CHAPTER16
When I arrived home, I decided the best way to avoid (a) my still conflicted feelings about losing Wallace, and (b) dissolving into a puddle of fear the ghost would come knocking, was to keep digging into the moms. But only after I’d closed all the curtains, triple-checked the door was locked, and stationed the baseball bat I’d insisted on taking from Bray’s closet near me on the couch. My rideshare driver surely had questions as to why a hobbling, one-shoed woman with a tattered wooden bat had climbed into his car, but he had the decency not to ask.
I propped up my foot with more ice and stationed my loaner laptop on a pillow on my lap. The DSA always gave me one when a case called for it. Same as my loaner phone, it was equipped with basic accounts, apps, a Wi-Fi connection. All the things one would need for run-of-the-mill internet use. Plus a little back door I’d learned how to engineer that granted me access to off-limits places on the web.
I started with a generic search forMontrose, hoping I might get lucky. It yielded listings for local apartment complexes with the name, a residential street, and flights to the local area from a city in Colorado called Montrose. They could all have been leads or all been nothing. Without breaking into Melanie’s office to look for more information, it would be hard to say.After a few hours of rabbit holes, I decided to take a more direct approach.
I’d worked a case several years ago with a fellow CI who lived in the darkest corners of the web. She’d since paid her dues to the DSA and rejoined civilian life but had told me where to find her if I ever needed a hand. A dog-grooming message board was about the most innocuous place I could think of, I had to give her that.
I logged into perfectpaws.com and searched for @yorkiedork123. I didn’t even know her real name, but I knew I could trust the person behind the cute little Yorkie profile picture. I’d chosen the name @muttmama because, should the day ever come when I could own a dog, I wasn’t about to pay for a fancy breed when there were plenty of rescues out there in need of adoption.
I opened the General Tips message board and typed.
@muttmama: My pooch stepped in a mysterious sticky substance, and I can’t get it off his paws. Any tips? I feel like @yorkiedork123 always knows what to do. Thanks!
I waited approximately two minutes before she responded. I could only imagine what kind of notification system she had set up to keep her looped into all the corners where she hid.
@yorkiedork123: I have the perfect solution! I will DM you the recipe.
“Perfect,” I said aloud. Surely someone somewhere could access every DM sent on the platform, so it didn’t matter if we kept sensitive information off the main threads. But the only way to get into a DM conversation was to invite someone from a main thread. Alas, I had to come up with abelievable story about dog grooming every time I wanted to talk to @yorkiedork123 privately.
A little window popped up in the corner of my screen.
@yorkiedork123: Muttmama! It’s been a while. What’s up?
@muttmama: Hey. Do you know anything about a company or person named Montrose that might be tied to a smuggling operation?
@yorkiedork123: Hmm. Location?
@muttmama: Bay Area, California. Specifically a neighborhood called Del Rio, in the South Bay.
@yorkiedork123: Hold please.
I held, by staring at the TV, where I’d left a series of rom-com movies quietly playing while I searched the web. After the scene in the alley, I’d been grinding my teeth and couldn’t bear to watch anything with even a hint of tension or a jump scare in sight.
My laptop pinged with a new message.
@yorkiedork123: Looks like the name of a black-market supplier. They run all sorts of things: arms, drugs, counterfeit designer goods.
@muttmama: Baby products?
@yorkiedork123: Weirdly, yes.
“Shit,” I said out loud, still a little stunned any of this was real. I did quick math to think back to what I’d overheard Melanie say on the phone that day. Whatever had happened to get them in trouble happened three weeks ago.
@muttmama: Any chance you see record of a deal or delivery from three weeks ago?
She disappeared for a few minutes again, and I imagined her clacking away at a keyboard in front of a wall of computerscreens. I had no idea what information she was accessing or who she might be talking to.
@yorkiedork123: Nothing specific, but apparently there’s been chatter about a seized shipment.
My mind kicked into high gear, thinking of other smuggling cases I’d worked. A seized shipment of smuggled goods usually meant someone didn’t get paid because the goods were never sold. If whatever was in that shipment was valuable enough for Melanie to put a lien on her house, whoever they owed money to was probably pretty upset.
But if a shipment of baby goods had been seized in one of the local ports, wouldn’t it have crossed Bray’s radar? At least Ihopedhe’d set up alerts for such a thing.
Something was still missing. But this was way more to go off than I expected.
@muttmama: Thank you. This is very helpful.
