“Drugs?”
I shook my head. “None of her friends mentioned drugs, and I didn’t see any evidence any of them are using. A little weed, maybe, but she wouldn’t need a late-night meeting to buy that.” There had been one weed shop I’d driven by. But she didn’t seem the type.
None of the men I had connected her with lived between her home and the school, either. A new client?
After breakfast, I checked my monitor and reviewed what the camera I’d left at Janice Iranski’s apartment had captured. Martin Johansson had showed up around ten in the evening and used a key to enter. He left at two-thirty in the morning.
I studied him. He was a large man, overweight and easily over six feet. He would dwarf the girl I met. I could see where Johansson would give a woman the creeps. He wasn’t attractive at all. Power and wealth were the only things I could see that he had to offer. At seventy-nine, he looked his age, which was unusual for a mage. We normally aged much slower than norms. My grandmother was one hundred ten, and she still looked to be in her early fifties.
Not knowing what else to do, I sent my consciousness into the datanet and searched out Johansson’s accounts again. Kirsten had asked me to describe how I did that, what it ‘looked like,’ and how it felt. I floundered trying to do so. A stream of golden particles floating in rivers and streams of color. Streaks of color. Buzzes and tingles and occasionally electric shocks if I came too close to some kinds of intrusion-protection devices.
I had no idea how I translated that into thoughts and numbers and words. I had spoken with a couple of other magiteks about the phenomena, and they were as clueless as I was about how it all worked. We did know that only about one magitek in a hundred could do it, and all of us that I knew about had a certain type of very expensive implant. An implant designed by my father. Needless to say, none of us, including my dad, had ever officially reported the ability. Magiteks faced enough suspicion without the authorities knowing we could crack banks and top-level military networks.
I quickly discarded the accounts associated with Johansson’s legitimate businesses, and those of his wife and children. I found the account through which he paid the apartment rent and his mistress’s expenses.
The personal accounts had some interesting expenditures, but the money sources were legitimate. That wasn’t what I was looking for.
Three accounts were totally disconnected from his personal and business interests. Outside money was deposited to the accounts, only one receiving a relatively fixed amount on a regular basis.
I traced the payments into that account to an account associated with a casino located in North Africa. It supplied a nice monthly income, and he siphoned it into his mistress’s account and a few others. I had no idea why a casino run by an Arabic criminal enterprise would be paying Johansson, but I knew that Muslims were forbidden to gamble. The truly interesting thing was that half of that money was forwarded to Ashvial, the demon lord.
Turning to the second account, I followed the sources to a trucking company, a shipping company, and several businesses located along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. If I was a suspicious kind of person, I might have guessed it had to do with smuggling of some type.
I struck gold on the third account. Among the businesses paying money into it was one owned by Ashvial. Among those receiving payments from the account was the vampire who owned the BDSM dungeon I had visited. Money had also gone to Fredo several times. Some of the payments, going both in and out, were huge.
Johansson was involved in human trafficking. Not just involved, but he was a major player, and he was in deep with the demon.
I ran a separate search in the police database on the name Janice Iranski and turned up a woman named Jovana Iranski, a drug addict who had been arrested several times for various offenses. She also had a record with Social Services for neglecting her daughter, Janice. All records of Janice ended about a year before, as did Jovana’s problems with eviction and arrests for drug sales.
Going back into the data stream, I searched Johansson’s account and found payments to someone named Camille Cordero. That was the name of the social worker assigned to the Iranski family.
It didn’t take long to put the pattern together. Young girls in Cordero’s caseload almost always disappeared from official records, and the cases against the parents were closed.
But how did that tie into Sarah Benning’s disappearance?
Chapter 17
All of the Hundred were rich. The families that were considered the Ten were the richest and the most powerful. Their founders were such strong mages that they had risen to the top and established control of a huge chunk of the world.
Johansson, I discovered, was one of the richest men in the Hundred, and one of the most low-key. Considering where a lot of his money was coming from, that made sense. I figured that half of his wealth came from illegal enterprises, and as far as I could tell, no one suspected. That required a lot of intelligence.
No one would blink an eye if I told them that Ashvial was involved in criminal dealings. He was a demon. Everyone assumed demons were criminals. It wasn’t just that they had a different morality than humans, they didn’t even have the concept of morality. Vampires were predators who fed on humans. The Fae, especially elves and dwarves, considered humans to be inferior. The only reason any Rifters bothered to give lip service to human laws was because we outnumbered them so badly. Some people maintained that it was our superior technology, but considering their magik and how difficult demons were to kill, I doubted that technology had much to do
