Taken by Dee Henderson Page A

firm let me keep working my daughter’s case as I wanted to have it run.”
    “I like that about you—that you kept a full press on to solve your daughter’s case. A dad’s instinct, I know, but it says something that you persevered through all those years.” She gestured with her fork. “Will you ever go back to being a cop?”
    He shrugged. “Probably. It’s what I enjoyed for the first eight years of my daughter’s life. They’ve asked me back. I’ve got staff who can run the day-to-day of Dane Investigations without me.”
    He waited for something else, but she didn’t offer anything further. “What prompted the questions?” he asked.
    “I know where something is that was stolen. I might have us stop and pick it up tomorrow.”
    He lifted his root beer, considered her over the rim. This was getting even more interesting. He wondered what had been stolen. “People smugglers. Also thieves?”
    “Think of it as a family of smugglers. Half the family liked the money that came from dealing with people. The other half preferred dealing only in objects. They smuggled art goods mostly, some jewelry. They’d let things sit for five years or more, then deliver them to a trusted broker in another part of the country.”
    “Which side of the family did you spend most of the eleven years with?”
    She shook her head.
    He tried another query. “Were they good smugglers?”
    “They liked boats. They moved a lot of goods up and down both the East and West Coast. The people side of the business was a strictly pickup and drop-off affair. But the objects—sometimes they’d wait a few years and have someone in the circle claim the reward for the item’s return. Most of the time they would sell it. They didn’t actually steal the items; they acquired them from those who were fencing the goods or from brokers who had a deal fall through.”
    “How many from the family can you identify for the police?”
    “Identifying is easy. Locating is hard. They travel the country in a way that’s somewhat predictable by season, but they never stay within a hundred miles of a place they’ve been before. And they have trip wires all over the nation—people they do business with, places they stop, names that change, even check-in calls. Have a cop ask the wrong question, mention the wrong name, raid the wrong place, detain the wrong person, and the entire family folds up shop and disappears like ghosts.”
    He thought about that and realized her dilemma. “You’re aiming to get them all.”
    Shannon nodded. “I chose my time when I could run with enough information to tear the group apart. Some of theinformation I needed was on the West Coast, some on the East Coast. It took a while to get enough.”
    And the danger in that decision she’d made was breathtaking . He forced himself not to follow up on her comment, kept his voice casual. “It sounds to me like a conversation with Paul is in order.”
    She shook her head. “The children side of this is first, if there’s someone who hired them that can be traced. The five are dead, but I don’t know who was hiring them.”
    “How did they die?”
    “A family dispute settled with guns. The two sides of the family are like the Hatfields and McCoys right now. What was left of the kidnapping side of the family shut down and disbanded a year ago. These last two girls taken were an outlier—it’s what got the last two people in those photos killed. The rest of the family has gone quiet, sort of hibernating, shaking off the internal implosion.”
    “Could you have gotten out earlier?”
    “When Flynn was around, I could . . . maneuver is probably the right word. It’s how I got the packages mailed. But getting out would have meant someone left behind got killed. They were good at controlling people, making you responsible for someone else’s well-being. If you exhibited no concern over what happened to your assigned person, they assumed you were uncontrollable and put a