5. Vince
5
VINCE
Archer, Wade , Diego , and I were all sitting in one of our conference rooms a few days later, reviewing a new case we had just gotten and mapping out the timeline, when Axel knocked on the door.
“You want me to come back later?” he questioned the room.
“Nah. What’s up?” Archer answered, knowing we had pretty much finished everything we needed to and gone over the timeline twice now with a fine-tooth comb.
"I think I found her," Axel said, his mild Swedish accent doing nothing to soften the seriousness in his voice.
He hesitated for a beat, " And I think I know why she ghosted you."
I knew exactly who he was talking about, and while I was happy to know she wasn’t dead, I also didn’t need the guys all up in my business on this one. I was about to say so, but my meddling cousin interrupted.
“What do you mean?” Archer asked, bringing Axel’s attention over to him.
“The website design company is called CAT Services Inc ., which stands for Creative Art Technology , C - A - T ,” Axel explained. “ Dane and I had to do some digging. Deep digging, because she didn’t make it easy to find out who owns the company, which is a good thing. But it’s registered to a Catherine Romano , and from an even deeper dive, I found her family called her Cat .”
“ Called , as in past tense?” Diego , ever the smart one, picked up on.
“Yeah, so this is where the ghosting part comes in, or at least that’s my theory,” Axel continued. “ Her parents were murdered in a gas-station robbery gone bad seven years ago.”
I heard mumbled curses all around me, but all I could think about was what happened to her and her sister after her parents died because her sister would have still been underage.
“Where were she and her sister? Her sister would have been a minor still. Did they get separated?” I asked, now suddenly worried for her instead of being my usual mad, bitter, and resentful that she went AWOL on me.
“No,” Axel said and then paused before looking me in the eye. “ They were at the robbery too, and the best Dane and I can find, something happened at the trial that she was a witness for, and both sisters may have been killed.”
My heart dropped, connecting all the dots as to why she had stopped writing. She didn’t ghost me. She died.
Archer held his hand up to get everyone’s attention. “ How the hell can she have died but still operate a website business?”
“Let me finish, asshole,” Axel grunted at him, then turned back to me.
“Best guess, and I got a call into a friend of mine who’s a Fed , but I’m guessing she didn’t die but was placed in WITSEC .”
You’ve got to be kidding me. All the puzzle pieces started to come together. I was happy she was still alive. Possibly .
“The names of the daughters were Catalina and Valeria Rivera , but those names disappear after the court shooting,” he said. “ Then , Catherine and Valentina Romano magically appeared out of nowhere seven years ago.”
“Then how did you find her?” Diego asked. “ No disrespect, but Feds don’t exactly make it easy to locate these people.”
“Yeah, so here’s where it gets weird,” Axel continued. “ Catherine Romano didn’t exist before seven years ago. No school records, no tax history, no medical files. It’s like she was just…created.”
I tensed, feeling that familiar gut punch of realization.
“You know who likes to create people out of thin air— WITSEC ,” Axel revealed. “ So , I ran a backtrace on newly issued identities from that year. People who suddenly appeared out of nowhere with clean records. Catherine Romano and Valentina Romano were two of them.”
“Jesus,” Wade muttered.
Axel nodded. “ Then I went back a year and filtered my search to find females of the same age and basic stats. That narrowed it down considerably. Especially when you look at some of the small details like how Valentina’s birthday is April 9 th , but Valeria’s was September 4 th . Notice the dates—they just switched the four and nine.”
“Hot damn,” Diego muttered.
“Okay, so now what,” Archer spoke up. “ How do we find her? The point of being in WITSEC is so no one finds you.”
“I traced the activity on her account,” Axel said nonchalantly as though this was no big deal. “ The second people start logging in somewhere, it leaves breadcrumbs. Every time she accessed the site, the connection routed through different IP addresses, which is standard for hiding a location—but the Wi - Fi towers showed a pattern. I noticed a cluster of pings coming from the same general radius, and from there, I triangulated an approximate location.”
“How the hell did you find that info?” Archer mumbled, and I knew the former cop in him realized that most of Axel’s search was likely not done legally.
Axel smirked. “ Because I’m good, bitch, which is why you hired me,”
Wade and Diego just grinned. I wasn’t sure if they were amused because he was right or because his accent made ‘bitch’ sound like ‘beach.’
Axel’s lips quirked slightly. “ She didn’t make it easy, and I had to jump through a lot of firewalls and scrape data from places that aren’t easy to do. She masked her tracks with a VPN , rerouted some of her internet traffic through remote servers, and kept her digital footprint practically nonexistent.”
He turned and faced me. “ She’s good, but I’m better. I can pinpoint her down to roughly a one-mile radius. Now it’s your turn.”
He was looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking. My bounty-hunting skills could help find her from there.
“It appears she and the sister both survived but let the gang believe they were dead,” Axel said. “ They moved around every year or so. I’m not sure if that was the Marshals Service doing that or if they were doing it on their own, but they’ve only been in this location for about eight months, so my guess is you’ve got time to find them before they move on again.”
“Is there still a threat?” Archer asked.
“Not really,” Dane said from the doorway he had just appeared in, holding up a paper. “ That’s what I was checking on. As far as I can tell, the only two surviving people from that shootout are dead. They were part of the Cross Street Kings gang. The one she testified against died in prison, and the one who likely shot at her outside of court, another gang member—they knew who it was but never arrested him—was killed in some turf war with another gang. So , my guess is if they are moving around, it’s not necessarily the Feds who are moving them.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
Dane and Axel both looked at each other and smiled a bit. This was not a happy smile, but rather a smile indicating what they were about to tell me would not make me happy.
“Iowa,” Axel said.
This just got a lot more complicated.