"Then where did he take them?"

Davy knew the name of the village and the girls' madrasa but he wasn't so sure he wanted to tell Mr. Aniketa. The information was all too likely to go from his lips to the police to the brothel, and he didn't want the mastaans showing up there.

"He took them to an Imam who belongs to COMPIAT-the antitrafficking network, you know? Then he headed back upstream. He said he was going to return the boat to Bhangura."

"When was this?"

"That same afternoon."

"Eesh! That's hardly any more than we already knew." Mr. Aniketa gave Davy his card. "This has my cell number. Please let me know if you hear anything." He sighed. "I went to school with Ramachandra's father. I've known him since he was a baby."

Davy gave Mr. Aniketa a card with one of his many e-mail addresses. "And please let me know if you hear anything, too."

TWENTY-SIX.

"Escalation"

Hector was limping in the cafeteria the next day, a fact that cheered me immensely.

"So there's Hector Guzman and Calvin. And then there's someone named Marius. Is that it?"

Jade blinked and Tara said, "What do you mean?"

"The guys in Caffeine's little gang."

Jade said, "Caffeine's gang? It isn't Caffeine's gang."

I blinked. "Oh. Whose is it?"

Tara spoke, "I don't know, but Caffeine and friends are just the high school minions. Like comparing the paper boy to the newspaper or the newspaper's publisher."

Jade said, "Yeah. I've seen that black Hummer cruise by and stop, and whatever she's doing, whoever she's talking to, she drops what she's doing and runs across the street, fast, and gets in the back."

Shit.

I sat back in my chair, suddenly overwhelmed. I thought I was just dealing with Caffeine, Hector, and a few sociopathic high school dropouts. Now it felt like I was facing a vast organized crime syndicate.

I wonder if she shared the video with the gang at large?

I hoped not.

After lunch, Grant asked me out again.

I guess I shouldn't have kissed him.

"No. But I'll pretend I like you when we're here at school."

He looked devastated. "Pretend? You'll pretend?"

I took his arm and tucked it through mine. "It's okay, Grant. I'm not pretending, but no more dates. We both need to branch out." We were walking through the crowded hall. "I'll even kiss you on the cheek when we're done talking if you answer one question."

He looked wary. "What question?"

"Where was the video made?"

He looked down at the floor. "It's because of Caffeine, isn't it? That's why you won't go out with me again."

"Look on the bright side. If it weren't for Caffeine, I wouldn't have gone out with you at all." I patted his arm. "We're all entitled to mistakes. I had a good time last night and I'd certainly dance with you again, but we are not dating. Sorry, that's just a fact. Answer my question."

He looked like he was going to cry which made me sad and then angry. I jabbed him in the ribs. "Have you noticed how many girls are checking you out as you walk through the hall?"

His head swiveled back and forth and he looked slightly less upset.

"Come on," I said. "I have PE-where was it?"

He told me and I kissed him on the cheek.

If there is a wrong side of the tracks in New Prospect, it is over by the oil field service companies, a patchy mix of rundown houses interspersed with fenced lots stacked with drill casing, mud tanks, and disassembled drilling rigs.

I moved through the neighborhood wearing the anonymous gray hoodie with a balaclava pulled up over my lower face and the hood well forward. On the first pass, I walked down the sidewalk on the street-side of the lot. Their "clubhouse" was a detached two-door garage, once adjacent to a large house, but the house was now a wreck, the victim of a fire, roof gone, some walls half standing. The garage, by contrast, was in good repair, its stucco sides mottled where not-quite-matching shades of paint had covered up graffiti. The ruin was bordered by a warehouse, a fenced lot stacked with mud pumps, and a construction equipment dealership.

There was no movement and I couldn't see any lights or activity, but access to the garage was from the rear of the lot, not the street. I went down to the next block and came back up the alley.

Judging by the weeds and litter accumulating across the garage doors, they weren't used much. The side door, though, was clear, and it was apparent from the ruts in the crusted snow and mud that cars usually parked on this side of the garage.

There were no cars parked there now, though.

I circled the building. There were no windows for me to get a look through, so I couldn't jump inside. I thought about breaking in, using a cinder block and accelerating it to 180 mph toward the door-jumping away before the impact, of course.

And that wouldn't exactly keep your visit secret, would it?

I wanted one of those cameras with the flexible fiber optic pickup that I could shove under the door. Something that would let me see inside.

I walked back to the ruins of the old house and looked for a nice hidden corner to use as a jump site. While I scrambled over the remains of one of the walls I glanced back at the garage and saw the gray sky reflected in something on its roof.

Ah. I stood up on the wall. There was a skylight.

I picked a jump site where two of the ruined walls came together out of sight from the adjoining lots and the garage. Most of the debris from the fire had been cleared out, but enough dirt had blown into this corner that a tumbleweed was growing.

When I returned to the rear of the garage, I couldn't see anybody. I experimented a bit, adding enough upward velocity to clear the parapet of the garage's stucco wall but with a slight forward component, not just straight up. I landed lightly on the roof without having to jump a second time.

It was an old-school skylight with frosted glass panes, but one of the panes had been replaced with transparent glass. I could see down into the garage and though there weren't any lights, the skylight provided enough illumination for me to make out carpeted floor and a couch.

I made sure my hood was well forward and the balaclava pulled up as far as my nose, and jumped into the garage.

No one leaped out of the shadows, which I saw, as my eyes adjusted, were not very deep. The floor was covered with irregular swaths of carpet, unmatched in color, texture, and thickness. Three couches formed an open square, facing away from the vehicle doors. An avocado-colored refrigerator flanked the side door and I heard its compressor kick in. Inside the refrigerator were several six-packs of soft drinks, two cases of beer, and some leftover fast food.

