Page 11 of Room Ten: Praise Times Three

$142,368,212.72 weird.

“No, not yet,” Case says.

Porter follows up. “If it’s a woman behind this, she has to have partners. Male partners. Because even though the twins aren’t much to handle, how many women do you know who could wrangle another woman and then inflict bodily harm?”

Reese responds dryly, “There are some out there.”

Another pause before Case says, “Damn, I’ve never popped a woman before.”

“They bleed just the same as men,” Reese says.

Caiden glances back at me, and I nod, knowing that Reese has done that thing where he quickly compartmentalizes things, sinking his psyche into a cold place where everything goes numb. He doesn’t relish the idea of killing a woman—hell, none of us do—but he will if it comes to that.

Dear God, please don’t let it come to that.

“Whatever it takes,” Case retorts.

“Exactly. We’ll call you guys later tonight, after it is done.”

Caiden disconnects the call and checks the navigation unit on the truck. “We’ve got about two hours of driving and three hours until sunset. How do you want to play this?”

Reese sighs, his gaze fixed on the road beyond. “We’ll get within distance and then use the drone to get a visual. But we won’t move in for extraction until well after nightfall.”

“There’s a possibility this chick has cameras all over her property. I mean, her skills are good enough.”

I pull open my laptop and launch into a debugger.

Caiden looks at me through the rearview mirror. “What are you working on back there?”

“I can’t monitor the tracker’s originating end without alerting her we are on the move and heading in her direction, but I’m thinking I might use the MAC address from earlier and track her that way.”

“You think she’s on the move?” Reese turns in his seat to look at me.

I shrug. “It’s possible. Unfortunately, the only way I could grab her location was by broadcasting mine like I was Epi. If she’s nearly as good as I think she is, she would have traced right back to us in downtown Chicago, nowhere near the Krushner’s residence. So, do we risk alerting her to our approach, or go in blindly and potentially miss her?”

“See what you can do, but the last thing we want to do is alert her to our location.”

“Roger that.” I go back to my computer and we all fall into this comfortable silence, the miles ahead of us stretched out, giving us a quiet before the storm vibe. We have no idea what we are walking into, which has me thinking about background information on Ms. Claudine Humphrey.

It’s like Reese is reading my mind. “Have you pulled up information on this IT chick?”

“Yeah. Not much here via the normal channels. She’s got a LinkedIn profile and a Fivrr account advertising herself as a web designer and a contract IT specialist. She’s from the area, graduated high school out of Plainfield. No college degree, but a bunch of technical certificates—so self-taught, maybe? Blue-collar parents, both still alive. Father draws a medical pension at fifty-four. Mother still goes to work every day stocking shelves at one of the big box stores. One older brother, alive, married with two kids. One older sister, deceased. She herself has never been married.”

“Fairly benign,” Caiden says.

“Yeah. Let’s see if I can find what they have scrubbed from the Internet.” My fingers fly over the keyboard as I launch a program I wrote many years ago that mines the deep, dark recesses of archived data, looking for keywords I specify. I start with her name, then cross-reference it with Epiphany Krushner.

Hit after hit after hit pings my computer. I launch into a series of photographs, my eyes bugging out of my head. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Reese spins around. I turn my laptop so he can see. “Damn.”

“What?” Caiden barks, clearly annoyed he can’t look because he’s driving.

“Epiphany Krushner and a bunch of other models changing clothes during a photoshoot, I’d guess. It looks like Ms. Humphrey might have been infatuated, taking discrete photos from what appears to be a camera in a bag. The shots suck, but they show enough.”

I close the pictures and read a few data trace logs. “It looks like she bugged a lot of Epi’s stuff and has been keeping tabs on her for a while. How long ago did the client say she fired her?”

“Six months.”

“I wonder why she took so long to make her move?”

Reese shrugs. “Maybe she was grooming the right henchman. What about her known associates?”

I chew on the inside of my cheek, something I do a lot when I’m deep in thought, and nod. “Looking those up now.”

---