Chapter 9 #2
“I’ve just figured out why I’ve had a parade of six spirits at a time all day.
They’re clearing our docket for the case so we don’t waste resources on red herrings.
I’m about to make a question list for them so we can record their information and process them all as quickly as possible.
We might not get them all put to rest as quickly as we’d like, but as long as we record all their information, we can handle the burials when we do identify their remains. ”
“Excellent work. Give me another hour today, and then I’ll have a fresh cop take over your spot.
Ask our guests to line up in the hallway and leave enough space for us to get through.
We can also clear out some space in the parking garage for them.
Can you ask how many statements we need to collect? ”
“Melissa, do you know how many other people need to give their information?”
The woman gestured to ‘yes’ before pointing at the homemade tiles with numbers on them, indicating we had over seven hundred deceased wanting to do their part. The number sickened me. “Not quite eight hundred, sir.”
“I see. I’ll be coming to see you in about twenty minutes so we can discuss what you’ve learned and see how to streamline this.
We’re going to need more than twenty Scrabble boards if we want to handle this in a timely fashion.
I take it that the spirits don’t know where the potential survivors might be? ”
“Do you know anything about the potential trafficking victims?”
As one, the spirits pointed at ‘no’ before regarding me with solemn expressions.
“But you are certain there are some?”
They pointed to ‘yes,’ and even Melissa seemed displeased by her inability to do anything more than confirm our fears.
“They can’t tell me anything about the victims, but they are confident they are out there somewhere, sir.”
“Ask if they were bound, please.”
I braced for the rage of the departed before asking, “Were you bound in a fashion that prevented you from knowing their fate?”
Rather than point, they nodded.
“It seems that is the case, sir.”
“That horrible woman,” the dragon growled.
“It is well enough that she is already dead, as I would delight in killing her myself. I’ll handle getting as many Scrabble boards as possible and finding volunteers to help question the deceased.
I am expecting you to leave in an hour. Take that fiancé of yours with you when you go. ”
“Yes, sir,” I replied before hanging up. “Sorry about that. We’re making arrangements so everyone can help eliminate as many leads as we can so we can get down to the bottom of this once and for all.”
* * *
Saturday, May 23, 2167
The Diamond Ward
Dragon Heights, Wyoming
By some miracle, when morning came, the cops in the Diamond Ward had somehow managed to process almost eight hundred ghosts eager to find rest. Rather than cope with more spirits waiting in the conference room, I waged war against paperwork.
The identifications of the victims brought with it more financials covering the final six months of their life; with luck, we might find some clues on how Madam Merorie had selected her targets.
Aware that the victims hadn’t been targeted for trafficking, I changed my approach on how to organize the money trail. Accounts belonging to the known victims went off to the side to be dealt with later. Payments to or from those accounts were flagged to be reviewed when time allowed.
Madam Merorie had a history of issuing payments to her future victims, often for small jobs and freelance work, which might give us the clue we needed to track down those who might live.
The small jobs, ranging between fifty to two hundred a piece, became the core of my investigation. The payments always came out in the form of a check from one of her smaller checking accounts, which received money from three of her business ventures.
I isolated every transaction from those business ventures, which included a car wash, a laundromat, and a used bookstore. All three businesses were strong candidates for being money laundering establishments, which might lead me to records of who else the mercury dragon clan had worked with.
Dragon Heights, apparently, kept digital records of public security footage into eternity, stored in several different data farms to preserve the information.
There were security cameras that showed the front of each of her shops, as they were located near monitored traffic lights.
The traffic cameras were on around the clock, and while the footage quality left much to be desired, it was clear enough to identify people and plates.
The lead wasn’t a true lead, not yet, but it might become one with time, effort, and determination.
I just needed to make the numbers whisper to me once I got everything relevant plugged into a spreadsheet.
That would cost me my sanity, as the records from the account came in a mix of digital and paper records; the bank predated digital records but had kept everything.
The bank had a policy of keeping records for dragons permanently.
I thought about sending the bank management flowers, as without that policy, I wouldn’t have been able to tie the first victims with the accounts and the three businesses, which had been in operation for years before Madam Merorie’s son had perished.
While I moved forward in tiny steps, I made progress, and that progress would take me closer to my goal. The sense of urgency remained, and as the minutes of my shift drew towards an end, I contemplated pulling an all-nighter to see if I could finish matching victims with payments.
I had at least two hundred more known victims to link, and until I managed to accomplish that, I couldn’t identify how many records belonged to possible trafficking victims.
More importantly, once I identified the trafficking victims, I would have to figure out why none of them had been able to find their way to the station to reveal their truths and find peace.
Could some of the unknown accounts, dating back well over fifty years, lead to a living victim?
Was it possible that some of the deceased victims hadn’t associated Madam Merorie with their fate?
The possibility existed that Madam Merorie had worked swiftly, flagging targets and getting them to work for her before handing them to the trafficking ring, disguising her role in the scheme. If that was the case, the money trail might prove difficult to follow.
Had she hired the trafficking victims like she had her murder victims?
I would find out soon enough.
