by I.B. Holder
Chapter 30 Chasing Style
Director Wilkes didn’t need to be reminded what his office looked like at four in the morning. He had been a witness to the predawn shadows every night since Laura had been abducted. The communication from Agent Bailey made his normally expressionless face turn downward into a scowl. Two hundred agents under his charge had nearly every US citizen who’d ever ridden a motorcycle under the microscope – thousands of hours of pornography were being compared for a ‘signature style‘ – “Jesus!” he thought. “I have men studying porn for fingerprints and I don’t have a single piece of solid evidence.”
Could this possibly be the best that the finest law enforcement agents in the civilized world could come up with? They were chasing style and transportation methods with the incalculably small possibility that someone would trip and fall on something that resembled a clue. He squinted, eyes beyond tired, and then an accompanying sharp pain in his temples.
The pain was a messenger from just this side of the impossibility of his circumstances. Wilkes could understand being confounded by a foreign agency – but believing that a motorcycle gang of sexual predators could keep him in the dark was beyond operating specifications. A meltdown was only days away, and it would coincide with what he knew to be the final punctuation to the case; the death of the director’s daughter on his watch, in front of an audience of millions gone mad.
It was ten after four now, but the clock in Wilkes office was wrong. There was no time, no time at all.
