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Nate let his head fall against the back of the sofa, the curve of the cushions supporting his neck. “Fine,” he said, setting the laptop aside. “I give up. Call in the cavalry. He must be able to narrow it down a lot faster than this.”
“Great,” Laura said, quickly hitting the call button next to Dean’s name and putting it to her ear.
“Yeah?” Dean said, in his normal manner, always refusing to answer the phone with a proper Bureau greeting as he was supposed to. Or maybe he just saw Laura’s caller ID and always liked to make it seem like they were just picking up from their last conversation, even though they could go for weeks without talking.
“Dean!” Laura exclaimed. “I need a hand finding a location.”
“Alright. What’s the case?” Dean asked. Most of the time, in order to assign billing and man hours correctly, techs and other support staff within the FBI had to enter a case number to be able to log their work. It was part of the system that made it difficult to do anything you weren’t supposed to… but not impossible.
“No official case,” Laura said. “This is a special one. We got a tip-off about someone hanging around there and we need to check it out – it could be related to a murder. We just don’t have a case yet until we verify everything.”
“Laura,” Dean said, in a sing-song voice. “Is that code for, you haven’t asked the boss yet?”
“Well, I can’t ask him until I know whether it’s worth checking out,” Laura reasoned.
“Of course,” Dean said. “Well, okay. Tell me what you’ve got. But you’re going to owe me a burger.”
“I’ll send you something to the office,” Laura said quickly, remembering Nate’s earlier words. If that was Dean’s subtle way of trying to get her to go out on a date with him, she needed to head the idea off now. At least if she was clear, there wouldn’t be any accusations that she was taking advantage of him. “I have a car registration, and I need to know where it’s from. It was seen driving along the road opposite a certain store.”
“Why don’t you just look up the store name?”
“It was too generic,” Laura explained. “Mickey’s. We looked it up. There are thousands of places called that in the U.S. alone. We presume the case is national, and probably more local if anything else, but we haven’t been able to narrow down the field enough.”
Dean seemed to hesitate. “How did you get this information?” he asked. “If it was seen, then surely you can just ask the witness where they were.”
Laura hadn’t thought of that. She racked her brain as fast as she could, her mouth opening to give the excuse before she could really finish thinking it through. “It was a video,” she said. “We were sent a video, and the metadata has been wiped clean.”
“Can I see it?”
“No,” Laura said, cursing herself and having to think fast again. Why was she giving him answers that just invited more questions? “It was sent to us via a secure link and since we watched it, it’s been wiped.”
“Oh,” Dean said. “Well, just give me the link and I can see if I can do any kind of recovery – or find out where the IP address was based.”
“If it’s okay, we’d rather focus on the location in the video,” Laura said, closing her eyes and hoping the nightmare would stop.
“Okay, fine, I’ll do what I can,” Dean said. “So, give me the rest. We have Mickey’s, we have a car registration – anything else?”
“Opposite the Mickey’s is a stretch of wooded area,” Laura said. “Down through the way a bit, there’s a cabin or hut or something based in a clearing in the trees.”
“Great,” Dean said. She could hear the sound of typing in the background. “And that vehicle registration?”
Laura recited it to him from memory. “Is that enough information? Oh, there were a couple of other buildings next to Mickey’s, but it wasn’t possible to make out what they were.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Dean said. “Okay, I already have the registration details up. Looks like it’s registered in Maryland.”
“Maryland,” Laura said out loud, for Nate’s benefit. “God, we were looking in D.C.! We were so close.”
“Okay, I have it.”
“What?”
“I have the location.”
Laura blinked. “Already?”
“It’s a very precise set of principles,” Dean said. “A place called Mickey’s opposite woodland with a neighboring building in Maryland. Plus, it’s actually not far from the town where the car is registered. You want the address?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Laura said, shaking her head at Nate in surprised wonder. “Can you send it to me in a text? We’ll get right over there.”
