by Matt Lincoln
“Let’s not forget,” Patel began as she leaned in close to him. “That you shot and killed a police officer right in front of us. Regardless of your role within the trafficking organization, you’ve committed an incredibly serious crime.”
Aaron’s face went white, and he looked like he might be sick. Before he could find anything else to say, I turned and left the room. We’d jumped into action immediately after getting off of the plane and hadn’t had a single moment to relax. Now that the interrogation was finished, I could feel a weariness settling over me.
“Well done,” Patel commended me as she followed me out of the room. “That’s our first significant lead. We should call Wallace and give him an update.”
“Yeah,” I agreed as I led the way out of the police station. The sun was beginning to set, and the air outside felt cool. The surrounding landscape was now awash in muted shades of pink and orange. As I watched the sun sink below the horizon, I felt confident that the information we’d gotten was about to turn the tide in our favor.
20
Junior
It had been about twenty-four hours since we’d arrested the man who’d been using one of the kidnapped children as a drug runner. Since then, I hadn’t had much else to do aside from wait. We couldn’t make a move on the other number until Fiona managed to track down a legitimate address, and we couldn’t interrogate the suspect until he was released from the hospital. The suspect, a twenty-four-year-old man named Collin Atkins, had apparently been doing everything he could to delay being released from the hospital, including exaggerating his pain and claiming he was mentally unsound. Fortunately, the authorities had seen through his act, and he was scheduled to be released into our custody sometime this afternoon.
Until then, however, I was left twiddling my thumbs at my desk. I’d noticed this trend ever since I’d started working for MBLIS. Because our agency was dedicated specifically to investigating international crime, there were often long stretches of time when we didn’t have much to do. The cases we did take on tended to be complex and dangerous, but it wasn’t every day that someone tried to smuggle tigers across the ocean or things of that nature. So I ended up having days of intense action and danger followed by just as many days of downtime.
“I’m so bored,” Miranda whined. “Hey, you want to go hit up a casino?”
“What?” I asked, snapping my head around to look at her so quickly that it hurt my neck.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” she sang. “We’re right off of the strip. We could literally walk to one and come back before anyone notices that we’re gone. Nothing’s happening right now, anyway.”
“Atkins might be here any minute,” I countered. “What would happen if the suspect arrived and there were no field agents in the office?” Miranda groaned, and she dropped her head onto her desk dramatically.
“It’s such a waste,” she lamented. “We’re in Las Vegas. Right here on the strip, surrounded by casinos and theaters. There’s a giant Ferris wheel not even a mile away, and we’re sitting in this office staring off into space.”
“It’s the middle of the workday,” I scoffed.
“What’s the point of working in Las Vegas,” Miranda groaned, “if you can’t shirk your responsibilities to go gamble all your money away?”
“Can’t you just go after work?” I asked. “Why do you want to rush off in the middle of the day?”
“It’s always more fun to do stuff when you know you’re not supposed to be doing it,” Miranda smiled devilishly. “That does sound fun, though. Going after work, I mean. Oh, why don’t we do that after the case is solved? We can all go out into the city to celebrate.”
“Don’t you think you should focus on actually solving the case?” I asked. “Before you start making celebratory plans?”
“Nope,” Miranda retorted. “Making plans just encourages me to solve it faster. Anyway, I’m serious. It’s been more than six months since you and Charlie started working here, and we’ve never all gone out to do something together. We wouldn’t have to go far. We’re already in Las Vegas.”
“That does sound fun,” I admitted. While I had explored the city, I hadn’t really gotten a chance to take advantage of the activities the city had to offer. Las Vegas was a city that came alive at night, and I always just went straight home after work.
“It’s a plan, then,” Miranda grinned, unilaterally deciding to take my vague interest in the idea as agreement. “Hey, let’s play a game.”
“What kind of game?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Miranda shrugged. “It’s so quiet right now, it’s depressing. Tic-tac-toe?”
“Sure,” I shrugged.
“No!” Miranda exclaimed. “I have a better idea. Let’s play ‘would you rather.’”
“What?” I asked blankly as she got up and plopped down into Charlie’s chair at the desk across from mine. “Aren’t we a little old to play something like that?”
“Don’t be boring,” she frowned. “It’s not like you have anything better to do, right?”
“Good point,” I conceded as I closed the laptop that I wasn’t actually using, anyway. “You first.”
“I’ll start it off easy,” Miranda hummed as she tapped her finger against her chin in a show of being deep in thought. “Would you rather break your arm or your leg?”
“Neither,” I responded immediately. Miranda rolled her eyes.
“That’s not how you play,” she admonished with an exasperated sigh. “Just pick one.”
“My arm, I guess,” I shrugged after thinking about it for a few seconds. “That way, I could still walk. I think it would be more inconvenient to have my mobility affected than my ability to grab or hold things.”
“Fair,” Miranda nodded. “Okay, your turn.”
“Let me think,” I mumbled as I glanced around the room for inspiration. My eyes landed on the open door of the break room. “Would you rather lose your sense of smell or your sense of taste?”
