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“Special Agent Hernandez.”
“Mr. Bridgewater.” She stuck her hand out to shake mine and it damn near disappeared when I closed my fingers around it. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“Figured as much.” I gestured for her to follow me and led her to the conference room closest to the front. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? Ice cream?”
The last bit was for Joss. I peeked out the door and caught a slight smile on my admin’s face. When I turned back to the room, Hernandez was staring at me like I’d lost my damn mind.
“No. Thank you.”
“Please, have a seat.” We settled in around the table—her stiff and me ready to melt into a puddle of exhaustion on the floor. “What can I do for you?”
“Your employee, Rylan Dennis. He’s currently in the hospital.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“He’s recovering from surgery to remove a bullet from his leg.” When I didn’t respond, she continued. “He had an accidental discharge of his weapon.”
Hernandez didn’t appear to like my silence. She pursed her lips.
“Rumors are that some people from the D’Angelo Syndicate were down in Kansas City with you at that warehouse that exploded.”
“You make a habit of starting investigations because of baseless rumors?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Do you make a habit of answering questions with questions?”
A smile curved my lips and I leaned my elbows on the table. “By my count, that’s only the second question you’ve actually asked.”
She opened her mouth, a quick retort poised on her tongue, but her jaw snapped shut before she let it fly. After a brief pause, she changed tactics. “I’d like to talk about Donald Baker. How do you know him?”
“Good ol’ Donnie was the CEO of Guardian Group.”
“And how’d you come across his name?”
Why did all roads lead back there?
“A friend of a friend went missing last year.” I rolled that around in my mouth, not really wanting to go on. Being in Kelly’s space this morning was hard enough, and here I was talking about her like I hadn’t already been over this a million times in the past. “Police wouldn’t do anything about it, so my company stepped in to find them.”
“Them?”
I let out a long breath, wondering how many times I’d have to relive that night. “Kelly O’Connor and Jen Lucas. Jen was abducted from her boyfriend’s apartment while we were looking for Kelly, and the two of them—along with a couple dozen other women and girls from all over the country—wound up on a boat headed toward the Atlantic. They were all shoved into the hull. It was a sex trafficking ring.”
“And Mr. Baker? How did he enter the picture?”
“The ring was being run out of his company,” I said, almost on autopilot at this point. “Kelly and Jen both worked there, and some of the men who took them were employed there as well. We looked into him.”
“He claims you’ve been harassing him.”
My fists clenched under the table. “Only tried talking to him.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Multiple times.”
Shrugging, I sat forward in my chair, resting my elbows on the table. “In the grand scheme of things, talking to a known sex-trafficker doesn’t seem like a huge offense. Especially not when it led us to find a missing girl chained to his living room floor.”
For the briefest flash, her gaze dropped from mine. “The girls were recovered. Help me understand why you were trying to talk to him in the first place.”
“That would’ve been another missing persons case. Another case the police wouldn’t do jack shit about. You might recognize it—a sixteen-year-old boy disappeared from New York and was found in Kansas City? Seems to me like that should’ve been on the FBI’s radar.”
Her spine seemed to stiffen and she sat up in her chair.
