Page 73 of Moonstruck
“Any excuse to see those sweet, adorable angel babies,” Calliope crooned.
“See, that is the level of respect my children deserve,” Lucas said, looking at each of them in turn.
The screen came to life. Calliope panned around the sprawling nursery with its carousel-themed wallpaper and custom-built cribs, stopping when she found Thomas. He sat in the overstuffed rocker, his ankle crossed over his other knee, two tiny bundles nestled in his lap.
When Thomas had requested a nursery be built in his home for the girls, Asa had thought it strange. He was the grandfather, not the dad. Wasn’t spending thirty grand on a designer nursery a parent thing? But now, he got it. Or, at least, he got why his dad had wanted it.
The proof was there in 4k resolution. Even with no sound on, it was easy to see his father was in love. Whatever he was saying or doing had the two girls smiling and cooing and blowing spit bubbles. Maybe this was what his father needed. It probably hadn’t been easy raising six kids who could never love him and a teenager Asa was starting to suspect maybe loved him a little too much.
“Should we get him?” Noah asked hesitantly.
“I can fill him in afterwards,” August said. “Let’s just get started. Calliope, did you get the information I asked for last night?”
“Yep. Got it right here.”
Lucas opened the folder he’d had in his hand when he entered, putting on a pair of reading glasses. “Okay, August and I spent all night going over victimology and building a profiler of the handler. Here’s what we suspect. We’re looking for a white man between the ages of thirty to forty-five, likely still living at home. Someone with a massive chip on his shoulder who thinks the world owes him something.”
“Well, that’s sixty percent of the population,” Adam muttered under his breath.
August gave him a sharp look, and he dropped his head. “He has a knack for technology and believes he’s smarter than most people. He’s not. People will always think he’s slightly off. He has a God complex. And any perceived slight will become a vendetta with him whether the other party knows it or not.”
“Perceived slight? Like what?” Zane asked.
Lucas waved a hand. “It could be literally anything. Bumped him in line at Starbucks? Took his parking space? Didn’t smile back when he smiled at you? He will consider you an enemy for life.”
Asa leaned back in his seat, his fingers playing with the hair that curled over the nape of Zane’s neck. “How does that help us get closer to finding the handler?”
Lucas looked to the speaker in the center of the phone. “We had Calliope pull up a list of people who had been rejected from both of the targeted schools.
“Spoiler alert, there’s a lot of them,” Calliope said.
“Okay, well, you can eliminate any women,” Archer said, then looked at Lucas for confirmation. “Right?”
Lucas nodded. “Yeah.”
Rapid-fire typing filled the room. “That only gets rid of about twenty names.”
“Eric said the guy who tried to run him over was very overweight and wore dark-framed glasses,” Asa said. “I don’t suppose there are photographs attached to any of those applications.”
“No, but I did pull DMV photos of the men,” Calliope said. “Unfortunately, there’s no law that demands people update their photos, so some of them could be decades old.”
A series of faces began to fill the screen. She was right. There were a lot of them and some of the pictures did, indeed, look decades old. People could change a lot in that time.
“Of this list, only fifteen are listed as needing corrective lenses. Four or so might classify as ‘very overweight’ but there’s a huge margin of error. The handler might have put on weight since any of these photos.”
Lucas tapped his pen on the file. “Okay, run deep background checks on the fifteen who need corrective lenses. We can probably use their employment and criminal history to at least eliminate them from the suspect pool.”
Calliope made a noise in the affirmative. “I can do that, but it will take me some time.”
“Hey, Calliope?” Zane asked.
“Yes, Zane?” she asked, her voice full of sweetness. She never talked to the Mulvaneys like that. Only the spouses.
“Can you cross reference those fifteen names and see if any of them own an old Buick?”
“An old Buick?” Jericho repeated, perking up.
Zane nodded. “Yeah, Eric said the guy who tried to run him down was driving a really old Buick.”
