The Doll (18 page)

“What kind of trouble is she in?” Alexis said.

Bradford inched the stroller into the elevator. She followed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really truly don’t, but I am a bit concerned, and it doesn’t hurt to play it safe, right?”

He stepped back and Alexis, arms crossed, glared at him until the doors began to close.

“Remember to call,” he said, and when she was gone, his shoulders sagged. Because it had been Kate Breeden who’d fed information to the Doll Maker, the issue of Alexis troubled him greatly.

Jahan was waiting when Bradford returned to the reception area.

“Who was it?” he asked.

“Michael’s niece.”

“Looks like she could have been her sister.”

Bradford nodded, swiped his card to buzz the paneled door open, and said, “They’re a couple of years apart or something,” and Jahan cocked his head as if doing sibling math, then followed him into the interior.

I
N THE WAR
room Samantha Walker sat in Jahan’s chair, one hand on the mouse, another around her own cup of coffee, while her head tipped up toward one of the flat-screen monitors. She scrolled through Veers Transport freight manifests.

They stood behind the chair and watched her work. From the
data she scoured, she’d clearly spotted the same incongruity in the Veers Transport warehouse that Bradford had.

“What’s your analysis?” he asked.

Without turning or breaking rhythm on the mouse, Walker said, “If we discount the trafficking, it has all the earmarks of a healthy money-laundering setup.”

“They do have to have a way to funnel and legitimize the payments for the girls,” he said. “Freight transport is the perfect cover, especially if they’re making the trip anyway.”

“But
this
much traffic,” Walker said. “They couldn’t possibly be moving that many out of the country. Our missing-persons databases would be burning up over numbers like this. Someone would notice patterns, similarities, and begin poking around. And what we’re looking at here isn’t the kind of operation that throws a bag over someone’s head and drags her over the Mexican border. This is serious organization and serious investment.”

Jahan, who had until now remained silent, said, “No freight at the depot?”

“Not a lot,” Bradford answered. “Not as much as you’d expect given the manifests, not even if they skipped the warehouse and delivered door-to-door for ninety percent of the stuff.”

“The amount of traffic may be cover,” Jahan said. “They may be transporting girls, but probably not on every trip. They need the miles, logs, and manifests to build the documents for a legitimate business and then to infuse the cash into the company—to wash it. Maybe some of those manifests are legitimate.”

Walker said, “That just seems so clunky. Inefficient, you know? To keep an operation like this running just to cover the trafficking.”

“Yeah, but it’s perfect,” Jahan said. “Who would look hard at something like that? Even we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t been pointed to it. This is the kind of thing that can operate out in the open for decades without drawing attention, and it probably pulls in enough from legitimate business to break even on its own.”

Bradford shrugged. “It’s a good setup for money laundering. It’s a good setup for transporting human cargo. Probably both.” He rested his arms on the back of the chair, his focus switching from one screen to the other. If he was right about Logan being held hostage in order to control Michael, then she was going to demand
proof of life along the way. To release the choke hold so she could save herself, they needed to find Logan, find the safe house, and they were running out of time and options. He said, “Legitimate business or not, the question remains, where’s the human cargo?”

“There’s still the business office and house.”

“I have a hard time seeing it. We’re missing something.”

Jahan said, “We’re searching for a needle in a goddamn haystack. I’d fire myself if I even faked confidence in having found everything.”

A buzzer interrupted—cue that someone had crossed the threshold of the reception area. Walker turned, began to stand, and Jahan said, “I’ve got it.”

He left the room. Walker, returned to the monitors and Bradford shut his eyes, pulling in the essence of the conversation. Jahan returned with two bags of takeout that left the room smelling more of deli than coffee or electronics. Nodding at Walker, he said, “That’s my desk, I want it back.” He handed her a bag. “Get off, go eat.”

He handed the second bag to Bradford.

“Talk faster than you eat, because I need to know everything you know, how it went down play by play, and then we need to get moving.”

They took turns, Bradford and Walker, reliving for Jahan the details of the early morning, half-speaking suppositions and theories between shoveled bites, while Jahan recorded the facts as they knew them in threads along the whiteboard, threads that led nowhere specific and everywhere vague, threads that wound around and around until the food was finished and Bradford stood. To Jahan he said, “Suit up.”

A
S PER PUBLIC
records, the office condo was owned by Akman, LLC, although the company’s actual business purpose was as nebulous as its name. Import/export was the war room’s best guess, although
of what
was still open for debate. None of the names of Akman’s three primaries were connected to any of the supposed owners of Veers Transport, though according to freight manifests, Akman did considerable business with Veers and not a whole lot else.

If that on its own wasn’t enough reason to go poking around,
Katherine Breeden’s name was buried within old corporate records, making the general consensus that Akman was just another face to the same money-laundering and human-cargo operation.

Akman’s office was in Las Colinas, on the north edge of Irving, twenty minutes up from Veers Transport, but for all intents and purposes, on the other side of the tracks, if not in another country completely. Here, stone masonry walls bordered neatly kept patches of grass, widely set apart from mirrored office towers, divided and plotted between golf-course-quality lawns and man-made ponds, with pristine strip malls and business complexes competing as prime office real estate.

Las Colinas was clean, structured, cutting-edge, respectable.

Definitely respectable.

A block before their destination, Jahan, behind the wheel in a suit and tie, nudged Bradford out of the inevitable sleep of a combat vet who’d learned to take whatever he could when he could because it was impossible to predict when there’d be more. He was awake as soon as Jahan touched his shoulder. Reached for the backpack and stepped out.

