6. Justice For All - Неизвестный

“Sloan?”

“Hi, baby.”

“This is a nice surprise,” Michael Lassiter said.

Sloan got a little rush just hearing her speak. Michael not only had a kind of Lauren Bacall beauty, she had the voice to go with it. “I’m headed back to the office. Rebecca is out of the hospital.”

“That’s wonderful news.”

“How are you feeling?” Sloan asked. Michael had been injured herself not long before and was still only working half days at Innova, the design corporation she headed.

“I’m fine.”

“No migraines?” Sloan started the engine and let it idle while she talked.

“Really, sweetheart. A little tired, maybe, but I’m all right.”

“Don’t overdo, okay?”

“I promise. I’ll see you at home in a little while.”

“I might still be in the office when you arrive,” Sloan said. The cyberinvestigation company she’d founded with another ex-federal agent, Jason McBride, after she’d been falsely arrested and dismissed from her Justice position, occupied the third floor of a renovated warehouse in Old City. She’d been sharing her loft apartment on the floor above with Michael for the last two years. “Call me when you get home.”

“Sloan,” Michael chided softly. “You know very well if you’re involved in something I won’t be able to drag you upstairs.”

Laughing, Sloan gunned the Porsche across the lot and out onto the Benjamin Franklin Parkway heading east. “Baby, I want to see you.

And being dragged away sounds like fun.”

“Oh, I’m sure I can think of other fun things too.”

“Can’t wait. See you soon.”

Michael said good-bye and Sloan hung up, just barely managing not to ask again if Michael was sure she was all right. She had argued against her going back to her job so soon, but she understood the need to work. Until she’d fallen in love with Michael, all she’d had was work.

Even now, when the hunt was on, the chase consumed her. Sometimes

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she couldn’t tell the difference between being the hunter and the hunted and all she could do was keep running through the complex labyrinth of cyberspace until she won or dropped. Only Michael had ever been able to call her back.

v

“Tell them no,” Sandy Sullivan mumbled, wrapping her slim arm around Dellon Mitchell’s narrow waist and tethering her with a leg across the thighs.

“Work, babe,” Dell whispered, trying unsuccessfully to extricate herself from Sandy’s grip. Not that she really wanted to go anywhere.

Sandy might be half her size, but she was curvy in all the right places and her skin was so smooth Dell could lose herself for hours just running her fingertips over every inch. Not that she could really last for hours without doing more than just touch her, but it felt that way sometimes.

The only thing in the world that could get her out of bed with Sandy was a call to arms. The only thing she loved as much as Sandy was being a cop. She was the youngest member of the High Profile Crimes Unit and awakened daily hardly able to believe she was part of the team. She’d do anything to prove herself. “I gotta go, babe.”

“Screw that, Dell. It’s your day off.” Sandy propped her head on her elbow, her short blond hair spiky and her eyes even sharper. “Even cops and whores get a day off.”

“You’re not a whore. You were never a whore.”

Sandy rolled her eyes. “Okay. Even classy streetwalkers like myself get a break once in a while.”

“I had a day off. Well, most of the day. And you kept me busy.”

Dell pushed up against the pillows, brushing strands of dark hair back from her face. Sandy automatically curled up against her chest and Dell stroked her hair. “The lieutenant’s out of the hospital.”

Sandy stopped playing with Dell’s nipple, thank God, and sat up facing Dell. “Frye’s okay?”

“I guess so, or they wouldn’t have let her out. I told you I would have taken you to visit her.” Dell wasn’t crazy about the fact that Sandy was her lieutenant’s confidential informant. In fact, she hated the risk Sandy took every time she went out on the street to gather intel. It only bugged her some that Sandy was a little bit in love with Rebecca Frye.

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Justice for All

She trusted the lieutenant. She trusted Sandy. It’s just that she couldn’t imagine measuring up to the lieutenant in anybody’s eyes. Frye was not only good-looking, she was an awesome cop. Dell thought if she turned out to be half as brave and smart at her job as the lieutenant, she’d be satisfied.

“She had enough people hanging around her,” Sandy said dismissively. She ran her finger down the center of Dell’s thigh, smiling when Dell twitched as if an electric current had shot through her. “Sure you have to go?”

Dell grabbed Sandy’s hand. “You know I gotta. And yeah, I’m gonna be thinking about what I’m missing the whole time.”

