path: root/missing-persons/CH-4.txt

"Let me get this straight. You think you can go through the DoD records and match the enlistment photos, or whatever photos, against this Christmas photo you found in some VFW?" Steven was talking with his mouth full again. Chase cringed and wondered how he could fail to realize he was doing it. She had tried telling herself that maybe the sight of partially masticated hamburger was a kind of art. Living art. But that idea never worked. Now she just insisted they sit side by side at a counter whenever they went out for lunch. That, at least, minimized the visual effects.

"That's the plan, yes." She sipped her coffee, felt the acid rumbling in her stomach. She did not add *and you're the only one who who has access* because she figured Steven ought to be well aware of what she was asking. He was the one who had told her what he could do back when he thought, for a brief moment, that maybe she really was going to solve the Whitmore case. He'd volunteered his services, Chase saw no reason to think that offer had been limited to one particular case.

"Well, okay, I'll help you pull the photos. Assuming you give me names."

"I sent you a list of names this morning. Two groups. Early war and late war. The Christmas photo was labeled 1942, but in case that's wrong I pulled the squadron records for 1940-1942 and then 1942 to the end of the war. Start with the first group and we'll see where that gets us."

"'We' huh?" Steven pushed back the plate of fries and twisted on his stool to face Chase. "Have you told Littrell what's going on?"

"Of course not." Chase liked her boss. Littrell seemed to shared her genuine enthusiasm for the work. She had actually spent most of the morning debating whether or not to tell him about her freelance case, as she had come to think of it. In the end she decided she would keep it to herself for now. "I've already run the name through everything we have. I know as much as Littrell could know unless he started doing fieldwork. That one tiny file is still the only official thing I have." Chase looked out at the street. She had, ever since that day, insisted they come back to the same tawdry Greek diner. The walls were still yellowed with cigarette smoke, though it had been years since anyone had been allowed to smoke indoors. The booths that lined the back wall were tattered, orange foam tufts stuck up through rips in the black vinyl cushions. But Chase had come to enjoy the place. The food wasn't much, but coffee was good, and Chase could sit at the counter and stare out the window using the mirror in front of them. It let her keep an eye on the street despite having her back to it. Chase was half looking for the prostitute, but deep down she knew she would never see her again. And even if she did she probably wouldn't recognize her. Outside people had on overcoats, the northern winds were starting to blow. No one was running around in rubber micro skirts, not even prostitutes. Chase and Steven both had overcoats and yet they had still taken Steven's car down the to the diner rather than face the cold bite of the wind for  a dozen blocks.

"That's not true." 

"Sorry what?" Chase tried to focus on what Steven was saying, but something was nagging her, something kept drawing her attention outside.

"That's not true. There was a handwritten note with the file right?"

Chase nodded.

"That means someone else looked into the case at some point... What sort of paper was it?"

"What?" Chase had drifted off again, she was staring out the window, watching a man parked across the street, sitting in a green Lincoln, reading a newspaper. "What sort of paper? Um, I don't know, paper."

Steven turned around again and grabbed her shoulder. "Listen Chase, You have to pull the file again, figure out what kind of paper it is."

"Why the hell do I care what kind of paper it is?"

"Because it might give you some clue as to when the person looked into it." Steven was grinning from ear to ear. "Figure out when the paper comes from and you might be able to get Littrell to pull the assignments log and find out who looked into it. Then you can track them down and find out what they know." Steven half bowed his head, clearly proud of this leap of logic, which, Chase had to admit, was clever, if not very practical.

"All right. I'll give it another look tomorrow." She grabbed the bill and spun it around. She fumbled through her purse and pulled up a dollar fifty in change which she dropped on top of Steven's money in the tray. "Let's get out of here."

Chase couldn't help watching the man in the car as she and Steven left the diner, but, as far a she could tell he never so much as blinked. *I've become paranoid*.Steven's car smelled of Nutter Butters. Down by her feet a handful of video game magazines that made for a slick carpet of crunching noises. They were two blocks away from the office when something made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. 

