thirty-six hours they’d lost because Charlie wanted to play the hero could mean the difference between life and death for those young Chinese women.
Dean had taken the journal to the FBI cybercrimes unit, which was also responsible for code breaking. If they didn’t think they could handle it, they’ll scan the code and send it to Quantico.
Time was running out. Jones’s killer could have moved the women, killed them, or traded them-and they’d never know. It pained Sonia to think that they’d been so close.
“Damn you, Charlie!” How dare he write
Dean returned and said, “They’re working on the journal. But I should tell you that it’s sophisticated in its simplicity.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Jones used random words-so it seems-that mean something to him, and there’s a pattern of sorts, but until we figure out what one of the components means, we can’t figure out any.”
“I get it.”
Dean pulled the letter from her hand. “You’ve read this enough. Don’t let him tug at your heartstrings.”
“Where is he? Why did he give this to us now? What’s he up to?”
“I would love to know the answer to those questions, but right now, Cammarata is the least of my concerns.”
He sat down at the table, comfortably poring through property records of Jones’s old clients, focusing on spreads in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Sonia was hugely frustrated that the clock was ticking and they didn’t know where the girls were. She hated sitting in an office looking at papers and maps when she wanted to be in the field.
Dean said, “Hey, did you know that two of the three good-faith locations that Vega gave you were adjacent to Rio Diablo land?”
“No,” Sonia said. “You think that means something?”
“Hmm.” Dean rose and, sleeves rolled up, marked his main wall map. She watched as he quickly added boundaries in different colors.
“What is it?” She just saw lines. They meant nothing to her.
“It’s coming together. Almost there.” He went over to another box and pulled more maps out, then traced more boundaries on his map. “What do you think?”
She stared. “I don’t-” she tilted her head. There did appear to be some pattern, but she didn’t know the relevance. “What do the different colors mean?”
He had pins and color-coded sticky notes and highlighter marks.
Dean said, “The red lines mark the Rio Diablo boundary. The blue lines are Jones’s property. Green are Omega and purple are Weber Trucking.”
She stared. “They almost connect.”
“Not exactly, more like a connect-the-dots moving from one safe zone to another.”
“I see.” And she was beginning to. “How does this help?”
“They practically give a perfect path from the Port of Stockton to the foothills with plenty of private roads to avoid major highways.” Dean pointed to the holes. “All this is owned by the Port of Stockton. And here … and here … and here I’m having ownership researched. But it’s mostly unused land. No route goes through a major town. I’m thinking that they stick to areas where they’re comfortable moving freely, where there would be minimal chance to encounter people or police.”
Sonia tilted her head back and forth. “Jones’s restaurant connects the land to the river. We already know they don’t transport their victims all the way to the Port of Stockton. The restaurant could be a temporary storage facility.”
Dean asked, “Why don’t they simply transport them directly to their final destination? Wouldn’t that minimize problems?”
“Sometimes, but when you’re dealing with a large number of victims, you want to disperse them quickly. The longer they’re in your possession, the greater the chance of being caught. If Charlie is right and they’re using small planes and helicopters to move them out of the area-”
“Damn, I didn’t factor that in!”
Dean went back to the maps and flipped open books, made marks on the primary map, traced things that Sonia couldn’t see. She had never seen him so animated. It was like he was seeing a completely different map, a different world, than she saw.
“Okay.” Dean stood back and surveyed his work. His tie was loose and he’d lost the jacket long ago. But he still looked like a beefy stockbroker, sleeves rolled up after the exchange closed. “I marked off all areas where private aircraft can’t land-in these areas because of the proximity to military or commercial air facilities. This area because of power lines-no way a helicopter can get in there. And terrain. You don’t need a large flat space for helicopters, but you can’t land on a slope.”
Sonia leaned forward. “Amazing. You’ve cut the search area in half.” She pointed to a stretch parallel to Highway 99. “What’s this? What does purple mean again?”
“Weber Trucking. Their business is here”-he pointed to a dot just outside of Stockton-“but the company or the owners own all this land just outside Lodi. Is that important? It doesn’t look like there’s much there.”
“I’ve driven past that area hundreds of times and never thought much about it, but I think there’s a small industrial area right off the freeway here.”
“You think they’d keep the women that close to a major highway?”
“Well, look at this. Right here, this is a deep-water channel. Omega would come down this way. There are at least a half dozen places where they could off-load the women and take them by small boat upriver-here, here, here-damn, all over the place. It wouldn’t be difficult, and at night? Unless we were there twenty-four/seven monitoring, we wouldn’t see it. Of course, it’s seasonal. These tributaries are fed by one of the reservoirs to the east, I think. I’d need to double-check, but I’m sure parts of these waterways are too shallow for boats of any kind, or dry by the end of summer. But now? End of spring? With all the snowmelt in the Sierra Nevadas, they’d still be usable. They could stop in the deep-water channel and in less than fifteen minutes have the women transferred to a small boat and headed virtually anyplace along the river …” She traced a route with one finger like a maze. She backtracked once and found she could get from the Sacramento Deep Water channel to the small industrial area completely on water.
“That’s it!” she exclaimed. She was giddy with excitement.
“You’re brilliant.” He kissed her.
“So are you.”
“I’ll get a warrant,” Dean said. “Give me a few minutes. I’m going to have to do some fast talking.” He gave her another quick kiss and left the task force room.
Sonia watched the door close behind him. She’d never met a man like Dean Hooper. She had a forceful personality and tended to be the dominant partner in her relationships. She always said when to jump, when to go out, when to have sex.
Dean Hooper would have none of that. He was in charge, and if she wanted to be in charge, fine, as long as he was her equal. Sonia didn’t realize how much of a turn-on that was, to have a man spontaneously kiss her. Maybe it was her fault, she tended to scare off prospects because of her job and her hot head. Riley once told her she played the tough girl just to see who was still standing at the end. “Most guys run away, but the one still standing? You’ll fall for him.”
Dean hadn’t run, and in fact, he had maneuvered himself so easily into her life that she felt sick to her stomach thinking about him going back to Washington.
She couldn’t fault him for that. Just like he wouldn’t be able to fault her for staying in Sacramento. How could she leave her family?
How could she let Dean walk away?
She turned her gaze from the map and looked at the copy of Charlie’s letter where Dean had dropped it on a stack of files. She read it again.
Sun Ling. She knew the name, everyone in the business did, but she’d never come up against him, and no one
