Leon S. Kennedy (notarookie) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-05-02 15:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, isabela, leon scott kennedy |
Who: Leon S. Kennedy and Isabela
What: A chance meeting leads to a partnership of sorts
When: Back dated to late January, prior to Leon signing onto the network
Where: A greasy spoon diner
Rating/Warning: Low/none
Status: Complete!
What a mess.
This was not the way Leon had expected things to go. He still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened. One day everything was fine, the investigation was progressing and the next he was called into his bosses office, told to turn in his badge and gun and that was that.
Well, that hadn’t really been that. There had been rumors floating around for weeks that the task force had a mole within it. Someone had been feeding intel to the yet still unidentified leader (or leaders), keeping them just that one vital step ahead of both the ATF and local authorities. But as far as Leon had been aware that’s all it was: a rumor. Imagine his surprise to find out that it hadn’t been a rumor, there was a mole within the task force and what was worse was somehow suspicion had fallen on him for being that mole.
It wasn’t true, of course. For as far back as he could remember the only thing Leon had ever wanted to be was a cop. He’d spent four years with the Denver PD before being picked up by the ATF and he’d had an exemplary record. His record with the ATF for the three years spend with them had been good as well, which was probably the reason why he wasn’t currently sitting in a jail cell. That and the evidence implicating him was circumstantial at best. But apparently it was still damning enough for his boss to give him the choice to either give a full confession or leave the ATF altogether.
And that was how Leon Kennedy now found himself in a rundown diner in the middle of the morning trying to decide what the hell he was supposed to do now. His mother had extended the invitation for him to come stay with her in Colorado until he got his feet under him again, but the idea of leaving California without at least attempting to clear his name (and put the investigation back on track) didn’t sit well with him. Neither did the idea of returning to Denver with the title of “dirty” hanging over his head. So he had elected to stay in California. Problem was that his reserves were starting to run low and he was having difficulty finding work. That title, “dirty”, was already following him around. No one would touch him.
It was a seedy little diner, that much was certain, but it was Bela's favorite place to work through some of her less than reputable interests. Far away from Miranda and Oriana and their safe life, and in a place that no one would bother her. Plus, the coffee and eggs were actually good. Bela just didn't ask questions as to why that might be. It was better not to know what dark secrets lurked in the kitchen.
Bela made her way into the diner that day with her face fully oriented on her telephone. Her other arm carried a notebook that looked like it was stuffed to bursting, and she waved it in the direction of the server as she marched her way over to her favorite booth.
It wasn't until she'd started to make her way to sitting in it that she realised it was already occupied. And by someone who felt like he ought to be familiar, too. "Well, look who's gone and graced my booth with his presence."
At the comment, Leon looked up from his coffee and his notes that he hadn’t been made to surrender along with his badge and sidearm. His eyes squinted against the bright sun coming in from the window behind the figure that was standing immediately beside his booth. He didn’t recognize the woman, but she obviously knew him from somewhere. In Leon’s experience, that was never a good sign.
“Your booth, huh?” He said. Keeping his eyes on the woman, he leaned forward, folding his arms over the notes in front of him. He took a couple of moments to try and match the woman with the dozens upon dozens of faces he’d met in the past year since joining the Southern California task force. No matches immediately came up. Then again, having spent the previous night in his Jeep, Leon was working on only a few hours of sleep and no breakfast. Giving up on trying to remember where he would have met this woman before, his eyes darted towards the several other empty seats in the diner before moving back up to the woman. He cracked a smile at her. “I didn’t realize this place took reservations.”
"Oh it doesn't, you sweet thing, but this booth's mine. It's the one I always sit in. You'd know that if you came here often, so..." Bela squinted at him, "New in town, then?"
Maybe not as familiar as she thought, but she swore he looked like a friendly face. Of course, there were plenty of friendly faces on Bela's long list of encounters in her life, even before her move here to California. Still, she couldn't shake the sense that she'd bumped into him somewhere, and she tried to pick her brain for that information while sinking into the seat across from him. He could always kick her out or move, himself, if he didn't want the company.
She set her notes down on the table and raised her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of notes, we could be note siblings.”
There was something unsettlingly familiar about the way this woman spoke, though Leon couldn’t quite identify what it was. She didn’t seem to actually know him, so his original concerns about having met her somewhere previously evaporated and he didn’t object to her joining him. “I was staying in San Diego until recently,” he told her.
At the mention of his notes, Leon glanced down at the pages under his arms and let out a breath. “To be honest, I was in San Diego working a case,” he admitted. “Then I was rudely removed from that case as well as from the ATF. I’m looking through these hoping I can figure out why I was removed.” He looked back up at her carefully. Who was she carrying out a stuffed looking notebook? A private detective? A private detective in a greasy spoon like this seemed a little too on the nose, then again, here he was a washed up government agent so...maybe not quite so much? “What are you working on?”
Bela raised her eyebrows more than once at Leon's confession, before making herself more comfortable in the booth. He was being honest with her, which she definitely liked. There weren't enough people in the world who opened up like that about things of that nature.
So she tapped her own notes, and decided that confessing her own deeds to someone tossed out of the ATF was better than confessing them to someone who was still working for them. "I had a very nice yacht once. Used to do charter cruises and such, but it got boring, so I started doing charter cruises and running cargo. At first, it was the sort of thing I was comfortable taking aboard without really looking. But the man I was doing the jobs for got... extremely inconveniently violent and manipulative. So one night, I'm sailing down the coast, and I decide to check."
