His Queen of Chaos
One that had surfaced because I'd cast the net wide and it had snagged on a name I recognized from an entirely different file.
Brooks, Tasha M.
I went to the laptop.
Zariah's mother had reappeared six weeks into the girl's captivity like a ghost with a phone number, and I, because I was thorough, because I trusted no one's mother, least of all one who'd abandoned a daughter for years and reappeared the exact week that daughter became the most valuable leverage in Atlanta, had opened a light file on her the day Zariah first said the name aloud in the penthouse. Nothing invasive. Public records, a credit pull, the shape of a life. Tasha Brooks lived in a rented duplex in Riverdale, worked rece