“The city?”
“No, the man.”
“No. Why would I?”
“You’ve never looked into your fiancé’s business? Didn’t you meet him at work?”
“What? How do you know that?”
“I know whatever I need to know,” he sneered at her, finding great disdain for her defense of the garbage she was set to marry without even knowing who he was. Of course, he supposed that was to be expected from a man’s bride to be.
“I worked for a different company that he did business with, not for his company.”
“His company doesn’t exist.”
“What? That’s absurd. I’ve been there. There are a huge staff and a corporate office.”
“It’s a shell. Every invoice, every service offered, every dollar earned...all are covers for a number of illegal mafia operations.”
“I don’t believe you,” she replied.
“Sidney Austrelia is the owner and CEO of GunderTech. That name, it sounds like a stupid name for someone to make up, right? That’s what makes it so clever. Use a name so ridiculous that no one would think you could make up something so dumb. The truth is there is no man named Sidney Austrelia. There is only a Ciaron Doyle, and he heads up one of the largest mafia families in Boston. They’ve been here for years, laundering money for overseas enterprises mostly, nothing that was any skin off my teeth—but they recently began operations in the area that made them a bit more visible to the naked eye.”
“No. That’s not Ciaron at all.”
Fergus could see the doubt in her eyes and he could smell her fear, not of him, but that what he was saying was true. He believed her when she said she didn’t know, but she had to have wondered why she always traveled with a bodyguard and driver. His guys had dispatched both before taking her. They’d soon be fish food at the bottom of a nearby secluded lake.
“Have you seen the news lately? Do people like you bother to read anything about how the common folk out there live? We’ve got a big drug problem that’s cropped up in recent months. Bad heroin on the streets. People keeling over from the bad shit your fiancé’s goons put out for them to shoot up.”
“No,” she said. “No.”
Fergus’s anger grew as she shook her head, refusing to believe her precious meal-ticket lover was capable of such atrocities. He stood up and walked over to her, grabbing each of the arms of her chair and picking it up slightly off the floor before slamming it back down. He might not want to hurt her, but he had no qualms about shaking her up with a huge dose of reality.
“His guys are snatching up women off the streets and selling them like cattle. Human trafficking, Eimear. Mothers, gullible immigrants, even teenagers...kids, Eimear! It doesn’t matter to him. I don’t take kindly to a man who prostitutes women and children. I won’t have that sort of shite in my town.”
He let go of the chair, shoving it slightly backward so that it clattered a bit as it resettled. She looked horrified, but whether it was from the show of force or his words, he couldn’t be sure.
“He wouldn’t do that,” she said, her words barely audible this time.
Fergus got up and walked over to the table nearby, snatching up a folder he’d gotten from a friendly within the local police precinct. He walked over to her, pulling photo after photo out of it and tossing them at her as she recited names and ages. Thirty women, more than half of them below the age of legal consent, in the last three months alone.
“You can’t know it was him,” she said after a long silence.
“But that’s where you are wrong. I do know it was him. I’ve already taken out a good bit of the chain beneath him. That’s how I found him. Not that long ago, a man sat right where you are, spilling his guts to save his own wife and child. Everything he said checked out, and it led us to your fiancé, Ciaron Doyle, AKA Sidney Austrelia.”
Eimear looked about her uncomfortably, her fear and disgust now readily visible on her face. She looked him in the eye as she spoke.
“If you know this, then why did you take me and not him? How are you any better than he is, snatching an innocent woman off the street and tying me to a chair in some shithole industrial warehouse,” she spat, glancing around. “I’m guessing we’re in Dorchester, down by the railroad tracks.”
Fergus was caught off guard. She knew pretty much exactly where she was. It didn’t seem like a girl of her standing would be familiar with the darker sides of a place like Dorchester, but she was. He realized that while he was doing his homework on Doyle, he’d neglected to do much on her. Once he’d discovered the engagement, he’d merely latched on to it, which he knew now was a mistake. It wasn’t like him to overlook details, but he now found himself wondering who she might be.