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"Exactly." Max takes a ragged sip of his drink. "I didn't think my actions affected him, but they did. His mother and I divorced last year, and she blamed me for his disappearance."
I furrow my brow. "Why?"
"If I'd been a better father, Nolan wouldn't have run away."
“Nolan didn't run away." I crunch an ice cube between my teeth. "He vanished from a public park."
"She never believed that." Max gnashes his teeth together. "She doesn't want to think about what happened to him. It's better if he simply grew tired of my panic attacks and moved to another state. At least in her mind."
"And you don't think Nolan moved to another state?"
"Fuck no." He stares at the liquor in the bar. "He was only fourteen. We checked with our friends and family after the police offered this hypothesis. But we discovered nothing. There's nowhere else he could've gone."
I pull my laptop out of my briefcase and set it on the bar. "I believe I know where your son is."
Max's eyebrows shoot up. "You're joking."
"There's a Mafia family that runs a crime ring out of a warehouse in Yonkers. My family and I were investigating them because they were producing illegal drugs."
"Are you a fed?" Max furrows his brow. "I don't want to speak to you."
Loads of parents have unpleasant experiences with government officials after losing a child. The incentive structure for government workers isn't to recover their child; it's to maintain their cushy jobs. Things slip under the crack because the officials are too busy apologizing for red tape that prevents them from taking action.
"I’m not government." I inch closer to Max. "This family hurt my brothers’ partners. We’re seeking justice."
Max nods. "That's better. I don't trust the government after they botched my son's disappearance."
"I understand." It's always better to empathize with a person who's lost a child. "The government sometimes doesn't exercise all possibilities in their search."
Max grits his teeth. "They kept sending me to different departments and apologizing for their failure to look harder. All my wife and I ever got were apologies. The FBI New York field office claimed they put out feelers across the East Coast, but we think it was a lie. They quit returning our calls one year ago and said our son was likely gone forever."
"My family believes your son’s still alive." I set my drink down. "But there are some things you must know."
"I'm willing to hear anything." Max swallows a lump in his throat. "I don't care how gruesome or fucked up."
"We think this crime family in Yonkers took your son to traffic him to men." I crack open my laptop and show him the blueprints of the warehouse. "We found a boy who escaped the basement of this warehouse last month. He said there were many boys like him down there."
"You'd better not be lying."
"I'm telling the truth." I point to the screen. "My brothers and I plan to infiltrate the warehouse soon."
"Shouldn't you call a special unit or something?" Max bites his lower lip. "This sounds dangerous."
I place my palm on his. "We have experience in this department. We’re confident the operation will go down without a hitch."
Max exhales a breath. "And my son is in there?"
“There’s a strong possibility." I take another sip of my drink. "He disappeared at Andrus Park in Yonkers. That's three blocks from the warehouse and close to where one of the owners lives."
Max clenches his fists. "Maybe the owner took my son to their home. Why did the police never tell me about this warehouse?"
"It's not on the cops’ radar." I zoom in on the blueprints. "The crime family has feds on their payroll and they buried themselves behind walls of misinformation to protect their identities. My associates needed to comb through two decades of county records to discover who owned the building."
"And you think my son is a sex slave? Are you sure they don't have a work camp there?"
I shake my head. "They use other employees in their narcotics business. The boys in the warehouse are strictly for sex trafficking."
It's possible the Diavolos are also involved in the black market adoption trade. But I won’t mention that to Max. I don’t know it yet and I don’t want to give him false hope.
