Page 69 of Ten

“My wife thought she would grow out of it. The wearing dresses and wanting to wear her shoes and the makeup. Then she accepted it and decided that JoJo was gay. She could handle that. She was comfortable with that.” He clicked his teeth. “But when JoJo told us she was supposed to be a girl? Adelina couldn’t accept that.”

“Oh.” Ten finally understood. JoJo had been born a girl in the wrong male body.

“JoJo ran away. I was in the field, trying to track down a cartel kill squad. When I finally got the call, JoJo had been missing for twenty-six days. Do you know what can happen to a lost little girl without anyone to protect her?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“I bet you do.” The man shifted behind him, and Ten tensed briefly. “I heard you were the man who brought that little boy back to his mother.”

There was no hiding the shock on his face. “Who told you that?”

“The little boy. Not so little anymore,” his captor corrected. “He’s a good kid, in case you were wondering. He’s in school in Waco. Varsity baseball. First chair trumpet in the band. Lives a perfectly normal life because you and yourbratvasaved him.”

“He got lucky because those two assholes couldn’t calculate the correct dosage of sedatives to keep him quiet when they kidnapped him.” Ten regarded him in the mirror. “Why would you chase that kid down? He has nothing to do with any of this.”

“He has everything to do with this. It’s not only Kiki that I want to kill. It’s all of them.”

“Them?”

“The ones who were paying Adrian Umansky and Tony Guerrero to make those disgusting movies.”

That got Ten’s attention. “Do you know who they were?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Which is why you need Kiki?”

The man nodded. “He’s going to tell me what I want to know.”

“Do you know who broke him out of prison?”

“The lawyer,” the man said. “Working for the traffickers and pedophile ring that financed Adrian and Tony, I suspect.”

“And the podcaster? Chad that’s causing all these problems for Nisha?”

“A leech,” the man spat. “He trolls online support groups looking for families of victims to interview. He used my daughter’s name to get into a closed group for Kiki’s known or suspected victims. I keep tabs on everything to do with Kiki’s crimes.”

“Did you set up the group?”

“Of course, I did.”

“To help the other families who had suffered like you?”

“No, to make sure I could control online spaces where Kiki’s crimes and those of his friends were discussed. I figured the people involved in financing the videos might also be interested in those spaces.”

“Your daughter...?” Ten hesitated. “Was she on one of the videos?”

“She was.” He spoke so softly Ten barely heard him over the air conditioner blasting. “If you could see how many thousands of times that video has been downloaded by degenerates...”

“I can’t even imagine what that’s like for you.” Ten swallowed the ball of emotion clogging his throat. To lose a child, but to be victimized again and again and again by sick freaks downloading and watching her violent end?

“I found JoJo staying with a group of kids like her. Transgender,” he clarified for the first time. “All of them kicked out of their homes or running away from abuse. I felt like such a failure as a father. I had been spending so much time worried about the wrong things.”

“You were doing your job.” Ten knew the type. Loyal, honorable, committed. This man had been fighting Zetas and cartel-hit squads. He had been trying to save his country from the ravages of narco-violence. “You were doing the best you could.”

The man regarded him strangely. “Are you in therapy?”

Ten snorted. “Is it that obvious?”

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