Trey blazed into the shop eight minutes later on the dot, his coat billowing, snow rushing in behind him. He clutched an armload of file folders to his chest, and I barely had time to stand before he unloaded everything on the counter. I caught one notebook before it toppled to the floor.
“Trey! What in the—”
“Sorry. It’s a long story, and I’m a little…something.” He shook snow from his hair. “First I have to tell you why I was wrong. Of course I was right too, but that came later.”
“What are you talking about?”
He started sorting the folders into piles. “The detergent thefts. The Sinaloa cartel. The distribution networks. We were looking for a traditional organizational structure—discrete branches stemming from a single source. We could never find it. Now I know why.”
He was amped, almost hyper. I’d seen him get frustrated—that was when the pacing started—and I’d seen him overwhelmed—that was when the wall came up—but I’d never seen him quite so manic.
“Trey? Are you okay?”
His head snapped up. “What?”
“You’re dialed to eleven, boyfriend.”
“Oh. Right.” He jabbed his chin toward the tea station. “I suspect the Lapsang souchong you purchased was not decaffeinated.
I snatched up the box. The label was a string of indecipherable characters featuring a serene white teacup pillowed on a cloud bank. “But I got it on Buford Highway! From a real old Chinese man! He said—”
“He lied. Or was wrong. I haven’t had caffeine in years, not since I joined the sniper team, because I never knew when I’d get a call-out, and zeroing a rifle is extremely difficult with caffeine in your system. Not your system, mine, I mean. Not that I have to zero rifles anymore, but—”
“Trey. You’re babbling. Stop it.” I put my hand over his heart; it was racing like a hamster on a wheel. “Maybe you should take some of Gabriella’s herb thingies to neutralize this.”
“I took the last of them. They didn’t work.” He blew out a sharp breath. “It’s rather disconcerting. Nonetheless, it does quicken the mental processing, it certainly does. Which brings us back here, to our detergent theft problem.”
He tapped the papers emphatically. His eyes were twin blazes, as sharp and blue as pilot lights. “We were all stuck—Major Crimes, SWAT, all of us—because the investigation would reveal different networks, but they seemed to be self-contained. We’d make the arrests, charge the offenders, send them to prison. But we couldn’t link them to the larger network.”
I paged through one of the folders as he spoke. It was thick with arrest records, most of them for misdemeanor shoplifting. I saw his name on a few of the reports, read the lines in the dispassionate language all cops wrote reports in—clipped, precise, without an ounce of descriptive lingo.
Trey stood at my shoulder. “When Garrity moved to Major Crimes, one of his first assignments involved tracking the movement of illegal drugs from the 75/85 corridor into the communities. Distribution networks. He discovered one particularly effective unit under the Sinaloa cartel, but he could never figure out how they moved the currency.”
I was confused. “How does this involve laundry detergent?”
“I’m getting to that.” He handed me another file. “I told you about the multiple arrests we made involving laundry detergent—always one size, always one brand. We found a stockpile of such at the Sinaloa stash house. I knew it had to be drug-related—maybe an ingredient in the drug-making process, maybe scent-masking—but I never figured it out. Until now.” He paused to let the next words sink in. “The detergent was the currency.”
“The what?”
Trey spread the materials out for me to see. “Street currency. A single one-hundred-and-fifty-ounce bottle of premium laundry detergent was worth ten dollars in illegal drugs. Customers paid street-level dealers with the detergent. The dealers then traded it back to cooperative local markets, most small grocery stores, where it was then returned to the shelves. It was the ideal street currency—untraceable, easily stolen, easily funneled back into the legitimate market, and not illegal to possess.” He pushed the pieces of paper into the center. “See for yourself.”
I looked where he was pointing. I saw a jumble of columns, a list of names. “They were laundering money with laundry detergent?”
He thought about that. “Yes.”
It all came together in my head. “The skate shop. It was the delivery spot. People brought in detergent, took out drugs.”
Trey exhaled in satisfaction. “Exactly. Which is what…the person with the tattoo…”
“Fishbone?”
Trey pointed his pen at me. “Right. Fishbone. That’s exactly what Fishbone was explaining to Garrity this morning. In return for reduced charges, of course. And protection.”
“Protection?”
“Yes, for him and his brother both. Because even though the skate shop operation is very small, the online criminal network Lucius connected it to is very…” Trey braced himself against the table with both arms. “Very…”
“Huge?”
“Yes. Enormous. More so than we ever suspected, more so than Fishbone and his brother wanted.” He nodded toward the countertop. “See for yourself.”
I scanned the collection of police reports, press releases, newspaper articles. It was a record of the Atlanta Metro Major Offenders Task Force doing exactly what it was supposed to do—connect local criminals with their larger organizational support system and bring both down in the process. And now there was a fresh series of indictments, the first series of charges against a confederation of former Gulag prisoners with disturbingly familiar nationalities—Ukrainian, Armenian, Latvian, a veritable encyclopedia listing of the former Soviet states, plus a smattering of Polish and Romanian names.
My head went swimmy. “Oh hell. It really is the Russian mafia. Just like Kenny said.”
Trey looked like Christmas morning with a pony under the tree. “The specifics are redacted until the search warrant is unsealed, but you can see the pattern regardless. The information has been right there, but we never had the…the …”
“Key?”
“Correct. But now we do. Now it’s a multi-national investigation with the FBI, the Justice Department, felony indictments at the corporate level. Because now we understand its structure.”
“Which is?”
He pulled the cap off the pen with his teeth. Instead of a flowchart, he drew a circle. Then he surrounded that with a second circle, and that with a third, like he was drawing a target.
“Each small drug operation, like the skate shop, was a circle. A single line made up of many single points—many single criminals—connected on that circle. Follow the line, and only that line, and it goes around and around. You begin where you end. No links to the larger organization. No way to get to the center.” He picked up one more folder. “The black market antiquities trade. Another circle. What Garrity discovered from Fishbone is that the key isn’t going around the perimeter of the circle. It’s finding the point on the circle that takes you to the next circle.”
He drew lines across the circles, creating what looking like a spiderweb. And then he put a dot in the very center, at the intersection of all the lines.
I stared. “The spider at the center of the web.”
Trey tossed the pen onto the drawing. “Garrity’s words exactly.”
“But how does Lucius fit in?”
“That’s what Garrity and I were trying to figure out this morning. He suspects Lucius’ murderer is on one of these circles, the point where the drug trade and the antiquities market intersect. We haven’t found that point yet, but when we do…” Trey looked at me, eyes bright. “It will exonerate your uncle entirely, I am sure of it.”
And then I saw it. The name. But not just the name, the translation of the name. I got a chill.
“Trey? What is this?”
He followed my pointing finger. “Known accessories in a particular Eastern European network. Some are in prison, others out of extradition, others at large.”
“What about this one? Belovuk.”
Trey nodded. “Serbian given name. It means—”
“White Wolf, I see that.” I was shaking now. “He’s the link, the point on the black market antiquities circle that connects to the drug circle that connects to the larger organization. He was Lucius’ contact, the one who traded him drugs for whatever he could steal. Including bones.”
Trey’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know this?”
I sighed. “Are you sure you don’t have any more of those herbal thingies?”