Quiet Protector: Brandon's Story Read online

  Isabelle’s voice is sickly sweet when she asks, “Can you add Megan’s name to the travel database? I want to know if she purchases a return ticket.”

  Papers crinkle under my backside when I add Megan’s name to the alert field next to Isaac’s. A heavy typing hand isn’t responsible for my sudden wish to stand. It’s the digits on the credit card Megan used to purchase her bus ticket. I’ve seen them before. Recently.

  I stop ruffling through a pile of wire transfer receipts when Izzy mumbles, “Brandon?” Her tone is more questioning than her one word.

  “Oh yeah, sorry, I was nodding,” I force out, giving the first excuse that pops into my head.

  Izzy giggles before replying, “Thanks, Brandon.”

  I exhale sharply when I find the document I’m chasing. The account number corresponds with a wire transfer that occurred almost thirty years ago. It’s the first exact match I’ve found, and it wasn’t anywhere I had considered looking. If it weren’t for Isabelle, I would have never found it.

  Happy for her to interrupt my naps anytime she likes, I say down the line, “Anytime, Izzy.”

  After bidding her farewell, I dive in for another twenty-plus-hour shift.

  “I don’t know whether to be impressed by your gall or disappointed.” When I crack open my apartment door, Phillipa saunters inside. “I figured you’d last a day at most. I hadn’t factored a week into the equation…” Her words stop before she playfully swipes at her nose. “Have you showered since I left?”

  I roll my eyes. “Yes… I just lost my deodorant somewhere in this mess.”

  By mess, I mean a huge web of conspiracy that stretches from my living room to the attached bathroom of the master suite. Although I’m working this angle for a completely different reason than Alex, he allowed me to work at home the past week with the hope I’d make a breakthrough on the sequence of numbers he handed me the afternoon before Isaac’s arrest. I’m this close. I just have one final hurdle to jump first—hence my extend of the olive branch to Phillipa.

  “This is crazy, Brandon,” Phillipa mutters as she takes in the workflow of criminal activity covering every inch of my apartment walls. “Are you sure each wire transfer was for an individual purchase?”

  I lift my chin. “It started well over three decades ago. From Christina Smite to Isaac’s down payment last week, each wire transfer has been linked some way to the Popovs. A small pile of unmatched receipts remain, but for the most part, they correspond with sales that never went past the deposit stage.”

  Phillipa’s pitch rises as quickly as her hope. “Did you find a match for Melody?”

  My teeth grit, but I manage to push out a reply. It’s short and to the point. “No.”

  When I pace to the stack of unmatched payments on my coffee table, Phillipa follows me. “The wire transfer identification digits in the Greggs’ file revealed it came from the same bank and branch as the payment Isaac made last week, but the account numbers were different.” I twist to face Phillipa. “Do you remember the massive payout the Petrettis were awarded when Col’s wife was killed during a sting?”

  She nods. “How could I forget it? It was the largest payment the state had seen. It certainly changed the way agents handle raids from thereon out.”

  I smirk, loving her eagerness even with this case being decades old. “Did you ever wonder where that money went?”

  Phillipa shakes her head. “I was only a kid at the time so I didn’t think much of it. Do you know what happened to it?”

  Smiling, I hit her with the big stuff. “Most of it was squandered.” Phillipa gags. She’s not surprised nor shocked by my revelation. Col has never been good with money. “But a decent chunk of it was donated to a rival association.”

  “Col gave it away?” Her high tone reveals she thinks I’m full of shit. I wish I were.

  “If I were to believe the paper trail, he donated to Vladimir’s retirement fund a decade before he had reached retirement age,” I disclose, gloating.

  Phillipa looks as surprised as I did when Megan’s bank records had me unlocking the very first match in the mail-order-bride conglomerate Dimitri hypothetically told me about weeks ago. If she hadn’t used the same checking account her father utilized to purchase her mother, I’d still be picking at a massive ball of twine, seeking a thread.

