How would he make the approach?
Having Whiskey with him would be ideal, but Whiskey wouldn’t be back until morning, and Gabriel wanted this off his plate.
Still, a stranger wandering up and knocking on a woman’s door for a chat, especially when she didn’t have any neighbors towatch out for her, seemed aggressive. Doing it at night seemed aggressive.
Without his dog, Sommer probably wouldn’t recognize who Gabriel was.
Like it or not, he should wait for Whiskey to soften the introduction.
Chapter Twenty
Gabriel
Tuesday
When the tap sounded on Gabriel’s door, he pulled his focus from his laptop screen up the wall to his analog clock on the wall. “Right on time,” he said, shifting his gaze to the door.
“Come in,” he called, waiting for Pila Varalia from one of the Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking task Forces to swing into his office. “Lights,” she said.
And Gabriel quickly shut his eyes as she flicked on the overhead.
Gabriel blinked under the fluorescent bulbs.
Pila sat in his guest chair and looked up at the flickering bulb. “They can fix that, you know.”
“It’s rarely on.” Gabriel shifted to the edge of his seat and leaned in. “What have you got for me?”
“I sent you an image before I came down.”
Gabriel took a moment to pull it up. A girl stood on a deck surrounded by adults. “This came from a video?”
“It was. I took the clearest frame that had the most information. If you need the video, I’ll have to get signatures because it becomes quite graphic.” Pila turned Gabriel’s laptop so she could see the image, too. “She’s being auctioned on the socials. Can you do anything with it?”
“There are elements I can start with. Do you know where this is in the world?”
“We believe somewhere nearby. This is showing up in the D.C. western Maryland marketplace,” she said. “But of course wenever know. We want to get to her before she’s sold to another location.”
So Gabriel began working on it. He started with the leaves on the trees and compared them to the same species to check the date range and make sure the video and the auction were contemporaneous. From the bowls of snacks on the table and the tub of ice and beer, this was an evening picture. That gave him a sense of the house compared to the apartment building. He surmised that it was an apartment building based on the variety of window dressings, which didn’t repeat in any direction. And from the position of the sun, looking at the shadow it cast across the deck, he calculated cardinal direction and approximate time. From there, he checked the shadow cast by the high-rise and decided it had to be at least four stories. That didn’t help him define where this might be, but it would help him rule out certain locations on his maps.
The deck was too worn, the chairs too mismatched for it to be a typical place of business. This was a mixed residential area.
He couldn’t get the pixels to cooperate in reading any of the license plates in the apartment’s parking lot. It would have been an easy day if he had been able to get three or four with the same registration address.
They were white.
White plates gave him nothing.
In the corner by the loading zone, there was a mechanic’s truck. The words weren’t visible, but the logo was fairly large. He clipped it and asked the AI to adjust it from an angled view to a forward-facing view.
The result wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t bad.
He put that logo into his search and got five different possibilities. Two were in Canada. One in Montana. One in Oklahoma. One in D.C.
Bingo.
Gabriel researched the business. It was a one-door mom-and-pop. They wouldn’t want any trouble with the FBI. They should be cooperative.
Given the time of day and the area traffic, it would be tomorrow before a special agent could stop by the office during operating hours. Gabriel decided to call the office to see if he could get some help over the phone. He’d feel it out.
