I look up in surprise as Mancuso steps up to my desk.I saw him come in a few minutes ago, but he disappeared into the conference room with Rick and Hugo without even noticing me.It’s clear what they’d be discussing in there, and I wasn’t surprised I didn’t get an invite.But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been curious as hell.
“Hey,” I return.
“Are you coming in or not?”he asks as if it were a given.“I’m about to brief.”
I try not to grin, but fail miserably.
“Does that mean I’m out of the dog house?”
He shakes his head, chuckling.“It means this case is coming together in a way not even you could fuck up at this point.”
Ouch, but fair, I guess.
“I’ll be right there,” I tell him, grabbing my mug and rushing for the kitchen to get a refill.
I may need the reinforcement.
It was an early morning, although you won’t hear me complain about the hour or so of sleep I missed.The soft stroke of Clem’s talented tongue on my flesh is officially my favorite way to wake up from here on in.But it does mean I’m walking around a little dozy, with my head in the clouds, and I want to be sharp so I don’t miss anything in this briefing.
“Four years ago, after Martha Benjamin died, Doyle found a copy of a divorce certificate he’d never seen before.He noticed it was dated a month prior to his birth date,” the agent starts the moment I sit down at the large table.
He puts up slides of the actual document as he lays out his case.
“Apparently, he’d always been told his father had been a one-night stand she only knew by a first name.”
“That must’ve been a shocker,” Rick observes out loud.
“Yeah, he’s pretty pissed when he talks about it.”
“So all this information comes from Benjamin?”I ask.
“This part, yes, and only after confronting him with all the beans his brother Everett spilled.Their father clammed up tight, but it wasn’t too hard to get Everett to talk.He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed and was quick to share the basic layout of the organization his younger brother had pulled them into.”
“So Benjamin went looking for his father,” Hugo prompts, trying to get Mancuso back to the sequence.
“Yes, and didn’t just find him, but an older brother as well.Not only that, but discovered the obvious shared interest in cars.Something his mother had tried to squash when she pushed him to go into teachers’ college instead.From what I’ve been able to pull together, between his own betrayal, and the bitterness old man Shirk and his oldest had hung on to for all these years, hate became a common ground between the men.With Benjamin clearly assuming the dominant role.He and his brother both tried to sell me their motivation as some kind of misguided rescue mission for boys needing strong male figures in their lives, like they were talking about the fucking Boy Scouts.”
Mancuso scoffs disgustedly, perfectly mirroring my slightly nauseated reaction to that information.
“Of course they shy away from the obvious punitive aspect of targeting kids of single mothers in particular, or the monetary gain their little army acquired for them,” he continues.“Between all three Shirks combined, their worth is in the millions, and I don’t think we’ve uncovered everything yet.”
“So what was the setup?”I want to know.
“Well, we know it was Benjamin who picked, groomed, and controlled the boys.It looks like Everett was responsible for the transportation of stolen vehicles to the junkyard in a smaller trailer, where he and his father would remove any identification on the vehicle, reset the odometers, and check and repair whatever they found wrong.Then the cars would be loaded onto a large shipping container, and would be trucked straight across the border to British Columbia as scrap metal.The RCMP is investigating where it went on that side of the border.”
The RCMP stands for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian equivalent of our FBI, responsible for federal law enforcement on their side of the border.It’s not uncommon for the two departments to work together, especially when it comes to organized crime, which this would fall under.
“Probably on a container ship to Africa or the Middle East,” Althof suggests.
“Probably,” Mancuso concurs.
“What about Ryan Wells?”I bring up, the boy’s poor mother still forefront in my thoughts, and she wasn’t the only one who lost a child.“Or the other victim.Did you find out anything more?”
“Benjamin straight-up refused to discuss anything around the murders at first, but Everett did,” the agent explains.“He claims not to know anything about the boy in Walla Walla, which is entirely possible, but it was obvious he’s very familiar with what happened to Ryan, even though he tried to deny that too.He tripped up when I talked about the different fingerprints we’d found on the Mustang and how we’d be comparing those to his.Then he suddenly admitted his brother called him to meet up on the old logging road up Black Mountain, but claims the boy was already dead when he got there.All he’ll admit to is helping to carry the body to the edge of the cliff, and driving his brother home to Spokane after.He confessed he was too freaked out to go back and collect the Mustang so he could get rid of it, as his brother had instructed.”
“Lucky for us,” Hugo comments.“That Mustang is where the investigation started for us.”
“That’s right, otherwise Ryan’s mom might never have known what happened to her son,” I point out, before asking, “What about the other kids who were recruited?What’s happening with them?”
