Chapter 12: Chapter eleven

Present day

 

Two days after catching the Lance Bryson case, the Feds arrived. The FBI was first but then Homeland Security, the US Marshals and, for some reason, the DEA showed up. Then the jurisdictional pissing contest was on in force before you could blink. Mike was entirely happy to stay out of it. If the case was drawing this much attention, he was sure he wanted nothing to do with it. Even with crime rates as low as they were—most major criminal operations had folded during the years that the ‘superheroes’ were operating domestically and relatively few had ever recovered—the Feds didn’t show up in those kinds of numbers for just anyone. Bryson must have been into something serious to draw the attention of so many agencies. Cases like that brought trouble like wild dogs brings fleas, and Mike was too old to want anything to do with it.

So, when Alesha told him that she had gotten them assigned to the interdepartmental taskforce that was being set up to investigate Bryson’s death, Mike was none too pleased.

“This is going to be a complete clusterfuck, and you want to get us in the middle of it?” he asked, putting his morning coffee down on the breakroom table and glaring at his partner. “Let the Feds sort it out. There’s no reason for us to get involved.”

Alesha looked wounded. “Sorry, I thought it would be good for our careers and, uh. Look, you don’t have to do it with me.”

Mike took a sip of his coffee and mulled that over. His own career was drawing to a close, and he would be happy to finish it out working unremarkable cases and then retire with his pension. Working high-profile cases with the damn Feds wouldn’t do him any good, and it could get him into big trouble. Taskforces like that tended to uncover a lot, and not just about what they were meant to be investigating.

On the other hand, if he left his partner to work the case alone, he wouldn’t be the cop he wanted to be. He might not be perfect, but he still saw a good detective when he looked in the mirror, and if he wanted to keep seeing that, he’d have to keep an eye on Alesha and make sure she wasn’t left without a paddle if the Bryson case turned to shit and people started looking for a scapegoat.

He sighed. “No, I’m with you. Just warn me before you go signing us up to anything next time.”

Alesha beamed. “Thank you.”

“We’re partners,” he said simply, wondering what he had gotten himself in for.

What he had gotten himself in for, it turned out, was a lot of dull meetings. There were three on the first day, mostly listening to forensic accountants. Apparently, Bryson had been a money man for some shady organizations, and the Harvard boys were having an absolute field day sorting through all the records recovered from his house. Everyone was given packets of information to look over based on what the accountants had been able to tease out so far.

Mike and Alesha were going over those files at the local cop bar because if Mike was going to look through financial records, he was going to need a beer. They sat in the back, in a booth set somewhat aside from the others. It was the booth cops used when they wanted to get some work done that they really should have been doing at the precinct but that required alcohol. The other patrons, mostly law enforcement themselves, respected this and gave the pair plenty of space. They were both on their first beer, though Mike was further through his than Alesha.

“Look at this,” Alesha said, pointing at one of the transactions. It was a hefty sum paid to a company that made lab equipment. “That’s a lot of money. Could be worth looking into.”

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“Hmm,” he said. Lab equipment could mean a lot of things. Drug production, counterfeiting, hell, it could be for an exotic animal breeding operation. “We should start by looking at what combination of things could come to that exact price.”

That, it turned out, was easier said than done. While the company did have an online catalogue, it was limited to their more reasonably priced items. Unless you wanted fifty-thousand pipettes, it would be hard to drop the kind of money they were looking at on their online store. Which meant they would have to speak to them if they wanted to know if this transaction was relevant to the case or not. There were thousands of transactions, and this one, though it was a lot of money, was by no means the largest. Money had been shunted all around the world and put into all sorts of projects, from investments in legitimate companies to money trails that just seemed to disappear. It was a lot to comb through, and this was only what the accountants had pieced together so far. The way they were talking, they’d have a lot more before too long. If they had to track down each potentially suspicious transaction, all other leads would go cold before they got anywhere. Better to let the Feds, who had more resources anyway, take care of that angle and use their knowledge of the city to run down other leads in the meantime.

He told Alesha as much.

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay. So, maybe we should be looking for Bryson’s sex slave, instead.”

“Problem there is where to look. There’s a BOLO out for any young, attractive Asian woman who appears distressed. We’ve got some approximate measurements based on her clothes, but it’s not enough. We need more to go on.”

Alesha furrowed her brow, considering what they could do at that end. They had already checked local hospitals and women’s shelters. “He had to get this woman from somewhere. We could look into suspected people-smuggling organizations, see if we can turn up a name or a photo.”

Mike nodded. “Good, but people like that won’t talk to the cops, and if we had anything definitive on them, they wouldn’t be suspected.”

“You could just tell me what you’ve got in mind,” she said.

“Way I see it, a man who would buy a woman like property, then have a damn secret room built to keep her in, he’s gonna be all about control. Hell, you saw the contractors’ statements, he had it done piecemeal so no one would know the whole story. Guy like that would’ve had some pretty precise demands on what this woman looked like. I’m betting that if we have the tech boys go through his search history from the time before he had the room built, we’ll be able to piece together what his ideal woman looks like, at least well enough to get an approximate sketch.”

Alesha raised her eyebrows. “And how long were you sitting on that idea while you were giving me a little teachable moment?”

Mike just chuckled and finished his beer. The truth is that he had only just come up with that idea in the last few minutes, and helping Alesha be a better detective was improving Mike’s skills as well, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

He flagged down a waitress and ordered another, content that they had a good plan to keep the spotlight off them, but still make progress on the case.

He was so content that he missed the subtle clues in the way Alesha’s body language when she talked about the purchase of the lab equipment. If he hadn’t, he might have known that she wasn’t going to give up on it so easily.

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