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a surveillance van with three other FBI agents and a tangled heap of audiovisual equipment. Seven hours of listening to the tinny patter of Albanian played through headphones, and the Bureau’s translator—a slight, olive-skinned man by the name of Bashkim—converting it into flat, dispassionate English beside her. Seven hours with no AC and no fan, the van amplifying the August heat until the cabin reeked of sweat and the agents’ clothes were plastered to their skin. Between the dehydration and the constant discordant input of two languages at once—not to mention her new partner Garfield’s inane chatter before she finally told him to shut up—Thompson’s head was pounding. The last thing she needed was a dose of Jess at her most tightly wound.
    Thompson silenced her phone with a sigh and stuffed it into the glove box. Thirty seconds later, she heard it vibrate—rasping against the van’s registration like a rattlesnake’s warning.
    “Lovers’ quarrel?” Garfield quipped, his eyes glinting with mischief. He’d been making pointed comments like that all day long. She wondered what he’d heard—how much he knew. But she didn’t want to get into it with him, especially in a van full of potential witnesses. Besides, they had a job to do. Bad guys to catch. That’s what her dad, now a captain with the Hartford PD, told her as a kid every time he left for work. It had never failed to make her smile back then—and much to her father’s consternation, it turned out to be the only thing she’d ever wanted to do when she grew up.
    The surveillance van was parked on one of the narrow side streets off Allegheny Avenue, in the Port Richmond neighborhood of North Philly. It was a working-class neighborhood—Polish, mostly, though the Albanian population had been on the rise of late, as had that of the Latvians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians—and, in contrast to the swanky, condo-studded neighborhoods that’d been popping up all over Philadelphia, the only concessions to luxury in sight were the ass-ends of several windowmounted air conditioners, dripping onto the concrete below.
    The sign in the storefront window declared Little Louie’s closed, but there’d been two men inside all day. Armed men, if the outlines of their tracksuits were any indication. Mostly, they just sat and drank, the better part of six hours spent shooting the shit about soccer, vodka, and assorted sexual conquests both real and imagined.
    It wasn’t until Petrela showed up that their conversation turned to the missing girls.
    Luftar Petrela was perhaps the single unlikeliest proprietor of an Italian restaurant who’d ever lived. Ghost-pale and wire-thin, he looked as though he’d never felt the kiss of the Mediterranean sun on his cheeks or experienced the warm comfort of a bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. His hair and eyebrows were thick and dark, but in a manner that suggested Slavic, not Italian. And of course, there was the fact he’d never actually learned to cook—he’d been too busy hurting people at the behest of his uncle, Tomor Petrela, local capo of the Albanian Mafia.
    None of which mattered much to the clientele of Little Louie’s, who to a one worked for Petrela, and mostly showed up so his list of people who needed hurting didn’t include them.
    A burst of rapid-fire Albanian, followed by Bashkim’s uninflected translation.
    Petrela: “Have they eaten?”
    Purple Tracksuit: “They claimed they were not hungry.”
    Petrela: “They must eat. They will not fetch a decent price if they’re malnourished.”
    Lime-Green Tracksuit: “The blonde was acting up again. Gouged at Enver’s arm when he opened the door.”
    Petrela: “We’ll raise her dose. Soon she’ll decide she likes the junk more than she likes fighting back. And there are some who’ll pay a premium for such feistiness.”
    Bashkim looked to Thompson, as if to ask if this was enough. Thompson removed her headphones—her hands trembling slightly from