On the Prowl

by Matt Lincoln

  “It would break her heart,” he finally said, his voice so small it sounded like it belonged to a much younger child. “It’s just her and me. My piece of crap dad took off one day and never came back, so she had to take care of me by herself. That’s the reason I got that job unloading boxes in the first place. She’s always had to work two jobs, but she hurt her back a few months ago and had to quit one. We were pretty much out of savings, so I started looking for a job so I could help her.”

  He sighed and continued, “Mr. Greer, the man who was at the shipping yard with me, he’s the only one who would give me a chance. My mom was so surprised when I came home and told her I’d gotten a job. She didn’t want me to, but I could tell she felt relieved when I got my first paycheck, and we could afford to buy more groceries that week.”

  There were tears streaming down his face now, and I felt a pang of pity for him. In my years as a federal agent, I had encountered every kind of manipulation tactic meant to evoke sympathy, but I could tell Andy wasn’t faking his tears or his remorse.

  He cleared his throat and kept talking. “Then, one day, one of the contractors who sometimes works with us, Xander, came up to me and asked if I could help him with a special shipment. He said the client was some super-rich performer who needed it for his new act in Las Vegas, and he wanted me to help him take it to him at night so no one would find out. I freaked out. I didn’t want to do it, but then he offered me so much money, and I just couldn’t say no. It was enough to pay the rent for two whole months, and I knew it would help my mom out so much.”

  He was rambling now, as though he couldn’t stop now that the floodgates had opened. It killed me to interrupt him now that he was finally spilling everything, but there was so much he was glossing over that I really needed to address before he got too carried away.

  “Whoa, hold on just a second, Andy,” I said, keeping my tone even and taking an exaggerated deep breath in an attempt to get him to mimic me and relax. “You said this was a guy who works for your company? Xander? Do you know his last name?” I didn’t have anything to write on, as I preferred having as few distractions as possible during interrogations, but I had an excellent memory, and I knew that Hills would be watching and listening from behind the two-way glass as well.

  “No, no,” Andy said, no longer crying, which I was glad for. “He doesn’t work for the company. Well, he kinda does. So, like, our company only has a few permanent employees who are all guys like me who work at the main office loading and unloading trucks. We don’t actually have any truck drivers, though. All those guys are independent contractors. I’m not super sure how that works, but basically, they don’t have fixed hours, and it’s not always the same people. So anyway, this guy’s name is Xander Mikos. He’s not around that often, or at least he wasn’t, not until he started asking me for help with his special shipments.”

  “Can you tell me what he looks like?” I asked.

  “He’s a little taller than me, with long curly brown hair,” Andy said. “Not really skinny or fat, just normal, I guess? He has brown eyes, and I think he’s like twenty-eight.” That sounded like the description Hills had given me of the man who’d tried to shoot us yesterday when we’d been at Carmen’s house. Had that been Xander?

  “You said shipments?” I asked. “So, there’s been more than one?” Alarm bells rang in my head, and a dreadful sense of foreboding grew in the pit of my stomach.

  “Yeah, four or five, I think. About one a month,” he said, and I schooled my expression carefully to ensure that the shock I felt at that statement wasn’t evident on my face. This meant that there were at least four other large cats somewhere out there just in the Las Vegas area, let alone the rest of the country.

  “Andy, you said he told you the first client needed the shipment for a show in Las Vegas. Did he tell you what the shipment was?” I asked, hoping I was wrong. If Andy could truthfully claim that he was unaware of how dangerous the shipments were, then it was possible a judge might have leniency considering his age and clean record. The same couldn’t be said, however, if we found out that Andy was aware he was helping to deliver dangerous wild animals to civilians.

  Andy had gone pale again, as though he could tell by the tone in my voice that the answer to that question would bear heavy consequences.

  “Well, yeah, they were animals for, like, circuses and shows. You know how a lot of shows in Las Vegas do animal performances…” Andy trailed off, and he sounded more uncertain the more he spoke.

  “It didn’t seem strange to you that he wanted your help to deliver these animals late at night when no one would see you?” I asked him, feeling a little hopeless at the position he was in.

  “Xander said it was because they wanted to avoid paying all the import and licensing fees,” he shrugged. “It was just cheaper to get them through his supplier, like when you buy a knockoff Rolex instead of a real one. It’s pretty much the same thing, just cheaper, you know?”

  No, I did not know, and counterfeiting was a totally separate and serious issue on its own, but I didn’t think bringing that up to Andy right now would help either of us in any way.

  “No, Andy. I’m sorry to say that Xander really fooled you,” I said truthfully, hoping that would convince him to give up any loyalty he might feel toward him. “What the two of you have done is a lot closer to human trafficking than it is to buying a fake watch. It’s a really serious crime, and Xander will not feel bad about dragging you down with him.”

  Andy was shaking again and seemed to have been struck silent as the reality of what he’d done really began to sink in.

