by Matt Lincoln
4
Charlie
I was surprised when Junior started talking to me as soon as we got into the car. Over the past few months of working together, he’d finally come to understand that I wasn’t a small talk person. Even though he still sometimes managed to wheedle a conversation out of me, for the most part, he was content to just listen to music anytime we drove anywhere. It had been hard, at first, to convince him that I wasn’t angry at him, and that wasn’t the reason I gave him one-word answers. Finally, though, we settled into a nice groove.
So when he started telling me about this investigation that he and Gardner planned to work on off the clock, I knew he must be serious.
“So, what do you think?” he asked as we made our way out of Las Vegas and onto the highway. “Do you want to join us? I know it irritated you that we never found out who the supplier was.”
He was right about that. It had driven me so crazy that all the other agents had called me a stick in the mud for not wanting to celebrate the conclusion of our first case. I really did want to figure out who had gotten all those animals into Greece.
On the other hand, though, I didn’t want to waste my time and energy on something that might not lead anywhere. Being unable to close the case completely had left me unsatisfied, and I didn’t want to relive that feeling if we investigated but didn’t manage to find anything in the end.
“Oh, come on,” Junior snapped, and I noted that he seemed to have lost a bit of the prim and proper schoolboy act that he’d had going on when we’d first met. “Do you really need to think about it? You’ve been moping around about how bored you are ever since we finished that first big case in Greece. You can’t tell me you aren’t itching to investigate something big again?”
Again, he was right. I was bored. I was craving some of that heart-pounding adrenaline that I’d felt three months ago in Greece. In the end, the allure of a potential new adventure was too great for me to resist.
“Fine then,” I sighed, and I saw Junior’s eyes light up in a way that reminded me of Amber. “So, what’s the plan then?”
“Well, we can’t use MBLIS resources,” Junior said. “That means we can’t investigate while we’re working, and we can’t use any of their computers or equipment.
“Well, I assumed that much,” I scoffed. “I meant, where are we going to start? We can’t exactly go up to Chicago whenever we want.”
“Well, first, Fiona’s going to do some further investigating on her computer at home,” Junior explained. “She said it shouldn’t be a problem since she used to be a hacker and apparently has this crazy set-up at home. I’m not sure if she wanted me to keep that a secret or not.”
“Well, too late now,” I shrugged. “But it’s not like I’m going to go around telling people or anything. Do we have anything else to go on?”
“Not really,” Junior frowned. “Fiona only just found out about the body today, so we don’t have a lot yet.”
“Well, guess we’ll have to wait and see what she finds then,” I replied.
The rest of the drive went by without another word as Junior began to play some weird Broadway music. He’d done it as a joke at first, saying that if I wasn’t going to talk to him, he should at least get to choose the music. He’d deliberately chosen something he thought would annoy me, but it had turned out to be kind of interesting. I’d actually listened to it at home a few times, although in general, it wasn’t my taste.
Our meeting with the police went smoothly and actually took less time than our drive down. The local PD had done most of the legwork and had already arrested the criminals involved. They had called us down to assess if the case was serious enough to warrant immediate attention, though. Fortunately, it looked like the perpetrators were just a bunch of amateurs ordering guns from wherever they could. The police were able to find records and receipts of all of their transactions, and frankly, they seemed pretty sloppy and careless to me. We’d give Wallace an update as soon as we got back, but it really didn’t seem like this was a well-organized group that needed further investigation. At least not until we had more to go on. Once again, it left me feeling frustrated over the lack of a real case.
Junior offered to drive on the way back, which gave me the opportunity to admire the sights of the city at night. Usually, when I was driving, I was unable to do anything other than concentrate on the road. Being able to watch the dazzling lights of the city as they passed us through the car’s window put me at ease. I’d never understood Harry’s love of the quiet, rural mountainside.
I smiled as we drove past what looked like a bachelorette party. A group of young women was walking down the street arm in arm, decked out in glittery dresses and clearly very inebriated. Just a few feet behind them was a family of tourists wearing matching neon green shirts. The mother was fussing over the two small kids while the dad snapped photos of everything around them with his phone.
I’d become a federal agent because I wanted to make the country safer, so it made me happy that people felt safe enough to walk around Las Vegas so freely. At the same time, I felt anxious watching them stumble around so carelessly. Las Vegas was fun, but it could also be extremely dangerous. I knew that from first-hand experience.
I glanced up as we drove past the stratosphere, its glass windows flashing as the lights of the city bounced and danced off of them. It was a massive, towering building that reached up into the clouds. There was some kind of thrill ride at the top that I’d always been curious about. It was a claw that dangled riders out in the open air over the city while it spun haphazardly. It was exactly the kind of dangerous thrill that I craved.
I leaned away from the window and settled back into my seat. The lights outside blurred into neon streaks as we sped past. I couldn’t imagine ever settling down somewhere peaceful and quiet. Being surrounded by light and sound and movement was what made me feel at home.
