Chapter 54 – Substantiated

Morgan threw open the door before Chloe could even knock.

“Chloe!” Morgan’s gaze swept over her face, searching, probing. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Chloe pushed past her into the apartment, dropped her bag on the sofa, and took out the device, which she placed on the coffee table.

“Here.”

Morgan closed the door, walked over to the sofa, and stared in surprise at the device, then at Chloe.

“What went wrong?” Chloe asked. “You said you’d give me fifteen to twenty minutes. It wasn’t even five!”

Morgan slumped into her desk chair and looked at Chloe guiltily.

“He disconnected the battery,” Morgan said. “Just like that. I’m standing out there with my fancy little gadget, watching him open the hood, disconnect the clamp, and that was it. Alarm off, lights off, everything off. In three minutes. There was nothing I could do. I felt so stupid.”

“We should have thought about that.”

Morgan shook her head. “It was my fault. There was no plan B because I didn’t have a plan B, and that’s 100% my fault. It was stupid. I should have seen that coming.”

Silence.

“Did you get anything at all?” Morgan asked cautiously.

Chloe leaned back. “Everything.”

Morgan blinked. “Like everything? The device takes fifteen to twenty-“

“I know how long it takes. I stalled him.”

“Kept him waiting? How did you-“

Morgan stopped. Chloe saw it working behind her eyes and then she saw Morgan’s face change. The relief that had been there just a moment ago gave way to something that looked like a punch in the gut.

“Oh shit,” Morgan said quietly. “Chloe. No.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me you didn’t have to-“

“I gave him a blow job.” Chloe’s voice was flat. Matter-of-fact, like the weather report.

Rain yesterday, sun tomorrow, occasional blowjobs today.

“On the sofa in his office. I edged him for as long as possible until the LED was green.”

Morgan’s eyes were wide and glistening. “It’s my fault. If the distraction had worked, you wouldn’t have-“

“Morgan.” Chloe leaned forward. “Stop. We both knew it was risky. You asked me three times if I wanted to back out. I didn’t, I didn’t want to. It happened, it’s over, and we got what we wanted.”

Morgan shook her head. “But it shouldn’t have-“

“It’s really okay.” Chloe sought her gaze and held it. “Honestly. It was just a blowjob. I just want to know if it was worth it.”

Morgan swallowed. She looked like she wanted to say something else, something comforting or apologetic, but then she did the smartest thing she could do and just nodded, got up, fetched her laptop and a USB cable, and sat down next to Chloe on the sofa.

“Then let’s check it out.”

~

Three hours and two servings of pad Thai from the Thai restaurant around the corner later, they had dug through several gigabytes of data.

Most of the stuff on Ben’s hard drive was unspectacular. Contracts. Release forms. Tax returns that weren’t particularly revealing. Emails that consisted mostly of the kind of business correspondence you’d expect, like booking requests, scheduling appointments, salary negotiations.

But then Morgan opened a folder called “Backups.”

Inside was a nested folder structure, sorted alphabetically by last name. Each folder contained subfolders with dates. The subfolders did not contain actual files, but encrypted links and cryptic reference codes.

“These are performer archives,” Morgan said, slowly scrolling through the list. “He stores everything his performers have ever done. But not locally, hmm. There probably wouldn’t be enough space on the hard drive for that. The actual files are stored on an encrypted cloud server that we can’t access. But the file names and dates are unique.”

Chloe stared at the screen. The names were partly alphabetical, partly sorted by date, and there were hundreds of them.

“Scroll to C,” she said. “Or no, to H, it’s last name.”

Morgan scrolled.

There.

Heart, Chloe.

The folder contained subfolders for every single shoot she had ever done. Casting Couch Cuties. Throat Me. Sinful Stepsisters. Bound.com. Dark Desires. Gangbang Galore. Erotica Kings. Tight Delight. Even her photo shoots. Everything was there, neatly documented, with dates and links.

“He hoards everything,” she said quietly.

“Looks like it,” Morgan nodded. “Every single actress he’s ever represented. Look, some of these folders go back twenty years.”

“Why? What does he get out of it?”

Morgan chewed on her lower lip. “Control? Leverage? Insurance? I don’t know, but it seems a bit obsessive.”

For the next hour, they tried to make sense of his finances. Morgan had opened a spreadsheet and was typing in numbers she filtered out of Ben’s financial documents. Chloe sat next to her, trying to understand the structure, but accounting wasn’t her strong suit.

“Okay,” Morgan said at some point, leaning back. “I’ve got a pattern. Regular payments, every six to eight weeks, always five figures. Sometimes fifteen thousand, sometimes ten thousand, once even twenty thousand.”

“From whom?”

Morgan turned the laptop toward her. “Dirty Dreams.”

Chloe frowned. “Why is he getting so much money from Valeria’s production company?”