  “Andy, did you help Xander deliver a package about a week ago to an apartment in Huntridge?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Andy nodded, sitting back into his chair. “He was actually kind of pissed about that delivery. I guess the guy had lied and said he lived in a house, and he was really mad when we pulled up to the address, and he saw that it was actually an apartment building. He and Xander got into an argument that night. He said that there were too many people around that someone was going to see us or find out. The guy wanted our help to get the shipment up the stairs to his apartment, but Xander said no. He wanted to get out of there as fast as possible before someone saw us, and he told the guy he was on his own.”

  That definitely matched Maude’s description of the night they delivered the cat, down to the argument, and the victim having to haul the crate up to his apartment on his own. Now, I was certain that Xander was the same man who had shot at us in Carmen’s house. He already felt uncomfortable about the delivery and must have been keeping an eye on the buyer’s apartment. When he realized what had happened and that federal agents were looking into it, he must have panicked and decided to try to get rid of us.

  “Can you tell me about the symbol?” I asked again, showing him the photo of the graffiti he’d spray-painted across the side of one of the warehouses.

  “It’s on all the shipments that Xander asks me to help him with,” he replied. “The animals, I mean. It’s never on any of the other normal shipments that he brings for our company, just on the ones he asks me to help with.” That confirmed our suspicions that the symbol was significant.

  “Why did you draw it on the side of that warehouse? And upload it to your social media account?” I asked, and Andy seemed to blush a little.

  “I just thought it was cool,” he said so quietly that if the two of us hadn’t been sitting alone in an otherwise empty and quiet room, I might not have heard him. “I thought it would look cool on my page.” Once again, I was reminded just how young and immature Andy was, and I felt a renewed wave of sympathy for him.

  “What else can you tell me about Xander?” I asked.

  He looked up at me and straightened up slightly, and all the resistance and defiance from before had gone. “His truck has a soda logo on it. It looks like it belongs to their company, but it doesn’t. He told Mr. Greer that he had bought it second hand. That’s why it looked lik
e that, and that was good enough for him. He’s a good guy like that, always giving people the benefit of the doubt.”

  He seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if he was about to say something else, but then he deflated and slouched down in his chair. “That’s it. I don’t really know where he lives or anything else about him.”

  For some reason, I didn’t quite believe him and couldn’t shake the feeling there was still something he wasn’t telling us. However, before I could prod him any further, he suddenly looked up.

  “Am I going to jail?” he asked, his voice completely devoid of any feeling.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly, not wanting to give him any false hope. The truth was that it wasn’t looking great for him. He’d admitted to helping Xander with the shipments and to knowing what he was trafficking, and there was also the fact that he had assaulted Agent Hills. All that said, I did feel bad for him. In the end, he was just a kid who’d made a bad choice in order to help out his mom.

  Andy just nodded in response. Feeling less triumphant than I thought I would, despite having gotten a full confession and an avalanche of useful new information, I got up and walked out of the interrogation room, where Hills was waiting just on the other side of the glass.

  “That was rough,” he said as I closed the door and went to stand beside him, where he was still watching Andy through the glass.

  “Yeah, it really was,” I said.

  “He won’t be tried as an adult, though, right?” Hills asked. “He’s still just a kid.” I was a little surprised at how concerned he seemed about Andy. He hadn’t struck me as the sentimental type, especially after how angry he’d gotten when we interviewed Carmen, though I understood that the situations were quite different. Carmen was a grown woman who had gone out of her way to let a wild animal loose in the hopes that it would hurt her fiance. Andy was just a dumb teenager who’d been trying to make some extra money to support his mother. It was easier to feel sympathy for one over the other.

  “You’re right,” I nodded, not taking my eyes off Andy’s sullen form through the glass. “He’s still a minor. And he’s got no criminal record. Maybe the judge will take all that into consideration.” I hoped I was right.

  “Yeah, well, he should,” he said with an edge to his voice. “There are already enough kids in prison serving time for stupid reasons.” I remembered that Hills had told me that before becoming a cop, he’d been a wild youth on the wrong side of the law, and I wondered if this case was resonating with him on a personal level.

  “Come on,” I said. “We should give a report to Wallace and update Gardner so she can run a search on Xander Mikos.”

  Hills watched Andy for just a moment longer, seemingly deep in thought, before finally entering the interrogation room and saying something quietly to the kid. Andy then stood and followed Hills out of the interrogation room and into the holding cell area. We led Andy to the cell closest to the door, and then Hills locked it and turned around without a word. We left the holding area and walked into the main floor of the office, both eager to relay the information we’d received and begin our investigation on Xander Mikos.

  14

  Fiona

  It made sense that I hadn’t been able to locate any suspicious shipments. The fact that the trafficker was using a misidentified truck was absolutely brilliant in its simplicity. It was immoral, of course, and absolutely wrong of them to break international, federal, and local laws by illegally trafficking animals like that, but I still had to admit that it was brilliant. The best way to hide something as egregious as a living wild animal right under people’s noses would be to disguise it as something else, something that would blend into the scenery no matter where it happened to be. A soda truck wouldn’t seem out-of-place anywhere. It could be near a shopping center, outside of a restaurant, by a hotel, downtown, even in residential areas. Most people would just assume there was a vending machine nearby being restocked. That, coupled with the fact that this guy Xander had been using that kid to sneak shipments around Las Vegas in the middle of the night, really explained why there had been no trace of anything out of place.

