Vigilante 4

By: David Erickson

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The human trafficking case teased at the end of the previous book becomes the central mystery. Rosalie’s team investigates Meridian Global Shipping, a company using its Port of Los Angeles facilities to move trafficked workers into forced labor operations across Southern California. But the mystery deepens when Rosalie discovers that the trafficking victims aren’t random—many are undocumented former employees of Vertex subsidiaries and their family members, people who “disappeared” from payrolls years ago. Someone is systematically erasing the last living witnesses to the old Vertex network before federal prosecutors can find them.
The trail leads to a figure the team calls “The Shepherd”—a mid-level fixer who inherited fragments of Knox’s network and is consolidating them under the protection of corrupt port authority officials and a compromised federal customs agent. The mystery structure centers on identifying The Shepherd’s true identity, with a satisfying reveal: it’s someone embedded within the federal witness protection apparatus, which explains how protected witnesses keep vanishing. The climax involves a rescue operation at a container ship departing for international waters—the team saves the trafficked workers and exposes The Shepherd, but recovered documents reveal the operation was funded through accounts connected to Victor Langston, who remains untouchable... for now.