Fatal Secrets

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Sonia:

I decoded Jones’s journal and discovered that he created a secondary code. I’m sorry, I should have given this to you earlier. I know you’ll figure it out, or know someone who can.

I lied to you the other night. I recognized one of the men who killed Jones. Sun Ling. He’s an American citizen born in Chinatown, San Francisco. He’s ruthless and has been involved in trafficking for as long as I’ve been in the business of stopping it. I don’t know who he works for now, I’ve been out of the game too long.

But he’s not in charge. He’s never in charge.

Please forgive me for everything. I’ll make it up to you. I have a favor to ask. Find Ashley Fox. I know she’s in this book somewhere. Find her and return her to her mother. Please. I’ve worked too long and hard on this to have it mean nothing. She needs to be rescued. I know you’ll save her.

I’ve always loved you, Sonia.

C.C.

Sonia sat alone in the FBI’s task force room, surrounded by humming computers and mountains of paperwork. But all she saw was Charlie’s letter.

She read and reread the letter he’d left with the journal in the main Sacramento Public Library. She was so frustrated she wanted to throttle him. Damn straight he should have given her the journal the other night. The thirty-six hours they’d lost because Charlie wanted to play the hero could mean the difference between life and death for those young Chinese women.

Dean had taken the journal to the FBI cybercrimes unit, which was also responsible for code breaking. If they didn’t think they could handle it, they’ll scan the code and send it to Quantico.

Time was running out. Jones’s killer could have moved the women, killed them, or traded them-and they’d never know. It pained Sonia to think that they’d been so close.

“Damn you, Charlie!” How dare he write I’ll always loved you. He was delusional. Or trying to manipulate her yet one more time.

Dean returned and said, “They’re working on the journal. But I should tell you that it’s sophisticated in its simplicity.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Jones used random words-so it seems-that mean something to him, and there’s a pattern of sorts, but until we figure out what one of the components means, we can’t figure out any.”

“I get it.”

Dean pulled the letter from her hand. “You’ve read this enough. Don’t let him tug at your heartstrings.”

“Where is he? Why did he give this to us now? What’s he up to?”

“I would love to know the answer to those questions, but right now, Cammarata is the least of my concerns.”

He sat down at the table, comfortably poring through property records of Jones’s old clients, focusing on spreads in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Sonia was hugely frustrated that the clock was ticking and they didn’t know where the girls were. She hated sitting in an office looking at papers and maps when she wanted to be in the field.

Dean said, “Hey, did you know that two of the three good-faith locations that Vega gave you were adjacent to Rio Diablo land?”

“No,” Sonia said. “You think that means something?”

“Hmm.” Dean rose and, sleeves rolled up, marked his main wall map. She watched as he quickly added boundaries in different colors.

“What is it?” She just saw lines. They meant nothing to her.

“It’s coming together. Almost there.” He went over to another box and pulled more maps out, then traced more boundaries on his map. “What do you think?”

She stared. “I don’t-” she tilted her head. There did appear to be some pattern, but she didn’t know the relevance. “What do the different colors mean?”

He had pins and color-coded sticky notes and highlighter marks.

Dean said, “The red lines mark the Rio Diablo boundary. The blue lines are Jones’s property. Green are Omega and purple are Weber Trucking.”

She stared. “They almost connect.”

“Not exactly, more like a connect-the-dots moving from one safe zone to another.”

“I see.” And she was beginning to. “How does this help?”

“They practically give a perfect path from the Port of Stockton to the foothills with plenty of private roads to avoid major highways.” Dean pointed to the holes. “All this is owned by the Port of Stockton. And here … and here … and here I’m having ownership researched. But it’s mostly unused land. No route goes through a major town. I’m thinking that they stick to areas where they’re comfortable moving freely, where there would be minimal chance to encounter people or police.”

Sonia tilted her head back and forth. “Jones’s restaurant connects the land to the river. We already know they don’t transport their victims all the way to the Port of Stockton. The restaurant could be a temporary storage facility.”

Dean asked, “Why don’t they simply transport them directly to their final destination? Wouldn’t that minimize problems?”

“Sometimes, but when you’re dealing with a large number of victims, you want to disperse them quickly. The longer they’re in your possession, the greater the chance of being caught. If Charlie is right and they’re using small planes and helicopters to move them out of the area-”

“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.”

“I put in your request for a legal attache to do so, and it’s been approved. They’re on their way.”

“And you said there wasn’t good news? That’s great. It’s a huge lead.”

“It’s Friday afternoon. There could have been hundreds, thousands of those knives sold. We don’t know how old, we don’t know when they were sold-”

“They could be limited editions. We have to follow every lead.”