  Megan’s mother, just like Isabelle, was sold when she was a child. She was just shy of her eighteenth birthday when Megan’s father purchased her with the compensation payout he was awarded after a workplace injury. Her sale had me wondering why the payment was directed to the Popovs instead of the crew who specialized in those trades during their heydays.

  It took several hours of trawling the dark web before I stumbled upon my answer. The Popovs have been running the ultimate pyramid scheme for the past forty-plus years. They find a lucrative product, mark it up by twenty-five percent, then sell it under their ‘quality’ brand. The training, sales, and shipment of goods all occur in-house. The Popovs just handle the currency side of things.

  That’s what happened with Megan’s mother. She was groomed in a small town on the outskirts of Hopeton, sold at auction before being delivered to Carlyle Shroud, a once twenty-nine-year-old factory foreman.

  He hasn’t worked in almost thirty years after a stack of pallets fell on him, shattering multiple vertebrae in his back. Although he can still walk, the pain associated with his sloth-like steps deem him unemployable. Even with a perfectly groomed wife, I doubt he’s enjoying life right now. His bank records the past decade show a majority of his support payments are spent on alcohol.

  Although I feel sorry for Carlyle, his miserable existence is the thread Tobias was seeking for decades before his death. His lonesome fifty-eight-thousand-dollar payment twenty-nine years ago helped me link an incalculable number of wire transfers between the Petrettis, Castros, and Popovs the past three decades.

  Three wire transfer receipts took me almost a week to work out. The one cited on the slip of paper found in the Greggs’ file is included in that group. “All the unmatched wire transfers were for identical amounts. They were deposited in the Popovs’ account within days of each other and dispersed at the same time, but no matter how deeply I scoured the records, I couldn’t link the payments to the sales of property, guns, drugs, or people, leading me to believe they were for services.”

  “Services?” Phillipa jumps in, her brow cocking. “What possible services could the Popovs offer that they weren’t already giving?”

  I slap the wad of invoices in my hand against Henry Gottle, Sr.’s picture at the top of my criminal wish list. “The Petrettis, Popovs, and Castros were powerful, wealthy, and feared in their own right, but one man still reigned supreme. Henry Gottle.”

  The pieces click into place for Phillipa when I move to the far wall in my bedroom. “Henry had the biggest chunk of the pie, making him the ideal target if those beneath him decided to band together.”

  “Exactly.” I point to a timeline of events that occurred the same weekend as the Greggs’ home invasion, which happens to be exactly one month after the payments were distributed. “Going off the dates of the Greggs’ home invasion, I discovered that several key members of the Gottle crew were hit consecutively one weekend. From the reports I found buried beneath a heap of bureaucratic tape, I unearthed that those targets were high-up associates of the Gottle cartel or direct relatives of Henry’s. Details are sketchy, but it appears as if he lost five associates, two sisters, and a brother in one night.” I twist to face Phillipa. “They also killed his mother during a failed attempt to force him to step down from his command. He lost almost his entire family within days of each other. There was only one brother unaccounted for. Rumors are that he was being sheltered by the CIA officer who had recruited him in his final year of college.”

  “Was?” Phillipa asks, her tone high.

  “Was.” I nudge my head to Mr. Gregg’s profile picture tacked beside Henry’s. When you see them side by side, some si
milarities are noticeable—most notably their strong facial structure. “Melody isn’t Henry’s daughter. She’s his niece.” I hand Phillipa a heavily redacted CIA file. “Two months before the birth of Henry’s son, the Gottle compound was attacked in a similar fashion as the Greggs’ home invasion years later. Henry’s father was killed along with many members of their association. The men responsible believed they’d scare Henry into folding his operation. He was only seventeen and about to become a father, so the last thing he’d want is to enter a gangland war.” I point to a picture of a young Katarina Rouse glancing down at her rounded stomach a baby-faced Henry is caressing. “Their plan backfired. Henry wanted revenge, he was just smart enough to know he couldn’t place his family in the firing line to get it.”

  “So he gave them up instead,” Phillipa fills in as an understanding glimmer ignites in her eyes.

