Cam snorted. Obviously he didn’t think this was a viable lead to pursue.
She didn’t even bat an eyelash at her teammate’s response. “I also want scene photos emailed to me within the hour.”
Philips opened his mouth like he planned to complain but then nodded.
Evan kept watching the woman who’d become far more confident over the years. She seemed to have grown into quite a force to be reckoned with. And foolishly he wondered if she was thinking about how he’d changed. She probably wasn’t thinking about him at all, other than as a pesky bug she wanted to swat away.
She spun and exited the container, the others following. Evan trailed after them and felt like he was five again, wanting to play with his older brother and the big kids when they didn’t want him anywhere near them.
Kiley stopped six feet out and stood staring at the container. “We need to figure out how Firuzeh learned of this container.”
“Firuzeh?” Evan asked.
“She was my CI,” Kiley said, quickly masking a dark shadow that had crept into her eyes. “She’d learned of a terrorist plot she said would impact millions of people and would occur in five days. We were meeting so she could tell me about it, except she was gunned down before she could provide any details. She managed to mutter the wordsport,coma, andBox 342.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Evan said sincerely.
She eyed him suspiciously, like she didn’t believe he could honestly be sorry, but her gaze quickly cleared. “At this point we have to assume she meant the Port of Tacoma and the two investigations are related.”
She obviously wanted to keep this all business, so Evan would comply. “What about the mailbox?”
“Her family owns a packaging and mailbox store, and I suspect that could be where she got her intel. One of our agents is following up to see who rented that box number at their place.”
“Sounds like a solid lead,” he said, hoping it would pan out. “And what have you learned about her shooting?”
“Nothing much. We’d barely notified her family of her death when our focus expanded to the container, and we don’t have the homicide investigation dialed in.”
“It’ll be interesting to see how your CI learned of this plot from the other side of the country.”
Kiley eyed him for a long time. “How did you hear about it?”
“Social media.”
She narrowed her gaze. “Social media?”
He didn’t like her skeptical study, but he was confident in his work and could hold up under it no matter how long she chose to grill him. “Chatter on the dark web said something big was going down soon. No details. Just cryptic comments, but they seemed credible to me, and I wanted to follow up. I have this friend at MIT who was working on a social-media study. He claimed he could predict terrorists by posts on social media before they even mentioned anything threatening.”
She pressed her lips into a fine line. “I read about that study referencing extremist groups using social networks. They use it to harass users, recruit new members, and incite violence. The problem is rapidly growing, and they said Twitter shut down 360,000 ISIS accounts.”
Mack let out a low whistle. “Seems like too big of a problem to get your head around.”
“It is,” Evan said, “and it can be overwhelming. But if you take it one terrorist at a time—focus solely on the one investigation until you resolve it—then you can keep going.”
“So, your MIT friend helped with that?” Sean asked.
Evan nodded. “They used statistics to develop a method to predict new extremist users. They can tell if an account belongs to a prior user and predict where an account suspended by the social-media company will pop up under a new name. They were even able to identify seventy percent of additional extremist Twitter profiles.”
Mack gave a firm nod. “That’s impressive.”
Kiley didn’t look nearly as impressed. “And they used this method to help you?”
“They did,” Evan said. “We worked together to take the information down to the local level, and my friend gave me a list of profiles to review. Of course, the conversations were cryptic, but I pieced them all together, worked and reworked them until I figured out they were communicating about the port and this container in particular.”
“No surprise they used the container,” Kiley said. “Smuggling terrorists in them isn’t anything new. Been going on for years.”
Evan was impressed by her knowledge. “Whatissurprising here is that they claim their goal is bigger than 9/11.”
Kiley stared at the container and tapped her chin—her thinking mode. “And even after seeing these social-media posts, you have no idea who these men are or their target?”