“Sonia, you’re not thinking your father is involved in this in some way?”

Not on the surface, but deep down, as soon as Sonia saw the photograph, she had suspected just that.

“Toni, let me lay it out. Yes, I think my father is still involved in trafficking, but I don’t know how. Finding him is my priority after this case. But one of those other men in the picture could very well be our killer. Making his move, taking out Jones and staking out this territory. There are already two people in that photo who are connected to this case. If we can identify the other men, and the female, we may find the killer. I need to find Charlie. He saw him.”

“You told me he didn’t see him.”

“He said he didn’t recognize him. I want to show him this picture.”

“He hasn’t contacted the office.”

“If I find him, can I offer him limited immunity?”

“Sonia, you can’t offer him anything, but if you find him, I’m not going to send you up the river if you let him walk. Once.”

“Understood.” Sonia had to locate Charlie. Dammit, where would he be hiding out?

Toni said, “You’re working closely with the FBI, Richardson tells me.”

“Yes.”

“Stick close. This is messy and multijurisdictional, but it’s also dangerous. Traffickers are rarely this bold within our borders. I fear this is a new operation, someone who has the money and power to control it from a distance, which makes him that much more difficult to capture.”

“I’m not going to let Greg Vega’s killer leave this country. I will find him, Toni.” Sonia wished she was as confident as she sounded.

“I hope so. I don’t like how he’s made this personal.”

“It’s not personal-”

“It is. These people broke into your house!”

“Toni, I’m being careful.”

“Are you too close to this? Maybe you should join your family-”

“No. I can’t believe that after ten years you’d think I would run away and hide and let someone else stand in my place. I know this is dangerous, we’re dealing with dangerous people. But I’m not too close to it, and I’m not leaving. In fact, my connection with Charlie and Jones and everyone else in the case gives me inside knowledge. I’m doing everything I can to minimize the threat, but I’m not walking away when dozens of women are in jeopardy. My entire career has prepared me for this.”

Toni said, “I didn’t think you’d step down. Keep me informed as often as possible. If you need anything, call.”

“I will.”

She hung up and made several calls trying to find Charlie.

Dean walked in a few minutes later and said, “We have the warrant.”

“That was fast.”

“Two double homicides in one day has everyone wanting results. Bob Richardson has been fielding calls from the media and politicians ever since our office’s involvement came out.”

“Let’s get rolling.” Sonia headed for the door.

Dean followed and said, “I contacted the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department. They’ll meet us at the warehouse to help serve the warrant.”

“Where’s Sam and Trace?” Sonia asked when she didn’t see them around the white-collar crimes area.

“While I was getting the warrant, Sam thought he’d check out Omega and feel the staff out. See if any of them will talk. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask the right questions. I should have had them talk to you before okaying it.”

“No, that’s fine.” She frowned. Something didn’t quite add up, but she wasn’t sure what was bugging her.

“Any sign of Cammarata?” Dean asked as he slid into his car. Sonia sat in the passenger seat.

“He hasn’t called. If he does, I’m going to meet with him. I need to show him the picture of the men with Jones. He might be able to identify one or more of the UNSUBs.”

“Then we arrest him.”

Sonia didn’t say anything.

“Sonia, dammit, we will arrest him. He withheld evidence, for one. He broke into your house. He assaulted you.”

“I’m giving him a onetime pass. I need his information, and there’s no way in hell he’ll meet with me unless I promise not to take him into custody.”

“Fine, I will.”

“Dean-” Sonia rubbed her eyes and stared out the window as Dean drove south toward Lodi. “I need the information.”

“This is about your biological father, isn’t it?” Dean asked.

“No.” She paused. Dean deserved honesty. “Partly. Charlie may recognize him. He knows most of the major players. It’s obvious he’s no longer using the name Sergio Martin. He may not-” she stopped.

“Sonia?”

“My whole life is a farce. What if I had never been Martin? What if that name was an alias? I feel like I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

“You’re Sonia Knight,” Dean said firmly. “Cop, sister, daughter … lover.”

She glanced at Dean and something shifted inside her. A calmness blanketed her, a wholly unfamiliar sensation. He reached for her hand. Held it. She wondered if he felt what she did.

She wanted to ask, but she feared voicing her feelings would somehow threaten this new beginning. And the last thing she wanted to think about was Dean returning to Washington. But maybe … maybe now would be the time to clarify their relationship. Their careers and family and residences on opposite coasts.

When Sonia gathered the courage to finally speak, Dean said first, “This is the exit. Ready?”

She nodded. “Let’s do it.”