Steven was stopped at a red light. Chase reached into her purse and pulled out some lipstick. She swung down the sun visor and angled the mirror back behind her. She brought her lips up and started to apply lipstick, but her eyes darted around the scene behind her. She saw nothing at first, and was at the point of admonishing herself again when she glanced across the seat at Steven's side mirror and saw, two lanes to their left, the same man in the same green Lincoln. Her heart started to speed up. 

"Steven, change of plans, I totally forgot I told a friend I'd meet her down at the mall this afternoon." She glanced around, up a head, they were just about to TK, which would cut down to the mall where there were thousands of tourists milling about the monuments. 

"Okay," he glanced over at her, surprised.

"Tell you what, why don't you cut down TK, drop me off at TK and I can walk from there." She risked a glance backward behind Steven's seat. The man was not looking her way. He did not really look like the sort of man who would hire a prostitute to deliver a slip of paper. He did, however, look like the sort of man who would work for that sort of man. She risked another glance. He had close cropped hair, almost a buzz. Ex-cop turned PI she decided. She looked again. He was wearing some sort of sport coat, Chase couldn't tell the color, but it was dark, probably blue, maybe black. It probably went with a suit, though Chase could not see a tie. He wore cop shades, aviator-style glass that were almost mirrored. If he did work for the man she had come to think of as her employer than her employer had very strange taste in employees. What, Chase realized with a start, did that say about her? Of course it was entirely possible that this man did not work for her erstwhile employer, but was following her for some other, entirely different reason. But, while she acknowledged the possibility she knew she didn't believe it. Whomever he was and why ever he was following her, Chase knew it had something to do with the Lt. Lawrence case. 

What surprised Chase was that it did not surprise her. She realized that on some level she had been expecting something to happen. Some part of her, some instinctual part she was not entirely familiar with had known something was wrong with the Lt. Lawrence case ever since she found the note Steven wanted to trace by paper history. But anticipating and living through were too very different things and Chase was pretty sure she did not like the later. She wanted to turn around and stare at the man, but she didn't want him to know she was on to him. But not turning around made her anxious, restless. She tried to keep herself from fidgeting in her seat. Instead she began to tap her foot against the pile of gaming magazines below, which prompted Steven to ask if she was okay. She sat up straighter in her seat, gave him her best fake smile, and assured him that she was fine. The truth was she was starting to not be fine. But mentioning what she was feeling to Steven struck her as absolutely impossible. She had begun to feel not just nervous but also embarrassed, *like the feeling you get when you dream you're naked in public* she thought suddenly. She realized she was blushing, but could not think why. Her hands had begun to sweat. She rubbed them along the sides of her seat, another nervous tic she willed herself to stop. But most of all she willed herself not the glance over her shoulder at the cars behind them. It was there, she knew it was there. She could feel it there. It was four long, excruciating blocks to their first turn and Steven hit every signal on the red. Chase felt like her heart was going to explode right out of her chest every time she saw another stoplight turn yellow just as they approached. Finally she turned to him in irritation, and told him that he needed to find a faster way to the mall or she was going to be late. Steven glanced over at her, unsure what to make of her behavior. More than anything he looked hurt, she decided. Typically male, when all else fails, look hurt. But he hung a left on tk and took a side street down toward the mall. Chase started telling Steven where to turn, leading him down increasingly narrow streets that would force the following car to reveal itself. The green Lincoln dropped further back, began to lag several blocks behind and other cars made sharp turns in behind Chase and Steven, but the Lincoln did not abandon them. Finally, when they were within a block of the mall, she told him to pull over and she hopped out at the curb, slamming the door behind her with barely the hint of goodbye. She knew as she marched away that if she had looked behind her that Steven's hurt face would have intensified, but she never looked back. She rounded a corner and ducked into a doorway, which turned out to be a bank alcove. She went up to the ATM, as if to use it, and instead watched as the man in the green Lincoln passed by, his head swiveling from side to side, clearly looking for something, most likely her.

