“Catalina?” When he called her name I swear every man in the room, except my father in law, literally jumped. When she came out from behind the sliding wall that I didn’t even know existed there were murmurs of ‘not again’ going around the room.
“The fuck! Mengele.”
This kid said, “hi daddy,” and smiled.
“What did you do?”
“I was going to tell you daddy.” He didn’t say anything and she started talking.
“Well since the IP address is all over the place we needed to narrow it down sooooo….”
“So you decided to use yourself as bait?”
“I wasn’t gonna go daddy, I’m not dumb. We just wanted them to tell us where to meet them and then I would’ve told you and you and the uncles could go get them.”
“Bring me your computer Catalina.”
“Aw daddy no, I’m being careful I promise.”
“Bring it!” She slithered out of the room after giving Mancini a dirty look.
“You can’t do that to her Lyon.”
“Are you crazy? She has some shit on her computer that can bypass all the spying shit I put on there and you want me to just leave it? Do you know what I see when I look at her computer the way I do all her siblings? Schoolwork and shit.”
“Well yeah, that’s why it took me this long to find this shit, but you’re not seeing how amazing this shit is. You see your eight-year old daughter, I see one of the foremost intelligent minds in the world today.”
“And she somehow found two friends with like minds out of all the people she could’ve met in that gifted program. I’m telling you this shit is worth more than gold. If you stop her now you’d only stump her growth, plus she won’t be able to stop, she can’t turn her brain off.”
“And I’ll warn you now, she’ll find another way. Wouldn’t you prefer to know what she’s up to than for her to go rogue?”
“So what do you suggest? That I let my kid continue to do this shit?”
“We can monitor her. I’m learning how to work around the programs she has on her computer.” Once again he held up the little gadget in his hand.
She came back with her laptop looking none too happy and walked around behind the desk. “Mengele, explain to me what exactly it is that you and your friends have planned.”
“Okay, so Lily found the names of some of the men, the ones with money. But they’re not the ones who go out and get the girls, they send other men to do that.”
“”The men they send out don’t just take teenagers, they take little girls too, like the bad man that took me. But they do a lot of different things. Sometimes they take kids from the mall, from outside of schools, lots of ways. But the bigger girls, they trick them like with the Craig’s List thing.”
“They pretend they need help with something and then when the girls go they disappear. You know what they do daddy? They use homes that are on the market, and set them up to look like they live there. Sometimes they even have some of the children they abducted pretending to be their kids.”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying, what she’d been able to piece together at her age. It seemed like something from an AI movie. “Well, Nia said that now they’re getting really smart, but some of them are still basic, she said if we wanted them to move fast then we had to give them incentive.”
“So the three of you decided to use yourselves as bait.”
“But daddy that’s not us. It’s a picture Nia made.” Mancini looked back down at the gadget in his hand. “What do you mean?”
She rolled her eyes at Mancini’s question.
“Nia doesn’t know what I look like, we’ve never met. Lily and I just told her what we look like and she made those on the computer, doesn’t it look real?” It was good to know that I wasn’t the only one in the room who was stymied. Even the great Mancini was shook.
“You’re telling me that you two just described yourselves to her and she came up with this?”
“Uh-huh!” Mancini was all but vibrating in his seat as the others in the room looked on in disbelief.
In the end Mr. Lyon took the computer for a couple of days as punishment but what he really wanted to do was add some stuff to it so that he could keep track of what his kid was up to. “The fuck am I supposed to do with this shit? Mancini?”
“I’ve got you, just give me a few days, damn.” He seemed way too excited and all I could think is how dangerous everything sounded. I had no idea she was this damn intelligent, it didn’t even seem real.