(Blood and Bone, #2) Sin and Swoon (25 page)

I make another call as we take off. “I need to go back, and I need you with me this time, Antoine.”

Antoine sighs. “Why do you have so little faith in me? You think I was just sightseeing like you were? Where do you think I was when you were calling me from the back door?”

A grin spreads across my lips. “You fucking broke into that room?”

“Goddamned right I did.”

It’s my turn to sigh, just not the annoyed way he always does.

20. Dinner and a movie

 I
sit back with the footage and my Bluetooth in my ear so Antoine can talk me through it. “Okay, what am I seeing?”

“The first part of what I was able to do is tour the room. See that hatch above? It’s the way in. One of those rooms you were in, it’s got a hatch in the floor. I bet under a rug. These douche bags always go for the hatch under the rug. Keeping it old school.”

“Stop nattering, I have to drive to Tanner in an hour. Let’s focus.”

“I miss Rory not being a creepy fuck. You’re not nearly as fun.”

“I also am not nearly as disturbed. And let’s not forget it’s Rory who made all this work for you and me.”

“Right. I actually forgot that for a second.” He moves the mouse on my laptop, having fully taken control of it, and clicks on a small box in the corner. “This is the bank; they have a video bank. I’ve been doing facial recognition on the footage for the three hours it took you to get to the computer.” I catch the tone he’s giving off loud and clear.

“The FBI has a lot of paperwork, and I had to check on Dash. The city needed me to fill out a bunch of forms explaining the massive gas leak one of us let off in their area. It isn’t all play on my side of this on the Internet.”

He chuckles. “You have it easy, trust me. I’m the sorry bastard watching the porn from slave hell. I might never have regular sex again after this.”

My skin crawls as he starts a video and narrates. “It’s seven hundred hours of footage. Games and sexcapades and sexathons. The girls are a bit of a story. So far I have found eleven missing girls in the lot. Three are Italian, two are Saudi, and one is Haitian. The other five are Canadian, believe it or not. All missing from the East Coast, suspected to have been moved by a gang out there that’s notorious for human trafficking across the border. I can’t even begin to tell you how fucking insane this is.”

The footage clicks over to the rooms, the harem first. “So this is the horse game, I guess. It’s some kind of kinky group thing.” He sounds annoyed, but I think we are both a little scared.

In the video, girls are on all fours, with long, straight ponytails and bridles on their heads, and that is it. They prance, still on all fours, swinging their ponytails as several men strut about the room. One man drops to his knees, pulling his erection from his pants and mounting a girl with dark hair. He grips the reins and pumps wildly but only for a moment. He then gets up and struts again, erection to the wind, until choosing another girl, this time a blonde. He grabs onto the reins and bucks. Her face is turned toward the camera; she seems to be enjoying it. The other men do the same. “What the fuck?” The words slip from my lips.

“Right, that’s about how I felt. This is the gentle shit. It starts to shift here. This little chestnut goes on for an hour.”

I don’t know what to add to that.

He clicks the mouse, and the movie switches to the room with ancient Greece as the decor. A woman in a toga and a wreath made of ivy walks about in a figure eight. She plays a small instrument.

A fat old man in a cloth diaper sits as two girls in nothing but long necklaces and crowns fan him with huge palm leaves. Another girl feeds him grapes by hanging them over his face. Nothing sexual appears to be happening until the camera scans about the room, revealing two men and one woman. One is pumping into her face, then ejaculating on her face, as the other man thrusts wildly behind her. These men appear to be slaves like the woman. They finish with her and go and bow before the fat guy.

“So, I’m going to go because this sort of feels like we are watching porn together, and I don’t know how I feel about that.”

I have forgotten he is there on the phone. “Right. Okay, so I’ll call from Tanner.” I hang up the phone and sit there watching as the big fat guy gets up, pulling a long dick from his diaper, and gets behind one of the men. I close the laptop, hating where that was going and how I feel about it all.

