Sharing Afflictions

Mendocino County Line

We let Curly go. He had given us a lot of information. He and his gang had never really intended to hurt anyone and in fact they had suffered more injuries than any of us. After what we put them through, I'm betting they won't be kidnapping anyone ever again. Besides, I still had their gun and wanted to hang on to it.

Roger came up to my apartment and helped us translate the decoded entries in Simon's address book. Many of them were filled with too many abbreviations for us to make sense of the entry. We did end up with a half dozen addresses that were distinguished by the Spanish word seguro. One in San Diego, one in Santa Barbara, one in Santa Cruz, one in Mendocino, one in Portland Oregon, and one in South Lake Tahoe. Great places to vacation, but why would you encrypt that? Our best guess was, that they were the location of safe houses. Seguro is the Spanish word for safe.

We called Agent Lee and updated him. We told him what Curly had told us implicating Carmella in Simon's murder. We told him our fears that the Mexican Mafia, Carmella, or both had taken Jean hostage. We told him what we had managed to decode from Simon's address book. He pointed out that the five locations were probably drug distribution hubs. Narcotics was not in his jurisdiction, but he said he would make some calls and see what he could find out that might help us figure out what had happened to Jean.

It was Friday night and everywhere was busy; so, we ordered in pizza for dinner. While we had the team together at my apartment, we discussed plans to rescue Jean.

"I'm worried about Jean," I said trying to hide the full extent of my concern. I was actually frightened for her life. "There doesn't seem to be anything the police can do until we can locate her or at least prove who took her. They won't even consider her a missing person yet. By the time they do, I'm afraid it will be too late."

"We need to figure out why and by whom she was taken," said Ripley.

"The by whom is either Carmella, the mob Carmella works for or both," Pixie said. "The why is probably to determine what we and the FBI know about what they are up to.

"Once they have that information won't Jean be expendable?" Rogue asked, voicing what we all were thinking but didn't want to say.

"We don't have much time. We are definitely on a deadline," I pointed out with a poor choice of words.

"We need to get into the heads of Jean's captors," Rogue reasoned. "Since she is a murder suspect, Carmella's bosses have got to see Carmella as a liability too, don't they?"

"Not if she is well connected within the mob. Being a killer won't count that much against her," Pixie suggested. "The cousins who took her in after her mother died are probably all part of the Mafia. Perhaps she heads up the diversification effort into cyber-crime. She may be the only one in their organization with the required expertise to pull off whatever they have planned."

"Let's assume Carmella is critical to the mob's plans," I hypothesized. "Then they are probably providing her refuge somewhere. Probably somewhere remote and secure. It would make sense they have Jean in the same location so Carmella can interrogate her."

"Their distribution hubs are probably very secure locations." Ripley pointed out.

"Yeah, that makes sense. But which one?" asked Pixie.

"The police aren't going to raid all the locations on the off chance they would find Jean at one of them. And even if they did the Mob would get rid of their product and Jean before the police even got close. The police will be of no use. We need a covert operation to sneak in and at least determine if Jean is at one of these locations. We may even have to come up with our own plan to extract her. Things are going to get really dangerous from here on. Is everyone still up for this?"