Emily Locke 01 - Final Approach

folders?”
    She leaned next to Brad and got so close to the screen her shoulder brushed against his. He wheeled his seat backward, to reclaim some personal space, I imagined. Jeannie grabbed his mouse.
    “Let’s see what he’s been up to.”
    “Okay then,” Brad said. “I’ll be over here, ringing you up.” He faded toward a computer at the far end of the counter.
    “Try My Documents,” I whispered.
    She double-clicked the folder and a new list of folders appeared.
    Jeannie read them off quietly, “Mortgage, Gear, Junk, MP3s, Old, Miscellaneous, Work, Financial, Pictures…”
    She clicked on the Work folder, but only old resume drafts were inside. Apparently Edward Kosh—Scud—was a building contractor before he hit it big in human trafficking and contraband.
    “Try Financial.”
    The folder contained a variety of Excel Sheets: Interest Payments, Master Card, Home Improvements, and New Car, among others. In a list of such specific records, a nondescript filename caught my eye.
    “Click on Transactions,” I said. The Date Modified column indicated it was updated only two days ago.
    Excel launched and populated a short worksheet. There were no column headers.
    Jeannie and I squinted at the data.
    “Oh my God,” she whispered. “Is this what I—”
    “This has to be male or female,” I said, pointing at a column of “M”s and “F”s.
    “Origin and destination cities too,” she whispered. “And are those the
ages
of kids involved? I can’t believe this. What’s with the question marks?”
    “Maybe a child not placed? And that last column…it has to be the person who took each child.”
    I remembered the paper I’d found in Kurt’s duffel.
    “Wait,” I muttered, unzipping the backpack. Where was that damn paper? I dug through stacks of money looking for it, and two thick bricks cash escaped onto the table. I glanced up in time to catch Brad staring, wide-eyed.
    “Long story,” I said, and shoved them back in the bag.
    Brad grinned. “Is that—”
    “For a prank.” Jeannie reached over me, into the sack, and extracted a crisp fifty from her recent bank run. “Looks real, huh?” She winked and handed it to him. “Just don’t try to spend it.”
    He walked toward the counter, inspecting the bill and turning it over in his hand. I wasn’t sure if he’d been tricked or paid off, and I imagined he was asking himself the same question.
    The paper I wanted was nestled along the backpack’s liner and I unfolded it and held it near the keyboard.
    “Look,” I said. “The first two columns on this paper match the ones on the spreadsheet, right down to the question mark. They could be dates, without the year listed.”
    “Wait a minute.” Jeannie leaned forward and looked from the monitor to the paper. “How much money’s in your bag there, Em?”
    I frowned. “Before I bought the car it was almost two-fifty.”
    She ran a finger down the smooth surface of the flat screen panel and stopped on the last three numbers. “Eighty-nine, seventy-five, eighty-four…that adds to what? Two forty-eight?”
    “I hate math.”
    “Well,
this
math,” she pointed to the numbers on the computer and paper, “is in
that
bag.” She flung her finger toward my backpack. “Column seven here is money, if you add some zeroes. And you’re hauling around an awful lot of zeroes, lady.”
    My eyes followed her finger and involuntarily fixated on the bag. I visualized its incredible stash, safely zipped inside. “Why would they risk toting that amount of cash?”
    “Money laundering.” She answered with conviction but I doubted she had any idea what she was talking about.
    I looked at the last column of the spreadsheet again. “Dalton and Kosh are obvious. And I know that name Reed.”
    She turned back to the screen, as if double-checking me.
    “That’s the guy I picked out of the photo line-up in Mattie’s case. The guy I was supposed to forget. He’s the one who went free because my deposition never made it to court.”
    “I don’t know what to say. You did everything you could.”
    I’d thought so too, but it hadn’t been enough. And now more children had been taken from their homes because that trial didn’t take Reed off the streets like it should have. At least six kids had been snatched this year, if I could believe what I was reading. And then it hit me.
    “Where are the other years?”
    “This is the only tab,” she said, clicking across the bottom, checking for more