The room smelled musty, slightly mildewed, with overtones of sweat and, I thought, marijuana, which I'd smelled in Amsterdam. It was cool in the room, but not as cold as outside. Two electric radiators were plugged in at opposite sides of the space.

The rear of the garage had rough closets walled with warped and torn paneling, and in the far rear corner was what used to be a laundry room. The utility sink was still there, but the dryer and washer were long gone and a toilet had been mounted in the middle of the little room atop an old floor drain. A hose ran across the floor from the old washer fittings to the flush tank's inlet valve. I peered into the toilet and backed away. It looked and smelled like something you'd find in the restroom of a badly maintained gas station.

I went through the closets. There was bedding, some men's and women's clothing, and a cluster of baseball bats, one of which had brownish-red stains on it.

In the last closet, opposite the three couches, I found the hidden video camera.

A camera mount, clamped to one of the closet's interior studs, held the video camera lens directly against the paneling. I walked back around and found the small hole at the back of a shelf, framed on one side by a tool box and some packaged oil filters on the other.

I went back and examined the camera. It was plugged into a power adaptor, so it didn't have to depend on batteries. It used solid-state media, a little postage stamp-sized SD card, which I popped out and examined. It was a sixteen gigabyte card. I pushed it back into the slot and powered up the camera. The directory in the little fold-out LCD monitor showed one file only, dated the previous week, too recent to be one of the freshman blackmail videos.

I hit play.

The camera was zoomed on the center couch and there was a guy sitting there, lounging back. He was old-in his late twenties or early thirties, I would say. He was looking slightly to the right of the camera, where the closet door would be, then I heard the door close and Caffeine entered the scene and went to the couch and kissed him.

Not like you'd kiss your dad, either.

When she moved down his body, unfastened his pants and pulled his zipper down, I pulled my hands away from the camera and banged against the back of the closet. By the time I turned the camera off she was going down on him.

I jumped away, all the way to my reading nook, in the Yukon, blushing furiously.

It's not like I'd never seen porn before. Internet access and all that. I was embarrassed enough the first time I'd seen video of two humans having different kinds of sex, just as I was embarrassed when I heard kids talk about who was "doing it" at school. But I'd never put the two together-seen a person I knew in real life do that.

I shuddered.

Did I really want to find the blackmail videos? Wouldn't I have to look at them? Was I really ready to see Grant, Tony, and Dakota "doing it?"

A blond woman wearing surgical scrubs was sitting in our kitchen in the Yukon, crying. I nearly jumped away before I realized it was Mom, wearing one of her wigs.

My next thought sent my heart thudding. "Is Dad all right?"

"He's fine." She shook her head. "It's my mom."

"What's wrong with Grandmother?"

"She fell and broke her hip last week. While she was in recovery, she threw a blood clot into her lungs and had to go on a respirator. She's back off of it, now, but she's going to need to move over to the fully assisted side of her retirement community. I don't know if she'll ever be able to go back to her apartment."

My heart slowed a bit. I'd only met Grandmother three times.

Some of the retirement community employees were watching for us-well, for Mom or Dad since they didn't know I existed. Dad didn't know if it was for them or the NSA.

Mom and Dad had jumped Grandmother away from there a few times to spend weekends with us, but the increase in surveillance after these mysterious absences had been intense. Mom and Dad decided it was too dangerous for Grandmother if they'd kept up the visits, though they'd asked her if she'd like to live with us full time.

Grandmother was torn, but in the end, refused. She had her other daughter and many friends. She wasn't ready to walk away from that life.

I fetched a box of tissues from the living room and hugged Mom. It was all I could think of to do.

"Did you see her?"

She nodded against my shoulder, then sat back. "Yeah. Talked to her after she got off the respirator." Mom waved her hand at the wig and the scrubs.

I saw that she was also wearing her green contacts.

Mom bit her lip. "She asked to see you."

It was my turn to bite my lip. "What does Dad say?"

"Dad doesn't know she asked." She blinked and added, "Yet." She was frowning. "Dad is in Bangladesh, seeing if there is any word of Rama. He hasn't heard about any of this. I just found out this morning, when I checked the e-mail drop."

"Aunt Sue?"

Mom nodded.

Sue was Mom's sister. I'd met her exactly once.

"Yeah. There were six e-mails in the box. We should check it more often."

"Should I visit her? I could do the Girl Scout thing."

Mom blinked. Once she'd jumped me close by and I'd visited Grandmother posing as a Girl Scout selling cookies. We'd sat on a bench outside her apartment and talked for an hour, but we kept getting interrupted as other retirees came up to buy cookies.

Mom smiled and blew her nose. "Think you're too big for that, now."

"Some other disguise, then."

"We'll see."

In the middle of the night I went into the school administration office and looked up Caffeine's home address. I figured it would be in a file cabinet, but the file room was locked and windowless, blocking me effectively.

However, I found her address and basic info in the school computer system. The database client was browser based and the secretary's computer was in sleep mode, still logged in. It didn't even require a password on wake up.

Besides Caffeine's address I also learned that she had three half sisters from her mother's current marriage and four half brothers from her father's previous and subsequent marriages, as well as two stepbrothers, children of her mother's current husband from a previous marriage. There was a reference to ongoing behavioral issues but that info was apparently in the physical file.

Hector Guzman had three older brothers and a younger sister. There was no mention of his father in the record, just his mother.