Allison Brennan - Fatal Secrets

“Damn, I didn’t factor that in!”

Dean went back to the maps and flipped open books, made marks on the primary map, traced things that Sonia couldn’t see. She had never seen him so animated. It was like he was seeing a completely different map, a different world, than she saw.

“Okay.” Dean stood back and surveyed his work. His tie was loose and he’d lost the jacket long ago. But he still looked like a beefy stockbroker, sleeves rolled up after the exchange closed. “I marked off all areas where private aircraft can’t land-in these areas because of the proximity to military or commercial air facilities. This area because of power lines-no way a helicopter can get in there. And terrain. You don’t need a large flat space for helicopters, but you can’t land on a slope.”

Sonia leaned forward. “Amazing. You’ve cut the search area in half.” She pointed to a stretch parallel to Highway 99. “What’s this? What does purple mean again?”

“Weber Trucking. Their business is here”-he pointed to a dot just outside of Stockton-“but the company or the owners own all this land just outside Lodi. Is that important? It doesn’t look like there’s much there.”

“I’ve driven past that area hundreds of times and never thought much about it, but I think there’s a small industrial area right off the freeway here.”

“You think they’d keep the women that close to a major highway?”

“Well, look at this. Right here, this is a deep-water channel. Omega would come down this way. There are at least a half dozen places where they could off-load the women and take them by small boat upriver-here, here, here-damn, all over the place. It wouldn’t be difficult, and at night? Unless we were there twenty-four/seven monitoring, we wouldn’t see it. Of course, it’s seasonal. These tributaries are fed by one of the reservoirs to the east, I think. I’d need to double-check, but I’m sure parts of these waterways are too shallow for boats of any kind, or dry by the end of summer. But now? End of spring? With all the snowmelt in the Sierra Nevadas, they’d still be usable. They could stop in the deep-water channel and in less than fifteen minutes have the women transferred to a small boat and headed virtually anyplace along the river …” She traced a route with one finger like a maze. She backtracked once and found she could get from the Sacramento Deep Water channel to the small industrial area completely on water.

“That’s it!” she exclaimed. She was giddy with excitement.

“You’re brilliant.” He kissed her.

“So are you.”

“I’ll get a warrant,” Dean said. “Give me a few minutes. I’m going to have to do some fast talking.” He gave her another quick kiss and left the task force room.

Sonia watched the door close behind him. She’d never met a man like Dean Hooper. She had a forceful personality and tended to be the dominant partner in her relationships. She always said when to jump, when to go out, when to have sex.

Dean Hooper would have none of that. He was in charge, and if she wanted to be in charge, fine, as long as he was her equal. Sonia didn’t realize how much of a turn-on that was, to have a man spontaneously kiss her. Maybe it was her fault, she tended to scare off prospects because of her job and her hot head. Riley once told her she played the tough girl just to see who was still standing at the end. “Most guys run away, but the one still standing? You’ll fall for him.”

Dean hadn’t run, and in fact, he had maneuvered himself so easily into her life that she felt sick to her stomach thinking about him going back to Washington.

He’ll leave. He has to. It’s his job .

She couldn’t fault him for that. Just like he wouldn’t be able to fault her for staying in Sacramento. How could she leave her family?

How could she let Dean walk away?

She turned her gaze from the map and looked at the copy of Charlie’s letter where Dean had dropped it on a stack of files. She read it again.

Sun Ling. She knew the name, everyone in the business did, but she’d never come up against him, and no one in ICE knew where he was. That certainly said something about their state of intelligence, didn’t it? She knew their focus was on terrorism, but right now she felt a far bigger threat from human traffickers than she did from a small-minded extremist bent on killing Americans for the sake of killing Americans. It was a valid focus, but why couldn’t they do both? Why couldn’t they fight terrorism and stop criminals from buying and selling people?

She took a deep breath. This was getting her nowhere. She had no time for self-pity.

She called Kane. He didn’t answer, of course. She left a message.

“Sun Ling. Chinese American, born in San Francisco. Trafficking. I need everything you know. I owe you big-time, Kane. Duke and Sean are godsends. Thank you.”

Sonia snapped her phone shut and it immediately vibrated in her hand. But it wasn’t Kane returning her call, it was her boss, Toni Warner.

She almost didn’t want to know what Toni had learned about her biological father, but she’d never hid from the truth before, and she wasn’t going to hide now. “Hi, Toni,” she answered. “What have you found?”

“I don’t have good news.”

“I wasn’t expecting any. Just answers.”

“Then you’ll still be disappointed. There are no records of Sergio Martin.”

“None? There have to be records.”

“Nothing, except for your deposition. The agents assigned to find him twenty years ago never did.”

“I knew that, but-”

“They concluded that he may not have existed.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I know that, you know that, but this is in the records. They couldn’t find a birth certificate they could prove was his. I don’t have to tell you Martin is a common name in Argentina.”

“So they never continued looking for him?” When Sonia became an agent with Immigration, she’d received permission to read her file, which included minimal information about her father. Now she realized that she knew everything they knew, which was almost nothing. She had always been certain that there was a file somewhere, maybe classified, but that one existed, so she could rest assured that someone was trying to find him and punish him. The statute of limitations on her case was long up-and the United States didn’t have the laws then to prosecute him-but traffickers were like drug addicts. They didn’t stop. The money and power were addictive. Many considered it simply a job, and the cries and pleas of the victims nothing more than the bleating of lambs being led to the slaughter.

“No one knew what he looked like,” Toni said.

“I do!”

“Sonia-”

“I sent you the picture this morning.”

“I know, but it’s not a lot to go on and the image is fuzzy. Are you certain?”

“One hundred percent certain. It’s him. Sergio Martin. I promise, I’m not hallucinating or making it up or guessing. It’s him.”

“I believe you, but-”

“No one else does?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that we don’t have a name, one that has any meaning or record. We have an old, unclear photograph. And we have the twenty-year-old deposition from a minor. It may not be related to this case-”

“Toni, my father was from Argentina. That’s where I was born. The knife used to attack Riley and kill Greg Vega were available exclusively at an Argentinean knife factory. He’s in the same picture as known human traffickers, including Xavier Jones, taken less than ten years ago.”

“On the surface it sounds good, but-”

“It sounds good because the intel is good! I know it’s vague, but honestly, we’ve gone after cases with less. We need to send someone to talk to the manufacturer of the knives.”