Nineteen and married. He looked back at the screen with that boyish grin on his face, and I wondered about Mancini’s pairing the two of us together. Then I remembered his resume and decided that the old adage never judge a book by its cover held true here.
The kid looked like your average college teen unless you looked closer at the eyes. You wouldn’t know that he was swimming in money either unless you knew what the Graff Diamond Hallucination watch on his woman’s wrist was worth. Damn, and I thought Gideon was over the top in the gift-giving department.
“Okay, I’m guessing you’re up to speed on what we’re dealing with here. So how do you propose we do this”
“First, we retrace our perp’s steps going back to the first kill in the pattern.”
“And how do we do that? I’m sure you know that I don’t usually work this way. I do most of my hunting on the ground.”
In fact, I think this person, whoever they are, might be doing pretty much what I do. I hunt down assholes and take them out. I guess you can say I’m nothing more than a glorified bounty hunter; the only difference is, I don’t hunt men and women down for bail, and my finds hardly ever make it into courthouse.
“That’s where I come in. I’ll pick up the trail using anything that connects through technology, and you can be the man on the ground. Are you ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.” I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing here.
Jason
It wasn’t hard to find the pattern after a while. Though Mancini hadn’t given us anything more than the bare bones, what little he did give us was enough to build on. This wasn’t going anything like I’d expected. Instead of having me do any of the legwork technically speaking, Track took point on that and sent me the patterns as they unfolded on his end.
“Are you getting the picture yet?” I nodded my head as I read over everything he’d laid out and sent back to me. “Lawyers, judges, social workers, cops.”
“Do you notice the one thing they all have in common?”
“Yeah, they all work out of the same district court.”
I could feel the blood humming in my veins the way it does when I’m on the hunt, though I knew we had a long way to go. Usually, with my cases, I know the perpetrator and go after him or her after weeks sometimes months of the guys collecting data. Since I’m going after the person who pretty much is doing my job, it’s like working backward.
I got the feeling halfway through that I wasn’t hunting this person to harm them, but it was more like Mancini, and the others wanted me to bring them in. The fact that Track could so easily trace their moves with just a few strokes of the keyboard told me why. Whoever this is was in danger of being caught soon. It’s like they weren’t even trying to cover their ass, or didn’t know-how. Still, it wasn’t going to be easy.
“So now we’ve seen the pattern, but there are a lot of cases going back more than a decade, closer to fifteen years in fact.”
“That actually makes it easier for us. All we need to do is go through all the kids they placed over the years. We’ll look at all the cases these particular people worked on together since it appears they worked as a team.”
“Then we look for those kids who would be adults now using their socials and whatever other information we have.”
“And how do we find that?” I finally lifted my head and saw the grin on his face.
‘That’s where I come in. I’ve hacked into the system’s database. I’ll send you everything as soon as I compile it in some semblance of order.”
“I should tell you, though, that if this hive of assholes have been doing to and with these kids what we suspect, it might not be easy finding them this way. Most of them will be off the grid, or their names and identities might have been changed. Lucky for us, their fingerprints will be in the system since, by law, their prints have to be taken when they go into foster care.”
“On the other hand, if they’ve been taken out of society, which is what I suspect, then their prints will be no use to us.” Back to square one.
“So what’re we doing here? How do we find them?”
“We go through the families that fostered them and start from there. It’s tedious, I know.” He didn’t seem to mind—a real computer nut.
It took hours; someone, I think it was Ash, or maybe it was Gideon, brought me some food at some point. I have no idea what time it is because down here is like a casino with the lighting; it always looks like daylight. Track has been pounding away at the keys this whole time with no letup. Every once in awhile, he’d swear or say something like, ‘got you, you bastard.’ But other than that, we hardly spoke.