Sandy kissed her, rubbing her breasts lightly over Dell’s.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Dell grabbed her and flipped her onto her back. Then she settled her hips between Sandy’s legs and gently bit down on her neck.

She could spare ten minutes.

• 25 •

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ChAPTER TwO

Rebecca shook Watts’s hand off her elbow as they climbed the few stairs to the alcove at the entrance to Sloan’s building.

“Will you cut that out. I’m fine.” She glared up at the palm-sized surveillance camera tucked into the corner. “Rebecca Frye and William Watts.”

Watts leaned forward so the camera could pick up his face. “You look like shit,” he muttered without moving his lips.

“Thank you. Now that you’ve registered your opinion, stop hovering.”

When the door didn’t automatically click open, she knew they were the first to arrive. A few seconds later a faint beep sounded and she quickly keyed in her security code. The door opened and she stalked into the cavernous ground level with Watts on her heels.

“I was just saying, you—”

“Unless you want to walk up to the third floor,” Rebecca said, punching the button to the elevator, “you should put a sock in it.”

Her voice echoed around the unfinished brick walls. Wood beams extended twenty feet overhead, enclosing the space that housed Sloan’s vehicles and the sophisticated mechanics controlling the building.

Sloan’s security was beyond state of the art and her company’s electronic surveillance center made the NSA look antiquated. With its hi-tech equipment and privacy, her building was the perfect place from which to run the HPCU.

“Man,” Watts muttered, hastily sliding into the elevator, “it was so nice and peaceful the last couple of days. Nobody bitchin’ at me.

Nothing more strenuous to do than fill out a few forms.”

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“I’ll bet it was great,” Rebecca said as the elevator whisked soundlessly upward. “Bored yet?”

“It was enough to make a man cry.”

Rebecca smiled as she stepped off into Sloan and Jason’s domain.

Two huge U-shaped workstations holding more than a dozen computers faced each other around an open central area. No one was currently at work but data streamed across many of the oversized plasma monitors.

“I’ll be in the conference room. You think you can rustle up some stuff to make coffee?”

Watts frowned. “Is it okay, do you think? I mean, coffee’s like a stimulant, right? Makes your blood pressure go up?”

“Don’t tell me you were listening at the door.” Having Catherine worry about her was bad enough. Appearing weak in front of her colleagues, especially those she commanded, was just adding insult to injury.

Watts held up both hands. “I’m not saying a word.”

“Coffee. Black. Strong. Now, Watts.”

As soon as he headed off to the small kitchen tucked into one corner, Rebecca made her way to the only other enclosed area in the expansive space. The conference room held a massive antique library table surrounded by ten chairs, a counter in the back where a never-empty coffeepot usually sat on a warmer, and one entire wall of monitors. The screens provided views of the streets in front and rear of the building in both directions, the entry alcove, the elevator, and everywhere else in and around the building except Sloan and Michael’s living quarters one floor up. A laptop rested on the table in front of Sloan and Jason’s customary seats. Rebecca eased into a chair in her spot on Sloan’s right, happy to be off her feet. She needed to be able to think, and the less she moved around, the less her head bothered her.

It felt good to be back at work. She’d been part of the special sex crimes unit until her previous partner, Jeff Cruz, was murdered. She’d been in the middle of an intense manhunt for a serial rapist, and between the stress of the case and Jeff’s death, she’d almost come unglued. But she’d met Catherine, and her life had changed in ways she’d never dreamed. Then her captain had assigned her to head the HPCU. She had worked in multijurisdictional task forces before, but not with civilian consultants. She’d resisted at first, even though both Sloan and Jason were highly skilled ex-federal agents. Now she couldn’t envision her

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team without them, any more than she could envision her life without Catherine.

“Here you go, Loo.” Watts slid a mug of coffee in front of her and put the pot on the warmer at the back of the room. Then he dropped into a chair across from her and sighed. “Home sweet home.”

Rebecca was about to answer when she caught movement out of the corner of her eye.

“It’s about time you two showed up,” she said when Sloan charged in.

Sloan’s sleek dark hair was windblown, her face flushed from the fast ride in the cold air. Jason McBride, a svelte handsome blond with piercing blue eyes, followed her in. As usual, he was impeccably attired in an open-collared pale blue shirt and dark trousers. He looked every inch the successful young businessman, which he was. What everyone on the team knew, but few others did, was that he was also a breathtakingly beautiful transvestite named Jasmine.

