Page 88 of See How They Hide

She sounded defeatist. Matt exchanged a glance with Kara.

Kara said, “You’re going to stick with us until we can find you a safe place. A place where you feel like you fit.”

“Maybe I’ll never fit in anywhere,” she mumbled. Then she said, “What about everyone else? There are others out there. Can you find them?”

“We have some leads,” Matt said, “and when we get a list, we’ll track them down.”

Kara said, “No one had last names at Havenwood, but did you all keep your real first names when you escaped?”

Riley nodded. “Jesse gave us the last names.”

“Before you left, you helped Thalia get people out. So you know some of the people who left Havenwood.”

Matt saw what Kara was getting at. “Our computer experts have backtracked how Jesse created the birth records in the hospital in Denver. They’re now going through more than a decade of records searching for a unique code that seems to be attached to the files Jesse created. It takes time.”

“Oh. Yeah. I can give you everyone’s first names, sure.” Riley brightened, looked marginally optimistic. She flipped the page on her sketch pad and started writing down first names.

“That’ll help us narrow the records we need to search, saving a lot of time.”

“Add their age and basic description if you can,” Kara said.

The food arrived and Riley nibbled as she wrote.

Matt mouthed to Kara,Good idea.

She grinned, popped a french fry into her mouth, then nodded toward the lobby.

Matt glanced over and saw Dean Montero walk in. He was about to go up the stairs when he spotted them in the restaurant. Surprised, he walked over. “Ryder Kim works miracles,” he said and took off his coat. “He managed to get me a room on short notice, albeit a cabin.” He motioned to the empty chair. “May I?”

Matt nodded. “This team wouldn’t function half as well without him.”

“I remember when you recruited him straight from the academy,” Dean said. The waitress came over and he ordered a burger, then said, “He was the top analyst candidate in his class and several offices wanted him.”

Matt knew that, of course.

Dean was watching Riley, but being directly across from her he couldn’t see what she was drawing. She was focused on her work, barely glanced up when Dean came over. Kara was the only one who could clearly see the page.

Matt’s phone vibrated. He looked down; it was Ryder. “Excuse me,” he said and got up.

Stepping out of the restaurant and into a corner of the small lobby, where he had some privacy, he answered. “What do you have?”

“The report came in from the lab on the red poppies. I sent it to you and Jim, but in a nutshell based on water and minerals, they narrowed the region to southwestern Colorado, and northern New Mexico, in the mountains. They assure me if we get a soil sample, they can test against it. But there’s one more interesting fact. The poppies have trace amounts of THC.”

“Which means?”

“They were grown in soil that also grew marijuana. They could have grown side by side, or they were stored together. It’s distinctive, because it’s not seen in these flowers in the wild.”

“That’s good as far as building a case, but that still doesn’t tell us where they are. We know from our witness that the group lives somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.”

“Zack is making progress with the finances. He found the original LLC paperwork for Havenwood, but it closed down eleven years ago.”

Around the time that the matriarch died, Matt thought.

“The LLC has a Nevada address, which is a mail drop that has also been closed for eleven years,” Ryder continued. “The mail drop doesn’t keep records that long, so we don’t know who opened it. I sent a local agent to pull the filings—they’re not online—and maybe if we cull through them we’ll find something that helps. We’ll have that tonight or first thing in the morning.”

“Terrific.”

“Nothing on Calliope Creations, but we’re looking at variations. Our best lead right now is the original Havenwood paperwork. If they paid property taxes through the LLC, we might be able to trace it that way. And based on Kara’s report from her interviews with Riley, the commune wasn’t trying to stay off the grid when it first started. We’re also in contact with several local assessors, but without the name of the payor or tract numbers, they can’t help.”

---