29
Eric
As I walk into the back office of the homeless shelter my gaze lands on the body of the head organizer lying on the ground with fresh blood oozing from his head.
This place is the source of where the girls were coming from. The moment I knew human trafficking on such a large scale was happening I knew I’d have to hit up all the places you could access girls who essentially no one would miss if they slipped under the radar.
St. Jude’s is one of the biggest charities who take care of the adolescent population in L.A. When I looked into their systems the other day things looked off and that’s when I knew to look a little deeper. I was right.
It’s been a week since the incident at the docks. This is the only thing we’ve managed to get. Everyone else has been split up doing different things. While I’ve been stuck on the same shit task of trying to track the device.
Sometimes it’s hard to live up to my name because people expect me to work magic. I mostly can, but every now and again I come up against shit like this and it’s like asking me to move the sun when it’s supposed to be where it is.
Borya and Oleg are standing to the side by the computer. The files on there are my reason for being here. They told me it was password protected and the dead asshole on the ground wouldn’t allow them access. I won’t need a password to retrieve whatever he didn’t want anybody to see. Chances are it’s illegal shit outside of what we need but I’m taking anything that will help me get closer to Robert and Micah.
“Just waiting for the cleanup crew, Boss. They’re stuck in traffic,” Borya explains casting a sideways glance at the body.
“We got this for you, though.” Oleg hands me a foolscap folder. “It contains the profiles of one hundred girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, all virgins and runaways or orphans.”
“Fuck,” I rasp.
This is good though. By screwing with Micah and Robert’s plans as much as possible, it draws them to me. I look in the folder and pull out an invoice for a hundred thousand dollars. That’s how much my dead friend on the floor was going to collect for this harvesting.
He’s actually written the word harvesting at the bottom of the invoice. I gaze at him, and he has that fatherly appearance but it’s a mask. When men like him look like that it’s a guise to fool people.
Motherfucker.
“He was going to transport the girls tonight, two trucks have gone already,” Oleg states. “The men have followed and tracked it to a house on the coast.”
“Go and take charge. I’ll finish up here with Borya,” I instruct, and he leaves.
I glance at Borya and note the drained expression on his face. I’ve had them working diligently on the streets while I’ve been working on the tracker.
“How is she?” Borya asks.
He’s talking about Summer.
“I don’t think she’s okay, but I hope she will be soon.” There’s no point pretending she means nothing to me. I’d just be trying to fool myself.
“Well let’s hope we can get down to the bottom of this. I’m sure getting Robert will help her move on.”
“Yeah.” Getting Robert is supposed to help us all move on and moving on means letting her go.
I know I should concern myself with getting to that part because that’s the hard part, not this that we’re doing. I just wonder what she’ll do by herself. I don’t want her to run back to Monaco or go anywhere where she can get in trouble again.
She has no money, no job, and realistically no one. It’s cruel, but I don’t want her anywhere near her father but that’s not my call. The deal was to let her go when this was over. Nothing more is supposed to happen to us. It’s just that she’s grown on me, especially over the last few days.
I didn’t want to leave her, but I can’t expect my men to do everything and when I’m called, I have to go. They needed to hack into the files here.
“I’m going to take the hard drive and look at his files at home,” I say, and Borya nods. “Did he say anything useful?”
“No, like everybody else he had limited information. I’m getting sick of these motherfuckers. Pity we can’t find something to end this once and for all. I’ve never come up against anybody I couldn’t find.”
“Me neither.”
This is perhaps our last lead. The first meeting we know of is taking place in the States in two and half weeks and even then, we don’t have an actual location of where to get them. It’s looking like it will be here in L.A., though.
I also figured they must have some other email correspondence we don’t know about. Bernardo said they contact Micah and Robert by email, but we haven’t seen anything come through the email address we have for anybody since we’ve been monitoring it.