“How you feeling, Frye?” Sloan asked as she and Jason took their seats.

“Good.”

The sounds of running footsteps heralded the arrival of the last team member, newly minted Detective Dellon Mitchell. Five-eight, black hair, blue eyes, slim and muscular, she wore low-slung black jeans, a black T-shirt molded to her slender torso, scuffed black motorcycle boots, and an equally well-worn leather motorcycle jacket.

At first glance she might be thought either a strikingly handsome young woman or a beautiful boy. At times, she was both.

“Lieutenant!” Mitchell’s eyes sparkled with welcome. “Hey. Great to see you.”

“Detective.” Despite her headache and fatigue, Rebecca put some force into her voice. The team would function without her, but just as much as she needed to be here, they needed to believe she was fit and ready to lead. “Sorry to interrupt your day off.”

“No problem.” Mitchell slouched into a chair, her legs spread casually. “It’s just so good to see you…” She colored. “I mean—”

“So,” Rebecca interrupted, saving both Mitchell and herself further embarrassment, “somebody fill me in on what the hell we accomplished the other night.”

She’d been shot in the middle of a raid and, despite her demands,

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none of her team was given access to brief her. Consequently, she had no idea where things stood with their ongoing investigation into a web of human trafficking and sex slavery that extended from the Port of Philadelphia deep into the heart of the city.

“We blew away the scumbag who shot you, for starters,” Watts said, his eyes hard and flat.

Rebecca hated to let on that she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, but she knew who’d been backing her up. “Thanks, Sloan.”

Sloan nodded. At the instant she’d pulled the trigger, she hadn’t been thinking of anything except that if she didn’t shoot the guy, he was going to shoot her and finish off Rebecca too. Afterward, she hoped the dead man was the one who had nearly killed Michael during a thwarted attempt on Sloan’s life. She wanted retribution for Michael’s injuries even more than she wanted to put a stop to the abuse of young girls and dismantle the organization behind the prostitution, pornography, and drugs.

“Anything on the ballistics yet?” Rebecca doubted they’d hit the one house where the man who’d assassinated her partner just happened to be guarding a group of smuggled Russian girls, but stranger things had occurred. Sometimes police work was just a lot of sweat, drudgery, and occasional luck.

“No match to anything in the system,” Watts said. “He was using a semiautomatic. These guys probably import them by the case.”

“So the weapon used to kill Jeff and Jimmy is still out there. And presumably the shooter is too,” Rebecca summarized. Initially they’d theorized that her partner Jeff and an undercover fed, Jimmy Hogan, had been executed by a contract killer who was long gone. However, an assistant district attorney, George Beecher, was murdered more recently, only days before the HPCU raid. He was shot with the same weapon used to kill the detectives.

Mitchell piped up. “So what are we thinking? That the shooter is local? A mob guy, maybe?”

“Pretty ballsy for anyone local to kill a cop,” Watts said.

“Yes, if we’re talking about the usual suspects,” Rebecca said.

Organized crime bosses preferred not to bring down heat in their own backyards. The killings were an escalation that suggested direct

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involvement from outside players, most likely foreign interests, since the girls were being smuggled in on ships from Eastern Europe.

“Mitchell,” she said, “grab the whiteboard and let’s put down what we know and what we better find out.”

Several hours passed as the team shared information and speculated. Finally, Mitchell put the marker down and they all stared at the names and arrows and tried to complete the picture.

“What do we know?” Rebecca looked around the table. “Who’s bringing these girls in and how?”

“They have to have local contacts to work the container switches on the docks and to put them to work in the sex clubs,” Sloan said.

“That’s the Zamoras’ territory.”

“Probably,” Rebecca agreed. “But the Zamoras are not in it alone.

Are we getting any information from Irina?”

Dell Mitchell turned bright red. She had gone undercover as Mitch, a drag king, to establish contact with a young Russian woman, Irina, who appeared to supervise a group of smuggled girls when they were dancing in local strip clubs. Mitch had needed to seduce Irina to discover the address where the girls were held at night under armed guard. Some of the surveillance team had listened in during the seduction, a fact that still embarrassed the young detective.

After a minute, Mitchell said, “I tried to get information on the girls who were in the house, including Irina, down at headquarters. The story is as soon as our people brought them in, Immigration claimed jurisdiction and moved them to a federal facility. No one’s heard anything since then.”