Snake Skin (18 page)

"Nice. She put a lot of time into this."

He blushed again. "Yeah. Told you she had
talent. I don't know why she wasted it on Vixen."

"Think maybe that was her way of standing up
for herself? Battling the bullies?"

"Maybe. But seems like creeping around in
shadows and going off on your own isn't the best way to do
things."

"So, did she win? The Shadow World
crown?"

His shoulder twitched in that heart-breaking
almost-shrug. "Dunno. After Draco was killed, I was locked out of
the game. Maestro wouldn't let me back into the site. A few days
later was the last I heard from her. That's when we talked about
meeting in person, when she said she needed my help. But she never
said with what."

Lucy considered this. "If I put you in touch
with my tech guys, would you let them access your email exchanges
with Ashley?"

"Sure, anything to help." He rolled the
chair back from the desk, met her gaze with a sorrowful expression.
"Guess I let her down. I should have been a better friend, should
have been there for her."

This boy had done more than either of
Ashley's parents, that was for certain. Lucy laid her hand over
his. "I think you were her best friend, Bobby. Her champion."

His hand jerked below hers, sending the
chair rumbling backwards. "Fat lot of good I was. Please find her,
help her. You can do that, can't you?"

"I'm trying my best."

Chapter 16

Saturday 6:38 pm

The Pittsburgh federal building was a
concrete and glass stump of a cube located just east of the
Steelers training facilities on Carson Street. Burroughs had never
been inside before, feds usually kept to themselves.

One more thing that set Guardino apart, he
thought as she chauffeured him through security and got him a
visitor's pass. He had to leave his weapon in a lock box, but that
was to be expected.

They took the elevator up to the second
floor. Bleached oak doors, all closed, lined the hallway. Most of
the doors were labeled as Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force. There
were no names of the individuals who worked behind the blank doors,
as if they were interchangeable cogs in Homeland Security's vast
machine.

Guardino led him to the far end of the floor
to a closed door that read: Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement, High
Technology Computer Crimes Task Force, Innocent Images National
Initiative, and Operation Predator.

"What are you guys, the red haired
stepkids?" he asked as she swiped a key card to unlock it.

She shrugged. "They like the press we
generate and give me the people I need to get the job done, so I
can't complain."

They stepped into an antechamber with a
secretary's desk, vacant given that it was Saturday. Behind the
desk was a list of all the agencies working the
multi-jurisdictional task forces under Guardino's command. Talk
about your over achieving. There were at least two dozen. No wonder
Guardino was so good at marshaling the troops and
multi-tasking.

She opened another secure door and they were
standing in a short hallway. Hand-lettered signs pointed in one
direction for Innocent Images Initiative, another for Operation
Predator. The door before them also had a hand-made sign but this
one was cross-stitched and framed. In delicate, old-fashioned style
letters it proclaimed:

Abandon hope all ye mofucking perverts.

Below the statement was an embroidered
cheerful yellow smiley face.

"One of my guys is Army Reserves. He brought
that back from Iraq, said cross-stitching made the down time go
faster."

Burroughs chuckled at the dark humor. To the
side of the door, someone had stolen a caution sign and plastered
across it:
Warning, illegal activities in progress. Enter at
your own risk.

Burroughs arched an eyebrow at her. "Take it
this place isn't included in the nickel tour."

She laughed, a low, rumbling throaty sound
that shook her entire body like she really meant it. God, did she
have any idea how sexy it was to find a woman who knew how to
really laugh instead of merely twitter or giggle as if laughing
were against the law?

"No one except us comes back here. Not if
they can help it." She unlocked the door and they entered a large
open room that took up the rear corner of the building. Tinted
windows lined two sides, a glass walled office sat in one corner,
and the rest of the area was filled with workstations and more
computers than he'd ever seen outside of the time he and Kim had
taken the boys to Florida and they'd toured Cape Canaveral's
Mission Control.

"Wow. You could run the country from
here."

