CHAPTER TWELVE
The Jennifer Parsons arrest had been three weeks ago, but Tim Hahn still spent the greater part of his days thinking about it.
It still felt like a huge step and so far, it was being seen as such from within the bureau—especially from Ortega.
But further beyond that, he sensed that it had accomplished something else, too.
It had, after all, been the first time the task force had taken down one of Kane’s so-called disciples before he had set them to task.
Agent Hahn wasn’t sure if he had fully been able to appreciate that just yet.
He had been the one who flagged Parsons.
Not Ortega, not the senior analysts who had been working the discipleship database since before Hahn joined the task force, and not even Agents Sterling and Stone who were the go-ahead agents on the entire Gabriel Kane case.
No, it had been him, fresh into the task force after several months undercover.
Now, three weeks later, he was staring at a database cross-reference that had not produced anything useful in forty-eight hours. It almost made him feel as if that huge accomplishment might not have been as important as he’d assumed.
He was in one of the many shared workspaces the Elementalist Task Force had taken over on the third floor of the Quantico facility.
The room that had been reorganized twice since Hahn joined and still didn't feel settled.
He had a desk along the east wall with two monitors and a phone that rang less often than he would have preferred.
The work in front of him was a lead out of Kentucky, which had come in five days ago when someone matching Gabriel Kane's description was reported at a gas station outside Harlan.
A state trooper had run the plates on an adjacent vehicle and then done a double take at the man walking back to it with a bottle of water.
The trooper had called it in but by the time anyone arrived, the vehicle and the man were gone.
Ortega had taken the lead on the Kentucky sighting herself which meant she was currently somewhere between Harlan and Lexington doing the kind of ground-level canvassing Hahn wished he was doing.
And in the meantime, Hahn had been assigned the database work: Kane's known academic contacts from his pre-Elementalist career, cross-referenced against persons of interest who had any documented connection to Kentucky, any residence history there, any family ties, anything that would explain why Kane might choose that geography if the sighting was genuine. He supposed it made sense. He had made a successful connection before so of course, they’d expect him to be able to do it again.
And that was fine with him; he’d just rather be doing it out in the field rather than behind a damned desk.
The list had started at over two hundred names.
Hahn had worked it down methodically over two days, eliminating the ones that couldn't survive basic scrutiny, flagging the ones that merited a closer look.
He was currently at sixty-one names remaining and had found nothing that felt solid.
Not since Jennifer Parsons, anyway. The connections were too thin or too old or too circumstantial to carry the weight he was trying to put on them.
He took a break from the Kentucky list and pulled up the shared case feed.
The task force maintained a running feed of active investigations with Elementalist-adjacent characteristics, cases that had been flagged by field offices or local law enforcement as potentially consistent with the Kane disciple pattern.
Most of them resolved quickly into something else, usually just a coincidence of method or a case that shared surface features but fell apart on closer examination.
The feed was populated enough that Hahn had learned to skim it efficiently, reading the flag summaries and the assigned-agent fields and making decisions about what warranted a longer look.
The Savannah case had been added yesterday morning and then updated around nine last night.
He read the summary twice. Two victims, both dead of chromium compound exposure, both via delivery mechanisms that required advance preparation and specific knowledge of each victim's daily routine.
The flag summary noted the element angle and the deliberate, patient quality of the methodology.
It noted that the compound had been introduced into environments both victims inhabited professionally, the studio of a painter and the supply chain of a florist. The assigned field agents were, of course, Sterling and Stone.
Hahn looked at the names for a moment. Hahn had read Sterling's work on the previous Elementalist cases several times when he first joined the task force.
And not just the official reports but the supplementary material, the behavioral analyses Sterling had contributed, and the methodological observations he had logged between cases.
It was among the more useful reading Hahn had done in his first months.
Sterling had a way of building toward a conclusion that was neither intuitive nor purely procedural, something Hahn truly appreciated.
He assumed it was the chemist in Sterling, always having to find a structure and succinct order to everything.
He’d only spoken to the man on two occasions, and both briefly.
Hahn knew that after his Parsons bust, the next best thing he could do was to rub shoulders with the primary agents on the case.
Feeling a bit like a brown-noser, he found Sterling’s contact information in the task force's internal system and inputted it into his phone.
He then sent a quick message without really even thinking about it.
Hey, it’s Agent Hahn. Was looking into active Kane cases and saw you and Stone were on the chromium case in GA. Anything I can run from here?
He sent it and looked back at the Kentucky database again before he allowed himself time to overthink what he had just sent.
There was a name on it that had been bothering him since yesterday, and not in the way the good leads bothered him.
Rather, this was more irritating than anything else, like a word or a melody you knew you recognized but couldn't immediately place.
The connection to Kentucky was present but loose, a documented residence that was years old and had not been current for some time.
By the strict parameters of his assignment, the name probably didn't belong on the list he was actively working.
But there was a secondary connection, less direct, that had surfaced when he ran the name against a broader geographic filter he had applied almost out of habit.
It was a very handy filter that extended the search radius to include adjacent states and produced results he, not anyone else on the task force, was not technically asked to produce.
The secondary connection didn’t point toward Kentucky.
It pointed in a different direction entirely, toward the Southeast, toward a geography that Hahn was now looking at on the shared case feed.
He had not done anything with this yet. He was not sure it amounted to anything.
It was the kind of thread that looked like something from one angle and like nothing from another, and Hahn had learned from the Parsons experience, that the difference between those two angles was almost always in how long and how carefully you were willing to look.
He wasn’t going to mention it yet. Not in the message to Sterling, not to Ortega, not to anyone on the task force. He had learned that lesson, too…to not show your entire hand until you knew it was the winning one.
He minimized the case feed and pulled the Kentucky database back up.
He found the name again and looked at it.
It sat in the middle of the list with no outward indication that it was different from the sixty names surrounding it.
He opened a separate window and started a new search.
He worked carefully, knowing that speed and progress were so often not the same thing.
Outside the window, the Quantico grounds were flat and bright in the afternoon light, and somewhere in rural Kentucky, Ortega was on the hunt for Kane.
Feeling that same irritable itch, Hahn looked at the name on his screen and began to pull the thread.