She pursed her lips together, "It was girls. A whole shipping crate of them. One of them was his ex girlfriend. So I did the right thing. And he blew my ship all the way down to the bottom of the bay. Nearly killed me, too. These notes are leads on him and his operation."
As the woman across from him spoke, Leon’s brows furrowed together. A group of girls rescued from the flesh market had suddenly appeared almost literally out of the blue near the office where his task force worked out of. He remembered the girls being taken in, questioned, processed. Hell, he’d conducted a couple of interviews. None of them had been willing to say who had rescued them, which had led to a few theories and suspicions among the investigators: everything from the “cargo” being dumped due to the increased pressure from the ATF (which Leon had felt to be a little too optimistic), to the girls somehow freeing themselves (also optimistic, but a bit more likely), to some vigilante rescue group finding the girls to the entire thing being a hoax.
Leon’s eyes narrowed skeptically. There was something fucking weird about this seemingly random encounter. “The right thing…” he repeated. “Sure.” But there was something nagging him not to completely discount what the woman was saying. Leon felt as though he was pretty good about being able to tell when he was being lied to. This woman wasn’t giving off the normal tells. “The ex-girlfriend,” he said as he started to flip through his notes. “You remember her name? What she looked like?”
"I do..." Isabela replied, squinting at him and his notes a bit. It was her turn to be just a tiny bit suspicious. "She was a friend, you see. Well, she still is, but she's moved on to better things. She was the one that connected me with her boyfriend and coordinated all the jobs. And he was an abusive arsehole right from the beginning, but it escalated quickly. I tried to warn her a dozen times. She's been through enough, you understand? So if I give you that information I hope you won't use it against her."
Bela felt extremely protective of Rachel Amber. She'd already offered to kill Mark, preferably in a fire, so that they'd both feel safe again. Other friends she'd gotten help with had already promised to be gentle with her, but this man was an unknown. "I'll trust you with my own issues easily enough, but she doesn't know you. At least, I don't think she does. But it looks like you're cross-referencing, and that IS interesting."
Leon frowned slightly. He debated how much more he should say. In order to protect the women, very little about them or their sudden appearance had been released to the public. Familiar feelings aside, he didn’t actually know this woman. She could have been anyone: a reporter looking for a story, or someone hired by the human traffickers to track down their lost cargo. Leon narrowed his eyes slightly. If she was either of those things, there were plenty of lines she could have fed him to gain his trust, why lead with the story that she was a smuggler herself?
Finally Leon decided that in order a little information, he was going to have to give a little in return, just enough to explain himself, but not enough to put any of the women in any danger. “A few months ago there was a group of young women who suddenly appeared out of nowhere near our headquarters,” he explained. “They were all victims of trafficking. Technically that falls out of the ATF’s jurisdiction, but some of the things those girls said…we were brought in to take a look at any possible links between them and the smuggling we were investigating.” He had only two pages pertaining to the women, one of which was a list of names. He scanned the list and one name stood out. Rachel Amber. The letters GF appeared next to her name. From what Leon had heard, many of the women had agreed to be put in protective custody. But, apparently not all of them had. That was worrisome with this asshole still at large.
“If what you’re telling me is true,” he said carefully, looking up across the table. “Then you and I might be looking for the same guy.”
Isabela's eyebrows raised as Leon shared more of the information he had. It seemed to her that if she'd kept on running Mark's merchandise, she would have run afoul of this agent or another one that worked with him. Mark himself was slippery enough, but she'd only taken so many precautions.
She leaned back in the chair a bit, and it was her turn to wonder if she should offer up anything more. But this man was ex ATF, and even if she did help him clear his own name, she thought she could work out some kind of deal. "Well, there's nothing much I can say to prove it, is there? Except if you work your logs of that event against the time of night that my Yacht went up in flames off the coast of Newport Beach, you'd probably notice that I had just enough time to drop those girls off and get my arse up the coastline at a good 25 knots cruising speed."
A twist of her lips, and then she added. "I probably have extra details about that investigation you were handling before it all went south for you. I kept a good log of my drops and most of my charted courses were laid in before I disembarked. If you bust this case open, though, I don't need to end up arrested."
Leon smirked at the woman across from him. “Are you trying to strike a deal with me?” The idea was ludacris, but it was tempting. Leon wouldn’t have even entertained the idea of buddying up with a smuggler before. But now? Well, his funds were dwindling, and even if he did somehow miraculously figured out what was going on within the task force on his own and provided evidence to put him back on the task force, who the hell was going to believe him? He couldn’t get a job as a goddamn rent-a-cop with the reputation he currently had. No one trusted him. But this woman...apparently she did.
Leon’s expression turned skeptical. “Why?” He asked her next. “You don’t even know who I am.”
"Why? I honestly couldn't tell you." Bela replied, shrugging one of her shoulders. "Except that I have a feeling that Mark screwed you over, too, and mutual enemies makes us friends. At least for now. And honestly I could use an extra pair of hands with all of this."
"So what do you say?" Bela reached her hand across the table, still looking quite confident in her plan, for whatever mysterious reason. It was mainly a hunch, but Bela was willing to trust her instincts. At least this time. "Deal?"
Someone had screwed Leon over, there was no arguing that. He looked at the outstretched hand. Did he really want to team up with an admitted smuggler? He furrowed his brows a moment in debate. He wasn’t getting anywhere on his own, maybe there was something to the whole “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” bit. After a moment he shrugged his shoulders. “What do I have to lose at this point?” He accepted the offered hand. “Deal.”