“Smell, obviously,” Miranda replied without hesitation. “Food is one of the greatest joys in life. Can you imagine never being able to taste stuff again?”
“If you lost your sense of smell, it wouldn’t taste the same, though,” I explained. “A lot of what we perceive as taste comes from our nose and ability to smell things. That’s why stuff tastes weird anytime you get a cold.”
“It’s a trick question, then,” Miranda protested. “That’s not fair.”
I just shrugged and smirked at her in response. We spent the next hour trading questions back and forth, each one increasingly more personal and risque than the last.
“I’m just saying,” Miranda chuckled. “If you had to choose someone in the office--”
“Agents,” Nelson interrupted before Miranda could go any further, and I breathed an internal sigh of relief. The conversation had quickly gotten out of hand and was becoming wildly inappropriate to be having at work in the middle of the day. “Collin Atkins is here. He’s being brought up right now. Which of you is conducting the interrogation?”
“I am,” I called as I quickly stood up. I was eager to both get away from Miranda’s line of questioning and to have something to do after the dull morning.
“What?” Miranda pouted. “Unfair. I wanted to do the interrogation.”
I felt a little bad as I turned around to look at her. It had been pretty rude of me to just jump up and proclaim that I would do it without even consulting her first. I wondered if I should offer to let her have it, but before I could, she broke into a wicked smile.
“I’m just teasing,” she snickered. “You should work on your poker face, Junior. Suspects will get the upper hand on you if you’re so easy to read and manipulate.”
“Thanks,” I replied sarcastically. I wasn’t dumb enough to let my emotions get the better of me when it came to working with a suspect. Obviously, the only reason it worked for Miranda was that she was my friend, and I wasn’t expecting her to try to manipulate me. I wanted to
tell her as much, but I knew that she hadn’t done it maliciously, and I needed to focus on the suspect now, anyway.
A moment later, the doors to the office unlocked and swung open as the police stepped inside with Atkins. After the bombing that had destroyed our previous office, Wallace had implemented more intense security measures to ensure that people wouldn’t be able to enter the office unless they had explicit authority to do so. Unless the person trying to enter had a code for the keypad outside the door, the doors would remain tightly locked.
“Looks like it’s time to start,” I nodded as Nelson showed the officers into the holding cell area. Miranda and I followed behind them. Nelson was speaking to one of the officers while the other one got Atkins settled in the interrogation room.
“No priors,” the police officer informed us as we entered the room. “His record was squeaky clean. His entire house was full of drugs, though, and not just meth. We also found several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin. From what we could tell, the kid was living in the house with him. There was a bedroom at one end with a bunch of toys and drawings.”
I made a note of that detail. All the children that had been found living in the upstate neighborhood had been made to sleep in basements or kitchens. Apparently, Atkins had been kind enough to give the little boy, Dajuan, his own bedroom.
“Thank you, officer,” I replied. “That’s very helpful to know.”
Not wanting to waste any more time, I stepped into the interrogation room. Collin looked up at me as I entered, and recognition flashed across his face.
“Hey,” he frowned. “You’re the cop that arrested me.”
“I’m not a cop,” I replied as I sat down in front of me. “I’m a federal agent.”
“Whatever,” Atkins rolled his eyes. “You busted me for the drugs, so same difference, right?”
“No, not really,” I answered. “To be honest, I’m not concerned about the drugs. I’m a lot more interested in the boy we found living with you.”
Atkins’s expression turned serious.
“What about him?” he asked.
“For starters,” I began, “why don’t you tell me how you got ahold of him?”
Atkins rubbed the back of his neck nervously and opened and closed his mouth several times before he finally spoke again.
“The internet,” he replied. “Off of this black-market type of website. I guess there’s no harm in admitting that now, right? You already caught me red-handed with the stuff. So yeah, that’s where I got him.”
“Were you specifically looking for a child?” I asked, a little confused by his explanation. “To use as a drug mule?”
“What? No,” Atkins snapped, looking genuinely shocked by my question. “I was just trying to hawk my wares. This website I’m talking about, it’s a bit like an open marketplace, but for stuff that’s not exactly legal, you know? Drugs, guns, services. All that stuff.”
“So you were there to sell,” I began slowly. “And you just happened upon someone selling kids?”
“Well, it sounds unbelievable when you put it like that,” Atkins scoffed. “But yeah, that’s pretty much what happened.” My mind was reeling. This wasn’t at all the picture of Atkins I had painted in my head.
“So you just decided to buy a child?” I asked. “On a whim?” Atkins began to fidget with his hands. His shoulders were hunched, and his entire body language exuded discomfort.
“What do you think happens to people on those kinds of websites?” he finally asked me quietly. “You’re a fed, right? You must know that it ain’t good. I usually don’t bother looking at other people’s business. I just sell my stuff and mind my own business. Something about that post caught my attention, though…” His eyes were steely as he trailed off.
“What did the post say?” I prompted.
