Page 159 of Sticks and Stones
He gave him a big swamp of nastiness.
“We were following orders,” Payton admitted. “We had four other cases in our laps, and we don’t do homicide. We’re Vice. We asked, we were instructed, and we did what we were told. Shit rolls downhill, Agents. You know that.”
Unfortunately, they did.
Look at their lives, as they were now trapped for three years under Gabe’s thumb.
Greyson jumped in because he knew Gene was fuming. It was best they focus on the case, and stop thinking about Corbin before the man stabbed them with his plastic straw.
“What can you tell us about the case that you worked prior to Corbin picking it up?” Greyson asked. “Gene, Ethan, and I will be working it, and like Gene said, Corbin is in protectivecustody and not accessible,” he said, covering where they had Corbin stashed.
In case the men had big mouths.
Kip shared what he knew.
“We filed a report,” he began. “Everything is in it,” he added.
Greyson stopped him.
“We have that. We want your impressions, and to know what you know. That’s the shit not in the file. We all know how this works, gentlemen. This is none of our first days on the job.”
They got it.
They likely did have information that wasn’t in the file.
So, they shared.
“Someone with some money is trafficking men. We haven’t been able to get a bead on who it is. All we know is they disappear in clusters. Three here, three there, and we can never tie them to anyone. It’s like the person running this ring is super sneaky and well hidden.”
Gene was making notes and letting Greyson run this one. He, technically, was higher up on the food chain with tenure as an agent.
What did pique his attention was that they needed to get missing person reports to start connecting the dots. Corbin hadn’t.
That was a thread that needed to be tugged.
“Do we know where they are being trafficked to?” Greyson asked.
The one detective shared.
“They seem to be staying in the US and not treading internationally. It seems local. All of the victims were here in the city, and found here.”
That was a good point.
“We had a stack of missing person reports and only a few sets of bodies. Corbin would have seen that had he pulled them. What we do know is that it’sALWAYSmen.”
Well, there it was.
Corbin’s file didn’t have other MPRs. It only had the three victims he’d been interviewing friends and neighbors about.
Yeah, now, Gene knew this was going to be a bitch to handle. They were just scratching the surface.
Sex trafficking cases were seldom easy. There were layers, and you’d handle one, and as you pulled back the next layer, there’d be someone else running it.
And more victims.
The people behind this wouldn’t be dumb. They did layers and changed their names to protect the business.
Instead of saying anything, Gene listened.