“Human trafficking, not porn. Human trafficking, not porn,” I mutter, cringing. I remind myself of the cages and open the laptop again. The footage starts back up immediately. I click, and it switches to another room where the brothel is. It’s got several types of beds and lounging chairs and drapes hung all around. The girls look like hookers from the Old West, with garters and feathers in their hair. They wear lingerie and hold platters of food and drink. The men wear cowboy hats and chaps. One man smiles, laughing and stroking the head of the woman sucking him off.

I pause and zoom in on his face. My phone rings instantly.

“Firstly, there’s a donkey in the circus room—do not watch that video. Secondly, we have a problem with the facial recognition.”

I wonder if he knows the person I am looking at.

“I have six senators, three princes, five bishops, a cardinal, twelve actors, several Supreme Court judges, and the list is just growing. This is insane. We can’t even take this to anyone.”

“Is the vice president on here?”

“No. Not that I’ve seen.” Antoine sounds weird.

“What?” I ask, scared of the answer.

He sighs. “The president is.”

“No wonder the security is so high.” I shake my head. “There’s no way the vice president sent us there with FBI agents and knew about the footage or about the place.”

“Unless he wants us to think that.”

I nod. “Which is why I asked if his name was on there.”

“I feel like we have bitten off more than we can chew.”

A chuckle escapes my lips, but it’s almost a sob. “I know we have. You know what I’m staring at right now?”

“Yeah.”

I narrow my gaze, running my hands through my hair. “You know who that is?”

“I do. Took me a minute to realize who it
wasn’t,
though. That scared me.”

“Then you know what that means?”

“I do.”

I purse my lips. “I hate this fucking case.” I hang up the phone and sigh, not even sure what to do but thankfully unable to do anything because I have to go to Tanner and find the kid of the deceased and creepy Dick Russell.

My phone rings. “Hey!” I answer Dash and close the screen on my laptop.

“When are we heading back to DC?”

I look down at the closed computer screen. “We are not heading back. I am fully assigned to this case until it is solved. I’m working with the FBI, and I won’t be done till it’s done.”

“Ang and I are headed back now, then. She’s a mess. And even worse, we have been reassigned. They’ve closed us down. This has hit international shit lists.”

I wince. “Of course she is, and of course it has.” I haven’t been there for her at all, and the week doesn’t look like it’s going to improve much.

“No, you don’t understand. The bed in the damned apartment she has been staying in is the black metal bed. She never even noticed it before. But the pieces are falling into place. They are all coming together for her. He painted it, but the paint wasn’t made for metal beds and has started chipping away. Forensics came, and of course the handprints are still there. Rory and Ashley’s handprints are on the bed, like a filthy souvenir. He never wiped it down. The mattress is the same one. He let the FBI use it as a safe-house bed, knowing full well girls had been raped and tormented on it.”

My stomach clenches. “Oh God.”

“Yeah, so I’m taking her home. She’s being reassigned to a section with lab work only, no patients to supervise. She’ll get to spend some quiet time on her own. I am being sent to DC, reassigned also.”

“Okay, well, wow. I’m headed to Tanner to speak to the daughter, the adopted one. Then I will be doing some analysis of my own.”

He’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t know how you do this, how you’ve spent your life doing this. Seeing this type of hell every day. Going to war and being an agent, I just—I have so much more respect for you, Jane Spears. More than ever.” He sounds affected or emotional. “I love you so much.” It’s not that every other I love you hasn’t been sincere, but this one is the most sincere.

I glance down at the huge rock on my hand and smile. He’s my forever. “I love you too.” I hang up and sigh, completely unsure of what to do about who I saw on the computer and how I will tell him about it. I turn the movie back on and watch the scene from the circus, not because I want to but because I need to. I need to be as disgusted as I can for what I have to do.

The trip to Tanner takes an hour and a half longer than I expect because of traffic. It’s bananas. Henrico comes, but Stanley stays behind to keep an eye on the son and daughter of Old Dick.

