Fatal Secrets

ship going through Panama with captives from eastern South America. You know that.” And Sonia had had nightmares for months after just hearing his voice. She’d felt weak and stupid for letting the past hurt her. Why couldn’t she just forget? But seeing Charlie today was already stirring up the awful memories. Ten years was a long time; it should be enough time to get over nearly dying.

It’s not as simple as death.

“I didn’t know the FBI had an open investigation on Jones.” Toni sounded as ticked off about it as Sonia had been when she first saw the Fibbies roll on scene.

“Neither did I, but I think this goes way high up the ladder. The agent in charge is Dean Hooper.”

“Assistant Director Dean Hooper?”

“The one and only, and Sam Callahan-he’s the SSA in charge of white-collar crimes-he’s answering to Hooper. Not only is it highly unusual, I don’t remember ever hearing about an A.D. in the field serving warrants.”

“Hooper’s an anomaly,” Toni said. “We have jurisdiction here. Do you want me to knock heads together and find out what’s going on?”

“I’d love it, but that’s not going to help nail Jones. I’m going to find out what Hooper has. If Jones has been playing with his books and we can prove it, maybe that’ll give me the leverage to make a deal. Names, routes, places. We can do heavy damage to the human trafficking business in the western U.S. if I can entice Jones to cooperate.” Sonia didn’t want to cut any deals with that bastard, but she had to look at the bigger picture. Either way, Jones would go to prison.

“I like it. You have my support.”

“What I’m really worried about,” Sonia continued, “are the Fibbies coming in wanting to make a big splash. The economy sucks, and politicians are always looking for scapegoats. Taking down a rich tax evader like Jones gives them headlines and crowing rights. And you know damn well the FBI wants those headlines to justify their existence and their budget.” Homeland Security, and ICE as a major investigative agency, took care of potentially deadly situations quietly and out of the prying eyes of the media. The public knew little of what ICE and other agencies had thwarted not only now, after 9/11, but before.

“I’ll make some calls-about Hooper’s investigation and about Cammarata. Quietly. No need to get feathers ruffled unless we are prepared to pluck them.”

“I’ll let you know what Hooper has and we’ll go from there.”

“I’ll back you up, Sonia, but let me be the bad guy. You know I love you and you’re my favorite agent, but you’re impulsive, and your temper is going to get you in trouble.” Again.

“Understood. Thanks, Toni. And let me know what you learn about Charlie as soon as possible. If he’s in this on his own, I have to get him out. He could screw up our investigation big-time.”

“You certainly don’t have to tell me Cammarata is dangerous. Are you prepared to arrest him?”

The pastry she’d scarfed down on her way to the office swam uncomfortably in the pool of coffee sloshing in her stomach. “Absolutely. I’ll do anything to protect the integrity of this case. I’m not about to let Jones walk free on a technicality.”

CHAPTER FIVE

At FBI headquarters Dean Hooper coordinated the organization of evidence they’d seized from Xavier Jones’s house that morning. He had nearly the entire white-collar crimes team working on analyzing every piece of paper and computer file, but he took the one thing he really wanted back to his desk. With everyone else on his team in the conference room or out in the field, he was alone.

Dean turned the day planner over in his hands. It was a half-size seven-ring executive planner, one day per page, covered in black leather. Pages could be removed or inserted as needed. It was in the seemingly innocuous details of Jones’s daily activities that Dean would find the path leading to hard evidence and, ultimately, a conviction. Everything he had now was circumstantial. Dean needed solid proof.

Jones was meticulous, and judging from how he reacted to agents going through his things, he was likely obsessive-compulsive. He practically had a coronary when Dean moved a vase an inch off-center. Jones strode over to the table and put the vase back dead center, perfectly symmetrical.

Oh, yeah, the guy was anal to the nth degree.

Technically, Dean didn’t have a warrant for the day planner, but when he looked through it at the house he noted that Jones listed all his bank account numbers and meetings he had with his accountant. That put the planner under “financial” in Dean’s book, so he seized it.

Jones wouldn’t be so dumb as to write down anything blatantly illegal, but he would have a schedule of his meetings and within the meetings, and the empty spaces, there would be a pattern. Next, he would check the planner against Jones’s known whereabouts and determine if there were any codes in the seemingly innocuous content. In addition, if specific meetings coincided with seemingly legitimate bank deposits or withdrawals, Dean could look at those entities to see if he had cause to get a warrant for their records.

Criminals had become extremely sophisticated over the last decade, and money laundering increasingly complex. While many bad guys use the tried-and-true methods-such as putting their cash into small, legitimate businesses to clean it-with the sheer amount of illegal money changing hands, criminals had to develop new and innovative ways to wash large amounts of money and get it circulating.

Dean could have delegated this rather mundane task of inputting Jones’s schedule into a database, but he had better luck identifying patterns and anomalies when he was the one typing the information. His mind processed it differently, he supposed, or maybe it was simply that how he wanted the information logged maximized his ability to recognize patterns. His database was easily sorted by date, dollar amount, entity, account number, or any other field, but Dean preferred analyzing the raw data by date. He’d found that while criminals tried to randomize their activities to avoid detection, they usually set meetings or bank deposits on a regular day or time. Dean had taken down Thomas “Smitty” Daniels because he cleaned his money on the first Monday of every month.

Daniels’s scam was good. Dean wouldn’t have figured it out so quickly without the specific time frame. Daniels was a landlord purported to own dozens of rentals. He deposited rent-in cash-on the first Monday of every month. That was a big red flag. How many landlords had all their tenants pay on time? Dean scoured the property records and found that Daniels was claiming to own property that he, in fact, didn’t own, and collecting “rent” from people who didn’t exist. He wouldn’t have been caught if he hadn’t had to increase the deposits, which alerted the FBI to a change in deposit history. By law, all banking transactions over $10,000 were reported to the FBI. Most were legitimate and, in real estate, substantial deposits and withdrawals were common. But Daniels had gone from deposits of between forty and fifty thousand a month to deposits of ninety thousand.

When Dean looked at the records, all deposited at the same time of the month, all cash, he launched the grand jury investigation. He didn’t know how Daniels was making his illegal money-he had wrongly assumed drugs, which accounted for an estimated ninety percent of laundered money in the United States. It didn’t take long to learn that Daniels was involved in sex crimes, specifically kidnapping minor female runaways for Internet pornography.

Xavier Jones’s name had come up in the course of investigating Daniels, but there was nothing substantial in Daniels’s records implicating Jones in criminal activity. The major impetus was an old photograph of Jones and Daniels with a group of known or suspected criminals. It was primarily Dean’s gut intuition after seeing that photo that had him looking closely at Jones for the last two years.

Dean suspected that Jones was involved with the illegal sex trade, but there was no evidence pointing directly at him, and until he learned that ICE was involved, he had assumed it was prostitution-Jones had contact with known prostitution rings. Dean knew less about the international scope of Jones’s activities than ICE agent Sonia Knight-human trafficking was primarily under the domain of Homeland Security. And while he should have known about the ICE investigation, even in this new era of sharing information, not all information trickled down-or up-to the right people.

He wanted Sonia to look at all his information immediately. He had a feeling she’d see things he didn’t because her experience tracking the buying and selling of people was legendary.

That Sonia Knight had been sold into slavery as a child, then escaped, was in itself an incredible story; that