Working on Meka’s case kept my mind from wandering too much. This wasn’t some simple case of investigating a possibly – usually – cheating spouse. This was a missing teenager. Too important for me to be distracted by some spoiled rich asshole who thought he could do and say whatever he wanted.

Fortunately, I’d always been good at compartmentalizing.

I put the last note into place on the whiteboard and then took a couple steps back, so I could see the big picture. I’d put all the information about Sylph Industries on the left and everything from the school on the right, then a picture of Meka right in the center. Theo’s name was right above it. Now I just needed to connect the dots, see the patterns.

One of the first things was to look at discrepancies. There weren’t any on Theo’s side. Everyone essentially said the same things about him. Good guy and all that. Nothing strange I could see in his finances, unless he had a hidden account in the Cayman Islands. He didn’t spend more than he made, not more than the average person did anyway.

It was Meka who seemed to have two different sides to her. Parents didn’t always know their kids as well as they thought they did. While I was sure there were some who were the same at home as they were with their friends, it wasn’t unusual for an investigation to turn up secrets that made parents cringe and cry.

On the other hand, teenagers weren’t always the most reliable witnesses when it came to their peers. Biases, jealousies, the simple fact of immaturity, all of those things came into play when they talked about other teens. But, sometimes, they saw more than the adults in their lives.

Which meant I had to figure out the actual truth. Was Meka the girl that her father thought she was? Or was she a secret rebel? Sleeping around with different guys?

I looked at her picture, as if that would tell me what type of young woman she was. It wasn’t a candid shot, but I’d seen plenty of those on her social media accounts. Those had shown her to be a fun-loving girl, but nothing that suggested the sort of behavior some of the boys in her class had attributed to her.

She didn’t have a best friend. There wasn’t one girl who claimed to be closer to her than anyone else. No one person in whom she’d confide.

Which meant, I suddenly realized, that she had to have put her feelings somewhere. If she didn’t have a person to tell everything to, and she didn’t put all sorts of personal shit on her social media sites, she had to have something else.

A diary. Journal. Whatever she wanted to call it. Maybe she used pictures instead of words, but she had to have an outlet somewhere. I just needed to find it.

“I don’t understand why Shawn keeps pushing for sex. I told him when he first asked me out that I wasn’t ready. He said it was okay. That he’d wait because I was special. I told him that if he couldn’t handle it, he should break up with me. I even tried breaking up with him, but he didn’t want to hear it. He just kept saying that he was fine going at my pace, but then when we were alone, it was all ‘come on, baby, I love you, don’t you want to make me feel good.’”

I read the journal entry out loud to make sure I wasn’t reading things into it.

Theo had let me into Meka’s room but warned me that he’d looked for clues already. I’d thanked him and then found the diary ten minutes later. Not really a surprise since I’d found it under her bras and panties. Very few dads would be willing to go digging through his daughter’s underwear drawer.

A cop probably would’ve found it, if any of them had bothered to take this case seriously, and maybe they’d even connect things the same way I had, but none of them could do what I was about to do. Shawn was a minor. They’d need to follow all sorts of legal procedures before they could even talk to him, and there was still a chance that he wouldn’t know where Meka was.

I planned to cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. If he thought that I had to follow all those same rules, he was going to say things he never would have said otherwise. If those things led me to Meka, then it wouldn’t matter how I’d gotten the information. She could tell the cops exactly what happened to her, and if it implicated Shawn, then he’d be toast.

And my gut told me that little slime-bag was at the center of the whole damn thing.

Which was why I was waiting outside the school on Friday afternoon, watching for that scruffy blond hair. I heard the bell ring, and I pushed myself off my car to stand straighter. A gust of wind made me pull my jacket closer, but I didn’t even think about getting back into the car, not before I had a little chat with Shawn.

A couple students gave me funny looks but considering the condition of the side of my face, I didn’t blame them. At some schools, seeing a woman with a bruised face wouldn’t be cause for a second thought, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the case here. This place was too nice to let all that out into the open. This was the sort of place where dirty secrets were kept in closets or under rugs where they belonged, never to be aired in public.

I didn’t think too much more on that because I’d spotted him. That cocky little swagger and smirk didn’t look any different from what I’d seen yesterday. Hopefully, that’d change in a moment.

I didn’t call out to him or go running toward him. I didn’t want to make a scene, not like that. I walked toward him, my pace nice and even, like I knew exactly where I was going but wasn’t in too much of a rush to get there. I didn’t stare at him but rather kept him in my line of sight as I pretended to casually look around. When I was a few feet away, I picked up speed, closing the distance rapidly as Shawn stopped to talk to a pretty blonde. She saw me first.

“Is she one of those bitches you said dug you?” Shawn turned when I spoke, and I grabbed his arm. “You can get back to riding her when I’m done with you. If she still wants you after I rip your balls off and cram them down your throat.”

“Hey, hey, woman, what’s your deal?!” He stumbled as I yanked him away from the blonde. “You can’t manhandle me like this!”

