an address on Jourdan Road for midnight tonight and offered Bonnie and her family in exchange for the device.”
“Anything else?”
Roman shook his head. “Only that we agreed to take no further action against him and that we keep her brother and father quiet.” He looked to Kir. “He did not give a name.”
Kir straightened from his semi-reclined pose and typed a few words on his computer. “We don’t need it.” He turned the computer around for Roman and Sergei to get a better look. “Knox and I pieced it together just before you walked in the door. Erick Rossi. On paper he shows as Chief Financial Officer for a pharmaceutical supply company out of Florida, but his real connection is to a major drug player in Southern California.”
“He’s a middleman?” Roman asked.
“So, it seems,” Kir said, “but not a very smart one. The supply company is a front for their connection with a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Florida. The manufacturer fell on hard times—too much competition. They opted to enter the black market for street sales rather than going out of business. But they had no clue how to market their product.”
“But Rossi did,” Roman said.
Kir nodded. “And then some. Rossi is their connection to the dark web. In exchange for his know-how and keeping the manufacturer tied in, Rossi gets a cut, the vast majority of which should be going to his boss in California.”
He tapped a few keystrokes and the database layout on the screen shifted to two side-by-side versions. He pointed to the one on the left. “This is the older of the two databases. It shows deposits going to an offshore account. The other shows each deposit changed to one that eventually ends up back in Bolivia in the bank account of his boss where it should have been all along.”
“And Kevin found this data somehow?” Sergei asked.
“No.” The pieces fell together for Roman as he spoke. “Bonnie said he’s been hired many times for hacking jobs. He was probably hired to change the data for Rossi. Better for a foolish outsider to do it than for one of his own men to do it. That way Rossi covers his tracks and frames a sloppy hacker instead.”
Kir nodded. “Cassie tells me that Bonnie specifically mentioned her brother and father arguing the day they disappeared. That the disagreement was about money. It may be Kevin decided to use the information he’d found and saved to blackmail Rossi.”
“A rash move at best,” Sergei said. He motioned to the laptop with his chin. “Who is Rossi’s boss?”
A wry grin from his brother was the last thing Roman had expected, but from the look on his face, Kir couldn’t wait to drop his latest bit of information. “A woman by the name of Gretta Sosa.”
Sergei smiled. A wicked one that said he wasn’t just pleased, but had the perfect plan to stack the dominos in their favor. “Well, then. We have data, a name and fifteen hours to work with. I suggest we make full use of it.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Jourdan Road ran the eastern length of New Orleans’s Inner Harbor Navigation Canal—a waterway that conveniently connected Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River. While Roman hadn’t exactly been a stranger to the terrain in his time since moving to New Orleans, by the time the sun set he’d personally combed every warehouse entrance and exit along the aged brown road and had mapped every possible means to navigate to their target destination—including the dock options off the canal and the overgrown entrances from neighboring buildings.
An old, water stained concrete wall ran along one side of the road—either to keep flood waters at bay for the neighborhoods farther east of the canal, or to muffle the railroad noise for the residents beyond. Feed chutes ran every half mile or so from the many grain silos on one side of the road to the warehouses backed up to the canal and thick metal electric poles stood in neat rows like industrial sentries.
But his main focus had been the pale gray building that stretched as long as a football field and boasted enough docking bays along the front to handle a swarm of semis at once. Once upon a time, the building had been part of the agricultural industry, but now served as storage and a staging area for all manner of shipments.
He stared at the building under the darkest night skies. The clouds that had hung heavy throughout the day had remained tonight, keeping the