Chapter 32
DANE
I pull up to Milo's cramped loft in Alphabet City, a technological hoarder's paradise where circuit boards and half-built computers compete with empty energy drink cans for every flat surface.
The air smells like soldered metal and the chemical hint of whatever energy supplement Milo's mainlining today.
Milo himself is hunched over three monitors, fingers a blur on his mechanical keyboard. The incessant clicking stops only when I drop Sarah's phone on his desk.
"Can you crack it?"
Milo scoffs. "Can I crack it? That's like asking if water's wet."
He connects it to some device I don't recognize, types commands I'll never understand, and within four minutes, he's in, scrolling through Sarah's digital life like he's reading a newspaper.
"People think passwords protect them," he mutters. "As if anything digital is ever truly secure."
I watch over his shoulder, that familiar coldness settling in my gut. "We're all just walking around naked, thinking our clothes keep us safe."
"Poetic, for a guy who shoots people."
I grunt, not denying is assertion.
Milo's fingers pause mid-scroll. "There's nothing here, man. Not even breadcrumbs."
"What do you mean nothing?" I lean closer, that prickle at the back of my neck growing sharper.
"I mean scrubbed clean. No texts, calls, or emails with Langford.
No photos. No 'Dear Diary, I'm meeting a creepy rich guy who's definitely married' entries.
" Milo unplugs the phone. "This thing's been professionally wiped and returned to her dorm.
Factory reset with just enough basic apps to look normal at first glance. "
"Fuck." The word tastes like copper in my mouth.
Milo swivels in his chair, tattoos shifting under the blue glow of his monitors. "Our boy's good. Too good. Regular rich assholes hire lawyers. This guy's hiring digital ghosts. He's got someone good keeping his tech tight."
I stare at the pink phone case, thinking about all the things that aren't there. About Sarah's silence. About how easy it is to make people disappear—first digitally, then physically.
"You know what this means?" Milo asks.
I do. It means Sarah might already beyond help. It means Langford isn't just covering his tracks, he's erasing them completely.
It means I failed.
"What about cell tower data?" I ask. "Maybe there's a ping that doesn't match her routine."
Milo's fingers fly across the keyboard again, his face illuminated in the electronic glow like some tech-savvy gargoyle. After a minute of typing, he goes completely still.
"It's gone."
"What do you mean gone?"
"I mean fucking vanished. Someone with serious juice has scrubbed her location data from the network." He spins toward me. "This isn't amateur shit. We're talking connections that go way beyond money. This is power. The kind that can make systems administrators break federal law."
The math is simple, brutal. Rich kid plus vanishing act plus deleted digital footprint equals body count.
"She's dead," I say with certainty. The words hang between us, heavy and certain.
"You don't know that," Milo says, but his voice lacks conviction.
"Yeah, I do." I stare at Sarah's pink phone, imagining her last moments.
Milo scratches his neck, the gears in his overcaffeinated brain visibly turning. Then his eyes light up.
"Wait. I made a download yesterday. I still have her cell phone tower data, some server logs from the carrier." He pivots back to his keyboard, fingers flying across the keys.
Multiple windows flash across his screen: code and coordinates that mean nothing to me but everything to him. I've never understood how Milo's mind works, but I'm grateful for it.
"Here we go," he says, pulling up a map with data points. "Anything spark any thoughts?"
I lean closer, studying the screen. My training kicks in, identifying patterns in chaos, finding the anomaly in the noise.
"There." I point to a ping from two days ago. "Financial district. Son of a bitch," I growl, slamming my palm against Milo's desk. A half-empty energy drink topples over, spilling green liquid across a stack of papers.
Milo curses, lunging to save his electronics. "That's where he was that day he was conducting interviews ."
"Where did she go after that?" I ask.
"Nowhere. Her signal's stationary for nearly forty minutes before disappearing completely." Milo's voice is flat, clinical, but I catch the slight tremor in it.
I pace behind him, feeling the familiar battle rhythm kick in, the same mental state that let me line up shots from eight hundred yards out. My boots wear an invisible path in his cluttered floor.
"That's where he did it, where he took her cell phone." My thoughts crystallize into certainty. "He didn't kill her in his apartment but somewhere in the financial district, then he got someone to put her phone back. That's why there's a gap in the dorm's security footage."