  I nod. “Except it wasn’t just Katarina and his unborn son he removed from his memory. He wiped the entire slate clean. He moved Liam and his mother out of the family’s brownstone in Manhattan, scaled down his crew to three men he trusted with the life of his only love and unborn son, then rebuilt his empire from the ground up.”

  “It worked.” Phillipa arches a brow as shock floods her face. “A majority of his wealth was amassed in the five years following his father’s death.” Her throat works hard to swallow. “As was his death count.”

  What she’s saying is true. I scoured the reports myself. Even with age not on his side, Henry won the war, but his victory came at a cost. “Katarina couldn’t forget what he had done, and neither could Liam. They wanted nothing to do with Henry. Liam’s opinion only changed when Melody was born, but their contact was still sporadic at best. Katarina still hasn’t come around.”

  Phillipa stares at me in shock for several long seconds, only speaking when her inquisitiveness gets the better of her. “How did you unearth all of this so quickly? This is a year’s worth of work, Brandon, and you did it in a week.”

  She scoffs when I say, “It isn’t hard to unravel an entire outfit when you find a sturdy thread.” I place the invoices onto my dining table before moving toward a third set of timelines. “Do you recall back in 2009 when the government was left reeling from a year-long intelligence failure that compromised its internet-based covert communication system?”

  Her face reveals her confusion, but she answers my question, nonetheless. “I was in my third year of college, but I remember my father saying the compromise left CIA informants vulnerable to an attack.”

  I nod again, agreeing with her father’s assessment. “Although a lot of effort was put forward to undo their error, intelligence sources revealed the damage was so severe, it would never be wholly undone. The exposure had already occurred. Even with CIA scrambling to secure their informants, they dropped like flies.”

  Phillipa’s head slants as her brows join. “Do you think that glitch had something to do with the Greggs’ accident? Although Liam wasn’t an informant, he could have been before he was recruited.”

  I halfheartedly shrug before shaking my head, still uneased by my objective today. I’m usually the guy who coerces people off the ledge. I don’t tiptoe them toward it. “I had considered that, but I couldn’t work out why there was a stretch in timelines between his home invasion and their murders. So instead, I focused my efforts on the CIA’s compromised system. I discovered this.”

  When I hand Phillipa Melody’s birth certificate that undoubtedly proves her parents were named Liam and Wren, her eyes bulge out of her head. It isn’t confirmation that Melody isn’t Henry’s daughter that has her shocked, it’s the fact Liam used the last name of Gottle on Melody’s birth certificate.

  “Unlike me, Liam didn’t change his name when he was recruited. He wasn’t ashamed of it and had no issues discouraging people who believed he should have been. In some ways, it worked in his favor—”

  “The Gottle name would have opened previously closed doors,” Phillipa interrupts, smiling.

  I lift my chin. “But regrettably, it also kept his family under the spotlight Henry tried to shelter them from almost a decade earlier.” I exhale out a big breath before laying all my cards on the table. “I don’t believe the donation Col made to the Popovs was out of the goodness of his heart. I believe it was his cut to fund the second attempted Gottle takedown.” Phillipa looks shocked but remains as quiet as a church mouse. “The exact amount Col donated was transferred into a Russian operative’s account precisely one month before the Greggs’ home invasion. It was forwarded with two identical payment amounts… the Castros and Popovs share of the fee.”

  “If this is true, how are they still in operation? Henry’s track record proves he doesn’t sit on his hands when threatened. If he had an inkling to any of this, the FBI’s wish list would have been sliced in half two decades ago.”

  “That’s the issue. Henry doesn’t know about anything I’ve unearthed.” I stop before correcting myself. “Well, he didn’t.” Realizing I need to finish flipping one stone before moving onto a new one, I say, “When the takeover bid failed, the individual groups who orchestrated it folded rather quickly by pretending the Russian group they’d hired to do the hits had acted alone. Henry then responded with the notoriety he’s famous for. He steamrolled them.”

  A vein in Phillipa’s neck works overtime when I backhand two oddly familiar faces on a makeshift perp board. “The Russian entity hired to do the hit on the Gottles was the Bobrovs?” When I nod, she pushes out, “Are you sure, Brandon? This isn’t child’s play. We can’t throw out an accusation like this without having the evidence to back it up.”