Jahan idled at the curb, waiting a few minutes to give Bradford a head start. An earpiece kept them connected, and Bradford continued on with the eyes of the world staring at his back, car after car flying by in an area where a man walking was about as common as a stray dog.

T
HE OFFICE COMPLEX
was shaped like a digital figure-eight made out of single-story buildings, connected in units of three, and gapped by manicured hedging and driveway. Akman’s unit was in the back right corner, and although the spaces fronting the business were empty, Jahan had parked two doors down.

Bradford continued the stroll forward, approaching from the far side, backpack unzipped, MP5 inside, the butt sticking out. Reached the go point. Jahan stepped from the vehicle and approached Akman’s door.

Tried the handle.

Knocked.

Waited.

No response, so Bradford slowed.

Jahan returned to the vehicle, shut the door, and held an imaginary conversation on his cell phone.

Bradford continued to the business that shared wall space with Akman. The door sign said
INTELISET
, with office hours scripted beneath.

Bradford opened the door and went inside.

The interior was one large room with a shallow hallway off to the left that appeared to lead to a second smaller room. Five desks occupied the floor space; two were in use: one man, one woman, both young and in casual attire. Both looked up from papers and keyboards when he entered.

“I’m trying to find Akman, LLC,” Bradford said.

“Next door,” the guy said, head tilting toward the wall with more emphasis than volume.

“Yeah, I tried them. Door’s locked and no one answers. I wasn’t sure if I had the right place.”

“Oh, you’ve got the right place,” the guy said. His tone carried all the disdain and scorn of a home owner toward the jerk who let his dog crap on the lawn. “That’s Akman.”

“I’ve got a courier envelope to deliver and need a signature,” Bradford said. “Any idea how they get packages?”

“Usually just collects on the doorstep,” he replied, and the woman added, “Gets cleared away about once a week, supposedly by the owners. I’ve never actually seen them.”

“Thanks,” Bradford said. The guy already had his face reburied in paperwork before Bradford turned to leave. The woman offered him a smile. “Good luck,” she said.

Even from InteliSet’s front door, Bradford could see Akman’s doorstep was free of mail, which meant either nothing had been recently delivered or someone had been by to pick it up.

Bradford bent down to tie a shoelace.

In response, Jahan stepped out of the vehicle and passing Bradford returned to Akman’s door. He reached for his pocket. Bradford stood and strode in his direction. Another few seconds and Jahan had opened the door, and Bradford was beside him, then past him, first into the building, weapon drawn, scanning quickly for threat, then alarm systems, then cameras, and found nothing.

Bradford tapped on the slightly open door and moved inward
enough for Jahan, still the suited businessman waiting on the outside, to slip in beside him.

The interior was nearly identical to the office next door: one large room and a shallow hallway to the left, which intimated at a second room. There were extra windows along the right wall, a bonus of being a corner unit. The place was trashed in the way of a quickly abandoned campsite: opened food containers, used plastic utensils, a cardboard box filled with half-empty chip bags and drink bottles, and an as-yet-unopened two-liter bottle of Coke.

Furniture was sparse: a couple of floor lamps, window blinds, and a folding table to the right of the room near the windows. Laid on it were a heat lamp, duct tape, and a box of Ziploc bags, but what caught Bradford’s attention, and jacked up his heart rate, was the baseball bat propped against the wall next to the table.

He nodded toward the piece of wood, and Jahan acknowledged it. Coincidence, maybe, that a bat had featured in Logan’s surveillance footage.

If one was inclined to believe in coincidence.

Fuckers.

On the carpeted floor, small spots of brown flecked the multi-toned Berber in a nearly invisible trail that led from the doorway toward the table. Bradford followed a few steps inward and the trail ended abruptly, about ten feet from the wall. More of the tiny flecks speckled the white walls on an area just beyond where, according to telltale streaks, a sponge, rag—
something
—had wiped the rest of it down.

Bradford signaled, finger toward the hall, and Jahan moved to the second room, using his elbow to nudge the open door farther inward. Nodded Bradford in for a look-see. Here again no furniture, only a set of copy machines. Jahan backed out, and Bradford continued to the end of the hall, to the last door, which opened to a bathroom. In the sink, bloody and torn, a match to what he’d seen on the captured surveillance, were Logan’s pants.

Through the rifle scope, Lumani tracked the gray car’s approach. Kept the crosshairs on the windshield, on the driver, as the vehicle pulled from the road into the small gas station. Within the limited parking area the car waited for another vehicle to move, and when it finally did, the Opel took the empty space. Perfectly, as Lumani had instructed: at the far edge of the building, as far away from the fuel tanks as was possible to go, and to where, as a shooter, he could cover the widest area.

Inside the vehicle, the occupants shifted. The Michael woman bent and, from what movement he could see, appeared to use a tool or a piece of metal, maybe a handmade knife, to slice the tape and work it off the ankles of the doll package.

Inside Lumani’s head sparklers tickled.

The unexpected was always part of the delivery. He planned on it. Counted on it. Made contingencies against the unknown many moves in advance based upon the certainty that any man skilled enough to be pulled in for this job would inevitably believe in his own skill enough to try to disrupt it. Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture.

But this one? He’d watched her. Studied her. Observed what maybe even Uncle, the reader of people, had missed. This one was already fractured, and the lines between her broken pieces were not fissures but scar material stronger than whatever had once filled those spaces.