“He called him something else,” Atticus recalled suddenly. “Their recruiter.”
“High-level escort service?” Archer asked. “It would explain where she’s been. They keep their girls on the move. Big money. Big clients. Lotta drugs. Lotta Stockholm Syndrome.”
Jericho’s mouth was a hard line as he seemed to contemplate Archer’s theory. “Maybe. But he was talking about crosses. He said they were helpers. That nobody suspected them. I mean, I guess they could be Epsteining. Rich dudes trading girls, but it still doesn’t explain how Mercy went from escort to dead in a river.”
Calliope’s voice broke in. “She’s not the only one.”
That brought the whole room up short. Atticus sat forward. “What?”
“When my search for Carlos turned up nothing and my search of UNOS turned up more nothing, I decided to search the archives for any bodies that washed up in the river minus their body parts,” Calliope explained.
“And you found more people missing organs?” Jericho asked.
There was the sound like a chair creaking, and then Calliope said, “No. Well, yes and no.”
“Which is it, Calliope?” Atticus snapped.
Atticus sighed as the silence stretched. After a minute, Calliope said, “Since it seems none of you can remember your manners today, I’ll address Jericho. And only Jericho.”
“What did you find, Calliope?” Jericho questioned gently.
Calliope gave a delicate sniff. “I found a fifteen-year-old John Doe they’d fished out of the water missing a lobe of his liver, but they couldn’t give a definitive cause of death because there was something…peculiar about the kid’s blood. They’d posited that perhaps he’d gotten a hold of an unknown synthetic drug.”
“Was that the only other one?”
“No. There was a nineteen-year-old runaway from Texas who they also diagnosed as a drug overdose, but again, they couldn’t identify the strange drug in her blood.”
Jericho frowned. “I get the liver kid correlating to my sister’s death, but how does the overdose case? She had all her parts, no?”
“Because she also had that same unknown compound in her blood. The expanded toxicology report came back this morning.”
“This makes no fucking sense,” Asa said.
Archer shrugged. “Maybe it’s something coming in from over the border. New synthetics are popping up all the time. If all three victims were drug addicts, maybe that’s how they convinced two of them to donate a body part. Maybe number three OD’d before she had the chance?”
Jericho shook his head. “The pathologist said my sister hadn’t done any hard drugs in months.”
“The standard toxicology report only looks for amphetamines, barbiturates, opioids, marijuana, and alcohol. The only reason we know more is because Thomas asked the pathologist to run a full toxicology panel…as a friend,” Calliope said.
Jericho’s gaze shot to where Thomas was sitting, his elbow on the table, head propped up on his fist. He didn’t acknowledge any of them but Atticus knew he heard every word. Thomas saw everything, heard everything, knew…everything. And nothing.
“Thanks for doing that,” Jericho finally said to the top of Thomas’s head.
“Anything for a friend of my son,” Thomas said, exhaustion evident in his voice.
“Where do we go from here?” Atticus asked.
“We go old school,” Adam said. “We head out to the neighborhood and we question people about what they know. If shitbag number one knew enough to call them ghosts, then there are bound to be others. We just convince them to talk.”
Jericho scoffed. “Yeah, right. No offense, Abercrombie, but nobody’s gonna say shit to you. No matter how much you try to look like one of us, they’ll smell the money on you.”
“You think we’ve never had to question someone before?” Adam countered.
“Ever questioned somebody without a weapon in your hand, pretty boy? Because the people in my neighborhood aren’t going to talk to somebody whose backup watch is worth sixty k.” He gave Atticus a contrite look. “No offense, Freckles.”
Atticus literally felt the blood drain from his face as the endearment left Jericho’s lips. He closed his eyes, mentally preparing himself for the onslaught that was about to ensue.
“What—What did he just call you?” Asa asked.
