Fatal Secrets (4 page)

All Dean wanted to do was rattle Jones’s cage. Make him nervous. Force him to make bad decisions. But men like Xavier Jones didn’t rattle easily. The subpoena was just the first step. He
did
keep a record of his illegal finances somewhere; Dean would find it. It’s what he did best.

Having ICE and Homeland Security involved was a problem, but not such a hindrance that Dean couldn’t turn it to his advantage. He needed to make a few calls to neutralize Sonia Knight. She was a hothead who could jeopardize his investigation. Corruption of this magnitude demanded patience and finesse.

Sam Callahan returned with Sonia’s partner and reported that no one was on the property.

“No one?” Dean asked.

“I could have told you that,” Sonia Knight snapped. “We’ve been sitting on this house for two days.”

Dean wanted to ask why, but that would have to wait. “Did you reach his attorney?” he asked Sam.

“Left a message at eleven-thirty when we left Barnhardt’s house.”

“Has his plane landed?”

“What?” Sonia asked.

He raised an eyebrow and said rather mockingly, “You didn’t know he was out of town? I’m surprised.”

She tensed and Dean was almost sorry that he’d rubbed it in, but she’d pissed him off with her not-so-veiled comments about his motivations. He cared more about the people Jones hurt than he wanted to talk about.

“He didn’t take a commercial flight,” she snapped.

“He has a private plane. Learjet.”

“I know that.” But it was clear from her expression that she thought it was still at the airfield. Which made him think she had some bad intel. Or was ICE running with too much work and too few resources, like the FBI?

“We’re on the same team,” Dean said, extending the olive branch. “I want to compare notes. But right now we need to prepare for his arrival.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s after oh one hundred hours. When did he land?” He’d been told Jones was going to be back between eleven-thirty and midnight, which was why he had delayed arriving by an hour.

“Twenty minutes ago.”

Sonia put her finger to her ear, listening. Dean waited, hoping she would share the information without being asked. Any branch of Homeland Security could be dicey to work with, but ICE used to be independent, and while the FBI didn’t have the best relations with their sister agency, Dean had never encountered any problems himself.

Sonia said, “Jones’s car turned off the highway. ETA four minutes.”

“You really do have a—” he stopped. An idea occurred to him. “Jones knows who you are.” He said it matter-of-factly.

“Of course he does, I’ve been in his face enough.”

“Right now I’m serving a limited warrant for specific financial documentation.”

“Why would—”

“I don’t have time to explain, but I’m asking you to trust me. Take your partner and go back to your surveillance post. You’re entrenched right now; we didn’t make your team anywhere on the property.”

A hint of a cocky smile emerged on her lips. “Of course you didn’t.”

He gave her an appreciative nod. “You train your people well. I’m asking you to let me serve the subpoena and shake Jones’s confidence. Then we’ll leave, and you monitor comings and goings, see who Jones taps when he’s on the hot seat. Do you have a wiretap?”

“Do you?”

“Dean,” Sam Callahan interrupted. “Three minutes.”

“We’ll meet at the FBI office at noon,” Dean said. “Okay?”

“We’ll meet at my office at one,” Sonia said. “Full disclosure.”

He extended his hand to seal the agreement and smiled. “My office. One is fine with me. I have too much paper and equipment to transport downtown, and believe me, you’re going to want to take a look at it.”

Her hand was soft and cold, but her grip strong. “Don’t disappoint me.” She reached into her pocket and dropped an extra-strong magnet into his hand, then gestured toward the security cameras around the house. “The security office is in a room off the kitchen. The door is unmarked. If you don’t have a warrant for the tapes, you might want to erase them—though I don’t really care one bit if Jones knows I’m on his ass.”

Sonia didn’t want to walk away, but Hooper’s identity
threw her off her game. She hoped she hadn’t given away her surprise when the Fibbie gave his full name.
Dean Hooper
.

She had already started down the porch steps when she remembered the reason she was here in the first place. She ran back up the stairs and leaned close to Hooper’s ear. He smelled of expensive cologne and leather. Voice low, she said, “I’m looking for an Hispanic teenager, a thirteen-year-old female. She was kidnapped from Argentina two weeks ago, and I have good reason to believe that Jones knows where she is. If you see or hear anything—”

Sam said, “Sixty seconds.”

