Free The Doll by Taylor Stevens Page B

drove into the parking area of the Mountain View prison unit. He had no legitimate reason for being here on such short notice, much less on a weekday and outside of visiting hours. It had taken an hour and a half on the phone during the drive down, and two hours this morning, asking favors and pulling strings, to make certain he’d get this far.
    He’d rolled into town at ten last night and spent the remaining hours between dark and dawn at a nearby hotel, grabbing what little rest he could from a mind that wouldn’t shut down. Replays and guilt. Possibilities and connections. Questions that didn’t have answers, until after a while it had all run together in a muddy pool and the sun began to rise.
    Bradford switched off the ignition. Before stepping out, he emptied his pockets, dumping everything, phone included, into the console. He repocketed his ID. None of the rest was allowed into the visitation area anyway, and the unnecessary clutter would only slow things down during the security screening.
    He paused before shutting the door, hesitant to move forward. Not because of what he might find, but for what, even after coming all this way to reach, he might not yet acquire. There were answers here, he was certain of it, but even after the warden had grantedthe exemption necessary for this visitation, he still didn’t know if Katherine Breeden would see him.
    Breeden was a lawyer, a damn good lawyer—thorough, clinical, brilliant, warm, and ruthless—a lawyer in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. She was there, not because she wasn’t smart enough to disentangle herself from the corrections system as quickly as she’d been dumped into it, but because Bradford had seen to it that she wouldn’t try.
    His success had taken ten minutes from start to finish, a conversation that had wrapped his metaphorical arm around her neck and put her in a choke hold, back when she’d been sitting behind bars in county, with bail set so high she couldn’t post a bond and flee, awaiting a trial being pushed through with impossible speed. Bradford hadn’t seen her since and it was difficult to know what to expect, what angle of approach would get what he wanted from a woman he was blackmailing into silence.
    She had to know he was coming.
    What was the point in being diabolically brilliant if there was no one around to admire the effort? Even if Breeden hated him, he was one of the few to whom she could gloat, perhaps the only one who could appreciate the endurance and tenacity necessary for a woman in her position to exact any form of revenge—assuming she’d had anything to do with Munroe’s abduction.
    But she had to have.
    Breeden had taken the fall for a crime that wasn’t hers because, to paraphrase a man Bradford had once known, she was risking her life to save it from a greater fear. Based on what he’d seen on those credit-card receipts, the people Breeden had kept silent for, the people she’d feared, were the kind of men who minced bodies into pieces rather than risk the repercussions and sting of betrayal.
    Out of the aftermath of Munroe’s Africa assignment, in the last pages of that story, had come the documents that outlined corporate shells, legal structures, and the mechanisms through which a criminal organization run by a man known only as the Doll Maker moved, transported, and sold human souls.
    Here, in the United States, Breeden had made it possible.
    Bradford had stumbled upon the connection shortly before she’d been arrested, the same papers he’d shown to Walker and Jahan the day before, and used that information to control her. The dossier ofinvestigations and dirt digging had uncovered what Breeden had created on American soil, and then in the threads of splotchy documentation went further, tracing back to Europe, drawing connections between the apparently legitimate businesses in the United States and a worldwide market that sold girls into sexual slavery.
    None of the information Bradford