Book 2: Chapter 40: Patience is Not a Virtue (1/2)
”So what do you do when you needed to track someone down?” Dan asked eagerly.
It was literally his first question, and Tawny already seemed exasperated. ”You shouldn't go looking for murderers, Daniel.”
Dan tried to look innocent. ”I'm just asking a theoretical question here, Teach. I'm not that irresponsible.”
He was bestowed with a glare that Anastasia would've been proud of, but Tawny grudgingly answered the question.
”You start with something that you know about them.” He paused, then shook his head. ”Well, no. You start with a physical description. You need that, at least. Then you can start scouting places that you know they frequent, or asking questions in places that they've been. Most of my job was just... sitting and waiting around for someone to show up.”
”I'm not very good at that,” Dan stated with disappointment.
Tawny shrugged. ”All the more reason to let professionals do their job.”
”How do you find someone if you don't have a description of them?” Dan pressed on, ignoring the comment.
”If you know where they were at a certain point in time, you start there,” Tawny replied. ”It was pretty rare for that to happen to me, though. Usually a client could at least provide a description of a target, if not an actual picture.”
”I don't have either of those,” Dan said, drumming his fingers against the table. ”Whoever hired me did it from a freshly created email account, and the storage facility he sent me to apparently has close to zero security. No cameras, and a single guard that works graveyard shift.”
”Then you're fucked,” Tawny informed him cheerfully. The officer ate a slice of pancake, humming contentedly at Dan's misfortune.
”If I'm fucked, so are the police,” Dan pointed out. ”It's not like they know any more than I do at this point.”
Tawny jabbed a fork at him. Syrup splashed against Dan's shirt as the officer spoke, ”Yet. They don't know any more than you do, yet. And that might already be untrue. We have access to resources well beyond yours, and therefore have far more options available to us. An officer is missing. High command will spare no expense in finding him.”
Dan wasn't so sure. The police in Dimension A were extremely hesitant to release information to the public and press. He had seen nothing on the news about a missing officer, nor even the bodies discovered at the storage facility. It wasn't an attitude unique to the APD, either. The feds hadn't released anything about their escaped prisoner, and even the attack on the FBI Field Office had been hushed up, though the rest of the gang war had obviously been covered.
Dan hadn't given it much thought, but there was a mind-boggling level of apathy going on in the press. And most people seemed content being blind to it all. It's not like the police or feds were even trying all that hard to cover things up. The field office was a ruin; the storage facility had been swamped by cops for hours. Dan hadn't seen a reporter anywhere. They'd swarmed the strip mall, in the aftermath of the Crew's attack on James Webb. Did the police have some kind of signal they sent out, saying it was okay to investigate things? Or was it something else?
There were no tip lines. There was no America's Most Wanted. There weren't even faces on fucking milk cartons, as far as he could tell. Would sending a photo of the missing officer, or the names of the murdered individuals, to the local news asking for any available information make a difference? Dan didn't know, and he wasn't sure if he should ask.