AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“When?” I asked. “When was she found?”
“Her body was brought to us August 20. Two and a half weeks ago.”
I should have looked harder for her. I should have done more. I should have been a better daughter, a better friend, a better person.
Now she was gone. Forever gone.
The system had failed her.
I had failed her. No matter what Will told me, I would never accept that I couldn’t have done more.
She was my mom.
Tuesday, October 8
22
Kara had convinced Michael that she needed to track down Tom Lee. Something was very strange about how he was still on duty when the other known officials who’d been bought off were out of the picture. Now was the easiest time in the history of LAPD to get rid of a corrupt cop, so why let him stay?
She’d been thinking about it all night.
It didn’t take her long to learn Lee was on shift from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m., so they waited outside the precinct, arriving at two thirty.
They sat in silence for a while, then Michael said, “You never told me what happened the day your informant was killed. Did you suspect the FBI had leaked it to Chen?”
“I knew someone had leaked to him, but I didn’t even think it could be the FBI. I assumed it was someone in LAPD.”
“Like Lee.”
“Yeah. Except I didn’t suspect him. He wasn’t there. Apparently, Elena had doubts so moved him before the raid, but I didn’t know that until yesterday.”
“What happened that day?”
“You really want to know?”
He nodded.
Kara didn’t like talking about it, but this was Michael, her partner. And if you couldn’t trust your partner, who could you trust?
So she told him everything.
Kara had built the case over nearly a year, spent eight months undercover with a big-box store and finally had enough to nail David Chen, his asshole bodyguard and a half dozen others who were complicit in keeping human beings as slaves. What else would she call the nearly three hundred girls and women—and a few old men—he’d illegally trafficked from China to work in his sweatshop? They were not free to leave—they lived in an apartment building Chen owned—and they weren’t free to find work elsewhere. They worked fourteen-hour days in a business he ran, and based on the books Sunny had obtained for her, it would take each person eighty years to “pay off” what Chen said they owed him.
Chen’s tyranny would end today.
Knowing she had to be up before five in order to stage with SWAT and a dozen cops, she stayed at Colton’s small house in Echo Park, much closer to Chinatown than her Santa Monica condo.
The sex was an added bonus.
For the last two weeks Colton had helped with the case by playing the part of a homeless drunk sleeping in an alley with line of sight on the shipping doors. He’d put the final pieces together—documenting shipments, individuals, schedules. So, they were having an early celebration. They didn’t work together often, and they hadn’t hooked up in months, so it was a nice evening.
He woke her up at 4:30 a.m.
“I have to bolt, need to build my next cover,” he said. “I made coffee.”
“You’re a god,” she muttered, stretching.
He chuckled, kissed her. “Hardly. See you when I close the next case.” And he left.