“Exactly.” Morgan tapped on a column. “And these are definitely not normal agent fees. Look at the time periods. According to his own performer database, Ben only had three active performers during these four months, none of whom were particularly successful. His regular income was only a few thousand dollars a month. And yet, like clockwork, every two months, fifteen thousand came from Dirty Dreams.”

Chloe stared at the numbers. “So he basically lived off those payments for long periods of time and paid Maven’s salary and the rent for the office.”

“Exactly. Without Valeria’s money, his agency would have gone bankrupt years ago.” Morgan raised an eyebrow. “The question is, what did he get the money for?”

~

It was Morgan who made the most important discovery.

She was deep in Ben’s client database, a kind of homemade spreadsheet that was surprisingly well thought out for a guy like Ben.

“Chloe. Come here.”

Chloe leaned over Morgan’s shoulder. On the screen was the database, a long list of names, statuses, contact details, and referral histories.

“See that?” Morgan pointed to a column. Next to several entries was a small red X. “These entries are marked as deleted. The actual files are gone, but the database logged the deletions. He probably didn’t know that happened.”

Chloe counted. All in all, forty-six red X marks, spread over a period of almost ten years.

“But that doesn’t make sense.” She sat up straight. “He archives everything. He has folders of performers who shot a single scene and then quit. He keeps twenty-year-old material. So why would he completely delete certain entries?”

“Exactly.” Morgan turned to her. “I can’t see who was deleted, and I can’t see what was in the files. Only that they were there and now they’re gone.”

“Can it be recovered?”

“Not with what I can do.” Morgan scratched her head thoughtfully. “But I know someone. He specializes in this kind of thing. Forensic data recovery. It’s not cheap, and there’s no guarantee, but if the data is still lurking somewhere on the copied hard drive, he’ll find it.”

Chloe leaned back slowly. “This is all extremely strange, or is it just me?”

“You’re definitely not imagining things. We see regular large payments from Valeria here that far exceed what a normal business relationship would justify, and then this obsessive archiving of absolutely everything, except for certain actresses, whom he has deliberately deleted. That doesn’t sit right with me.”

Morgan crossed her arms and frowned.

“If Valeria really is running a trafficking network, and from what you heard at her parties, it sure as hell looks like it, then it seems to me that Ben is playing a key role. He has access to young, often desperate women who are new to the city and don’t know anyone. He sees them first, or among the first at least. He knows who is vulnerable, who has no one to ask about them. He identifies them, refers them to Valeria, and when they disappear…”

“…he deletes the files,” Chloe finished the sentence.

Chloe felt her hands clench into fists. Her fingernails dug into her palms, and she let it happen because the pain was something she could hold on to while everything else was slipping away beneath her feet.

If that’s true. If Ben really is part of it. If Samantha found out and that’s why-

“Chloe.”

Morgan had gently placed her hand on Chloe’s fist.

“So far, it’s just a theory. If it’s true, then this is big,” Morgan said. “And dangerous. We can’t just go to the police with this. Not with what we have, and not with the way we got it. And especially not when judges and politicians are really coming and going at Valeria’s parties.”

Chloe nodded. Her fists slowly opened.

“But it was worth it,” she said. Her voice was calmer than she felt. “Whatever I had to do today. This is more than we had before.”

Morgan looked at her. There was still a certain guilt in her gaze. But there was something else on top of that. Respect, perhaps.

“It definitely wasn’t for nothing,” Morgan confirmed quietly.

Chloe nodded slowly. “Then I can live with that, even if it means I’ll have to deal with Ben’s special attention now.”

Morgan looked at her, put a hand on her shoulder, and squeezed it lightly. “Say if there’s anything I can do, will you?”

Chloe had to laugh. “Why, do you want to help suck him off next time? Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It’s all good, really.”

Morgan grimaced but also had to laugh. “Even if I did fancy men, I can’t imagine I’d fancy this one.”

“You can say that again,” Chloe whispered, raising her eyebrows. They both had to giggle. Somehow that helped Chloe feel better. 

Morgan closed her laptop and rubbed her eyes. It was almost midnight. “The numbers are blurring before my eyes.”

Chloe blinked and only then noticed how dry her own eyes were. They had been staring at the screen for hours, combing through folders, comparing payment flows, taking notes, and at some point the initial excitement about their findings had turned into a tough, dull exhaustion.

“Enough for today?” she asked.

“Enough for today.” Morgan stood up, stretched, and her back cracked audibly. “Wine?”

“Oh God, yes, please.”

Morgan disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of red wine and two glasses, one of which had a tiny crack on the rim. She poured the wine, handed Chloe the intact glass, and raised hers.

“What shall we drink to?”

Chloe thought for a moment. “To a successful penetration?”

Morgan snorted, half amused, half guilty. “Fine. To a successful penetration.” They clinked glasses, and Chloe took a big sip.