As we made our way through the Strip and back toward the office, I became even more determined to solve the Jane Doe case and figure out the significance of the flower tattoo.
5
Fiona
It thrilled me when Junior had told me that Charlie was interested in joining us on the Jane Doe investigation. To be honest, Charlie could be pretty intimidating. He didn’t talk very much, and he was always frowning, so when I’d first met him, I assumed that he was just in a perpetually bad mood. Junior had assured me that that’s just the way his face was, and that he was just bad with people. I could relate to that sentiment, and over time, I’d learned to gauge by the tiniest changes in his expression or body language whether he really was in a bad mood. Ultimately, though, Charlie was a good agent, and I felt that the more people we had working on this, the better the chance that we would discover something. Plus, working with both Charlie and Junior would be a good opportunity for me to practice getting over my social anxiety.
I’d spent the last hour sitting at my desk at home and researching everything I could about the unidentified woman and the flower symbol, but I still wasn’t having any luck. Even with my personal setup, there just didn’t seem to be any information publicly available. Of course, there was always classified information such as whatever might be hiding in the Chicago Police Department records database, but I would need to hack into their systems to get to it. I looked down as I heard a whine. My dog, Beau, was rubbing his head against my leg.
“Aw, do you want a cuddle?” I said as I lifted the small Bichon Frise onto my lap. His fur was getting long enough that he could probably use a trim, but I just loved how cute he looked with his hair all puffed up like that.
“I can’t figure this out, Beau,” I muttered to him. “I’ve gone deep, and I still can’t find anything. And Charlie and Junior are counting on me to get them something to follow up on, so, no pressure or anything.” I picked Beau up in my arms and stood up from my chair. I walked the few paces from my desk to my bed before collapsing onto it.
“Of course, I probably could get al
l the information I need,” I said to Beau as he nestled himself under my arms. “It wouldn’t even be that hard. Just a few keystrokes and I’d have access to everything the Chicago PD has on this case. But that would be super illegal, and I gave up my life of crime years ago.” I lifted my head to glance over at my desk, where the glowing lights of my monitors seemed to beckon me in. With a groan, I rolled off the bed and marched back toward my desk. Beau whined at the sudden loss of contact.
“Sometimes, what is right and what is legal don’t completely align,” I mumbled to myself as I began to hack into the Chicago Police Department’s computer system. “I’m not going to look at anything else, just this one case. And it’s not like it’s an invasion of privacy. She’s dead, and no one even knows who she is. I’m just trying to figure out who did this and prevent it from happening to anyone else.” I kept trying to convince myself even as I was typing that this wasn’t the wrong thing to do.
I’d been right about it not being hard. After only a few minutes, I was into their system, and my heart began to pound as the reality of what I’d just done sank in.
“Too late now,” I declared resolutely, staying true to my word and pointedly averting my eyes from anything that didn’t directly relate to the Jane Doe case. “You already did it. It would be a waste to stop at this point.” After a few more clicks, I found what I was looking for. To my disappointment, though, the file was mostly empty.
They had burned the body post-mortem, which I felt was a small mercy. I couldn’t imagine the pain someone would feel dying that way. Judging by the amount of burnt trash found in the dumpster, the police were able to conclude whoever killed her had placed her body inside and then set the entire dumpster on fire. The file did contain some new information, though. According to the autopsy report, they found a high concentration of drugs in her system. Considering the state they found the body in, the fact that the coroner was able to find any trace of drugs at all indicated that the amount must have been extraordinarily high.
One of the theories police had, then, was that her death might have been the result of some kind of drug deal gone wrong. As I read through the list of drugs found in her system, I couldn’t believe they’d even consider that. Half of these weren’t even used recreationally, so it was unlikely that she was using them to get high. On top of that, the crime seemed way too extreme to just be attributed to a bad drug deal. Whoever did this had either been extremely angry with this girl, had been trying to conceal her identity, or both.
The only other thing in the file was a police report made almost a year ago by a woman living in the apartment building the dumpster was attached to. Her name was Ruth Crawford, and eight months ago, she’d called the police to report that her next-door neighbor was missing. According to the woman, her neighbor, a young woman named Laura Turner, had gone on vacation to Japan and had never returned. Laura had asked Ruth to watch her rabbit for two weeks while she was gone. A few days into her trip, Laura had stopped calling, and when she still wasn’t back a month later, Ruth had called the police.
According to Ruth, Laura didn’t have any family, and she and Laura were close and would often go out shopping together. It was unlike Laura to stop answering her calls. Unfortunately, the police couldn’t do much. If she really was somewhere in Japan, the most they could do was alert Japanese authorities that an American citizen was missing somewhere in their country. The case eventually went cold, and Laura became another statistic among the thousands of people that go missing every year. As far as how it related to the Jane Doe case since Laura was a missing woman who lived in the building, it was the only lead they had at the moment, however flimsy.
My mind was racing as I took in the report. If Jane Doe was actually Laura Turner, then that still left a lot of questions unanswered. How does someone go missing for nine months, then suddenly turn up dead outside their own home?
