“You sound just like Shae’s wife,” Indi told her, holding out her hand for the microbrewery key. Before she opened the car door, she said, “Stay right behind me, Brooke. I’ll be moving fast to the entrance. After we go in and I relock the front door, move to the side and stand right by the front door while I clear the space.” She handed Brooke a small but powerful penlight. “No overhead lights, please. I don’t want to advertise that anyone is in here.
“The fact that the blocklist on your phone is empty because none of them have attempted to call you even once in the last six hours or so—after constantly blowing up your phone—is givingme the heebie-jeebies. Let’s do what we need to do so we can get out of here, okay? Something tells me our friends from Reflex still aren’t done playing their games.”
Chapter 25
“That’s the sort of shit that’s been going on.” Blake was sitting with her crew in the tiny conference room behind the Utopia control booth, where she had been telling them everything that had been happening with Reflex. “I’m sorry I’ve only had time to give you brief updates here and there until now. Needless to say, we are dealing with bottom-of-the-barrel sleaze. We had no idea how much deeper things were going to go when Brooke first came to us about Reflex.”
Tracey was, as was the rest of Blake’s team,livid. “Forget the embezzlement and money laundering for a minute. The fact that they stole the remains of some poor woman’s dead motherand sold them to make money? Are you even fuckingkiddingme right now?” She was so mad that the veins on her temples were pulsing. “What the hell kind of Satan’s minions are we dealing with here?!”
“The kind that need to be put down like the rabid dogs they are, evidently.” Blair was equally incensed. “Blake, dude…tell me you have some target practice lined up. Those motherfuckers need togo.”
“If Brooke gets her hands on them, they’re going to look like Swiss cheese by the time she’s done with them.” Five cold, malicious smiles spread across the faces of Blake’s team. “We’re actually in a good spot right now. Local law enforcement is primed to move in tomorrow. Brooke and India Lunastar from Infinity Security went to the Cask & Canvas microbrewery tonight so Brooke could grab a piece of artwork she’d left there by mistake. I know my woman, though.” Blake’s sunlit green eyes glinted. “She’ll take the opportunity to snoop around andsee if they left anything incriminating in the office. If they did, she’ll snag it, and we’ll use it to nail their balls to the wall.”
“In the meantime, what can we do?” Kat asked. “Sitting on our asses while shit is going down doesn’t exactly sit well, especially with this team.”
Blake shook her head. “Unfortunately, nothing at the moment. As much as I would love for us to head down to Cask & Canvas to be with them, we’d only get in the way. Besides, they shouldn’t be there that long. Indi won’t let Brooke expose herself any longer than is necessary. My Italian fireball might bitch if Indi escorts her out of there before she’s ready to go, but Brooke also respects the hell out of Infinity and their capabilities. If Indi says it’s time to jet, Brooke will listen to her. We’ll wait and see what they bring back to headquarters, if there’s any information to be had.”
The team rose. “I guess all we can do is hang around and wait then,” said Quinn as Parker added, “No reason we can’t practice while we’re waiting, though, is there? Setting up a scenario to take down useless fuckers like Reflex is ourfavoritekind of target practice.”
“So it is.” A smile filled with malice crossed Blake’s handsome face as she moved with her crew to the door. “Something I suspect Reflex is also going to learn before too much longer. Such a pity, don’t you think?”
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“Here it is.” Brooke swept her penlight across the desk in the small office at Cask & Canvas, then ran it over the inbox. “I was afraid that useless fuckstick Jack Norris had crumpled it up and thrown it in the trash, which is what he would have done if he’d found it lying on the front bar. Thankfully, Gene must have found it and slid it into the inbox to keep it from gettingdamaged.” Leaving the artwork where it was for a moment, she frowned as she looked at the mess strewn across the desk’s surface. “The office was never this disorganized the few times I was in here. I mean, I wouldn’t have ever called it pristine, but there was always some semblance of order at least. It looks like a tornado swept through the place.”
“I’m getting the impression someone was looking for something and was in a big hurry,” India observed, glancing over her shoulder from her position facing out in the doorway. “What in a microbrewery office would be worth causing this kind of bedlam? An uber-secret product formula?”
Brooke was poking through the clutter. “Indi, product formulation in the microbrewery industry isbeyondcrazy. There’s so much to it. Developing a product specification sheet. Submitting all the paperwork required by the FDA and other regulatory bodies. Stability testing. Optimizing the production processes and preparing batch instructions. Seriously, it’s insanity. It’s also information you typically don’t keep in the office. Formulation components are stored in a separate section of the brewery itself.” Flipping through a few sheets of paper, she grimaced, then tossed them aside. “Whatever we’re searching for, it won’t be product formulas.”
Pausing for a moment, she braced her hands on the desk to consider what she was looking at. “Someone was looking for something, something important to them, but was clearly getting pissed because they couldn’t find it. Which means we’re not going to find it on this desk either. However,” she straightened up and folded her arms over her chest, tapping her chin with the fingers of one hand as she thought. “I’m willing to bet that whoever plowed through these papers didn’t have time to finish their search.
