Page 28 of Deliverance

My phone vibrated on his desk. I turned it over and saw Liam’s name on the screen.

“Hey, what’s up?” I asked.

Liam was working from Maya’s house today on Archers’ tasks. We had made a good dent in the profile yesterday, and Dominic was still working on it today, but a million other tasks had piled up, so Liam was tackling some of those today.

“I was able to track the truck that brought the girls to the rail yard to a five-block radius on the eastside of the city.” Liam got straight to the point. “I’ve narrowed it down to a ten-by-ten block area, but there aren’t enough traffic cameras inside that radius for me to narrow it down any further. I think we need to put surveillance inside that area and search building by building to see what turns up.”

“Okay,” I said, my mind racing with logistics. “Let me conference Izzy in.”

I put the phone on speaker and conferenced Izzy in. When she answered, Liam explained what he had found to her and Alexander, who was now listening in as well.

“Who do we have who can do this discreetly?” I asked.

We had gone to ground with most of our operations, but we should be able to spare a couple of people.

“The best would be Danny and his team,” Izzy said. “I know he doesn’t want to leave Grace, but we need him back for this.”

“I can send a few SDS people to guard the hospital,” Alexander offered. “We can post someone outside her room as well.” We had a group of SDS employees who weren’t on a team but instead did individual work.

I chewed on my bottom lip. “If we can spare a couple, that would be great. Then Danny can round up a few on his team and start narrowing the search grid. However,” I stressed. “This is surveillanceonly. They are not to engage if they see anything. Survey and report back their findings. That’s it.” I didn’t need anyone else getting hurt, and if we were closing in on the Kingfisher, he was likely to lash out.

“Copy that. I’ll convey the details to Danny and his team.”

“I’ll send you over the area and where the cameras are,” Liam said. “I’ll put it together in one of our standard surveillance packets.”

“I’ll send people to the hospital now,” Alexander said.

Izzy and Liam ended the call, and I rubbed my temples. Finding where the truck originated would be great, especially if we found more girls or could get clues to where they might be. But every move now felt like a carefully coordinated dance where one wrong step could be the one we didn’t come back from.

“Hey,” Alexander said. “This is good news. We’re a step closer.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m just worried.”

“I know,” he said. If there was anyone who understood the weight of leadership, it was Alexander.

There was a knock on the door. Sebastian opened the door and poked his head in. “Got a second?” he asked.

“Sure,” Alexander said. “What do you have?”

“Hey, darling,” Sebastian said, ignoring Alexander’s question. He placed a quick kiss on my lips, then took the chair next to me. “So I was going through the emails we downloaded from the judge’s burner email, and I think there’s a light pattern here for shipments.”

“A pattern like, you know when the next shipment is coming in?” Alexander asked, leaning his elbows on the desk.

“Not conclusively,” Sebastian said. “But I was able to find a couple of things in there that leads me to think there will be another shipment through the rail yard in the next couple of weeks.”

“That’s if it still comes through,” I pointed out. “Kingfisher could have moved operations.”

“He could have,” Sebastian agreed. “But I don’t think he will. This is a lucrative business for him, and there’s something interesting about this rail yard I found during my research.”

“What’s that?” Alexander asked.

“This rail yard is a pass-through point or an access point for at least eighty percent of the railway in the Midwest. So the freight trains that come through go all over the country. I don’t think he can afford to stop using the rail yard.”

“I agree,” Alexander said. “Let’s put a person from the tech department on the rail yard feed for the next couple of weeks. I know Liam’s monitoring it, but an extra set of eyes wouldn’t hurt.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

If there really was another shipment, we should be able to track it through the cameras Nathaniel Drake gave us access to. It was another step closer and a small win, but it still felt like we were running out of time.