I launched a different program and ran a search for flight tickets purchased under the name Laura Turner from Chicago to Japan. Sure enough, I got a hit for a flight from approximately nine months ago. Laura had definitely checked in for the departing flight. However, she had not checked in for the return flight, which meant that Ruth was right. She’d never come back to the United States. As my eyes roved down to the next hit, I gasped in shock. Laura Turner had purchased a one-way ticket from Japan to Chicago just a few days ago. That flight had landed the night before Jane Doe’s body was discovered.
“There’s no way this is a coincidence,” I muttered to myself as I switched gears and opened an image-editing program. I pulled up the tattoo and began refining the symbol into as clear and as flat an image as I could. Up until now, I had been letting the computer automatically refine the image for me, but a computer was only as smart as the person who designed it. I needed to make sure I was more thorough from here on out.
I launched a powerful deep-net trawler that I’d programmed myself with the help of a hacker acquaintance. It was more powerful than any of the programs I used at the office and significantly more illegal as well. It granted access to pretty much anything you could imagine, and if you didn’t know what you were doing, you could very quickly find yourself becoming the target of the FBI. I hadn’t used it in a while, but if there was ever a time, now was it. I uploaded the image onto the program and specified for Japanese results only, hoping this would help to narrow the results down.
The program finished its scan in just a few seconds, and it presented me with a few hits. They had all been deleted, but it was a simple matter for me to run a recovery program and get them back. Once I did, it rewarded me with several paragraphs of Japanese text. At the bottom of each of the posts, the flower symbol glared at me in stark black and white.
For a moment, I considered sending the images to Nelson and having him translate. He spoke Japanese, and he’d probably be able to pick up any nuances or slang that a virtual translator wouldn’t. I almost immediately decided against it, though. Nelson would no doubt want to know how I’d come across these posts. I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea of telling him I’d hacked into the Chicago PD’s database and then used an illegal hacking program to find and restore the posts. It would be better to use an online translator until we got more solid evidence.
As I was running the text through a translator, I wondered at the fact that people had developed technology that could find and resurrect deleted content in a matter of seconds, but we still hadn’t invented a decent translation program. The translation was a little awkward in the end, but as I read through, I was able to get the gist. Every post had to do with the buying and selling of women and concluded with a message to wait for further updates. I began to understand why Laura had gone missing and why she’d been killed.
6
Charlie
“So, then it’s definitely an international case now, right?” Junior asked. The three of us gathered in Gardner’s office while she told us about everything she’d discovered the previous night. “She went to Japan, disappeared for nine months, then suddenly turned up dead here in the US.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” I nodded. “But MBLIS isn’t about solving individual cases. Unless we have a reason to think that this is an ongoing issue or that it will happen again, I doubt Wallace will go for it.”
“It is an ongoing issue,” Gardner argued. “All the posts I found revolved around human trafficking. Most organizations that do that don’t kidnap a single person and call it a day. There are more women involved, I know it.” Honestly, it was a little surprising to hear her speak that much at one time.
“Okay, well, what’s our next move?” Junior asked.
“Hang on a minute,” I interrupted, suddenly remembering something. “Back during our first mission, after we arrested Lucas, he told me that he used to get in contact with the supplier through this specific website that can only be found using a special program or something.”
“Yes, that’s how I found the posts,” Gardner confirmed.
“Okay, well, maybe we can use that program to get in contact with him,” I suggested. “If it’s the same guy running both of these operations, then we know of a way to get to him now. Lucas said he always talked to him through this program, so there’s a high chance he’s creeping around in there somewhere.”
“That could work,” Gardner mumbled, furrowing her eyebrows as she concentrated. “We could pose as an interested buyer to lure him out. We’ll have to do it in Japanese, but I think we can make it work as long as we stick to simple sentences. Do you have the information from Lucas’s laptop, Charlie?”
“I have it,” Junior suddenly spoke up, standing up and walking over to his desk to retrieve his own laptop. Thank goodness for his meticulous record-keeping. Junior handed his laptop to Gardner, and she quickly went to work plugging the information into her own computer.
“Okay, we’re in,” she nodded. Displayed on the monitor was a messy, disorganized-looking web page with dozens of posts. I shifted my chair closer to the screen.
“Wait!” Gardner burst out suddenly, causing both me and Junior to jump in surprise. “We’re not supposed to use any of the agency’s stuff for this investigation, remember? Or do it during work hours.”
I snorted in response.
“Because we’re so busy right now,” I said sarcastically. “The office is dead. This is a better use of our time than just sitting in the break room eating chocolate like Castillo and Patel.”
“Wait, not my chocolate, right?” Gardner asked indignantly, moving to get up.
“Focus, Gardner,” I urged, and she frowned petulantly before sitting back down.
“Better not be eating my stuff,” she murmured darkly. She pulled up a translation app before turning back to Junior and me. “What should I write?”
