Allison Brennan - Fatal Secrets

“What?”

“We haven’t found the body yet, but there’s evidence that Charlie is telling the truth. We’s keeping it quiet for now.”

“Who am I going to tell? So Jones is dead?”

“I think so.”

“Well, damn . What does that mean? A new leader in town? Turf wars?”

“I have no idea,” Sonia said, “but it’s somehow connected to our investigation into the shipment of young Chinese women. Jones knew his killer, voluntarily met with him and didn’t appear concerned until the moment he was shot. I’m thinking it’s a rival taking over, but we really don’t know.”

Her cell phone rang and she excused herself and left the room.

Dean smiled at Sonia’s brother. Riley Knight was a likeable guy. “I’m glad you’re okay. Sonia was really worried yesterday.”

“Thanks. Now what really happened with Charlie last night?”

“He broke into her house at three-thirty in the morning. Woke her up.” Dean didn’t want to worry Sonia’s brother needlessly. “You can see she’s no worse for wear.”

Riley wasn’t convinced. “He just walked in?”

“It won’t happen again, I assure you. I’m putting a couple of agents on her house. I haven’t told her yet, so …”

“I gotcha.” Riley relaxed and smiled. “You seem to know my sister pretty well.”

“Well enough to know she won’t like the idea of two FBI agents babysitting her.”

“Do you believe the story Cammarata fed Sonia? About a meeting that ended up with Jones dead?”

Dean had been skeptical, but so far Cammarata’s story held up. “I don’t know. So far the evidence confirms everything he said, but they’re still searching for Jones’s body. No one on his staff has seen or spoken to him since yesterday evening.”

“Could be that Cammarata killed him, dumped the body, and ran to Sonia with the story of three suspects. He didn’t give a name?”

“No. Claims he didn’t recognize anyone at the meeting, but he was hiding.”

“Bastard. I can just see him pulling this off. Fashions himself a vigilante, but he’s nothing but a killer. Probably thinks he’s doing Sonia a favor by killing Jones.”

“Why?” Dean said. “He apparently wanted information from Jones.”

“Maybe he got it. Killed him. Made up this story to divert Sonia’s attention from him, so he can slip away.”

Dean hadn’t actually considered that Charlie Cammarata had killed Jones and the unknown victim, though his story of what he claimed happened certainly seemed incredible. The evidence should prove it one way or another.

Sonia walked back into the room. Her face was pale, her eyes in shock. “The Vegas are dead. They were tortured and murdered in their home early this morning.”

I’m too old to rough it in the wilderness .

Charlie’s bones creaked and his muscles protested as he trekked out of his makeshift camp near the Pardee Reservoir outside of Mokelumne Hill, a small town with a population of less than a thousand. He’d hidden his car near Highway 49 and Electra Road, camouflaged it, hiked in to further separate himself from his vehicle in case anyone came looking for him. He watched for clues that someone else was in these deep woods, using his tracking skills to avoid a predator instead of finding one. But when it appeared no one was following him, he had time to regroup and finish what he’d set out to do.

After leaving Sonia’s house early that morning he didn’t dare go back to his cabin on Jones’s property. Either the bad guys would kill him, or the good guys would arrest him. Neither option appealed to Charlie. So he opted to go camping. He’d certainly endured far worse conditions than one summer night in the wilderness.

He felt shitty about scaring Sonia last night, but he hoped she’d realize that he’d risked everything to give her the information about Saturday. She was smart, she’d figure it out. She had most of the information she needed; it was a matter of trusting her instincts and taking those leaps of faith he’d tried to teach her. But those leaps often coincided with breaking the rules and the law, and Sonia wouldn’t go that far.

And because she wouldn’t, she’d never be able to stop predators like Xavier Jones. It was a war. She had to start treating it like one.

Charlie wasn’t heartbroken over one predator taking out another. If he could find a way to get all of them to fight and kill each other off, ICE might finally be able to make some substantial inroads into the vast enterprise of human trafficking.

It pained him to think that Sonia thought so poorly of him. He wasn’t willing to sacrifice the girls from China, but he had to find Ashley Fox first. There was no reason he couldn’t do both. Rescuing Ashley was his job; he was focused on saving the one. He couldn’t afford to think too hard about the many who died of AIDS and syphilis and beatings and suicide. He didn’t have to think about the mistakes he’d made and how he’d hurt people he cared about because of this drive to do anything to help the weak and innocent.

On one level, he realized that he had crossed the invisible line between right and wrong, but really, wasn’t that line arbitrary? Who decided which law to follow and which to abandon? They played fast and loose with the laws every day, it was just a matter of getting caught. This was war, and in war the rule of law could be suspended. People talked about the moral high ground, but the moral high ground meant a whole lot of nothing if you were dead.

Charlie stopped his brisk walk through the forest and leaned against a tree, a sharp pain in his chest making him want to cry out. It wasn’t his heart, it was the pain of being unable to stop it. What he’d seen in his lifetime was enough to break anyone. The mass graves in Central America. The brothels of women and young girls all over the world. The “tourist sex trade”-predominantly men who traveled from developed countries into third-world countries where child sex laws were lenient or nonexistent. The money they spent to indulge in their perversion … Charlie harbored no guilt in stopping them, even if he’d broken not only the law but the Ten Commandments. No one else was willing to do it, and frankly, Charlie wasn’t going to wait around for Satan to claim his own. He’d send the bastards down to the pit early, maybe saving one child in the process.

Head in hand, sitting in the dirt and pine needles, memories roared to life. The sight and stench of the dead, the dying, the desolation. There were so many, too many, and still he moved forward, doing what he could. If he did less, he couldn’t live with himself. The law didn’t matter to him. He’d paid lip service to it as a young, idealistic recruit in the former INS. He’d been in ROTC, did his time in the Marines, came into the job with the idea that he would help people and feel good about it. The only son of a man from Costa Rica with a green card and a woman from California who’d met after World War II while working in a factory. Good people who raised him to help others. He’d been an altar boy, a football player in high school, believed in the American Dream.

The American Dream that predators used to lure those who had nothing into their deadly web.

The sheer mountain of corruption and hate, of slavery and despair, and Charlie was a small nothing compared to all the evil in the world.

He wasn’t sure exactly when he snapped, when he decided working within the law wasn’t helping. There had been crime scenes he would never be able to forget, that came to him not only when he slept, but when he was awake. The prostitutes with syphilis who were shot and buried in a mass grave-unmarked and unremembered. The young teenage boys kidnapped and forced to fight in wars they had no hand in creating, in countries not their own. How many of these child soldiers had Charlie buried? But the one pivotal moment, when he knew they’d lost the war, was in New Mexico on a scorching August afternoon.