We finally pull into the driveway of a small home and sit there for a second. “So, your dad has a billion dollars, and yet you live in a middle-of-the-road home?” Henrico gives me a look.

“Yeah, weird.” We get out and walk up to the house. I knock loudly. A small woman with fuzzy blonde hair and a wide smile answers the door. “Hi, can I help you?”

“We are looking for Amanda Russell.” I pull my badge so she doesn’t slam the door in my face.

She nods but her eyes don’t leave the badge. “I’m Amanda.” She opens the door wide for us. There are kids’ toys on the floor, and the TV is blaring. It’s like a normal home for any middle-to-lower class family. “Come on in; ignore the mess. The kids are home for Christmas break now.”

I had forgotten about Christmas. It dawns on me that I have to go to the South for Christmas with the in-laws.

Henrico gives me a look. “I’ll wait out here. Keep an eye out.”

I nod and close the door. “My name is Jane. I’m with the FBI.” I hold up my badge for her. It’s never had as much use as it has on this file.

“How can I help you?” Her face is no longer friendly and sweet.

“We found your father’s cabin and the cells below.”

Her eyes dart to the right. She winces and nods. “You’d better sit down.” She sits too, looking at the kids I didn’t even see on the couch against the wall. “You guys go clean up that basement, now.” Her tone is nervous, but I think they take it as angry. They scramble without making much fuss. When they’re gone she turns back to me. “Now you listen here, I’ve worked long and hard to forget about all that. I don’t need some media bullshit and scandal involving me or my kids.”

“That won’t ever happen.”

“Good. Because that man is not my family.”

My stomach drops. “So you were never one of the kids to him?”

She shakes her head. “I was never anything but a burden to her, something he wanted and she didn’t. They didn’t need to adopt; they had two kids. But he wanted—” She pauses. “Like I said, I have moved on. But I want my share. I have earned it.” Her voice shakes a little.

“Yes, you have.” I look down, hating that I have to do this. “Did the other kids know, your brother and sister?”

She nods once.

“And the wife, your adoptive mother?”

She nods again, less sharply. “It started when I was fifteen. I never understood why he wanted to adopt me until my fifteenth birthday. He took me to the cabin for my birthday. We skied and snowmobiled, and for the first time he was nice to me.” Her eyes glaze over, and I am grateful she spares me the details.

“When did you leave the family? Your family?”

She sighs. “When I was seventeen, I ran away. I lived on the streets for a while, did some drugs. Then I met a priest who does an outreach program in Bellevue. He helped me. Got me off the streets, got me a job and some counseling. I met my husband and never looked back until that lawyer came. Roland Guthrie. He had a partner who wanted to take my case, wanted to help me get the money I was owed.”

“Lawyer?”

She nods. “Yeah, he and his partner, Sven Kelpie, have made the case for me. They said I should have my third; I was legally adopted, and I was owed. Said it would take some time. All they wanted was the cabin. No commission, just the cabin and the land.” She laughs bitterly, and I nearly wrinkle my nose.

“They must have known about the cabin.”

She gives me a look, and I feel about one inch tall. “Everyone who is anyone knew about that lodge. You think you can have a fun lodge like that and not share it with all the successful important people in the world? Of course they knew, but if they wanted that nasty pit as their payment, I was fine with it. I just needed to win my share first. I earned it.”

“Wait, so the will was never changed to take you out, you just were never in it?”

She nods again. “That’s right. He could have sex with me and torment me, but he couldn’t let me have my share of the money. I slept in a cell for a month once. Growing up, my bedroom was in the basement next to the boiler room.”

“Of the house in Queen Anne?”

She shakes her head. “No, our main house was out on the water. It’s not part of the will because it was gifted directly to my brother and sister before he died. The bullshit story about me being cut out was done by the media, leaked, but I don’t know how. I can’t imagine anyone who would benefit from such a move. All I know is there was no deathbed change to the will.”