"Maybe she's not dead." Milo wants to hold on to hope, but his voice is weak.
The financial district. Buildings of glass and steel where money washes away sins.
Where calculating men engineer their perfect lives, and people like Sarah become inconvenient footnotes to be disposed of.
I've seen the underbelly of those pristine towers—the service corridors that never make the architectural magazines, mechanical rooms that roar with machinery loud enough to drown out screams. There are sub-basements where maintenance staff never ventures, freight elevators that don't appear on public directories, and unmarked doors that lead to forgotten spaces.
"Where in the financial district?" I ask, leaning over Milo's shoulder, my reflection ghostly in the monitor's glow. "Can you narrow it down further?"
"Cell data isn't GPS tracking, Dane. I've told you that," Milo mutters, fingers dancing across keys with the precision of a concert pianist. "But if we have enough pings..." He trails off, lost in his digital excavation.
I run my hand over the stubble on my jaw, thinking.
"There have to be enough data points to triangulate." I can't accept any other possibility. I didn't save Sarah, but Brian will still pay.
"Working on it," Milo snaps, typing faster. "I'm not just a pretty face with cool tattoos."
Minutes tick by as Milo works his digital alchemy, transforming random data into meaningful patterns.
I pace behind him, my body remembering the controlled impatience of waiting for mission parameters to align.
The moment before action is when mistakes happen—when the mind races ahead while the body remains trapped in present time.
"BINGO!" Milo's shout nearly makes me reach for my gun.
He spins in his chair, face lit with the triumph of a successful hack. "I've got it. Three separate tower pings created an overlap zone small enough to be meaningful." He points to a blinking dot on his screen. "That's where her phone last registered before going dark."
I lean closer, something cold and familiar settling in my gut as I recognize the address.
"That's were you report said Veritas has its offices," I say quietly. Milo sent me a report about the company after I saw the name on Lila's desk.
"Oh, yeah." He nods.
"The place where Lila's interviewing."
Milo's eyes open wide. "Your bartender is interviewing at the same place this girl disappeared from?"
My blood turns to ice water. The universe doesn't deal in coincidences like this, only patterns waiting to be recognized.
"Sarah wanted an internship too," I say, more to myself than to Milo. "Langford dangled it like bait... said he could get it for her."
The realization is a punch to the sternum. How many businesses in that gleaming tower offer internships to pretty college girls? How many have a connection to Langford?
No. I'm getting ahead of myself, seeing conspiracies where there might be nothing but bad timing. The world's full of innocent explanations nested inside sinister ones, waiting to make fools of paranoid men like me.
"Hold up." I force myself to be methodical. "I need a concrete connection between Langford and Veritas. Something solid. Can you find that?"
Milo cracks his knuckles, wincing slightly from the hours of typing. "Let me work my magic."
His fingers assault the keyboard like it owes him money. Multiple windows cascade across his screens—financial records, corporate filings, news articles. The digital breadcrumbs of a life carefully constructed to withstand scrutiny.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Milo whispers after five minutes of searching.
"Langford's not just connected to Veritas, he's a major investor.
Buried under three shell companies and a trust in the Caymans, but it's him alright.
The paper trail's deliberately convoluted, but I found board meeting minutes where his name appears through Rockwell's private equity division.
He's practically bankrolling the whole operation while keeping his name off the letterhead. "
His tattooed fingers dance across the keyboard once more, peeling back digital layers like an archaeologist uncovering a mass grave.
"And get this, Veritas isn't the only company he's got hidden away in that building.
Three floors down is Quantum Edge Tech. Also Smith, Davidson & Ross, Velox Pharmaceuticals, Blackstone Edge Capital, and more.
Same ownership structure, same shell game.
Different name, same puppet master pulling the strings.
It's like he's created an entire ecosystem under one roof, all carefully segmented so nobody connects the dots. "
I lean closer to the screen, the blue light making me squint.
Of course Langford would build himself a private hunting preserve disguised as a corporate empire.
Men like him don't just hunt, they create the terrain, stock it with prey, and make the rules, so they can enjoy the chase at their leisure.
Tale as old as time: the wealthy believe the world exists for their consumption.