  “I have proof.” She looks more panicked now than she did when I admitted to hacking CIA servers. “With Kirill’s focus elsewhere…” I nudge my head to Katie’s photo Grayson sent me weeks ago. “… cracks on the failed takedown bid only began surfacing eight years ago.”

  Phillipa’s mouth drops open. “Right around the time Milo was released from prison.”

  “Correct.” I flip open a file on a side table. “Mr. Gregg…” I pause, suddenly feeling odd referring to him by a name he wasn’t born with. “Liam did disturb Crombie attempting to set fire to a barn on the outskirts of his property as stated. The only thing the reports failed to reveal was that he made a citizen’s arrest before dropping him off at Saugerties PD. The officer who wrote up the report was—”

  “Rory Langfield,” Phillipa interrupts, reading the information from the incident report that has no claimant details jotted down. “With his trust low, Liam wouldn’t have given his details to anyone, let alone to the Chief of Police.” She takes a moment to absorb the information before locking her eyes with mine. “Do you think Rory recognized Liam?”

  Nodding, I head to my laptop resting on the dining table before suggesting for Phillipa to take a seat. Once she does, I press play on a surveillance video of a dairy farm forty miles from Melody’s family ranch. “The foreman had security installed after an insurance claim for an equipment shed blaze was denied because the assessor didn’t believe the fire was sparked by the welders working on a neighboring milk shed. His report stated the fire was deliberately set.”

  “Crombie?” Phillipa intuits.

  Her downcast lips shift into a smile when I jest, “Allegedly.”

  We watch the thirty-seven-second movie in silence. There’s no sound, so we don’t need to be quiet. I just want to see if Phillipa gasps the same way I did when I stumbled upon this footage.

  She does, although it’s more an annoyed groan than an angry gasp. “Langfield dropped Crombie off?”

  “But wait, there’s more.” I point to the far corner of my monitor, steering her gaze to Milo Bobrov, who waits for Crombie to enter the residence before he joins Langfield at his car. “Milo was witnessed following the Greggs the very next weekend.”

  I don’t disclose that I’m the sole witness of that statement. I don’t know why. Perhaps because I’ve spilled a lot of information to a woman I
hardly know. Or perhaps it’s because I know Phillipa isn’t being as sharing as I am. Whatever the reason, my purge still significantly lightened the weight on my shoulders.

  “Do you recall me mentioning there was a possible link between Isaac Holt and the driver of the cattle truck that killed the Greggs?” When Phillipa nods, I toss a liquidation sale document to her side of the dining table. “Isaac purchased the dairy farm two weeks before the Greggs were murdered.”

  “What’s your take on that?” Phillipa sounds more fretful for me than Isaac.

  I give her a halfhearted shrug. “I wanted to believe he knew the type of business he was purchasing. Almost every employee at the farm had a criminal record as long as my arm.”

  “But?” Phillipa queries when she hears it hanging in the air.

  “But… paperwork reveals Isaac terminated all employees with known cartel ties before handing over operations to one of his many feed-the-starving-children-of-the-world charity organizations. I plan to dig a little deeper into his tax records to see if the farm was purchased to launder funds for his illegitimate businesses, but I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath just yet.”

  Phillipa folds her legs under her bottom before pursing her lips. “That’s understandable. You looked wrecked.” She laughs when I roll my eyes, then, not even five seconds later, she says, “This is all very impressive, and I’m stunned you squeezed a year’s worth of work into a week, even if you skipped showering to do it. However, I’m still a little lost as to why you demanded my immediate attendance at your apartment. What does any of this have to do with me? I don’t work cold cases.”

  She watches me with wide, panicked eyes when I cross the room to tug down David Crombie’s mugshot taken the night he was found hanging in a prison cell. “He’s your missing thread.”

  Phillipa touches her chest. “My missing thread?”

  I leave her to stew for a few seconds before lifting my chin. “Milo had no clue Crombie was about to fuck him over as Rimi Castro had done to his brother years earlier.”