Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
Blaze walked into the conference room. Dom was already at the head of the table. Hunter was at the far end. Siren was two seats down from Dom with a folder in front of her and her laptop. Axel was connecting his laptop to the room monitor.
Siren stood and attached seven photos to the whiteboard at the back of the room with magnets. “I spent half the night on this. But I’ve found a pattern of missing persons. All female non-predator shifters between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six.”
She pointed at each photo as she continued.
“A finch shifter in Eugene. Twenty-three months ago. A wren shifter in Spokane two years ago. Oldest case in the stack. Rabbit shifter in Olympia, eighteen months. Fawn shifter in Bend, eleven. Squirrel shifter in Salem, nine. Hummingbird shifter in Tacoma, seven. Dove shifter outside Seattle, three months ago.”
Blaze looked at the row. Seven young women, all the kind of shifter who couldn’t fight a grown man off in animal form. His wolf was growling inside him.
“Nell Meadows is number eight,” Dom said. “This is organized. And they are good enough at it that seven police departments haven’t connected the cases.” Dom looked at Axel. “Your turn.”
“I got into the SIM and the storage on the phone.” He pulled up one of Nell’s social media accounts on the room monitor. Her profile photos came up. Her posting history. Her followers and following.
Then he pulled up a video. “She posted this three weeks ago.”
The video played on the large room monitor.
It was about sixty seconds of a tiny brown bird with a striped face perched on a branch singing.
Behind the bird, the angle showed a paved trail and the trunk of a Douglas fir.
The geotag pin was in the lower right of the screen.
It read: Pine Ridge Trail, Fate Mountain, Oregon.
“That’s how they found her,” Siren said.
Axel then pulled up Nell’s search history from the week before she disappeared. He scrolled slowly so the room could read each query.
Feeling like someone is watching me. How to tell if you’re being followed. Best self-defense for short people. Pepper spray legal Oregon. Can you call the police if you’re not sure something is wrong?
Nell could feel she was being watched, but she didn’t tell anyone.
Hunter then started his report. “I scouted the area around her last known location. There’s a fire trail about twenty yards through the woods from where you found the phone.
” He set an evidence bag on the table with a hair tie in it.
“I found this in the leaves at the edge of the road. The scent matches the scent on the cardigan from the diner break room.”
A beat.
“I’m guessing the fire road is where they loaded her and drove her out.”
Dom looked around the table. “The investigation just changed. We’re not looking for one person who grabbed one woman.
We’re looking for an organized operation that hunts non-predator shifter women across the Pacific Northwest. They have a method.
They have a system. Nell is one of at least eight.
There’ll be a ninth if we don’t find them. ”
He waited.
“Axel. Keep working the digital. Pull the socials of all Siren’s leads. Look for common scout accounts, common followers, a pattern in who liked or commented on the videos before the women disappeared. Cross-reference the geotags.”
Axel nodded.
“Siren. Your pattern is the spine of this. Keep building it. I want to know who else fits the demographic.”
Siren wrote on a yellow legal pad.
“I’ll have Valeria share everything we have with Fate Mountain PD.”
Then Dom looked at Blaze.
“Blaze. You work your contacts in the underground. An operation moving women across state lines for two years without getting caught has been moving them through somebody’s territory. Make some calls.”