She waited until he was forced to make a decision; he turned left. Chase took off in the opposite direction, walking as fast as she would without drawing attention to herself in such a way that he might notice in his review mirror. She went two blocks without stopping and then crossed TK and headed into the grassy fields of the mall. She slipped into a crush of tourists thronging around a bus, getting ready for the long walk up to the reflecting pool. No one seems to think anything amiss with her so she tagged along. About halfway down the mall she moved over to another group, ignoring a few glares from this group, which clearly thought she was freeloading on their tour. That she had no headphones to hear what they were listening to did not seem to occur to them. She stuck with them only long enough to get the steps in front of the Air and Space Museum where she broke away and sat down to collect herself. She was quite sure she had lost the man, whomever he was, but she was also quite sure that if she went right back to work or even perhaps to her apartment, he would pick her up again. Chase was unsure what to do, so she called her mother.

Her plan had been to ask her mother to come get her, but as it turned out, her mother was still in Las Vegas, staying with Aunt Elene now since Aunt Elene had apparently bought a condo out in Desert Shores. Chase momentarily wondered if perhaps she didn't need to drop her own problems and fly out to Vegas to stage some sort of intervention and stop her mother from, well, being in Las Vegas. 

"Honey, I'm fine, no need to worry. I won't go spending all your inheritance." Chase's mother found this uproariously funny and Chase had to hold the phone away from her ear while her mother and Aunt Elene cackled in the background. "Seriously Chase darling, don't worry, we aren't even gambling. God, haven't even been to a casino room since I talked to you last. Done with that. There's so much else to do dear..." Chase could hear Elene snickering in the background and decided that she did not want to know any more details. Instead she told her mother she was headed out the Chesapeake house and to let her know if or when she might be coming home so Chase could clear out before she did. "Well then I'm not telling you. Clear out. What kind of way to talk to your mother is that?"

"I only meant so you could have your space. It's your house mom, I'm just dropping in while you're out of town. So if you don't want me there when you get back, let me know. That's all."

"Well don't worry dear I won't be back for another few days yet, we switched our tickets to next week. But I'd rather you were there when I got home anyway, that place gets so lonely out there this time of year."

Chase assured her mother she would stay and visit, though she already knew she probably would find an excuse not to. She hung up and walked two blocks to the subway station. She got off an exit sooner than she would normally and walked the last half mile above ground, keeping an eye out for green Lincolns. She didn't see any, nor did the hair on her neck ever stand up, which she was beginning to trust more than she used to. She went in the office, told her boss she was going to be working remotely for a few days, grabbed her things and bolted. Steven watched her go, the hurt look having been replaced by a more honest general sense of bewilderment. Chase smiled at him and waved from across the room as she headed out the door.


                                -----


"So she just jumped out of your car and took off?" Elliot shook his head. The signal was slightly delayed, but Steven saw that he was going to drop his head in his hands and give one of his famously exaggerated sighs.

Steven had been half-sitting half-leaning on the arm of Hiroshi's chair and craning his head down so that the camera atop the monitor would see him and send both their heads flying down the wires, under the ocean and back up into Elliot's London flat where it was, Steven glanced at his watch and did a little math, well past four in the morning. At least it wasn't that late in D.C. But then again, Steven thought suddenly, imagine how much more of a clusterfuck this could become before that time in D.C. Lovely.

His back hurt and Elliot's disapproval was expected so Steven saw no point in sitting through it. He stood up and paced behind Hiroshi who was exhorting Elliot to cut them some slack. Steven admired his roommate's ability to take no shit and wondered absently, and not for the first time, if he would get more respect had he too had sold his first company at the age of eighteen. Or for that matter, if he had just sold a company. Or even started one.  

"So what the hell did John do?"

Steven glanced over at the arched doorway to the kitchen where John was leaning against the wall, arms crossed and brows furrowed. "I pulled back," he said drily, raising his voice to make sure that Hiroshi's Skype mic picked him up.

"You mean you lost her?"

