+18 eps. 12-16 - Gillian and Brock face huge changes in their lives after she leaves the PD and he moves back to DC. But no matter what, looks like they just can't help coming across each other.
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As soon as Andrea went to sleep, still asking and teasing and fussing about his dating somebody, Brock fetched his computer and started opening the emails Jo had sent him. He read the first one and paused. He hated reading from the screen. Green activists would have to forgive him, but it was like a file wasn't a real file if it wasn't in paper, to hold it and turn the pages, and mark and underline and scribble additional notes. So he put the printer to work while he made his late tea.
Then he sat down to really read. And paused at the second email, scowling. What was this all about? What had Russell and Gillian bumped into? He kept reading, but soon the ramifications were too many to just keep them in mind.
For the first time since his years as a profiler with the BAU, he brought his whiteboard to the family room and fetched markers of assorted colors. Then he started to map out the case, taping the different pictures to his chart. It took him about an hour, until he checked he hadn't left anything out. He poured himself another tea and stood before the board, his eyes darting from one thing to the next under a focused scowl.
So this coyote smuggled illegal aliens into the US, but he didn't do it the traditional way: he picked them up at Monterrey, Mexico, and took them by boat across the Gulf to Florida. There, they were loaded to freight trucks and shipped to different cities all over America.
Boston was one of the regular destinations. There, he would sell his passengers and leave with his pockets full of the dirtiest money. The new owners of the illegal aliens—who ignored they'd just been sold like cheap goods—kept them caged in containers at the large harbor yards. And Brock felt a chill at realizing that was South Boston. He'd lived nine months only streets away from where those people were locked up like animals.
The local group was run by the owner of a transportation company, and he offered cheap working force to a number of places and organizations in different cities of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The list included both legal companies, like Green Textile, and illegal rings of fight clubs, brothels and even drug-distribution nets, which used them as mules.
The illegal aliens were told they would work for a few weeks to pay their debt, and in time they'd be provided with a fake green card, a few dollars and a bus ticket to any city of their choice. So none of them resisted when they were picked from the crowded containers. They were actually happy to get out of those hideous cages and back on the trucks, that took them away never to be seen again. Because none of them ever made it out of their new jobs alive.
The company Gillian and her team had investigated first had thirty-two of them, including eight boys and girls under five, because some of the illegals came with their children. The company forced the adults to work twelve-hour, seven days a week, with only one meal a day. They kept them in the storage across the backyard, with armed guards so they wouldn't even try to escape.
Most of the people rescued from the textile company were sick out of weakness and exhaustion. Their life expectancy, after their previous imprisonment in the containers, was two months, three for the strongest ones. And according to their first depositions, when one of them died, the body was stored in the cold shed until the next Wednesday. Then new people arrived, to replace those who had died over the week, and the dead bodies were taken away on the delivery truck. The man they were looking for at the beginning had been shot dead by the guards when he tried to climb the wall and escape.
The simultaneous procedures in five different cities had rescued, only an hour earlier, about three-hundred illegal aliens. Girls enslaved into prostitution, young men forced to fight to death in secret pits where people would bet on them, older men and women enslaved in all kinds of manual jobs, away from the public view. Their lives turned into living hells, with death as the only hope to escape their fates.
Brock poured hot water on his third tea, shaking his head. No wonder Cassidy was in such a rush to be there. And no wonder Jo expected a call from the Director for an update. He didn't remember anything that big in the last ten years.
All of a sudden he felt completely out of focus. While all of that was happening, he was worried about Viv's frown and Andrea's dress. Nice, Brockner, you really know your priorities.
Yes, Cassidy hadn't told him about it. But he was there when Russell reported over the phone about the first steps of the case, and he had consciously refused to ask about it. Because it was about Boston. And it was about Gillian.
He exhaled, annoyed at himself. Like he didn't know he would have to hear about her eventually, now that she was in the Bureau. Like hearing about her was such a big deal. Like he still cared. When it had been one of the best things about being back home: the opportunity to get rid of her reckless need to be in danger, jeopardizing everyone around her.
