Page 52 of Riptide
Cara shook her head. "Nobody hired her. She just found him. On her own. Jessica has no idea how Blaire even knew to look for Shawn. He was careful. Used cash. No social media."
Tom raised his hand like a kid in class. Piper snorted.
"Actually, I might have an idea about that."
Everyone turned to him. He spun his chair, monitors glowing behind him.
"I've been analyzing publicly available information about Blaire's known victims. These people are incredibly diverse." He pulled up a chart. "Different ages, backgrounds, reasons for hiding. No pattern a human investigator would spot."
Gabe leaned forward, his investigator’s senses tingling. “An interesting angle of attack. Smart.”
Tom nodded. "I wrote a program to analyze the data. The sample size is small, but the diversity is the tell. There's no way anyone could know where to look in massive amounts of data—government databases, corporate HR files—unless they had a program searching."
"What kind of program?" Reagan asked.
"Pattern recognition. Data scraping. Machine learning, possibly." Tom's hands moved as he explained. "It would search accessible databases—and some that maybe shouldn't be accessible—looking for markers. Data points that don’t match, like Cara’s….” He stopped, swallowing hard. “Like People who've disappeared. Changed identities. Moved suddenly. Any red flag suggesting someone's hiding."
Gabe's FBI background kicked in. "That would require illegal access to protected databases."
Wade's dry response: "There’s a shocker."
"It's like she's got a search engine, but to hunt people," Piper added excitedly. "Instead of searching for cat videos, she's searching for people trying to hide."
"Can we find this program?" Gabe asked. "Shut it down?"
Tom hesitated, looked at the others. "Finding it would require accessing Blaire's systems. Which would require methods I can't?—"
"Methods I can't officially sanction," Gabe finished. "Good thing what happens outside Haven Cove isn't my jurisdiction. And what I don't know about, I can't act on."
The tension eased slightly.
"So our target shifts," Reagan said. "We're not just stopping Blaire from blackmailing Cara. We're shutting down her entire operation."
"Which makes her more dangerous," Wade said quietly. "If she realizes we're investigating her methods..."
Gabe noticed the dynamics—Piper glancing between him and Cara with a slight smile. Cara carefully not looking at him. Wade getting quieter, more serious.
"I need to keep Blaire thinking I'm under her thumb," Cara said. "She wants daily check-ins starting tomorrow. I need to play along while you work."
"That puts you directly in her sights," Gabe said. "If she suspects?—"
"Then I need to be convincing." Something in her tone suggested depths he didn't understand. "I've played roles before."
"You two are very intense right now," Piper observed. Reagan shot her a look, but Piper just grinned.
Tom refocused them. "I sure would like access to Blaire's computer or cloud storage. Legally, I mean,” he added quickly. “If someone could locate the program, we could identify other victims. Build a case."
"And if we prove she's illegally accessing protected databases," Wade said, eying at Gabe, "that's federal crime territory. FBI jurisdiction."
Gabe groaned silently. If they could prove it. Legally. Taking this woman down might be justified in the Big J sense of that word, but his world ran on legal justice. "If we could prove it without using tainted evidence."
The catch-22 hung in the air.
Gabe's radio crackled. "Chief, sorry to bother you off-duty, but we've got a situation at the Sampson residence."
He sighed. "What kind of situation?"
"Mrs. Sampson called 911. Says her neighbor's building some kind of surveillance tower in his backyard aimed at her windows."