“It was a lady,” he explained. “At least, that’s what the post said. Some lady couldn’t afford to take care of her two kids anymore, and she wanted to offload them onto someone like some kind of underground adoption. I was just going to ignore it, but then I happened to see some comments the post was getting.”
His nostrils flared, and his face contorted in disgust. “People were asking how small the kids were, if they were obedient, some other stuff I can’t even say out loud. I don’t know what came over me, but I just couldn’t ignore the post knowing that these creeps were trying to get their hands on some innocent little kids. So I contacted the original poster.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She told me to call a number,” he replied. “It was a woman’s voice, but it was a guy who turned up with the kid a few days later. Anyway, I had originally told her that I wanted to take both of her kids, but she said the little girl had already gone. That made me feel sick, but I decided I could still take the boy. She told me I’d have to pay her ten grand for him.”
Atkins laughed as he buried his face in his hands. “I only had eight. It was literally all my savings, but I couldn’t back down now that I’d come this far, so I talked her down. Two days later, this huge dude shows up with the kid and takes the money. And that was basically it. I went out and got a bed and some toys from this charity drive near my house and gave him the spare room.”
“And you made him deliver drugs for you,” I concluded. Atkins scowled.
“Hey man,” he groaned, “I had to make money. Especially after I spent literally all my savings buying him from that crazy lady who probably would’ve given him to some creep if I hadn’t come along.”
“Weren’t you concerned about his health?” I asked. “You were cooking meth in your kitchen, just feet from where he was sleeping every night. Don’t you know what those chemicals can do to a growing child?”
“What do you want me to say?” Atkins snapped. “What else was I supposed to do? I couldn’t go to the police without ratting myself out. And I never sent the kid anywhere dangerous. Only to repeat customers that I knew were cool. We were perfectly fine until you and that other lady came knocking.”
For a long while, we were both silent. This hadn’t been what I’d expected at all, and I felt conflicted. Atkins did have a point. It would have been impossible for him to contact the police without giving himself away. After all, the only reason he even found the post was because he himself was conducting black market deals on the website. Overall, it didn’t seem like he’d acquired Dajuan for any nefarious purpose. On the contrary, it seemed like he’d been trying to save him from being exploited by someone who might have done something much worse than having him walk drugs and money between houses. That being said, I couldn’t just ignore that he had purchased a child and put that child at risk by cooking drugs under the same roof.
“So you really didn’t know anything about the children that were found in the other neighborhood?” I asked.
“I knew about it,” Atkins shrugged. “It’s been all over the news. I just didn’t really make the connection. All this time, I thought Dajuan’s mom had just decided to get rid of him and his sister. I never really questioned the story. I guess it makes sense now that it was all a load of crap.”
“You don’t know anything about what happened to the little girl?” I asked.
“No,” Atkins shook his head. “The post had already been up for a few days when I contacted the poster, so it’s not surprising that someone had already taken her. I remember the lady asked a lot of questions, though.”
“What kind of questions?” I asked.
“Personal stuff,” Atkins shrugged. “She wanted to know how old I was and how much money I made and why I wanted the kid.”
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
“The truth, mostly,” Atkins shrugged. “I fudged some details about how old I was and what I did for a living, but I told her that I didn’t want him being snatched up by some pedophile. She actually seemed happy about that and told me she thought I’d be perfect.”
That was a little bizarre, to say the least. Wh
y would the supplier care about what happened to the children after she’d sold them?
“Okay, Mr. Atkins,” I nodded as I moved to stand up. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
“Wait,” he interjected before I could say anything further. “What’s going to happen to Dajuan?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Is he going to be adopted for real?” Atkins asked. “I know that lady was lying about being his mom, so where’s he going to go now? Foster care or something?” There was concern in his eyes, and I could see that, regardless of what mistakes he might have made, Atkins really did care about Dajuan.
“I’m not sure,” I answered honestly. “But I can tell you he’ll be taken care of. MBLIS is seeing to it that all the kids we recover are given medical exams and protective care until we can locate their families or secure alternative homes for them.”
“Good,” Atkins nodded as she relaxed into his chair. “That’s good. I’m glad he’ll have someone looking out for him.”
I nodded before turning and leaving the room. I’d managed to gain new information that would help us with the case, but I still felt unsettled.
“Are you okay?” Miranda asked as I fell into the chair next to her just outside the interrogation room. “That was definitely a twist.”
“I’m fine,” I responded. “I just feel kind of bad for him, I guess. The more I think about it, the more unfair it seems for him to be treated the same as the people from the rich neighborhood who took the kids to use them as servants. He wasn’t trying to use Dajuan. He was trying to rescue him. His methods weren’t ideal, and his living situation wasn’t great, but doesn’t it just seem wrong to you that he gets the same punishment?”
“The world isn’t black and white,” Miranda sighed. “What’s legally right and what’s ethically right don’t always coincide, but it’s not really our job to figure out the difference. We investigate the crimes and find answers. It’s up to the courts and the justice system to sort out the rest.”
