Page 53 of Deliverance

Sebastian, Alexander, and I slipped through the opening one at a time. I straightened on the other side and let my eyes adjust to the darkened room.

The hidden office was small but deliberately outfitted. A desk with a small lamp sat against the left wall. Along the back wall, a set of built-in shelves was lined with binders. The binders were neat and labeled with meticulous care. The rest of the building was a front, but I’d bet money that this is where Kingfisher actually worked. Had he sat at that desk and planned his criminal takeover of my city?

Alexander moved to the shelves while Sebastian swept the rest of the small space. I crossed to the desk. The surface was clean and uncluttered. I tried the drawers. All were locked, but not for long. The top drawer held nothing but a single pen. The bottom drawer was empty.

Alexander pulled a binder from the shelf and flipped it open, the papers rustling as he looked through it. “Evelyn,” he said quietly.

I moved to his side. The pages were dense with columns. Dates, locations, and numbers running down the left margin in sequence. It was a familiar format.

“It’s a manifest,” I realized.

“In code,” Alexander agreed. “But instead of shipment weights or cargo, there are these numbers. These are?—”

“People,” I finished.

My stomach turned. Each entry had a unique number, a date, two location codes and another two columns of coded data Icouldn’t decipher. I flipped through the pages slowly, scanning the numbers.

I recognized one.

I tapped on it, drawing Alexander’s attention. “This is the number etched into the wall at the warehouse,” I said.

Alexander held the page closer, his eyes narrowed on the entry. “That’s the date of the SID raid.”

Sebastian peered over my shoulder. “You think the women are assigned numbers?”

I thought for a moment, my brain racing. “I do. I think they’re assigned numbers, and I think one of the women from the SID raid etched that number into the wall. She may be able to tell us about the symbol next to it.”

“The symbol is in the ledger here too.” Alexander pointed to the end of the row. “It’s in a couple of these entries.”

“She’ll still be in protective custody, right?” I looked up at Alexander.

Anticipation coursed through me. If she could tell us what the symbol means, it may help us crack the manifest’s code and give us concrete evidence against Kingfisher.

“She should be,” Alexander said. “Dominic would know for sure.”

I nodded and slipped back through the opening to where Dominic, Marcus, and Adrian waited.

“We found a manifest,” I said. “It’s in code, but we recognized one of the numbers as the same one we found at the warehouse. It’s from the night of the SID raid. One of the women we rescued may have written it. We need to talk to her.”

“I’ll reach out to Ethan,” Dominic said without hesitation. “He can set up an interview for us, quietly and off the record, so it doesn’t spook anyone.”

“Good,” I said. “We’re going to photograph everything here and then put it back how we found it.”

Adrian nodded. “Good idea. Better to not let him know we’ve been here.”

I agreed. Right now, the only advantage we had was that Nathaniel Drake didn’t know we were on to him. I wasn’t willing to give that up until we were ready to take him down.

CHAPTER 22

EVELYN

Ethan Mercer was waiting outside the SID safehouse when we pulled up. His hands were in the pockets of a jacket that had federal agent written all over it, although it had no visible SID symbols on it. Despite seeing him through the grainy body camera footage, he was younger than I expected, maybe mid-thirties, with a clean-cut look that matched everything Dominic had told me about him. He screamed “by the book” all the way down to the sharp crease in his slacks.

The safehouse was a nondescript townhouse on a quiet street in the next city over. SID had a large office building in this city, and we had left early this morning to get here on time. All my guys had come along, but only Dominic and I got out of the car. I didn’t want to overwhelm the girls inside, and I didn’t want Ethan asking more questions than he probably would already.

Mercer’s eyes found Dominic first. “You look terrible.”

“Thank you,” Dominic said, rolling his eyes. Lingering bruises from the crash still littered Dominic’s skin. A special kind of rage filled me every time I saw them. “Ethan, this is Evelyn.”