More Than a Hotline Fling

-29-

Damian's POV

"Lay it on me," I rolled my sleeves up my forearms and palmed the table in front of me. "I need to give names to these faces."

"Nine to start, Sir." Jenks' dark hand pointed around the spiderweb-designed linkages we put up in our 'board room.' Windowless with a lockable door, the room housed one wall-sized cork board for old-school, i.e., non-hackable, suspect boards.

Jenks and I were also the only ones who didn't use NYPD's digital case mapping tool in extreme or high-profile cases. Missing office security video footage was, by definition, an extreme case.

To Jenks' annoyance, I swapped the key for every case that required the room for brainstorming, warrant attainment, and raid planning. At the risk of a lot of busted Vice egos, only he and I were allowed in.

In the middle of our board sat Santino's smugass mugshot from when he was arrested in Bronx. From the angle of his lifted chin, his narrowed eyes looked down his nose.

Even with the comfort of him being in prison, I hated that fucking picture. He taunted me, plotting under our radar, withholding something I didn't know, and smirking the whole damn time.

Not for long. We're so close, I can fucking taste it.

Above him were the other bordering mara leaders Vice's undercovers tracked, with links between Santino and Luiz Amaya, our friend from the 34th in Inwood and previously arrested accomplice, and their known associates from the Baker Row case. New players included the circle of Rodrigo Lopez's supporters within Bronx and Ramon Samantiego. Thirty-six potential perps splayed across our board, each one's suspected rap sheet earning a cell in Rikers.

MS-13 had layers of membership, associated with their level of involvement. At the lowest level, informants, kids as young as thirteen, served in loose affiliation positions ranging from ad hoc tip-off informants to lookouts for police. Menial but more routine tasks, including extortion, were performed by more regularly involved members. As a person sank deeper into the organization, his finance and special op activities became more illegal and hands became bloodier.

Our highest level of investigation focused on clique leaders operating in specific Inwood and Bronx neighborhoods. Santino and Amaya aligned themselves both as clique leaders in the 34th. Beyond them, cross-state and even international players came into scope. Spanning outside Vice's reach, we turned that pile of suspects over to the feds.

With the new links discovered, my undercover detectives' assignments doubled. Their intel trickled in slowly, inconsistently, but recent mara meeting reports from the Gang division's undercover detectives unearthed upcoming operations that trapped me and Jenks in this room until we set all the board's pieces. To narrow our focus on the puppet string pullers, I funneled the drug and weapons trafficking raids over to the Narcotics and Gang divisions.

Leaving us to do what Vice does best: focus on the sicko assholes exploiting high school girls, in this case.

After weeks of inconsistent reports, Jenks dug up Samantiego's details. They were grim. The twenty-six-year-old fronted as a bodega worker. To most in his neighborhood, he flashed a perfect citizen image. He served food and swept floors with a charming smile and a fluent, bilingual vocabulary. Most of his time was spent as a go-between, laundering money and pulling connections that spanned four precinct lines.

"Personal preference puts him on our radar," Jenks muttered, crossing his arms. "Money control isn't all he's interested in."

Intel rumors of Samantiego's voyeurism fetish churned my stomach, because that was our suspected link between him and the Amaya-Santino sex trafficking operations. Expansions were expensive. On-site cash collection was efficient. A higher risk of being caught was outweighed by a lower chance of interception and quicker access to the funds.