Sonia caught Dean’s eye. He’d understood. Motioning for Trace to follow, she ran down the stairs and stayed low to the ground, in the shadows, until she was out of sight.

Dean Hooper
. She hadn’t made the connection when he had first introduced himself as Hooper. Agent? An understatement if she’d ever heard one.

Everyone in the business for more than a couple years knew Assistant FBI Director Dean Hooper. The FBI’s own Eliot Ness. He’d said her reputation preceded her? She had nothing on Hooper, and under any other circumstances she may have had a fan-girl moment and asked about some of his more interesting cases.

She didn’t like that a fed with such a high rank was on Jones’s ass, because while she wanted to nail him, she needed more than his tenure in prison. She needed information, and her man inside was still working. If Hooper acted too soon, she’d lose names and files and more people—women and children—would disappear or die. What was he doing in the field, anyway? She assumed he
worked out of Washington; if he was in Sacramento or San Francisco, she would have known.

Sonia didn’t partner well. She thrived in her authority and command of her office, but trusting a partner only resulted in disaster. She called Trace her partner, but she was technically his supervisor, so she didn’t have to worry about him making decisions without consulting her, or going behind her back to plan an operation that could get agents hurt or worse.

But Dean Hooper had looked her in the eye with a confidence that spoke of unwavering honesty, and she wanted to trust him. She had no choice, really. He’d blindsided her with not only his arrival but his identity. And if Xavier Jones thought that the FBI and ICE had made a major connection in his activities, he’d cut his losses and run.

She’d give Hooper tonight.

Sonia heard her team report that Jones’s black Escalade had pulled to a stop in the driveway. She and Trace sprinted to their original position and she grabbed her field binoculars to observe the scene at the house.

“What’s going on?” Trace asked her.

“A minute.” She watched Dean Hooper on the porch, standing next to Sam Callahan. Dean was an inch shorter, but with a far greater presence, for lack of a better word. She watched as nothing happened for a full minute. Then the driver got out.

Sonia’s mouth went dry. The coffee she’d been drinking all night churned painfully in her gut, and she froze, staring. She had to be wrong. It had been years since she’d seen Charlie Cammarata; how could she instantly recognize him?

As the driver closed his door, she saw part of Charlie’s
familiar arm-length tattoo. But her mind filled in the rest of the intricate black cross with vivid, blood-red letters dripping down the center:

La vendetta è mia
.

Vengeance is mine.

What was the disgraced, renegade ex-ICE agent doing working for a known criminal?

What are you up to, Charlie?

Charlie opened the back door of the Escalade and Xavier Jones, the devil himself, stepped out. Sonia had half a mind to put him in her sights and kill him. That she also wanted to put a bullet in Charlie scared her. She thought she’d gotten over his betrayal. She thought she’d forgiven him.

The urge was short-lived—going to prison wouldn’t help them find Maya or any of the buyers Jones supplied with a steady stream of young foreign women. She needed the bastard alive in order to identify and arrest every damn one of his business associates. She would go through their files one by one and track down every woman they’d sold into sex slavery or forced labor and give them a future. The ones who were still alive.

She watched Jones walk to his front porch, and his confident stride and arrogant half-smile told her Hooper’s arrival wasn’t a surprise. Sonia noted that Charlie acted like a bodyguard, imposing and fearsome. Greg Vega was there, too, and she sighed in relief. She’d been worried about her spy, knowing the huge risk he had taken in contacting her. But he was safe, at least for now. She hoped he had something solid for her so she could get him and his pregnant wife into a safe house.

Charlie glared at the feds while Callahan handed Jones the warrant. Did Callahan or Hooper or any of
the other longtime agents recognize him? Probably not. Charlie’s punishment had been swift, and while it hadn’t involved prison time, he’d lost everything. As well he should have. Before his fall from grace, he’d been primarily undercover, and few agents outside of the then-INS knew his name, let alone his face.

