The thought alone makes me want to vomit, and Abigail shifts in the seat next to me. I have a feeling she just called dibs on this guy’s head, and suddenly Anders makes a whole helluva lot more sense to me. I make a note to have Jake chase down info on her mom as well.
“Same story with your friend over there?” I ask, gesturing to the other teenage girl slumped against the opposite window.
“Pretty much.”
“What about the other people he sells? Do you often have a lot of people in the house?”
Still looking out the window, she shakes her head. “That gets handled somewhere else. Sometimes he brings in the girls he likes for a little while, but then sells them to slave auctions when he gets bored. He’s started talking about how these girls have babies all the time and how that’s another way to make money.”
These sentences, all strung together with zero emotion, by a young woman who can’t even buy herself a drink, may be the single worst thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. That Silas Blake could somehow pull off being such a horrible human, just ruining people one at a time… I look over to Abigail, and her jaw is bunched so tight, I’m guessing she’ll have a migraine by the end of the night.
Fucking hell.
“What do you think he’s going to do now?”
The young girl’s voice is still devoid of emotion as she keeps her answer simple. “He won’t stop. He’ll keep running his business from wherever he lands, but he won’t forget this. It’s why I sent the police away. He’ll just keep looking until he finds us.”
I open my mouth to refute her, but she holds up her hand, knowing. Her shoulders carry the resolve of a person who’s given up hope, or maybe one who never had hope to begin with. Silence settles over the vehicle, making it feel like a tomb.
We finally make our way to the women’s resource center, and Omar comes out to greet us. Just as we’re walking them through the front door, the rain stops and the clouds part to reveal a blinding blue-sky afternoon. I can’t tell if it’s a good omen or a bad joke.
We get them squared away, and some familiar-looking folks from the Wimberley team come to relieve us. I’m told they’re also helping us with body disposal, which is nice of them.
Bedraggled and mud-spattered, we meet back at the PTN, with DB video-conferencing in from Dallas. None of us want to be there, so DB gets to the point as soon as we sit down.
“This is the third op in a row that we were operating on intelligence from the Marshals and key information was missing. I know that Jake’s been figuring out how to identify the bad data, but we’re at a point where we have to acknowledge that the data has been deliberately compromised.”
“So what’s the play, boss?” Thane asks, looking so tired that I can’t wait to crawl into his arms and fall asleep with him.
“Here’s the thing, people pay me a lot of money to figure out their data security issues. And the Marshals have a data security issue right now. So, I propose y’all let me take this on and, in the interim, we’ll put a pause on going after people from the Marshals’ list. Jake and I will work together and figure out where the leak is and how best to plug it.”
Anders asks a few questions, and then we vote. It’s unanimous, but whatever caused Anders to ask the questions also causes him to pause before agreeing to the change. We review a few more points of analysis, then break for the evening.
I follow Thane out to his car, numb from everything.
“Hey…are you okay?”
I look up at him, defeated.
“Everyone seems on board with this new direction, but I feel like I’ve fucked things up, let DB down.”
“That doesn’t sound right. He totally complimented you on the logistics you put together, they were just based on incomplete data. Turns out none of us were doing anything wrong, we were working with data that has been purposely corrupted. Even still, none of them were unsuccessful operations.”
“But he’s not telling us anything new. And the bad guy got away this afternoon. You should have seen that girl’s face. She said she knew he’d never stop, and she believed it with every fiber of her being. Doubt we can call it a successful op.”
“That’s true, this op wasn’t great. But we also took out a lot of bad guys and freed four people who had been at his place, against their will, for years. And based on what that young woman told you, we have enough information to disrupt his little operation. We’ll get him eventually. In the meantime, he knows that we’re looking for him and he has to keep a low profile, which means he’s probably not going to be hurting people in the same way. We stopped him tonight and we’ll clean up the rest later.”
I’m not sure…maybe it’s the adrenaline of being in the field, maybe it’s the fact that I can’t imagine the hell those two young women went through in that house, but I feel like a wrung-out, stupid idealist who has not one clue how the real world works.
I turn, and Thane is standing by his car, holding the door open for me. He lightly touches my waist as I lower myself to the seat, and maybe the emotional craziness of today is to blame, but the smallest show of affection has me feeling teary-eyed. He enters the car quietly. Despite his impressive musculature, I am forever surprised by his gentleness.
“Are you still okay with coming out to my place, or do you need the evening to yourself?”
I reach out, grabbing his wrist. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
He smiles and scruffs my hair. “You got it, Ro.”
I turn my head so his hand cups my cheek. “Don’t read anything into this, but I’d really like to just stare out the window for a while, and hopefully by the time we get to your place, I’ll have words for you.”