I shoved him back against a tree and ignored the muttering behind me. People were watching, but I didn’t care, not if it helped me get Meka back.

“I’m gonna have your badge, bitch!”

“Listen up, bitch,” I snapped, “because I’m only saying this once. I’m not a cop. I’m not required to read you your rights or treat you like anything other than the piece of shit you are.”

Fear flickered behind his eyes. “I can still call the cops on you.”

“Yes, you can,” I agreed. “And we’ll have a nice little chat about the drugs in your backpack.”

The color drained from his face. “The what?”

It’d been a guess based on his bloodshot eyes and general demeanor, but apparently a good one.

“I don’t care about the shit you poison yourself with,” I said. “I care about Meka and where she is. You tell me what you know, and maybe I won’t make an anonymous call to your principal…and the local police department.”

He glanced around, squirming nervously. “Not here, all right? I got a reputation.”

“I’d think getting your ass handed to you by a woman would improve the way people think of you.” I wanted to stay here and make him look like an even bigger asshole, but I didn’t know what he was going to tell me. If it was something that would embarrass Meka, I didn’t want the whole school finding out. I sighed. “My car’s over here.”

I didn’t let go of his arm, practically dragging him to my car. I had a feeling he was going to spread around some seedy lie about how I blew him or some shit like that, but I didn’t care. If a couple rumors floating around a high school were the price I had to pay for finding Meka, it’d be worth it.

I shoved the kid into the back seat and climbed in after him. “Talk.”

He crossed his arms, looking even more like a sulking child than he already had. “Look, I got a rep to keep up, and she was hurting it. Being a damn prick tease. I took her out three times.” He held up three fingers. “Everyone knows that a girl got to give it up on the third date, but she just kept saying she wasn’t ready, or some shit like that. I told her fine, I’d be good if she went down. She was lucky. No dude’s gonna shell out cash for three dates if he ain’t getting some that third time.”

I couldn’t resist. I smacked the back of his head. “Real classy.”

He shrugged even as he glared at me. “Anyway, she wouldn’t do nothing. Not even a handy.”

“Shawn,” I warned.

His cool-guy demeanor shifted, and he looked uneasy for the first time since I’d met him. “Look, these dudes are serious. I was getting my…medicine when I made a joke and then they held me to it. These ain’t the sort of dudes you wanna mess with. Believe me.”

“What joke?”

His eyes shifted, and he looked paler than only moments ago. “Just let it go. When these girls is gone, they gone.”

“I’m losing my patience, and that doesn’t bode well for you, Shawn.” I took my phone out of my pocket. “Maybe I should call my friend at the FBI.”

His entire face morphed into panic. “You don’t have no–”

“I do,” I said while tapping buttons. “Keep giving me the runaround and you’ll meet him up close and personal.”

“All right, all right.” He held up his hands. “I’ll tell you everything. You said you ain’t a cop, right?”

“I’m not.”

“My supplier got locked up almost a year ago, so I started looking for another one. I found this guy who had primo stuff. Except after a couple weeks, he didn’t want money. He wanted something I could get him. Girls.”

My free hand clenched into a fist. Girls. Plural. I realized that he’d said that before too. I just hadn’t caught it until now.

“Him and his guys wanted girls that no one would miss. They didn’t need to be pretty or skinny or anything. Just high schoolers. And losers. Not so many that people would notice, but whenever they said they wanted one, I had to do it.”

“Hate to tell you, but a whole lot of people noticed Meka was missing.”

“Yeah, I fucked that up.” He scratched the back of his head. “That last night, I made everything perfect. Dinner. Flowers. I shelled out serious cash. And she still said no. Bitch needed to learn a lesson, and they needed a girl.”

“You gave your girlfriend to human traffickers because she wouldn’t have sex with you?”

He scowled. “It sounds all kinds of shady when you say it like that.”

“It’s pathological, you moron,” I snapped. A couple pieces clicked into place. “Did you tell them that I was looking for her?”

He shrugged yet again, but the guilt was plastered on his face. Now I knew why I’d been attacked, and how they’d known where I was. He was lucky I was more concerned with Meka than my own safety.

“Where is she, asshole?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Seriously. I take the girl to meet the guys. I get my stash. They get the girl.”

I reminded myself that it wouldn’t be a good idea to knock Shawn out. Delivering him to the cops would have to be justice enough.

“Where do you meet them? The same place every time, or do you go somewhere different?”

“It’s one of those storage places,” he said. “On the edge of the city.”

I pulled my notebook out of my pocket. “Address. Now.”

He hesitated, then rattled it off. “Just don’t tell them you got it from me, okay? You might not be a cop, but they don’t like people sticking their noses in their business, you know?”

Oh, I knew. And I had no doubt that they were going to be royally pissed when they figured out I wasn’t just coming for Meka. I’d get her, but then I was going to burn the whole damn thing to the ground.

But first, this asshole was going to jail.