"Not quite. Most of these machines aren't
hooked into any government network. We only use them for dirty
work—going on-line."

"Playing games with the bad guys. How many
active cases do you have going at a time?"

They stepped into the glass-walled office.
It wasn't large, but it felt spacious. Probably because she had her
desk jammed back in the corner, leaving room to move freely around
a small conference table and chairs.

"SAFE has 127, I'm developing several dozen
more with Innocent Images—when we're ready to issue warrants, the
SAFE squad will handle those as well as any from Operation Predator
that turn federal. We've a few multi-jurisdictional task forces
running, including some international ones."

"Shit, how do you keep all that in your
head?"

"I don't. Told you, I have good people
working for me. I just set them loose and try to stay out of their
way. Hardest part is we have almost two hundred cases pending
trial—I'm dreading juggling the schedule once we get court
dates."

"Two hundred? But you've only been here
three months."

She leaned against her desk, which matched
the rest of the decor: bleached wood, very modern. Except for the
small tropical jungle she had growing along the sunny side. Not
your grandmother's shriveled African violets, Guardino had
cascading vines with delicate white and purple flowers that smelled
better than any perfume, several orchids, and a few dessert-like
plants with weird-shaped flowers.

"Blame Taylor," she said. "His first case,
he infiltrated a big web-ring, was able to nail one hundred
thirty-one targets. Of course, word has spread, so we're not likely
to get that lucky again anytime soon."

He looked around. The obligate flag and
portraits of the president and the FBI director lined one corner,
other than that there was no vanity wall—unless you counted the
photo of Guardino with a man and a girl white-water rafting through
rapids. That photo along with one of the three of them, smiling and
dressed up for a Christmas card, were the only personal items on
her desk.

"You got lucky reeling in those three
Canadians," he reminded her. "Are a lot of your suspects
international?" It'd be nice to think that all the perverts had
been chased north across the border and far away from his kids, but
he knew that was a pipe dream.

"You'd be surprised. Last year, while I was
still in DC, we closed down a major sex trade-drug operation that
was centered here in Pittsburgh."

That brought him up short. "You're kidding.
Human trafficking here? C'mon, this is Pittsburgh."

"We worked with DEA, ICE, and Interpol,
tracing Ecstasy from the Netherlands to Marseilles where some of it
was used to purchase women from Belarus and the Ukraine. Then the
drugs and women were shipped to the port of Savannah, the drugs
distributed all over the eastern seaboard, while the women were
sent here."

He sat on the corner of her desk, taking
care not to upset the plants. "How come I didn't ever hear anything
about this?"

"The women were kept in a production studio
two blocks away from Pittsburgh Police Bureau Headquarters on the
North Side. They were being used for internet porn—the highest
bidder could script whatever he wanted done to them and view it on
his computer." She opened up a filing cabinet and handed him a
folder filled with photos. "That's just a taste of what some of
them suffered at the request of the site's patrons."

He flipped the file open and almost gagged
on the bacon-cheeseburger he'd had earlier. He swallowed hard and
slapped the file back onto her desk.

She took it, held it gently as if it were
something precious. "Off duty officers were guarding the production
studio and the women, and we found several prominent police
administrators involved. So we went in quietly, grabbed everything
and made our arrests. A few people we turned, are using them to
work our way back to the guys running the show."

Burroughs digested that. There had been
several surprise retirements last year, but scuttlebutt had
attributed them to pressure from the union and a change in the
political climate. "Why didn't you guys make this public? It would
have been a major media event."

"I prefer to work behind the scenes. John
Greally, my SAC agrees. And with the involvement of the police
department, it didn't seem in the public's best interest to
undermine their confidence. DEA has some guys undercover,
infiltrating the Netherlands drug ring, so they didn't want to draw
any attention either. The ICE guys wanted to grab the headlines,
but since they screwed up, they kept quiet."

"Customs screwed up? How?"

