IT’S A start. Now let’s see how much of a start.
The overnight at SOS is quiet. We don’t have much in terms of round-the-clock staff, because we aren’t a normal police district. We don’t punch a clock. We don’t stay in one neighborhood. We go wherever the action is, and we work whatever hours necessary. Only a few detectives and officers are in the squad room when I enter.
I find the room with the POD footage and start working the desktop, searching for the POD camera at Van Buren and Kolmar. I’m not great with this stuff, but the techies are all long gone for the day.
It takes me a while, but I finally find the right camera. I click on the recorded footage for today. Fast-forward through a lot of nothing, a few people walking along sidewalks, one couple making out, all but ripping each other’s clothes off. Some car traffic. Mostly an empty intersection at that time of night, in that part of town.
There. The two men, sprinting south down Kolmar, then pivoting, turning onto Van Buren, running right toward the camera.
I lean forward, squint. Black-and-white, grainy, the usual.
But I have their faces. Maybe not enough for facial recognition. But I have them.
The first one is white, a small frame, thick hair that seems dark. Young, I’d say, maybe early to midtwenties. The second one, the one who shot at me—also Caucasian, much taller, solid but trim, his hair buzzed short, looking behind him to gauge my progress, running with a handgun in his left hand.
I pause the recording so I won’t be forced to see myself showing up a few moments later, out of shape and winded, catching my breath at the corner.
I rewind and replay. Are they Russian? Could be. Definitely could pass for eastern European. Too hard to tell. Probably too blurry to get facial rec with them.
But if I see them again, I’ll recognize them.
I open the garbage bag I took from the house. The clothes don’t tell me much, though I see price tags on a couple of items, which tells me that Shiv probably bought Evie some clothes to wear. Makes sense. If I’m right and she escaped from the traffickers, she didn’t exactly have time to pack a suitcase.
The only thing I find that could be remotely identifying is a piece of paper with some handwriting on it.
A fost eliberat acum trei luni.
Locatia lui e necunoscuta.
I don’t know the language, much less the translation.
On the desktop, I minimize the POD footage and pull up the internet. I type in the words from this note. Several websites cascade down the screen, all of them in a foreign language, most of them beginning with the familiar “www” but ending not with “.gov” or “.com” but with “.ro,” which I don’t recognize. But it doesn’t take long to figure it out. These are Romanian web pages.
A spike of adrenaline. Evie was from Romania.
I pull up an online Romanian-to-English translator and type in the words scribbled on the note. The translation to English:
He was released three months ago. His location is unknown.
I write that down on a notepad. Okay. Now I just have to figure out who “he” is and what he was released from. Prison? Some government facility?
With nothing else to go on from the trash bag, I head to the inventory room, which is closed this time of night. I can’t get in without an officer signing evidence in and out. It’ll have to wait till tomorrow.
My phone buzzes. I don’t recognize the number.
“Officer Harney?”
Close enough. “That’s me.”
“I’m sorry to call so late. This is Angela Dupree.”
“Oh, you’re fast.” It was only around four hours earlier that we spoke.
“Well, once we talked, I couldn’t really think of anything else.”
“Sorry about that.”
“I looked through some old papers. I think I found the name of the company that my late husband was worried about. It was called KB Investors Group. He called it KBIG. He didn’t want them to invest in the Stratton project. He vetoed them.”
“Vetoed them?”
“He was in charge of due diligence. He had to say yay or nay. I didn’t know a lot about what he did, but that much I understood. He said no to KBIG, and his partners were upset.”
And they wouldn’t have been the only ones upset.
The folks at KBIG, kicked out of a major deal by Nathan Stofer, might not have been so happy, either.