Avi snickered. “What’s our latest Scooby Gang mystery?”
“May I, Jericho?” Calliope asked.
Jericho looked at Atticus in surprise. He’d spent the first half of their long drive home explaining what he could to Calliope in the hopes that she would be able to help piece together whatever was going on. They’d been too tired to talk when they got home, and later, when they’d woken up, they’d gotten…distracted.
Jericho cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. Go ahead.”
His hand went from stroking Atticus’s wrist to clenching it as a picture of his sister appeared. She was pretty in a hard sort of way. She had the look of somebody who had wrapped herself in barbed wire and then dared somebody to scale it. She’d been hurt before somehow. Had Atticus known what she looked like aside from the horrors of the morgue? He didn’t think so.
“This is Jericho’s sister, Mercy. She disappeared a little over eight years ago and was not seen again until a few days ago when her body washed ashore septic and missing a kidney.”
“Missing a kidney?” Avi asked, no longer amused. “Like a ritual? Like Jack the Ripper?”
“No. Like she’d donated a kidney,” Atticus provided. “Though I suppose if a serial killer had anatomical knowledge, he could have excised a kidney, but the pathologist seemed pretty sure this was a donation gone wrong.”
“It wasn’t any legally sanctioned kidney donation,” Calliope said. “I cross referenced your sister’s profile with UNOS—the United Network for Organ Sharing. They keep a database of every donor, every transplant, every recipient. Your sister didn’t donate a kidney, not legally anyway.”
“Black market?” Archer asked. “A kidney on the black market goes for a hundred and sixty thousand, easy.”
“It would explain my vision. The guy watching over your sister was in scrubs, but he did not look like your typical hospital employee. Hygiene was not a big priority with this guy,” Lucas said.
“You think my sister figured out a way to sell her kidney for six figures and they dumped her when she got sick?” Jericho asked, still squeezing Atticus’s wrist hard enough to leave marks.
Archer shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”
“It still doesn’t explain where she’s been for the last eight years,” Atticus said.
“I’m not trying to be insensitive,” Lucas said, “but she was a drug addict. How do you know she didn’t just stay away of her own volition? She wouldn’t be the first addict to just disappear.”
“Didn’t you say you saw a man dragging her down the street?” Atticus asked.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she was being kidnapped,” Lucas said, voice dripping with sincerity. “You know as well as I do that addicts don’t make great choices when it comes to their partners.”
“Right, the guy!” Calliope said, excitedly. A man’s face appeared on the screen. He had greasy brown hair slicked back in a ponytail, a burn scar on his face, and a meanness in his eyes that Atticus knew well. He’d taken out dozens of men and women just like him, people who were so dead inside, so morally bankrupt, that they no longer had the capacity to see people as humans, just product.
“You found him,” Lucas said. “That’s the guy from my vision.”
“Technically, Jericho and Atticus found him. Or, at least, his name. Carlos Perez, aka Scar. This guy’s a bit of a mystery. Up until around eight years ago, Carlos was just another low level street thug. His biggest claim to fame was being the number two to this slightly bigger shitbag.” A picture of Bryan popped up on the screen.
Noah popped a piece of gum in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “Can’t we find shitbag one and two and torture them until they talk?”
“Shitbag one is in the wind. We talked to shitbag two last night. The only person he’ll be talking to going forward is God,” Jericho said.
“Did you learn anything useful?” Asa prompted.
“I guess that depends on your definition of useful,” Atticus muttered. “Shitbag one got really sketchy when we brought up Carlos. In some kind of weird reversal of fortune, it seems Carlos now outranks Bryan. He’s an enforcer for some kind of…something.”
“Some kind of something?” Archer managed. “That’s helpful.”
Jericho sighed, clearly frustrated. “Bryan said when he got out of prison, Carlos had hooked up with some ‘scary dudes’ and they were nothing like your average street gang. He said they had money. They had connections.”
“Like the mob or the cartels?” August asked.
Jericho shook his head. “Nah, man. Carlos said these dudes were ghosts. Said they’d been operating in our territory for over a decade and nobody knows they’re there. He used the word sinister.”
“Can’t we just find this Carlos guy? Did Bryan give you a hint where to look for him?” Adam asked.
“He said we won’t find him unless he wants us to and that we don’t want him to come looking for us. He called Carlos their enforcer,” Jericho said, gaze glued to the picture on the screen.
