Page 47 of Deliverance

“Okay,” Alexander said. “Let’s get started. Dominic, are you feeling up to sharing the profile with us?”

Dominic nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“Before we get started.” Izzy cleared her throat. “There’s something you all should know. I just found out about it this morning.” She hesitated. Izzy never hesitated, so my stomach immediately sank. “Director Keller was found dead in his cell this morning.”

Fuck.

Alexander swore. “How did he die?”

“Initial report says apparent suicide.”

“Well, we know that’s not the case.” Marcus folded his arms.

“We do,” Izzy agreed. “But will the SID?”

Everyone looked at Dominic, who shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “There will be an investigation, but everyone there wants this gone, so they may just try to wrap it in a tidy bow.”

“If only we lived to make their jobs easier,” I drawled.

“If only,” he agreed with a wry smirk. “I’ll call Mercer after we’re done. See if there’s anything he can tell me or if I can influence him in any way.”

“After,” Alexander said. “We need to go to him with answers about who Kingfisher is.”

I nodded. This profile was more important than ever. Dominic pushed back from the table and walked over to the whiteboard. Grabbing a marker, he studied the board for a moment. There was something different about the way he carried himself this morning, an edge that hadn’t been there yesterday. Yesterday had changed him. It changed me too.

“All right.” Dominic uncapped the marker. “Here’s what we found. Victimology first. The women and girls he targets are young, between fourteen and twenty-five, and conventionally attractive. Beyond that, there’s no consistent pattern. He pulls from clubs, off the streets, and in some cases from families who sell their own children.”

The room went quiet at that dark reminder, but he kept going. “Whatisconsistent is geography. The women are taken around certain areas repeatedly. This points to Kingfisher having business in all of these geographic areas.” He listed several cities on the whiteboard. “Kingfisher has some kind of footprint in these cities. Property, business interests, connections, something that links him to this area.”

“All of those cities are in the Midwest,” Alexander pointed out.

Dominic nodded. “He has some national reach, but the Midwest is his hunting ground for sure.” He moved to the next section. “Methodology. His whole operation is built on insulation. Middlemen on top of middlemen. He has never, as far as we can tell, gotten his hands directly dirty. He uses several different brokers across states and hires people to do the dirty work for them. He primarily moves the women via freightliner and box trucks, and once someone becomes a liability, they disappear.”

The weight of his words, along with Izzy’s announcement, hung heavily in the room. Kingfisher had the power to take out a federal agency director. That was not someone to be underestimated.

“He’s maintained at least one to two layers between himself and his operation, as far as we can tell. Historically, he’s kept more, but with the added pressure of the last couple of months, he’s been forced to compress his operation, which is why I think Director Keller had stepped up to do the work directly. We can use that to our advantage because it makes him more exposed.”

“But it’s also likely to rattle him,” Marcus pointed out. “Which could make him more dangerous.”

“It could,” Dominic agreed. “But I think we can use it. The next piece of the puzzle is motivation.” He wrote three words on the board.Money. Power. Control.“This isn’t purely financial. The money matters to him, but so does the power. And then there’s an element of cruelty as well. The taunting behavior he’s expressed through his text messages shows his ego. He has a god complex, and he’s been unchallenged long enough that he believes he’s untouchable.”

Dominic’s jaw tightened slightly. “The Archers changed that. He doesn’t like it. He’s fixated on neutralizing the threat rather than pulling back and going quiet, which is what a purely rational actor would do.”

“He thinks if he takes Evelyn out, everything will go back to normal,” Adrian said. His words landed grimly in the silent room.

My life had always been at stake; I was used to that. But the expressions around the table said the others hadn’t made peace with that the way I had.

“That’s my read,” Dominic said, lips in a grim line. “But that fixation is what is going to get him caught.”

“Why?” Alexander questioned.

“He’s getting sloppy,” I said. “He’s taunting me, but in doing so, he’s going to leave himself open. If he’s focused on me and not his operation, things will slip through the cracks.”

Dominic nodded. “Last thing: timeline. We believe he’s been operating for approximately a decade. There’s a file on him at the FIA and the SID, but it’s thin. Too thin for an operation of this size. He’s had people looking the other way for a long time.”

“Like Director Keller,” Izzy said.

“Exactly,” Dominic said. “So that’s it for the profile. The next step is to match it.”