John shook his head. "Yes asshole, I lost her." Look, why the fuck was I following around Steven's friend in the first place? That's the real question here. How the hell did we let you talk us into this crap? We had a good inside person who could help us. Now, thanks to your strange desire to play cloak and dagger games, we've spooked her to the point that if she ever does find out what's going on here she's sure as shit going to want nothing to do with us."

Steven was pretty sure Elliot has missed about half of John's rant thanks to the damping acoustics of the room's stained beige carpet and the microphone's natural tendency to kick into mute mode, but it appeared, when Steven glanced over at the monitor, that enough of it had gone through to make its point. He leaned over the top corner of Hiroshi's new Aeron chair, lifted from the now defunct internet startup that had taken care of his visa, paid his way from Japan, put him up in this apartment with Steven and then, about eight months later, imploded. Hiroshi didn't seem worried, in fact he seemed to love being unemployed and, as he pointed out whenever Steven asked if he felt cheated, he had a very nice chair. Steven stuck his head into the camera frame and scowled at Elliot, "Seriously, I look like the asshole here."

"No shit."

"Fuck off man. I really don't care what you think of me, I don't care what anyone in Enigma thinks of me, but Chase is my friend. You don't do this sort of the thing to friends."

Elliot sighed again. "Well, I have good news gents. I'm coming to straighten all this out. I'm coming to America."

Steven and Hiroshi exchanged a look that more or less said, *no way he stays here*. Elliot stared at the screen looking a touch hurt. "No room at the inn, is that the problem?" He clapped his hands in the mic, which produced a loud crunching sound in Hiroshi's speakers. "Did I say anything about needing a place to stay you twats? Relax. I'm coming over for a Ruby conference, giving a talk actually," he paused as if waiting for someone to ask what it was about. No one did. "Anyway, I'll be in D.C. for four nights, two weeks from today actually."

No one on the D.C. side of the conversation had anything to say. 

"I think it'll be grand," Elliot continued. "Good to get over to the colonies every now and then." He leaned his face in closer to the camera and appeared to clicking around on his desktop. A moment later the background of his London flat was replaced by an image of the American flag. "It'll be good gents, first time we're all in the same room. The brain trust here can really put its brains together and figure something out, maybe come up with something that will take this investigation a bit further than our esteemed steven_42 has managed to do thus far."

The conversation had devolved to username insults. Steven walked away from the camera and sat down on the leather couch that he and Hiroshi had gone in on back when there was money in the house to spare. He poked around on the coffee table, sifting through a few pizza boxes until he found the two they had ordered earlier. I pulled out the last slice of peperoni and ate it even though we wasn't hungry. He half-listened to Hiroshi and Elliot, but mainly he was thinking about Chase, which produced in him a feeling that thinking about Chase had never produced before: guilt. In the beginning it had seemed so simple, when they started searching there had been very little to go on. They used the same search tools everyone used, but they came up largely empty so Steven started plugging it into public government databases, but again there were no significant hits. Then one day he had been sitting at work, watching Chase from across the room for the millionth time, when he decided to try plugging the name into his own database. Nothing. Then he tried the DoD database, which technically he wasn't supposed to do. The DoD logged all its queries, even Steven's, but he decided no one would ever care. He barely looked at the log files for the systems he was supposed to maintain and he assumed that Walter Peabody probably didn't look very closely at his query logs either. After all the main point of a log was to have a record of what happened to the database in case something went wrong. It was pretty unlikely that anything was going to go wrong with a single search, so pretty unlikely that Walter would ever even notice that Steven had searched. He would see Steven logged in, but that wasn't unusual since the network Steven was in charge of was set up to connect to Walter's when it needed to. So Steven had just plugged in the name. 

The crust of the pizza was a spongy, terrible thing that made Steven regret ever taking a bite of pizza in the first place. He tossed it back into the box. The first bite of pizza tastes very different from the last his father used to say. 

