Page 37 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

“It’s my understanding that he’s been out of the country.”

“That would make sense.”

She finds exactly one image of him: a class picture of him as a ten-year-old boy. He’s standing with a dozen other boys, all in school uniforms, but I pick him out right away. He looks angry. “There’s not much for Luka. Weirdly.”

“What do you have on the family?”

She pulls up a few articles. It turns out they’re a longtime Albanian mafia powerhouse stretching back to the seventeen hundreds, possibly earlier, and their clan is named the Ghost Hound Clan.

“Very dangerous. The father, Bernardo Zogaj, the latekyre—that’s their word for don or king—was killed in a suspicious plane crash ten years back with his wife, Violetta. The elder Zogaj brother, Alteo, took over the Ghost Hound Clan after that and ran it with an iron fist, expanding operations across the Southern Hemisphere until he was killed in a suspicious boating accident—just last month, in fact.”

“Lots of suspicious transportation accidents,” I say.

“No shit.” She taps some more. I wait, staring longingly at the cookie bag.

“Here’s a transcript of court minutes that indexes Luka. It’s not about him per se, but it suggests Luka was sent to an Albanian military school at the age of twelve. Hold on—” She taps some more and finds a different court transcript where somebody says he apprenticed in a crime family operating in Buenos Aires. There’s another theory that he was sent to a reformatory of some sort. “Just a lot of rumors. Here’s what I know: rumors pop up in the absence of information.”

“How did the brother die? What exactly happened with the boat?” I ask.

“All I have is those three words—suspicious boating accident.”

“Drowned?”

“Who knows? I’m sure it’s common knowledge among the criminal set, but it’s not like I have access to that sort of information. If you want to tap into the bad-guy rumor mill, you’d have to go to the dark web, but it’s not something I’d recommend.”

“Wait, do you think I could get a lead on my sister over the dark web?” I ask.

“I mean... unlikely? But anything is possible with the dark web. I mean, it really depends.”

“How does somebody get to the dark web?”

She shakes her head. “You shouldn’t.”

“But there’s an outside chance I could get a lead on my sister and get more information I need on Luka Zogaj... I have to find somebody who knows the dark web.”

“No matter how fucked up your sister’s situation is, you’re not doing her any good getting yourself fucked up, too. You understand? This all feels like a hornet’s nest that you don’t want to poke.”

“You know somebody, don’t you? There’re more cookies where that came from.”

She sighs. “This isn’t a cookies thing.”

After a lot of prodding, I get her to promise to contact a kid named Darren from the computer science lab who can get onto the dark web.

“Darren is paranoid as hell, though,” she warns me. “He’ll only meet face-to-face through referral, and you have to pay him in bitcoin. He has this whole superspy way of doing reports. You’ll see. I’ll tell him to reach out to you.”

Chapter Fourteen

LUKA

Orton shows up at my penthouse looking upset. I lead him in, gesturing to a couch.

“You better be standing for this,” he says.

“What’s up?”

“There’s a nasty little rumor going around. Somebody’s saying that you’re not a true Zogaj.”

Not a true Zogaj.Orton lets the words sit between us, scowling all the while.

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