8
Charlie
I trudged through the office doors slowly, feeling angry, disgusted, and depressed all at once. It had been a long and trying day, and I had reached my emotional capacity limit around two hours ago. When everything was said and done, four other couples had been discovered to be hiding illegally trafficked children inside of their homes. The fallout had been catastrophic. Neighbors who’d had no idea about what was going on and who had at first been angry at us for disrupting the peace of their neighborhood had quickly turned against the guilty couples, and an angry mob had formed. The police had to deal with arresting the guilty parties, working with social services to get aid for all the children, and keeping the perpetrators from being torn apart by their own furious neighbors. The entire time, Patel, Junior, and I had been in the middle of it all.
The arrested suspects were currently being booked and processed into the local jail, and they’d be transferred over to MBLIS’s custody tomorrow. It was already past five when everything had finally been settled, so we’d decided to push the interrogations until the next day, as it was likely to take a fairly long time to interrogate six couples. By the time we’d gotten back to the office, it was already six, and I was ready to go home.
“There you are!” Fiona said as she walked through the door. “Wallace has been keeping us updated on everything that’s been going on. You were all gone for so long I was getting worried.”
“It was quite a day,” Junior answered. He sounded as exhausted as I felt.
“Oh my goodness, your face,” she said as she approached Junior and lifted her hand to run it gently over the angry red scratch marks across his cheek.
I raised my eyebrows in surprise over how forward the action was, and I wondered if maybe Miranda and I weren’t the only ones fraternizing. Fiona froze as she realized what she was doing and suddenly yanked her hand back in a way that wasn’t subtle at all.
“It’s fine,” Junior said. “One of the suspects came at me with her keys. Anyway, I brought you the Weavers’ phones and laptops. There has to be something on here that will point us in the direction of how they got their hands on Kamya. I asked the police to collect the personal devices of all the other couples as well, but I figured this was a good start.”
“It is,” Fiona nodded. “I’ll get to work right away.”
“I’m gonna go give Wallace a rundown of everything that happened,” I said. I really wanted to just collapse into my chair, but I knew if I did, I wouldn’t want to get back up again.
“I’ll come with you,” Patel said, and we headed into Wallace’s office together. We went through the events of the day in as much detail as we could, and Wallace’s face grew more serious as we spoke.
“This is bigger than I thought it would be,” he admitted when we were finally done speaking. “The best we can hope for is that this was an isolated incident and that the only people involved were the ones arrested today in that neighborhood. However, I think we can all agree that thinking that would be naïve and unrealistic. It’s much more likely that this is a massive operation and that we have only uncovered a small part of it. For now, I’d like you both to go home and get some rest. You’ve done a lot today, but there’s still more we need to learn before we move forward. Tomorrow, we’ll conduct the interrogations and proceed from there. Good work today, agents.”
We said our goodbyes before leaving the office, and I walked back into the bullpen. My desk was still mostly empty, as it had been in our last office. This time, though, I had put up a few pictures of Harry, Eliza, and Amber. As I looked at a picture of her, I couldn’t help but remember the little girl that Patel had pulled out of the cabinet under the sink. She looked like she was around Amber’s age. I felt a renewed jolt of anger course through me, but even more than that, I felt a deep sadness. The thought of Amber being put through what those children had been subjected to was too awful to imagine.
“Hey, now Junior and Charlie are twins,” Miranda called from where she was leaning back in her desk chair, balancing on two legs.
Junior and I both looked at her to see what she was talking about, and she pointed to her left cheek. Right, I’d been pretty severely injured during the bombing at our previous office. The injury had healed, and I, fortunately, hadn’t suffered any damage to my eye, but I had been left with a long, thin scar that spanned from right below my eye to my chin.
“Very funny,” I remarked, and Miranda just stuck her tongue out at me and winked.
“It’s not going to scar,” Junior said, though the nervous tone of his voice made it evident that he was worried it would.
Fiona shook her head and murmured something at him that caused him to smile.
“Don’t worry if it does,” Miranda said with a shrug. “Scars are sexy.” She smirked at me, and I shook my head at how brazen she was being. I could tell she was trying to cheer me up, and I had to admit that it was working.
“Well, I think I’m going to head home,” she said as she stood up from her desk. “I will see you all tomorrow.”
“I think I’ll head out too,” I said as I stood up from my own desk to follow her out the door. She turned to look at me and smirked again once we were both on the other side of the office doors. She could be so obnoxious, but I still smiled as I followed her down