He kicked at the pile of boxes suddenly, sending them flying up from the coffee table and onto the living room floor. What sort of people had obscene number of pizza boxes lying around their living room anyway? The flying pizza boxes drew John off the doorjam where he had been leaning ever since Hiroshi and Elliot connected almost a hour ago now. John sat down next to Steven, but didn't say anything. John was older than Steven, older than any of them, probably close to fifty Steven guessed, and John had been the Marines for twenty years which, apparently, gave one a great appreciation for silence. John didn't look like a nerd, and when they first met in person at a shortwave conference several years ago Steven hadn't liked him. John was old. He was divorced. He had kids. He talked to people he didn't know, said hello when he ordered coffee, called waitresses by their names. He did not fit any of the stereotypes Steven believed were traits of people he related to. And yet, despite all that John was definitely a nerd. He had that intangible thing that drew him to other nerds and Steven could sense the same thing in John that he had found years earlier in Hiroshi. He might not share Steven's social awkwardness or Hiroshi's blindingly single-minded focus, but John had the obsession and curiosity that Steven considered prerequisites for serious friendship and so, while it took longer, they had eventually become friends outside of Enigma as well as within it.

Elliot Denning on the other hand was not a nerd. Nor was he something that Steven would ever call a friend. Elliot was an opportunist, as John had put it. He thinks there's something cool about nerds so he hangs around them Steven had told Hiroshi when he noticed Hiroshi was spending more time Skyping Elliot that Steven considered healthy. He and John had staged an Elliot intervention of sorts, but in the end it was decided that since Elliot actually had a bit of money, or at at least claimed to, they should keep him around. Hiroshi has taken to calling him our investor. There was also that small fact that Elliot was the one who noticed the transmission in the first place. Not that Steven or John or Jason wouldn't have eventually, but Elliot had actually found it. As he insisted on reminding them at least once a week in the chat room. Hiroshi, who had more experience with such things thought that Steven and John just didn't get Elliot's dry British sense of humor. "They're all a bit off over there, it's just a different language is all."

Now Steven knew why he instinctively hadn't liked Elliot from the first time he had encountered his handle (lionhearted, cringe-worthy even by Enigma standards), because Elliot convinced him to do things that were very bad ideas. What he should have done was listen to his own instinct and done what he initially planned to do -- tell Chase the story from the beginning, asked for her help and if she had said no, well, then there it was. But he had a feeling she would have said yes. Clearly she liked a mystery, that much was obvious to him now. But now he had to explain why he had had a hand in sending her messages via prostitute, following her around after work and generally freaking her out enough to make her, apparently, leave town for a few days. 

He wasn't looking forward to the conversation, but as he listened to Hiroshi and Elliot planning meetings around Elliot's conference schedule Steven suddenly knew he had to tell her first thing tomorrow morning. It would be over the phone, which he didn't like, but it had to be done even if it wasn't the ideal way to do it. 

Ever since Chase had hurriedly gathered up her things and abruptly left work on a Tuesday afternoon, she had been calling Steven every morning and making him call in every favor he had with everyone he knew at the DoD. He was out of favors at this point and quite possibly out of friends as well, but he had managed to get her nearly thirty photos from service records, most of whom were not deceased, which meant that he had absolutely no business asking for them. Nor did she. But he had done it because he knew he would have done just about anything Chase asked him to do.

"Stop beating yourself up about it, it's my fault. I didn't know she'd be that aware." John had leaned over and was speaking softly. Steven nodded.

"Most people aren't that observant. Unless of course they're doing something wrong, then they look over their shoulder every two minutes..."

"Well, we did sort of give her some confusing information and it's made her do somethings that she probably shouldn't have. So I guess she's one of those people now."

John nodded. 

"And I made her that way..."

John snorted. "You might be taking a bit much credit there kid."

Steven felt himself blush. He didn't like it when John called him kid. 

"Come on Steven, I think you need to get out of here tonight. Let Hiroshi work out the details with Elliot and how about you and I go get a beer?"

Steven didn't really want to get a beer. In fact he wanted to sit around feeling miserable about himself all night. Or even better go to bed. But it was Friday night. So he got up, threw on a nicer shirt and ducked out the door with John in tow, leaving Hiroshi and Elliot to scheme on their own.