. Her fantasy ended there because she didn’t know what she’d do with these frightened people. They’d been stolen and dumped in a land where they knew no one and nothing.

  “Impossible,” she muttered.

  “Not really.”

  “Even with noble motives, it’d be extremely hard to do the right thing.”

  “Rescuing the victims couldn’t be a one-person operation. You’d need transportation, translators, lawyers and more. The FBI would coordinate.” He paused to put the pieces together. “I’m sure they aren’t involved in anything like this at present. If they had a rescue strategy under way, you can bet that Levine would have bragged to us about it.”

  Another thought occurred to her. “What if it wasn’t a hundred people being stolen from Wynter? What if it was only a handful of kids?”

  He jumped on her bandwagon. “A few kids could be separated from the others by an inside man, someone like Patrone.”

  She built on the theme. “He could have been helping someone else, maybe doing a favor for the woman who raised him. Or it could have been Liane.”

  She wanted to believe this was what had happened. Patrone had been trying to do a good thing. He didn’t die in vain. He was a hero.

  “More likely,” Sean said, “the human cargo was stolen by a rival gang.”

  “Who’d dare?” From the little she knew about the gangs in San Francisco, they focused on local crime, small scale. “Wynter is big business, international business.”

  “So are the snakeheads.”

  And they were lethal. “Liane’s brother is a snakehead.”

  “Her brother might have used Patrone to get access to the shipments. He could have told them arrival times and locations.”

  “And Frankie found out.”

  She shuddered, imagining a terrible scenario with Patrone caught between the brutal thugs who worked for Wynter and the hissing snakeheads.

  Which way would he go? Being shot in the chest was a kinder death than what the snakeheads would do to him. She hoped that was a decision she never had to make.

  Chapter Sixteen

  While tracking down Jerome Strauss, Emily insisted on taking the lead. She was driving when they went down the street where the BP Reporter’s offices had been. The storefront windows were blown out, and yellow crime scene tape crossed off the door. The devastation worried her. “If Jerome had been in there, he would have been fried.”

  In the passenger seat, Sean held up his phone and snapped photos. “I’ll send these pictures to Dylan. He might be able to give us a better idea of what kind of bomb was used.”

  “I’ll circle the block again.”

  She wasn’t sure how the attack on Jerome connected to her. He knew her as Emily, a poet who he occasionally published in the Reporter. Her journalism was done under a pseudonym. She’d engineered the publication of the Wynter material by Jerome, making sure he got it for free. And they’d discussed the content. But she never claimed authorship.

  She thought of Jerome as a friend. Not a close friend or someone she’d trust with deep secrets but somebody she could have a drink with or talk to. She’d hate if anything bad happened to him, and it would be horrible if the bomb had been her fault.

  On this leg of their investigation, she and Sean were more prepared for violence. She had her pepper spray spritzer and stun gun. He was packing two handguns, two knives, handcuffs, plastic ties to use as handcuffs, mini-cameras and other electronic devices. Sean was a walking arsenal, not that he looked unusual, not in the least. His equipment fit neatly to his body, like a sexy Mr. Gadget. Under his olive cargo pants and the denim jacket lined with bulletproof material, he wore holsters and sheaths and utility belts.

  Her outfit was simple: sneakers and skinny jeans with a loose-fitting blouse under a beige vest with pockets that reminded her of the kind of gear her dad used to wear when he went fishing in the mountains. This vest, however, was constructed of some kind of bulletproof Kevlar. She also wore cat’s eye sunglasses and a short, fluffy blond wig to conceal her identity.

  Sean’s only nod to disguise was slumping and pulling a red John Deere baseball cap low on his forehead. Surprisingly, his change of appearance was effective. The slouchy posture made his toned, muscular body seem loose, sloppy and several inches shorter. He’d assumed this stance immediately; it was a look he’d developed in his years working undercover.

  Years ago, she’d hated when he left on one of those assignments. The danger was 24/7. If he made one little slip, he’d be found out. While the life-threatening aspect of his work had been her number one objection, she’d also hated that he was out of communication with her or anybody else. She’d missed him desperately. He’d been her husband, damn it. His place had been at home, standing by her side. To top it off, when he finally came home, he couldn’t tell her what he’d done.

  Given those circumstances, she was amazed that their marriage had lasted even as long as it did.

  At the crest of a steep hill, she cranked the steering wheel and whipped a sharp left turn while Sean crouched in the passenger seat beside her, watching for a tail.

  “Are we okay?” she asked.

  “I think so. Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?”

  “I’ve got this.”

  Actually, she wasn’t so sure that she could find Jerome’s apartment. The only time she’d visited him had been at night, and she’d been angry. She wasn’t sure of the location. And she didn’t have an address because he was subleasing, and there was somebody else’s name above his doorbell.

  Also, it was entirely possible that he hadn’t returned home after leaving the hospital. “I hope he’s all right,” she said.

  “The docs wouldn’t have released him if he wasn’t.”

  It was difficult to imagine Jerome in a hospital bed with his thick beard and uncombed red hair that always made her think of a Viking. “I’m guessing that he wasn’t a good patient.”

  “Are we near his apartment?”

  “I think so.”

  Jerome liked to present himself as a starving author with a hip little publication. Not true. He had a beer belly, and his beard hid a double chin. Not only was he well fed but he lived in a pricey section of Russian Hill with a view of Coit Tower from his bedroom. The word bedroom echoed in her mind. She never should have gone into his bedroom.

  In her one and only visit, she’d been naive, and he’d had way too much to drink. While showing her the view, he lunged at her. She sidestepped and he collapsed across his bed, unconscious. She left angry. Neither of them had spoken of it.

  She recognized the tavern on the corner, a cute little place called the Moscow Mule. “Almost there, it’s one block down.”

  As they approached, Sean scanned the street. “I don’t see anybody on stakeout, but I’m not making the
same mistake twice. Go ahead and park.”

  In one of the multitude of pockets in his cargo pants, he found a gray plastic rectangular device about the size of a deck of playing cards. He pulled two antennae from the top.

  She parallel parked at the curb. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a jammer. It disrupts electronic signals within a hundred yards.”

  “Inside Jerome’s apartment,” she said, “hidden cameras and bugs will be disabled.”

  He handed her a tiny clear plastic earpiece. “It’s a two-way communicator. You can hear me and vice versa.”

  “But won’t this little doohickey be disrupted as well?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a nod, “but I’ll only use the jammer for three minutes while I enter Jerome’s place. I’ll get him out of there, and deactivate the jammer while I bring him down to the car.”

  Compared to dodging through the broom closet at her place, this was a high-tech operation. She popped the device in her ear. “I’m ready.”

  He slipped out the door, barely making a sound.

  Turning around in the driver’s seat, she watched him as he strode toward the walk-up apartment building, staying in shadows. Though Sean was still doing his slouch and his poorly fitted denim jacket gave him extra girth, he looked good from the back with his wide shoulders and long legs. She was glad to be with him, so glad.

  As he entered Jerome’s building across the street from where she’d parked, she heard his voice through the ear device. “I’m in,” he said. “Which floor?”

  “Wow, your voice is crystal clear. Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear. Which floor?”

  “Jerome is three floors up, high enough to have a view, and his apartment is to the right of the staircase. I can’t remember the number, but it’s toward the front of the house and—”

  A burst of static ended her communication. Jammer on!

  She looked over her shoulder at the apartment building. If it had been after dark instead of midafternoon, Jerome would have turned his lights on. They would have known right away if he was home or not.