Page 87 of Ground Truth

Allowing Hedinger into Jarsdel’s thought process was a mistake. Serendipitously, the phone Hedinger used exclusively to contact him rang.

He picked up the call. “Yes.”

“What’s the status of my project?” Hedinger demanded.

“Nothing to report yet,” Jarsdel said, sipping tea and watching the images flash across the screen.

The passport databases contained standardized images and biometrics, which was good. But it was a large database. Could take a while to get all the way through it.

“Keep me posted,” Hedinger demanded before he hung up.

Jarsdel smirked and shook his head as he slipped the phone into his pocket.

Patience was a virtue and Hedinger had precious little of it. Good thing the man was rich. Money was the only virtue he possessed.

Jarsdel accessed the software again and set it to compare the woman’s video image with the UK passport database. He had no reason to believe she owned a UK passport. But it was an easy thing to check, so why not?

And having gone that far, why not check the man and the kid, too? Why not check all the UK databases at once?

Jarsdel fed all the images into the software and set them to run against UK databases.

His tea had grown cold. He carried the mug into the kitchen to warm it up.

When he came back with the hot tea and a couple of cookies, one of the searches had found a match. Confidence level was one hundred percent.

Jarsdel dry swallowed the shortbread, swigged tea to wash it down, and stared at the screen. The man’s video image was a match to the UK passport photo for Avery Tumbler.

“Mr. Tumbler. Nice to meet ya,” Jarsdel mumbled toward the screen.

The other two searches were still running, so Jarsdel pulled up a background check on Tumbler. A few short queries later and Jarsdel had a complete history.

None of it reported that Tumbler was married or that he had a son.

Meanwhile, the images of the woman and the boy failed to match anything in the UK passport databases, which Jarsdel had been expecting.

He watched the balloon video again. The boy sat easily on Tumbler’s shoulders. The woman grasped his arm the way a girlfriend would.

“Maybe they’re not married. But they know each other. For sure,” Jarsdel said aloud.

He checked Scotland’s tax rolls. Tumbler owned a home. He found Tumbler’s address on a map of Scotland.

The village, called Portmahomack, was in the Scottish Highlands on the northeast coast. According to the internet, the total population of the village was a mere seven hundred souls.

Tumbler lived outside the village on a small farm he’d inherited from his father. The farm had been in the Tumbler family for generations.

Jarsdel could take a flight up to Inverness, rent a car to drive farther north, look around. But it was a long way to go on a hunch. He’d lose a whole day. Maybe more.

With Hedinger already on his ass about results, he was reluctant to waste resources.

He needed confirmation. Or at least a reason to believe the woman might be living in Portmahomack.

How could he get confirmation?

He’d already tried all the available databases. Perhaps the human approach would yield results.

Jarsdel pulled up a list of pubs in Portmahomack. Pubs served as gathering places for locals in rural communities everywhere across the UK. If Tumbler had a woman and a kid, folks at his local pub would know about them.

He located the pub closest to Tumbler’s address, opened a fresh burner phone, and dialed.

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