"We had eleven girls in that facility. My
agents secured it, began evidence recovery and handed the girls
over to Customs. By the time they made it to the detention
facility, there were only ten girls. One of them, Vera Tzasiris was
missing."

"So they lost one. After what they'd been
through, can you blame her for not trusting the authorities, taking
off if she had a chance? What happened to the other girls?"

"After they testify, they'll be offered
asylum here. Until then they remain in detention."

He shook his head. "Seems kind of unfair.
Locking them up, I mean."

"Better than what they could expect if we
hadn't gotten them out of there." She removed one small photograph
before returning the file to its locked drawer. "Still, I feel bad
about the missing girl, Vera. I took her statement myself before we
turned her over to ICE. I promised her that she was out of danger,
the worse was over. It'd be nice to find her someday. Make sure she
was all right."

She didn't meet his gaze but he got her
meaning when she slid him the three by five photo. It was a head
shot, the kind you see on dating sites or used by actresses. The
girl in it was in her early twenties, dark hair, a wide, toothy
smile that reminded him of Julia Roberts.

He admired Guardino's pragmatism and the
fact that it didn't totally crowd out her humanity. And it felt
good that she trusted him not to betray her confidence. He had a
feeling her attitude of putting victims first didn't always go over
so well here in federal country where the name of the game was
cover your ass. "I'll keep my eye out. See what I can do.
Unofficially."

She nodded her thanks. "I've done all I can
through our channels, but no one at HQ wants her brought in, too
many mistakes might be made public." She glanced out the glass
walls of her office. Several men and women were clustered around a
desk brimming over with computer equipment. "Well hell, what's
going on now?"

Lucy stepped out of her office just in time
to prevent a civil war.

Or more precisely a public lynching. The
bullpen—a large open room filled with moveable desks and
workstations—was currently configured into a horseshoe centering
around Taylor's desk, brimming over with computer equipment.
Standing beside Taylor was Fletcher, the ICE surveillance tech.
Surrounding him was the rest of the High Tech Computer Crimes Task
Force.

"You can't disconnect from the write-blocker
while you're running EnCase," Taylor was saying.

"Besides," another H-Tech member lectured
Fletcher, "we only work from images, clones, not the original. What
were you thinking?"

The rest of the cyber-warriors voiced
similar sentiments. Fletcher was turning red, holding his hands up
against the hoards attacking him.

Lucy stepped into the fray. "What's the
problem, gentlemen?"

The H-Tech team backed off, leaving her
facing Taylor and Fletcher. Taylor slanted a look and a scowl at
Fletcher, then shook his head. "Nothing, LT. I've got everything
under control."

She had her doubts about that, but let it
slide.

"I appreciate your trying to help," she told
Fletcher, leading him away from the nest of wires and electronics
that had overrun Taylor's desk.

He looked back over his shoulder with a
tight-lipped frown.

"I was setting up for tomorrow and they said
you needed help with the Ashley Yeager case." His voice was taut
and she wondered what she'd missed prior to her arrival.

Lucy nodded to Burroughs. "I'll be back in a
minute."

She led Fletcher to his workstation. She and
her team were the lead on Operation Honeypot but since ICE would be
involved in the post-arrest negotiations with the Canadian
authorities, the ICE Special Agent in Charge, Grimwald, had wanted
his people involved throughout.

So far, Fletcher had been an asset, even if
he was a bit eager. Agent-wannabee, she'd pegged him as, the way he
hovered and volunteered for any little assignment during their
briefings. Just like Taylor had been before he made it into
Quantico.

"It was nice of you to give up your weekend.
Especially after working so hard this morning."

He shrugged and inclined his head in a
self-deprecating bounce. "I felt bad about the girl. Just wanted to
help. I didn't realize you guys follow a different protocol than we
do."

"Hey, no problem. Listen, we need to get
started early tomorrow on Operation Honeypot. Why don't you head
home, spend some time with your family?"