“How many guys?” I asked. “Where’d you hear this?”
“Saw them myself,” Linc said. “Crawling around West Philly, banging on doors. I scared a couple assholes off, but that won’t stop him.”
I rubbed my face with both hands and cursed softly. I knew Ronan would come for her, but I didn’t think he’d do it so fast, or with any real strength. “Plug one in,” I said, gesturing at the sticks. “I want to know what’s on it.”
“If I get a virus, you’re buying me a new laptop,” he said and plugged the stick in.
“I doubt Ronan’s in the computer virus business,” I said, though it wasn’t entirely impossible. More and more mobs were moving into cybercrimes, since that was quickly becoming the most lucrative business around.
The Valentino family remained old-school and analog though.
“Huh,” Linc said, clicking around for a second. “Looks like a bunch of spreadsheets.”
I shifted my chair around to stare at the screen. He was right, it was a bunch of Excel spreadsheets with titles like Jessica, Angelina, Rachel, all general female names.
“Open one,” I said.
Linc sighed and doubled clicked on Angelina.
The spreadsheet loaded slowly, but when it did, we both leaned back in our chairs and stared.
It was a profile. The top left corner was a picture of a stone-faced brunette girl, young and pretty, choppy short hair, thin cheeks. Her stats were next to it: age, weight, eye color, that sort of shit. It listed what looked like cargo ships, based on some quick searching, and a town in Ukraine. At the bottom was a price, in the thousands, which seemed absurdly, disgustingly low.
“This can’t be what I think it is,” Linc said.
“Open another.”
So we did, and another, and another, and each of them was the same: some girl from Eastern Europe with a fake American-sounding name, a list of physical attributes, what looked like a shipping manifest, and a price.
When we’d looked at the whole stick, Linc plugged in another one, and another. They were all filled with Excel spreadsheets with female names.
“There’ve got to be a hundred girls here,” I said softly, leaning back in my chair in complete shock. “This has got to be half the girls they’ve trafficked in the last few years.”
“Names, dates, ships, and I think there are a few fixer names in here. Look, the name Anatoli keeps coming up.” Linc pointed at a couple of profiles. “I bet he’s the guy shepherding these girls over.”
Everyone knew the Healy family trafficked in girls from Europe. It wasn’t some secret—the bastards brought them over in droves, sold some off to other crime families across the country, and whored the rest out like slaves. It was fucked up, and something the Valentino family hadn’t gotten into, or at least not like the Healys.
But seeing records like this was astounding. It was one thing to hear the rumors and to occasionally see the girls working corners, but another to see ship names, fixers, stats, weight and prices.
I slammed Linc’s laptop lid closed.
“Hey,” he said. “Careful. Computers don’t like that.”
“Don’t tell anyone what you saw,” I said, yanking the USB stick from the drive. I stashed the sticks back in the bag with the cash and zipped it up. “Not anyone, do you hear me?”
He nodded once. “This is big, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. I need to see what the Don wants to do with all this before we make any moves.”
“You’ve got ideas though, don’t you?”
“I’m working on it,” I said and stood up. “Tell nobody. Understand?”
“Yeah, boss, I hear you.”
I nodded then pulled the cash from the bag. Irene wouldn’t need this, not after I took care of her. I tossed it down on the table.
Linc snorted and took the stack, thumbing through it.
“For your silence,” I said.
“What a generous man,” he said, grinning. “It’s why we stick around.”
“Maybe one day you’ll be loyal to something other than money.”
“I hope not,” he said, smiling. “Money’s great.”
I left him there to enjoy his little windfall. My mind was already working circles around this problem, coming up with ideas about how to maximize these profiles and how exactly I can use them to destroy the Healy family. This was the sort of information most crime families fought and died for—and as I stepped out into the sunshine, a realization hit me hard.
Ronan knew Irene took those sticks. He knew she hid them, and he knew I probably had her. He had guys on the street searching for her already, and that would only get worse.
She wasn’t safe on the street. Hell, she wasn’t safe anywhere.
I got in my truck and hurried back to my apartment.
Ronan knew me. I’d come for him more than once in the last few months and our guys were always on the lookout for each other. I didn’t think he knew where I lived, but I couldn’t be sure. Ronan was a clever bastard and slippery as hell, and I wouldn’t put it past him to stake out my place.