Charlie was here because he had his own vendetta against Jones or someone close to Jones, Sonia was certain. Charlie did nothing without revenge as the motive. It didn’t matter if it was his revenge or that of others—at least, that’s how it had been in the past. But now? Sonia didn’t know. She hadn’t seen him in ten years. Was he the feds’ contact? It made sense. How Hooper knew about the travel, when they left the airport. But Sonia didn’t see a man like Charlie Cammarata giving anything to the FBI. He’d never had an ounce of respect for that agency; he’d barely tolerated his own employer.

Dammit, she wished she could hear what they were saying! Sitting on the sidelines was excruciating, almost as painful as giving up control—and to the FBI, no less. She hoped she wasn’t making a huge mistake giving Hooper the lead.

“Dammit, Charlie, what are you doing with Jones?” she muttered.

“Who?” Trace asked, looking through his own field goggles. “Who’s Charlie?”

Trace had been in high school when Charlie was fired. He wouldn’t have known him. “Charlie Cammarata,” she said reluctantly. “My partner when I was working out of El Paso.”

She breathed easier when Trace didn’t comment, thinking he didn’t know about what happened. Her relief was short-lived.

“Why is a former INS agent working for Jones?”

Trace sounded like Charlie had gone to the dark side, become one of the bad guys. And while Charlie was no saint, he wasn’t trafficking in humans. “If I had to guess, he’s working a job.”

“For us?”

“No.” For himself.

“We have to report it.”

“I know.”

“I can do it,” he said quietly. “Considering your history with—”

“I’ll do it,” she snapped. Trace didn’t know half the history she had with Charlie Cammarata. Most of the closed-door disciplinary hearing ten years ago with the Office of Professional Responsibility was still classified or sealed, and Sonia would make sure it remained so as long as she breathed.

But Charlie’s involvement with Jones was one big-ass fucking wrench in the works.

Towering
was the only word Dean Hooper could think of to describe the Jones residence. With three-story ceilings, a sweeping staircase, and an excessively large great room with floor-to-ceiling windows, during the day it would have a view of Devils Lake and the San Joaquin Valley beyond. The decor was dark, rustic, and minimal, with a cloying scent of Pine Sol and wood polish. Not a speck of dust or a cobweb in sight.

Jones had his fingers in many, many pies outside of his consulting firm. He owned enough property to make Donald Trump jealous, and enough toys to send up red flags to the IRS. Had Dean not already been looking at Jones after taking down Thomas Daniels and finding Jones’s name in Daniels’s records, the IRS would have launched their own investigation. But Jones had been audited twice in the last eight years, and the IRS could not find anything illegal.

His longtime friend, a U.S. Treasury Department analyst, had told him, “My gut tells me the guy is dirty, but every path I follow somehow ends up legitimate. I’ve been working on this for months and I’m no further along. You’re the whiz kid. Maybe you can find what I’m missing.”

Dean didn’t always like his reputation; it put him in a
place with few friends and lots of people waiting for him to screw up. But he did see patterns of illegal behavior in the numbers that others missed, including computers. It was the human element. Putting the information together in different ways and factoring in human psychology, coupled with the personality of his target. That experience, and intuition, couldn’t be replicated by a computer.

This was the first time Dean had met Xavier Jones in person, and he wasn’t wasting a moment. Already he had better insight into his character and personality. Clean to a fault. Sanitary. Uptight that strangers were in his house touching his things. Extremely confident that the FBI would find nothing incriminating, irritated and arrogant at the same time. There was nothing personal—no photos, diplomas, or awards of recognition. If he had any of these things, they were hidden from guests.

“I’m happy to assist in your investigation, Agent Hooper,” Jones said, “but I’m afraid you aren’t going to find what you’re looking for.”

“What am I looking for?”

Jones shrugged, his smirk arrogant. “Who knows? A businessman does well, and the government thinks I don’t pay my fair share. I can assure you, Agent Hooper, my tax returns are squeaky clean.”

And that, Dean knew, was his biggest obstacle. As far as he could figure, Jones was paying his taxes. Jones’s main business enterprise was his consulting firm—he lobbied both state and federal governments on behalf of a huge number of clients, mostly the big-money players like city government, Indian gaming, and labor.