In good news, after verifying the woman’s various expenditures and flagging them in a different spreadsheet, I was able to filter out recurring payments and earnings associated with vendors other than my three target businesses.
After that, I began weeding out general spending unlikely to be associated with contract labor or potential trafficking payments.
Thousands upon thousands of remaining transactions boiled down to almost two thousand potential victims with an additional twenty thousand accounts flagged for consideration.
Thanks to the list of known victims the cops had compiled, along with their account numbers, I was able to isolate payments to them and place them in a separate spreadsheet.
That left me with over a thousand unique accounts I needed to pull identification and records from, compare against missing persons databases, and otherwise begin my hunt for the imperiled.
Armed with the public records of court cases and crimes and contacts with every bank in the city plus the required warrants to match account numbers with identification, I went to work creating an entry for each account and comparing the owner and registered users against missing persons records.
My first attempt scored me a hit, identifying a woman who had disappeared over eighty years ago; Madam Merorie had paid her thirty dollars with the check memo stating she’d been hired to run an unspecified errand.
Aged twenty-six at her disappearance, I doubted Celeste Marie Hickens still lived. According to the bank, she had come to Dragon Heights at age twenty-two, testing into the system and opening an account six months after arrival.
She was registered as having worked at one of the Diamond Ward brothels, which had a reputation of accepting only the prettiest of women.
Thanks to the warrant, the bank cooperated, providing me with Celeste’s complete banking history, which showed her last transaction happening six weeks after running the errand for Madam Merorie.
According to Celeste’s banking records, a lot like me, she had taken up doing odd jobs and cleaning up after the rains.
Next week, I would make a point of going out to earn a few extra dollars from the rains, as I’d discovered I disliked missing out on free money.
Working with the deceased had been too important, although I might spend some of the evening hunting for the lizards the other bounty hunters had missed.
Maybe, the titanium dragons permitting, I might keep one as a regular pet.
I checked on Garnet and Tourmaline to discover the pair slept in the bed I’d placed on the other end of the table.
I grabbed my phone, texted Erik, and suggested that we should go hunting for straggler lizards as our evening activity.
Before I had a chance to put my phone down, someone knocked, and my husband poked his head into the conference room. “You realize our shift ended an hour ago, right?”
I checked the time. “Crap. I lost track of time.”
“I was going to give you five more minutes before barging in and forcing you to stop working. The Emerald Ward has an utter infestation of lizards from the rains, so we can go hunting there. Things got out of hand; the rains were light in the places they expected it to boom, and the Emerald Ward somehow attracted most of it. The Emerald Ward was not prepared, so there are lizards everywhere. In good news, most of the dead ones have been removed. It’s the live ones that are the problem. ”
I bet; on a good day, lizards enjoyed evading those wishing to catch them. “What species of lizards are we going to be hunting?”
“If you can legally purchase it in a pet store, you’re likely to find it.
So far, there have only been two dangerous ones found, which were mature Komodo dragons.
There are a lot of alligators running loose.
And I mean a lot. They’re all six inches or smaller, though, so they aren’t an actual risk to anybody. ”
If any of the alligators were left out in the wild, they’d grow and become dangerous. I bowed my head and sighed. “I need to think over what I’ve learned today, so let’s go earn a fortune. We’ll do extra hours tomorrow for our firearms work.”
“Sure, that works. Just as a warning, your parents are here and wish to confirm that you’re still alive. They realized you have been flying under the radar, and they became concerned. They want to know what sort of trouble you got into because they took their eyes off you for five whole seconds.”
I snickered. “They won’t be learning any of my secrets from me.”
He grinned. “I told them I kept you out of trouble and showed them one of the beryls I found.”
“We should make them go hunt alligators with us. They’ll hate it. Get your parents to join us, too. They’ll hate it even more.”
“But what if I want to hoard you to myself with our kittens and your bird?”
I stared at him. “What do you want, Erik?”
“I want to go on a dinner date after we catch some alligators,” he replied, staring back.
Well, at least he’d learned he needed to tell me if he wanted a date. “Okay. I will tell them everything is fine, order them to go home and stop bothering us, and we’ll go on a dinner date. Do you want the kittens and bird to stay with them until after our date?”
“That would be ideal. We can test having them stay overnight with Peridot.”
I considered Tourmaline, and after a moment, I shook my head. “They can take the kittens, but the bird stays with me. He’s still a baby, and he played a lot while I worked, so he’ll probably sleep until it’s his supper time.”
“We can test keeping Tourmaline with us while the kittens abuse your parents.”
“That sounds good. Do we need to head home to get anything for the kittens?”
“I am certain your parents can take care of our kittens with what they have for Peridot. I mean, ours love potatoes. I’m confident in their ability to feed them.” Erik shook his head and eyed my work. “Do you need help packing up for the night? It looks like an explosion tore through here.”
“It’ll be fine overnight. I’ll just lock the door and tell Captain Andretti there will be no need for an investigation or a trial should anyone disturb my paperwork empire.”
“Please don’t kill any of my co-workers,” Erik begged. “I actually like them.”
“Then you best make certain they know not to touch my papers.”