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Hunt smacked his head. “Oh, yeah.”
He looked sheepish, so I knew that he hadn’t intentionally forgotten.
Still.
“We’ve had three from the Souls Chapel area, two from Bear Bottom, two from Uncertain, and there’s one more from a place deeper south than here, it’s called Whispering Pines,” Beckham, our information gatherer via person—Hunt was the information gatherer via web—said.
“Thank you.” Lynn tipped his head up so that his gaze was on the ceiling. “Any luck pulling their cell phone records?”
“Phones dumped at a rest stop not far from a central location between all four locations,” Hunt muttered. “All were coming home from a party. Each had an invite via text from that same number I was telling you about earlier.”
The ‘same number’ was actually a weird thing. The phone number in question belonged to an elderly man in hospice care. What it looked like was whoever was making the calls and texts were ghosting the old man’s number. On the man’s phone information, there was no record of him ever making the call.
Plus, the phone had been in a lockbox in the middle of a hospice home health center for over a month, and no one had used it in so long that there was dust collecting on the screen.
I’d found that out myself when I’d sweet talked a nurse into letting me have my ‘dad’s’ phone.
“So pretty much we have fuckin’ nothing?” Bruno guessed.
“Right,” Zach grumbled. “This is a fuckin’ nightmare. How the hell do they do all this so secretively?”
“Because they have people helping them,” Sin said. “The sheer amount of crooked people in this world, I’m finding, is fucking terrifying. Cops. Lawyers. People high up in the government. Medical personnel. You name it, people are disgusting.”
He had that right.
I had no idea what an intricate underground system that human trafficking had in place until Lynn had opened my eyes to it. And Sin was right. There were people helping this ‘cause’ that never, not ever, should’ve been helping them.
These were people that you were supposed to be able to trust.
Before I’d come on the scene, Lynn had put his own father-in-law-to-be into the ground because of his involvement. He’d been the mayor of fuckin’ Dallas for Christ’s sake.
Then there was Trouper’s entire reason for going to jail. Trouper had volunteered to help because there’d been a few women in the Air Force at his base that had disappeared. Come to find out, one of his very own friends had gotten himself involved. Then, when his wife had been traded into it, Trouper had lost his damn mind. Then he’d lost the court case.
“I think that’s all that we can do for today,” Lynn said, sounding annoyed. “Until we have something more solid to go on, we’ll keep our ears to the ground.”
I sighed and stood up, my arms stretching high above my head from being in a chair for the last two hours as we listened and brainstormed.
“Oh, before y’all leave,” Lynn said as he rolled his sleeves back down his arms. “I now have a lawyer on retainer. Her name is Swayze…”
“Swayze Marrin. Long, curly blonde hair. Walks with a limp. Has sexy blue-green eyes that make you want to fall into her soul and is all alone in this cruel world,” Sin said. “We know her.”
“How do you know her already?” Six asked curiously.
“Trick here is in love with her,” Zach said as he bumped me with his shoulder.
I punched him in the arm, a denial on my lips.
Only, that denial never came because he was right.
I definitely had feelings for her.
Twelve years in prison—all of it her fault—didn’t dim the feelings either.
“And this is a small town,” I grumbled. “I live across the street from her.”
“What are the odds that you know her that well in such a short time of being there, though? Man, you boys move fast,” Six drawled.
“Not much of a coincidence that I know her when she’s the one that got me sent to prison,” I said. “I think it’s more of a coincidence that she’s here right now in the city that I landed in.”
Lynn was quiet, his head tilted slightly, and his eyes were sparkling.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Is it a coincidence?” I asked.
Lynn didn’t answer. Instead, he walked out and didn’t look back.
“It totally wasn’t a coincidence,” Six drawled. “That man has things up his sleeve that even I wouldn’t expect.”
With that, she walked out, too, following her man.
That left the rest of us staring at each other.
“He’s like a meddling mother hen,” Beckham said as she too stood. She reached for her son, Hiro, and patted me on the shoulder as she walked past. “Good luck to you, good man. I want to meet her soon.”
Trouper’s amused face followed his wife out.
“I think you should just go for it,” Sin suggested. “Get rid of whatever that chip on your shoulder is saying and make her want you.”