“They had to leave before they were done looking, for whatever reason, but I’m positive they assumed they could comeback and finish searching without a problem. However, since Gene shut down Cask & Canvas at light speed—changing the locks almost on the spot—the partners from Reflex were locked out without warning, with no way to access the microbrewery. It was probably thelastthing they were expecting. That means, whatever they were trying to find, it’s still here.”
“What the hell is it, though?”
“Fuck if I know. But everything in me says this whole entire scam was Kilgore’s brainchild. Likely, ‘it’ was the part of the grift he was cutting his partners out of, which means it wasn’t part of the embezzlement or money laundering piece of it. Which leaves body brokering, Watson.”
Still keeping her attention toward the front door of the microbrewery, Indi said slowly, “What if what you’re looking for contains all the details of any body he’s ever brokered? Names, dates, locations, purchase prices, etc.? What if he was getting intoitdeeper than anyone suspected, especially his partners? What if live bodiesanddead bodies havealwaysbeen his focus, but no one ever knew or suspected? I had Brielle pull some numbers when I was looking into Marion’s mother and her remains. A full human cadaver can sell for as little as one thousand dollars and up to as much as two hundred thousand dollars, depending on who you sell it to and for what purpose.”
“Holyshit.”
“Holy shit is right. Those records have to be buried in here somewhere. Nothing else would make as much sense. Even though we’ve been assuming all along that dead body brokering was beyond the capabilities of Rob Vonn’s network, maybe itwasn’t. Vonn—Kilgore—concealed those papers in an area no one else would think to look because he didn’t want anyone to find them and learn exactly what he’s been up to. Whichfurthermeans you need to tear this place apart, Brooke, while I stand guard.
“Rob Kilgore was brokering bodies—dead ones, live ones, body parts—and pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes concerning his level of knowledge and involvement while he was doing it. When his scam was discovered, however, he was murdered for it, and now his partners want that information for themselves so they can continue the grift for their own benefit. The burning question is, however:which one of them actually pulled the trigger?Because everything in me is screaming the answer tothatquestion will light the fuse that will blow everything to smithereens.”
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“Rob Kilgore set up a body brokering scam that flew under the radar,” Trill said in the impromptu meeting in the Bunker taking place in response to Trill’s summons. She tapped the side of her laptop. “Unbeknownst to his partners, he was brokering dead bodies and body parts, in addition to doing live body brokering.But no one knew. Our prevailing assumption has always been that he didn’t have a network established that allowed him to broker dead bodies. No connections to shady funeral homes and research institutions, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, or medical schools, just as an example.”
Bryn was meditative. “We also assumed he was too mobile to easily establish a permanent network that would allow him to exploit drug addicts and alcoholics in a given area on an ongoing basis. When they ran their embezzlement and money laundering scams, Reflex was out and gone from a location within eighteen months, two years max. With body brokering, therefore, we presumed Kilgore would find it impossible to keep the store open long-term…let alone have enough time to set up a functioning local broker network in such a short amount of time in the first damn place. Both live and dead bodybrokering on a consistent basis gave every appearance of having insurmountable challenges.On the surface, that is.”
“Ifhe had already established the foundation of a general brokering network that wasn’t limited to specific locales, however, the established connections that existed could automatically be leveraged, no matter where he was located,” Teagan pointed out. “Which means,” she raised a brow at Drew, “your little moonchild has been frying a much bigger fish, cuz. She was never a bad boy chaser. Kilgore was simply her ticket to infiltrating something a whole fuck of a lot bigger.” Drew nodded, her face thoughtful. “Body brokering is an industry worth billions and billions of dollars, in all its guises,” Teag continued. “Now that Rob’s dead, though, his personal network may have died with him.”
Running her hands through her light auburn hair, Blake asked, “How long had he been running this scam without his partners knowing then? That’s whatIwant to know. I realize, however, this isn’t something of concern to APS anymore, as intrigued as we might be. Kilgore, frankly, is pushing up daisies. Langston, Norris, and Berger just found out about his body brokering grift and haven’t been involved, so they don’t know dick.But…those remaining three partners will be going down for their Tampa embezzlement and money laundering con tomorrow, which means Gene and Sandy Wheeler and their microbrewery will be safe. My woman will be ecstatic.”
“She deserves it,” Jaime told her. “No one has a bigger heart than Brooke.Allof our femmes have huge hearts. Those hearts lead them to do stupid shit that results in spankings sometimes,” the corners of her mouth tilted up, “but I would never want them to be any different than they are, even if they do give us heart attacks on occasion.”
Blake checked her phone. “Nothing from Brooke yet, but she’ll text when she and Indi are on their way back to APS. Jesus,I hope to hell she’s found her artwork intact, or else it may get ugly. She hates Reflex with a fire in her soul that won’t bode well for their continued survival if they’ve managed to piss her off even more than they already have.” She chuckled, her sunlit green eyes glinting. “Then again, those might be easiest odds I’ve ever calculated. We should be thankful and take the guaranteed win because easy money like that doesn’t come around too often at APS.”
