Orphan X: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

name?”
    “Danger.”
    “Really?”
    “No.”
    Nothing. And then the boy gave the faintest grin.
    Mia looked away to hide her own smile.
    The elevator dinged its arrival at the twelfth floor. “If you’re done giving Mr. Danger the third degree…” Mia said, mussing Peter’s hair and tugging him out after her.
    Too late, Evan looked down, noticing Mia’s drugstore bag still twisting in his fingers. He reached for the doors as they bumped shut, and then he was riding up to the penthouse level with her belongings. Returning them would have to wait.
    Tonight he had work to do.
    *   *   *
    He tossed Mia’s plastic bag on the kitchen counter and consulted the vodkas neatly arranged in the freezer, settling on the flask-shaped bottle of Jean-Marc XO. Made using four varieties of French wheat, the vodka was distilled nine times, then microoxygenated and charcoal-filtered. As he poured two fingers over ice, he noticed that a box of Band-Aids had partially slid out from Mia’s drugstore bag onto the counter. Muppet-themed, of course. The gaudy colors, so out of place against the gray slab and stainless steels, leapt out at Evan. He found something unsettling about the Day-Glo oranges and vibrant greens, though he could not put a name to the feeling.
    He slid the box into the bag again and sipped his drink on his way back to the Vault. The vodka felt silky going down his throat, the texture of purity.
    Morena Aguilar had armed him with two things: her on-call cell phone, now resting on the sheet-metal desk next to his trusty aloe vera plant, and a name.
    Bill Chambers.
    There was no scarcity of information on William S. Chambers of the LAPD. As a result of several big, well-timed busts, he’d worked his way up from patrolman to detective II, finally landing a spot in the coveted Gang and Narcotics Division four years ago. That explained how he’d managed to carve out his own little despotship in the middle of Lil East Side–controlled Boyle Heights. He was in an ideal position to do favors for the gangbangers if they helped him in turn. And so they left him to his concubinary of coerced girls, maybe even threw influence to protect him and guard the block he’d turned into his personal labor camp. Evan uncovered multiple Internal Affairs investigations, all of them hindered by misplaced evidence or about-faces by key witnesses. Next he searched the money. Chambers’s bank accounts showed multiple cash withdrawals and deposits just below the ten-thousand-dollar threshold for mandated bank reporting. Questionable activity. But not ironclad proof.
    And the First Commandment demanded ironclad proof.
    Evan picked up Morena’s on-call cell, a crappy plastic unit with a smudged screen, as light as a toy phone. It was a disposable model out of Mexico. When he thumbed up the text message history, he felt a sudden drop in the temperature of the Vault, a coolness at the back of his neck. A number of explicit texts from a recurring phone number contained sexual directives and instructions for Morena, some including photo references of clearly underage Latina girls in particular poses. He stared at the face of a child who couldn’t yet have been fourteen. Her features were leached of affect, the dead, red-rimmed eyes wholly detached from her body and what it was doing.
    He traded the phone for his drink but found he’d lost his taste for vodka. Or anything else. Indignation burned, and he had to evoke the Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.
    In the years he’d been doing this, he’d never broken a Commandment, and he wasn’t willing to do so now.
    Back to the databases with renewed energy. The phone number of the sender Evan sourced to a batch of prepaid phones bulk-sold to Costco last year. A simple bit of reverse-proxy code let him slip behind Costco’s firewall, and he checked data files at the store locations nearest Chambers’s home address. Nothing. Next he looked at several Costcos between Chambers’s