Page 48 of Her Forever SEAL

Lydia leaned over her laptop and picked up a printed page from the table. “Preliminary analysis. I won't have full confirmation until tomorrow morning, but the composition is consistent with a fast-acting benzodiazepine compound. Not a standard pharmaceutical formulation, this was mixed, not manufactured. Higher concentration than anything you'd find in a prescription.” She set the page down. “In a healthy adult male it would cause significant sedation within twenty minutes of ingestion. In someone with a pre-existing cardiac condition—” She stopped. “Lettie was right not to use it.”

Sophia thought about Tom Bowman sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee his wife had brought him, trusting her completely, not knowing.

She stopped thinking about it.

“How many people are we looking at?” she asked.

Rylie answered that one. She looked down at her tablet, her eyes moving between her screen and the board. “Minimum six. Probably more.” She turned the laptop around so they could see the diagram she'd built—names replaced with roles, lines connecting them. “You need somebody running long-term surveillance on Lettie. That's one person, possibly two working shifts because you can't have the same face in the same place every day without being made. Somebody separately photographing Brady at the park. That's not the same person as Lettie's surveillance, the timing overlaps. You have somebody who made the call to the Mathnasium. Somebody physically present when Bree walked out of that building, at minimum one, more likely two for a clean grab of a teenager who might fight back. At least one handler wherever Bree is being held right now, probably rotating, which means two. And Mary.” She paused. “And whoever is above Mary.”

Rylie closed the laptop. “Six people on the ground as a conservative estimate. Could be eight. This is not a small operation. This is organized, funded, and it has been running for months without a single mistake.”

“Until Kayla noticed Mandy,” Angie said.

“Until Kayla noticed Mandy and you noticed Lettie,” Rylie pointed out.

They worked through what they had for another hour. Angie was going back to the Mathnasium in the morning, not as herself, as a woman whose daughter was thinking of enrolling, which gave her a natural reason to be there and to ask questions and to chat with the receptionist who had put Bree in a car with strangers. She needed a description of the voice on that call. Accent. Any background noise. Anything.

Lydia was going to keep working the tower data and start cross-referencing property records.

Rylie made a call while they were still at the table. She stepped to the corner of the room and spoke quietly for about four minutes, then came back and sat down. “I have a contact,” she said. “From before. She tracks trafficking movement in Southern California. I've asked her to run the signature on this operation against anything she has on file. If this network has moved girls through this region before, she'll know.”

The word trafficking hit the room the way it always did. Even though they all knew. Even though it had been sitting in the middle of the table since Lettie had repeated Mary's words that afternoon. Saying it out loud was different.

Sophia felt it move through her like cold water.

She thought about Bree at lacrosse practice. About Bree's laugh, which was loud and uninhibited and a little honking at the end, the kind of laugh that made everyone nearby start laughing too. About the fact that she was fourteen years old and somebody had looked at her and seen a commodity.

She put her pen down just for a second. Just long enough to press her fingers against the table and breathe.

Angie's hand landed on her arm. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

Sophia picked up her pen.

“What else?” she asked.

“I want to talk about Mary,” Rylie said.

They all looked at her.

“Mary is the interface. She's the one with direct contact with Lettie and Peggy. She's the one who handed over the vial. She's the one who made the trafficking threat.” She folded her hands on the table. “She's also the one with the most exposure. Every conversation she's had with those women is a liability. She knows it. Which means at some point, when this operation reaches whatever its conclusion is supposed to be, Mary disappears. She'll be pulled out and her identity dissolves back into nothing.”

“We only have fifty more hours.” Sophia said.

“Can we push her? Kidnap her? Force her to talk?” Sophia asked. She was angry.

Angie shook her head. “That just lets everyone in the group know there are other players. We lose our leverage. Trust me, Sophia, we want to, too.”

She nodded. “So we need to move faster than their timeline,” Sophia said.

“Yes.” Rylie looked at her. “We do.”

The room sat with that for a moment.

“There's something else,” Lydia said.

She had been at her laptop through most of this, adding things, cross-referencing, her face giving nothing away. Now she looked up.

“I've been looking at the architecture of this operation. The patience of it. The resources. The identity construction on Mary. The level of advance surveillance on two separate families in two separate geographic areas.” She paused. “You don't build this to steal helicopter schematics.”