Exposed (Madame X, #2)(47)

A silence, and then a wave of his hand. “I was an idiot, and paid the price. No one to blame but myself. So I sang like a canary about everything I knew, except Caleb. I wasn’t protecting him, mind you. But telling stories about a ghost is how you get turned into one yourself. I told them everything I knew in exchange for a reduced sentence and a transfer to a more white-collar prison. Got ten years, did five.”

“And the only reason you did any prison time is that Caleb didn’t warn you?”

“It wasn’t that he didn’t warn me so much as that he made sure I was left out in the open for them to find. That was always the plan. There’s always someone as bait. He set me up, and I spent five years in a federal pen for it.”

“What I don’t understand is why you got involved with it in the first place. I mean, if you knew it was illegal, why do it?”

Logan doesn’t answer for a few moments. “You didn’t grow up the way I did.”

I quirk an eyebrow at him. “I don’t know how I grew up.”

A sharp exhale. “Shit, I’m sorry. You’re right. But my point is, I grew up poor as dirt. Skipping school, smoking pot, running in a gang. I watched guys OD, watched my best friend die in front of me because of drugs. So, those kinds of crime, they have victims, to me. I see the effects. They’re immediate. You sell coke, that means someone is hooked on coke. And if you’ve ever seen a real-deal cokehead, it’s not pretty. So I’d never do that shit. I’d never sell drugs. But flipping houses, that was good hard honest work. I was making decent money, and no one was shooting at me, I wasn’t gonna step on or drive over an IED, or have a rocket shot at my helo. But it wasn’t, like, lucrative. I was making good money, but it all went back into the next flip. So when I made that big sale and was actually flush with real cash, I wanted out. I had that tip on a parts facility, and I smelled money, you know? There’s always money in technology. Always. You just have to suss it out and figure out how to sell it. Well, I went into the deal with Caleb skeptical, but at first it seemed legit. And it was big money. The idea of a big payout, like two or three commas and a lot of zeroes in your account? For a hood rat and ex-grunt like me, that was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. And he worked me into things gradually, kind of like how you cook frogs, you know? Start ’em out in the water, keep it warm, and gradually turn up the heat until they’re cooked, and they never even realize it. Caleb did that with me. Hooked me in, bit by bit.”

“How well did you actually know him?” I ask.

A shrug. “Not well. He was always a mysterious sort of cat. You rarely saw him in person, usually just talked to him on the phone, or got an e-mail from him. So did I know him, personally? No. I met him maybe three times, and each of those times was for maybe twenty minutes, max. He was just . . . cool and aloof.” He pauses, takes a breath, and continues. “So that’s how I got involved in a crooked business, and went to jail for it.”

“And you blame Caleb for that.”

He bobbles his head. “Yes and no. I knew what I was doing was wrong after a certain point, but by then I was making so much money that I couldn’t make myself back out. Once you’re clearing a million here, a million there, it’s hard to stop. So in that sense, no, I don’t blame Caleb. I can’t. It was all me. But I do blame him for setting me up, letting me and the other twelve people who went to jail take the fall for him. But then again, we were the dumbasses who let ourselves be taken, so can we blame anyone but ourselves for that, in the end?”

“I see your point. It’s a very mature way to look at it, I would say.”

A snort of laughter. “I had five years to think about it. At first, yeah, obviously I placed all the blame squarely on Caleb’s shoulders. I spent hours just dreaming up ways I’d get even with him when I got out. But as time went on and I started to really think about it, I came to the conclusions I just shared with you. Yeah, he’s culpable, and I do hold him accountable for me doing jail time. But the real blame falls on my shoulders. Both for doing dirty business and for being an idiot about it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pissed off at him, and I was even more so when I first got out. I went looking for him, planning on exacting some kind of revenge, I guess.”

“How did you find him?”

“It wasn’t easy. He’s not exactly listed in the phone book. Nor are any of the companies he’s legally associated with in his name. Also, I couldn’t just sit around and hunt for him. I had to start over. See, when I started working for him, I made sure I had money stashed all over the place that couldn’t be easily tracked back to me. So when I got out, I had seed money. Started over. Started small. Made sure my record was buried as deep as it could go, made sure I kept myself out of the light, bought up companies via dummy corporations and turned them over, one by one, small ones, building up capital. And the whole time I was looking for Caleb, on the side, sort of. Eventually I started hearing little rumors. Mostly about a kind of escort service for the super rich. Not really an escort service though, I discovered, as much as a kind of matchmaking program. Nothing illegal about it, on the surface. You weren’t buying a match, you were paying for a service. And that service could be a date for an event, a long-term companion, or if you were serious, a potential bride. It was wildly, prohibitively expensive, super secret, super exclusive. ‘The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club’ sort of thing.” He glances at me. “That’s another movie reference that went straight over your head. Whatever. The undertone of the whole thing is that you were for all intents and purposes buying the girls. Not outright, and they weren’t sex workers. You couldn’t initiate sex during contracted events, that sort of thing. It was the kind of thing you didn’t talk about, so it was hard to find out much because no one would talk about it.” He eyes me speculatively. “And then as I got closer to the actual service, to the real Indigo Ring, I started hearing about another layer, an even more exclusive service that was even more hush-hush. You.”