"I mean fucking vanished. Someone with serious juice has scrubbed her location data from the network." He spins toward me. "This isn't amateur shit. We're talking connections that go way beyond money. This is power. The kind that can make systems administrators break federal law."
The math is simple, brutal. Rich kid plus vanishing act plus deleted digital footprint equals body count.
"She's dead," I say with certainty. The words hang between us, heavy and certain.
"You don't know that," Milo says, but his voice lacks conviction.
"Yeah, I do." I stare at Sarah's pink phone, imagining her last moments.
Milo scratches his neck, the gears in his overcaffeinated brain visibly turning. Then his eyes light up.
"Wait. I made a download yesterday. I still have her cell phone tower data, some server logs from the carrier." He pivots back to his keyboard, fingers flying across the keys.
Multiple windows flash across his screen: code and coordinates that mean nothing to me but everything to him. I've never understood how Milo's mind works, but I'm grateful for it.
"Here we go," he says, pulling up a map with data points. "Anything spark any thoughts?"
I lean closer, studying the screen. My training kicks in, identifying patterns in chaos, finding the anomaly in the noise.
"There." I point to a ping from two days ago. "Financial district. Son of a bitch," I growl, slamming my palm againstMilo's desk. A half-empty energy drink topples over, spilling green liquid across a stack of papers.
Milo curses, lunging to save his electronics. "That's where he was that day he was conductinginterviews."
"Where did she go after that?" I ask.
"Nowhere. Her signal's stationary for nearly forty minutes before disappearing completely." Milo's voice is flat, clinical, but I catch the slight tremor in it.
I pace behind him, feeling the familiar battle rhythm kick in, the same mental state that let me line up shots from eight hundred yards out. My boots wear an invisible path in his cluttered floor.
"That's where he did it, where he took her cell phone." My thoughts crystallize into certainty. "He didn't kill her in his apartment but somewhere in the financial district, then he got someone to put her phone back. That's why there's a gap in the dorm's security footage."
"Maybe she's not dead." Milo wants to hold on to hope, but his voice is weak.
The financial district. Buildings of glass and steel where money washes away sins. Where calculating men engineer their perfect lives, and people like Sarah become inconvenient footnotes to be disposed of. I've seen the underbelly of those pristine towers—the service corridors that never make the architectural magazines, mechanical rooms that roar with machinery loud enough to drown out screams. There are sub-basements where maintenance staff never ventures, freight elevators that don't appear on public directories, and unmarked doors that lead to forgotten spaces.
"Where in the financial district?" I ask, leaning over Milo's shoulder, my reflection ghostly in the monitor's glow. "Can you narrow it down further?"
"Cell data isn't GPS tracking, Dane. I've told you that," Milo mutters, fingers dancing across keys with the precision of a concert pianist. "But if we have enough pings..." He trails off, lost in his digital excavation.
I run my hand over the stubble on my jaw, thinking.
"Therehaveto be enough data points to triangulate." I can't accept any other possibility. I didn't save Sarah, but Brian will still pay.
"Working on it," Milo snaps, typing faster. "I'm not just a pretty face with cool tattoos."
Minutes tick by as Milo works his digital alchemy, transforming random data into meaningful patterns. I pace behind him, my body remembering the controlled impatience of waiting for mission parameters to align. The moment before action is when mistakes happen—when the mind races ahead while the body remains trapped in present time.
"BINGO!" Milo's shout nearly makes me reach for my gun.
He spins in his chair, face lit with the triumph of a successful hack. "I've got it. Three separate tower pings created an overlap zone small enough to be meaningful." He points to a blinking dot on his screen. "That's where her phone last registered before going dark."
I lean closer, something cold and familiar settling in my gut as I recognize the address.
"That's were you report said Veritas has its offices," I say quietly. Milo sent me a report about the company after I saw the name on Lila's desk.
"Oh, yeah." He nods.
"The place where Lila's interviewing."
