“Temporarily. I fully intend to get it back. And you need to find out who the girl is and where she got taken from.”
I could see Branning’s point about the payments—nobody wanted to fund a monster’s lifestyle. But we weren’t. Sending a payment in cryptocurrency wasn’t the same as handing over cash. You couldn’t hide it under a mattress. No, when you held crypto, it meant you controlled an address on that currency’s blockchain, which was the central ledger where all transactions were recorded. And you controlled the address by having the private key, basically a long-ass password, that was allowed to sign its transactions.
Anyone could look at the balances and transactions from a particular blockchain, but what we couldn’t do was link them to an individual.
The beauty of crypto was that owners remained anonymous.
And the frustration of crypto was that owners remained anonymous.
I could see that GutterMuse hadn’t spent one bean of the Kepcoins he’d been sent, so either he had access to a bunch more wallets he was draining before the ones we’d identified as belonging to him, or he wasn’t doing this for the money.
Or maybe both theories were true?
I’d watched three live sessions in his red room, two via stolen identities, and one by piggybacking on a guy I was monitoring for totally unrelated reasons. He was in jail awaiting trial, willing to cooperate if it would buy him leniency, but he didn’t know much more than we’d already discovered. And when I said “we,” I meant “I” because the FBI had been blissfully oblivious until I held a show-and-tell.
My relationship with the authorities was a complex one. My moral compass didn’t align with the letter of the law, partly because the law was an ass and partly because those who were meant to enforce the law also broke the rules when it suited them. Fight fire with fire and all that. I rooted through their databases, fucked with their systems, and exposed their dirty tricks when it suited me. I had more loyalty to my cadre of hacker friends than I did to the FBI or the CIA. Don’t even get me started on cops or the assholes at Homeland Security.
But I did have one or two rules.
I wouldn’t jeopardise national security, and I wouldn’t stand back and watch young women die because some psycho had a torture kink. Even if all the point teams worked together, we didn’t have the resources of the FBI, nor the capacity to handle a long-term investigation. Groups like the Choir were rapid reaction forces. We weren’t out there interviewing sobbing relatives or searching for body parts in rural Wisconsin.
My hunt for GutterMuse and his cronies was my hobby, not my career, but I was still better at it than Special Agent Branning.
By digging through the darkest corners of the cyber world, I’d linked seventeen missing women to the horrors of Room 72 for sure, and there were another twenty-four possibles that fit with the pattern. Forty-one women, and only one and a half bodies had ever been found. Dark-web lore said the group was named after Dante’s Inferno, specifically the seventh and second circles—violence and lust respectively.
I’d picked out four main players—GutterMuse, the_dollmaker, KeepHerQuiet, and Dustpatch. Dustpatch was my arch nemesis. He ran the cyber side, the security, and he was good. Perhaps almost as good as me. I hadn’t been able to crack his shell yet, but I would.
“I’ll start rounding up missing persons reports,” Branning said. “They’re due a move this time or next time.”
“Unfortunately.”
The group didn’t stay in one place. No, they took three or four girls in an area and then moved on to a new hunting ground. Their recent trip to Oregon had come as a surprise because they tended to prefer the southern states, but they’d hit three victims in the Beaver State without the Feds coming close to catching them, and now they’d be gearing up for a new adventure, if they hadn’t left already.
“My money’s on Alabama.”
“Why?”
“They haven’t been there yet, and they stay south in the winter.” And I couldn’t blame them. Who wanted to get cold and wet in Oregon or Washington or New England? When they popped up in Maine a couple of years ago, they’d headed to Louisiana afterward. “I need to prep.”
By “prep,” I meant send the payment, set up the tools I needed, and steel myself for what was to come. Oh, and this time, I had the added complication of explaining to Nolan why he’d find me puking in the bathroom later.
Speak of the devil…angel… Whatever. I hung up on Branning as Nolan walked in with his dinner.
“Did I interrupt your call?” he asked. “Sorry.”
“No, my call interrupted our dinner. Which I now can’t eat.”
“It’s cold? You want me to reheat it?”
To Nolan, it was a simple question, but to me, his words were a floodgate. He’d been back in my life for over two months now, and in some ways, things were different from before. Nolan had put down roots and built up a successful business. I was no longer a child. He’d kissed me.
But in other ways, things were the same. He still made sure I ate and went out of his way to keep me safe. I felt comfortable around him. He still hated the FBI as much as I hated cops. And I kept most of my thoughts, feelings, and actions, my past, and my present secret from him.
He said the next move was mine, but I couldn’t make it.
Not without letting him see more of me.
And I didn’t mean my underwear.