  Part of me felt a little vindicated. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t find anything because this guy had just done that good of a job covering his tracks. However, another part of me felt angry that someone had managed to slip by my watchful eye so easily. It made me question every other case I’d worked on up until now, and I couldn’t help stressing over the idea that there may have been something I had missed in those cases too.

  Before the anxiety could get the best of me, I stood up out of my chair and left my office, heading for the break room. I’d suffered from feelings of anxiety ever since middle school when I first started getting bullied. I’d managed to overcome the worst episodes but would still feel it creeping up from time to time when I felt especially stressed or overwhelmed. I kept a stash of chocolates in the break room for just such occasions, and I worked on slowing my breathing as I made the trek over there.

  When I opened the cabinet furthest to the right where I kept my chocolates, I was first shocked and then annoyed to discover that someone had clearly taken one of the bags of individually wrapped chocolates I kept in there. I brushed it off, not wanting to let it bother me now that I was finally calming down, and instead took the other bag, which was filled with caramels.

  I brought the bag back to my office and glanced over toward the bullpen as I did, wondering which one of them had pinched my candies. I wouldn’t put it past Naomi, who had a sweet tooth to rival my own, although she had always asked me in the past before taking any. Maybe one of the new guys had done it, though neither of them seemed like the type to take stuff without permission.

  I brushed the thought away as I reached my office, dropping back into my chair and popping a caramel into my mouth. I needed to get back to work. Hills and Chapman didn’t really have anywhere to go without more information on Xander, and since Miranda and Naomi had wrapped up their most recent case, they were also on standby until we either got another case or got more leads on this one. I hated the anxiety of having so many people depending on me, but I knew when I took this job that I was going to have to get over my insecurities. I tempered down the uncomfortable feeling that was threatening to build inside me and ran a new search on Xander Mikos, cross-referencing it with shipping and trucking terms.

  I didn’t get a lot of useful hits, but I did notice a few vague mentions of the name on online forums dedicated to the hobby of keeping exotic animals as pets. The majority of the posts mentioned him as a contact for exotic birds and Bengal cats, which appeared to be a type of hybrid between a wild and domesticated cat that looked kind of like a tiny leopard. To be totally honest, the entire subculture seemed pretty fascinating to me, if not for the fact that, judging by the discreet way the people on this forum seemed to communicate with each other, the majority of these animals were almost certainly illegal to own.

  The website itself wasn’t findable via a normal search engine, and if it hadn’t been for the advanced searching software that I had access to as an agent of MBLIS, it would have been difficult for me to even find it. The only way for an ordinary person to get to it would be for them to receive a direct link from someone who already knew what the website’s web address was.

  I noticed one of the regular posters went by the screen name Xander Mikos, and although he was often tagged on threads when someone would ask about obtaining a specific kind of animal, he never seemed to start threads himself and only ever posted the type and quantity of animal he had available, along with invitation links for private chat servers. However, the links were long since dead, since the program used was specifically designed to expire links after a short time period. Clearly, these people knew what they were doing was illegal and were taking steps to cover their tracks. I got the feeling that Xander Mikos was probably an alias as well. It would make sense considering how careful he was being about giving out his contact information,
and it would explain why I had gotten so few results.

  Operating under that assumption, I ran a new search, this time including the names Zander, Alex, and Alexander, as well as some terms that commonly got used on the forums under his alias. As an afterthought, I also added connections to Greece as a reference in order to further narrow down the search. This time, I got three substantial results. The first was for a woman, which didn’t match Andy’s description, so I discarded that option. The second was for a man in his late sixties, and although I thought that was possible, I didn’t think it was very likely that a man approaching retirement age would have the physical stamina to be loading and unloading crates filled with dangerous wild animals. The last one was for an American man in his late twenties named Alexander Michaels. Records indicated that his parents were originally from Greece, that he had a prior criminal record for drug dealing, and that his most recent address was listed as being here in Las Vegas.

  According to the search, he was a freelance truck driver who specialized in freight and heavy shipments. This absolutely matched the description that Andy had given to Agent Chapman. We were looking for a man who had his own truck and regularly worked as a contractor for various companies, which would allow him to hide his own shipments among the contracted ones. We also needed someone with ties to Greece, where the cougar’s shipping container had originally shipped from.

  “This is our guy,” I said out loud, unable to keep a smile from forming on my face. I popped another caramel in my mouth, already feeling the tension from earlier slipping away now that I’d found our first major lead on the identity of the trafficker. Carefully making a note of the address on file, I got up and moved toward the door of my office, intending to hand the information over to Director Wallace as soon as possible.

  I was barely out the door when I ran into Miranda, almost literally, as I stopped just short of physically slamming into her.