I headed downstairs to my assigned room. I’ve been around wealth for the past ten years and have seen some shit that the other half does with their money, but this Mancini guy takes the cake. I’d already done a walkthrough of my rooms, and if everyone else had digs like this, then the utility bills on this bitch must be enough to feed a small country each month.
There was a bedroom, a sitting area, and a full bathroom. There was also what I could only deem as an entertainment center equipped with state of the art everything. That’s where I was headed now for the computer that I was supposed to use while here. I couldn’t use my personal laptop even though Gideon had outfitted it with all the bells and whistles to make sure it remained secure and off-grid. This Mancini guy was taking no chances.
I did a little research of my own before retrieving the piece of paper with the contact information he’d given me earlier from my pocket. This Track guy was younger than me in years, but his resume made mine look like a kindergarten kid. The private dossier Mancini had left on my desk as if he’d already decided that we two would be working together was even more enlightening.
The kid worked for the Pentagon in the past and was part of ANONYMOUS, the latter I found more impressive than the former. That meant he knew his way around a computer, something I’m okay at but nothing spectacular. He does his tracking with technology while I do mine the old fashioned way.
I hunt assholes using common sense and their own fuck-ups. I spent a good while reading about his supposed ancestor and got sucked in. I did pretty well in school, but you learn something new every day. The richest man to ever live was a brother. Even by today's standards taking into account inflation and everything else, he had the kind of money that would give Bill Gates a hard-on.
According to history, his descendants had pretty much fucked it all away, but according to Mancini’s records, that had not been the case. At least one of his descendants had had the foresight to sock away some of that wealth, as was evident by that bank account Mancini had pulled up earlier.
This kid, Track, and his dad were the sole heirs of some serious coins, and the kid was all of nineteen, damn. I put in the number on the computer, and his face came swimming onto the screen a few seconds later, like he’d been waiting for me. “Hey Track, I’m Jason, Mancini told me to get with you.”
His smile was warm and inviting, and you wouldn’t know by just looking at him that he was anything more than a college geek into computers. Except most people’s ideas of a geek does not look anything as handsome as the kid did, or as built. Most computer nerds didn’t go for the gym life, but it was obvious that he did.
There was a gorgeous black female standing next to him with her hand on his shoulder. “Jason, this is my wife, Valerie. Go hang with the others babe; I’ll be here for a while.” She leaned down and kissed him, and he whispered something in her ear that made her giggle before walking away.
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.