“Including the guy I found,” Rose added pointedly, bringing the conversation back to the dire topic at hand.
“Tell us what you know, MV.” Poison cleared her throat, and Rose pictured her squaring her shoulders. She wished she had a visual into the room, but the apartment Phoenix had chosen was a surveillance blind spot.
Rose had been “MV” to her sister for so long that sometimes she hated the nickname. At first, it had been like a security blanket. A reminder of the distance between them. But now it was just a reminder that, while Rose felt closer to her sister than she had in years, there was still a massive divide between them.
“Actually, Keys should talk,” Rose told the group. “He’s the one who actually found usable information.”
“No, no, you did really well,” Keys insisted immediately. “I just helped you build a better defense, but you’re the one who found it.”
Rose felt her cheeks flame at the compliment. “Really? I mean, it was difficult. I shouldn’t have gone snooping. I knew better. I’m nowhere near your level.”
“Trust me,” Keys assured her. “What you did was exceptional. Better yet, you knew when you were in trouble and you reached out for help instead of trying to handle it yourself. I’m proud of you.”
Rose was very grateful no one in this conversation could see how hot her cheeks and the back of her neck got at his compliment. Likely, he didn’t even realize the magnitude of what he’d just said in a conversation that included more than just them. Over the past two hours, Keys had said other things that made it obvious how acutely oblivious he was. Not that Rose minded—no one had ever called her script “beautiful” before—but she would have preferred not to have an audience for such compliments.
Thankfully, Jack picked up on it. “Children,” he said in a stern voice.
Rose heard Keys clear his throat. “Right, uh, sorry.” No doubt he was apologizing for getting them sidetracked again. Did he even realize his words could have been taken as flirtatious? “Your perp isn’t on the police’s radar as far as we can tell. While he’s new, Jack was able to backtrack past sales and estimate that he’scaptured four to five women. At present, it looks like he only has two.”
“Is ‘he’ generic,” Phoenix asked, “or have you confirmed his gender?”
“It’s a guess,” Jack answered. “Based on height and build, we’re making a logical assumption that he is male.”
“How is he, uh, shipping the parts?” Kitty inquired next.
“Private carrier.” Rose was able to pick up on the clicking of Keys’ keyboard in the background as he spoke. “The kind that gets paid not to ask questions.”
“Maybe we can track the carrier,” Poison suggested.
“No,” Jack, Rose, and Keys all said at the same time.
Keys cleared his throat before explaining, “One of the reasons he hasn’t gotten caught is because he’s not doing mass shipments. Best we can tell, he keeps the women alive long-term. While I doubt he’s providing real medical attention to them, their past wounds look crudely mended. We estimate that he’s shipping once a month or so.”
Rose was about to say something when Poison spoke first, “Wait. People have alotof parts. How long is he keeping them for? You said five-ish victims, but only has two now. If he’s only shipping once a month…”
Rose could imagine her sister’s scrunched-up face as she tried to solve the equation of the math problem she’d just created. As amusing as she found Poison’s math struggles, Rose decided to step in and come to her sister’s aid. “He’s shipping once a month, but it’s multiple packages,” she explained.
The silent timer on her computer screen went off, and her eyes flicked over to her left again to see that Oscar was still safe and entertained. She checked on him more often than that, but never wanted to get so distracted with her work that she forgot to—hence the timer.
“We think he keeps them about six months,” Keys continued Rose’s train of thought. “As for why tracking the carrier won’twork, he just shipped out his last batch. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t want to wait around another month before we actually find this guy.”
Rose agreed, especially because she knew one of the victims. Nora Daniels. Back in her misfit teen years, Rose and Poison’s parents had sent Rose to a private school for troubled youth. They’d hoped it would shape her up, and keep her from getting into even further trouble. What they didn’t realize was that the public school district Rose had gone to until she was sixteen had been one of the poorest in the Atlanta area with no computer lab or computer science programs. The private school, however, did—and once Rose got her hands on a keyboard, there was no turning back.
“Do you know how or where he’s finding the women?” Kitty asked them.
“Unfortunately, that was almost too easy,” Jack answered with a tone of disgust. “Their profiles are all very similar. Young, in debt, and proverbial job hoppers.”
“Just women?” Phoenix clarified.
“That we’ve found evidence of,” Jack said.
“Nora visited different women’s shelters in the days leading up to her disappearance after getting evicted from her last apartment,” Rose informed the group. Nora was the whole reason she’d reached out to Poison in a panic the day before. She hadn’t seen her teenage friend in years, and yet what were the odds that the dark web live feed she stumbled into showed Nora? Upon further investigation, Rose learned that Nora had been living on the streets of Detroit since before Christmas. “I was able to trace the other victims to similar places, but only three I can confirm all five women visited at one point or another.”
“Homeless shelters make for easy pickings,” Poison woefully murmured. The truth behind that statement was a sad societal fact that Rose couldn’t argue with. “You willing to go undercover?” Poison asked either Phoenix or Kitty based on the angle ofher voice. “Plant ourselves at those three shelters, see whose attention we draw?”
It was Phoenix who replied, “I need to find a new place anyway. Been at this one too long.”
“MV,” Poison said into the phone, “can you give us backgrounds that are similar to Nora’s and the others’? You’ll need to tell us about them so we can mimic them.”
