“Feelings beyond friendship?” Brig asked again, still trying to work it out in his head. “That’s what you honestly think?”
The ridiculousness of the entire situation was too much for me. I would call Jared when I was done. Epiphanies were rarely ever timely, but I’d finally had mine. I was washed up as a fixer, and guarding people left too much time for me to wonder about their lives. I needed to find another path. It was good of Brig to have helped me find some clarity.
“Chase does?”
I was ready to go home. And even though I wouldn’t work for Torus anymore, at least Locryn Barnes wouldn’t murder me. I’d still be in Chicago, after all.
Twenty minutes later, Dallas Bauer finally came into the room. He had his jacket off, sleeves rolled up, gun holster on display, badge there on his belt, and he looked both exhausted and in need of sustenance.
He could stand in line.
“Your color’s off,” I said before he could open his mouth. “You should eat something.” My tether was short, and getting shorter by the minute.
He scowled at me. “I’m fine,” he grumbled just as his stomach growled.
I arched an eyebrow at him.
“You’re a real smartass, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told once or twice.”
“I bet,” he muttered, and then, still glowering, he turned to Brig. “You’re in danger, Mr. Stanton, but not from who you think.”
Brig, who had retaken his seat next to me, asked Dallas to explain.
“Eston Travers, the man your sister fought against all those years, is dead.”
Brig jolted, and I squeezed his shoulder to remind him I was there. And it surprised me that I cared enough to make the effort. Instinctively, I’d reached for him which wasn’t like me in the least. Perhaps the quick answer was that I was the only one there who could, or would, comfort him. He had no one else in that moment, only me.
“Have you ever heard of the Seeds of Life?” Dallas asked him.
“Of course,” Brig said hollowly, almost sadly. “My sister was a part of––” He sucked in a breath and deflated before my eyes. “No,” he rasped, gaze all over Dallas Bauer. “You can’t think that she would––”
“We don’t think,” Dallas told him. “We know, Mr. Stanton.”
“But she hasn’t been active with that organization for years.”
“And that was probably true,” he agreed. “It looks like when her ex, Bonham Keller, and several other members of her group were put in jail back in 2011, she distanced herself from Seeds of Life, who had some crossover members from the Earth Liberation Front.”
Brig just sat there, silent, listening, waiting.
Dallas glanced over at me and then returned his focus to Brig. “But what she didn’t know was that with eco-terrorism sort of dying out, a lot of her comrades from Seeds of Life continued to become more militant,” he explained, carding his fingers through his thick hair, his voice rough-edged and gritty from lack of sleep. “Lane still felt a great deal of sympathy for their cause, so she’s been taking them medicine…and funneling the money she was supposed to be using to build shelters, to keep their commune in Mexico afloat.”
Brig looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, to give him a moment to wrap his brain around this new information. “Lane Stanton used her brother’s resources to help radicalized members in an offshoot of her old organization remain hidden in Mexico?”
He nodded.
“But why would the FBI care to keep track of an organization they believed to be defunct?”
“They’re eco-terrorists. Doesn’t mean they gave up on their objectives.”
“Then you’re telling me that even after Keller and the others went to jail, the group remained active?”
“No, the group is defunct, like you said.”
“Then why do you guys care?”
“Technically, we don’t. The DEA does.”
He was talking in circles, and I didn’t know if he was doing it to get a rise out of me, or if he was just that beat. “What kind of drugs?” I asked him.
“What’s going on?” Brig sounded frantic as he looked from Dallas to me and back.
“Lane’s old group is in the drug business now,” I told him.
“I’m sorry?” He was breathless.
“They can’t be moving product on their own; it’s Mexico,” I said to Dallas.
“Absolutely right.”
“How did it start?”
“They were cooking meth out there on their commune and funneling that back to the US, but they’ve moved on to bigger things.”
Bigger only meant one thing. “The cocaine business.”
“Correct.”
“How much bigger?”
“Lemme show you,” he indulged, shifting forward in his chair, opening the folder in front of him and pulling out several eight-by-ten glossy color photographs that he turned around for both Brig and me to see. There was a cluster of people in each, gathered around a table heaping with bricks of what could only be hundreds of kilos of cocaine. From the angle of the shots, I was guessing that the camera had been on a button or a lapel pin, something at that height.