Freezeout: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery by Smith Dean Wesley

Author:Smith, Dean Wesley [Smith, Dean Wesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: WMG Publishing
Published: 2016-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

November 17th, 2016

Las Vegas, Nevada

THEY ATE LUNCH while bouncing questions around about the motives of the five sisters, finding none at all that made any sense to Pickett. What had happened to those young girls, the horror they had survived, would certainly scare anyone.

And it made sense they were still very tight and had disappeared from any contact with a family that had allowed that horror to continue. But vanishing every year from good spouses just made no sense.

As they were just finishing their meals, Sarge’s phone rang and he answered it. After a moment he said, “Hi, Mike. Any luck?”

As Sarge spoke and Pickett and Robin watched, Sarge got out his small notebook from his shirt pocket and started to write.

Pickett wanted to lean over and see what he was writing, but instead just sat there.

Finally, Sarge said, “Thanks, Mike. We owe you.”

Mike must have said something because Sarge laughed before hanging up.

“Mike was able to get into the hotel servers and cloud storage,” Sarge said, “but you didn’t hear me say that.”

Both other cops nodded and smiled. This would have been another matter if they were all still officially on the force, but they were just mostly private citizens who could bend rules far more than regular detectives could do.

“He said the hotel doesn’t record exact connections or things like that, but they store usage from each room and basic levels for three years.”

“Makes sense for lawsuit reasons,” Robin said.

Sarge nodded. “Mike said he couldn’t dig out specific addresses or anything like that,” Sarge said, “but the activity from that room showed all five were online most of each day on the five computers. He said their activity looked like they were searching all sorts of databases.”

“Searching for what?” Robin asked a half second before Pickett could ask the same question.

“Mike was wondering the same thing,” Sarge said, shaking his head.

They sat there for a moment. Pickett knew they needed to get focused again. Somehow.

“Okay,” Pickett said. “We have solved a bunch of missing person cold cases.”

“And a few active ones,” Sarge said.

“So we could quit right now,” Pickett said, “get this to one of the active duty detectives and get him to get it in the papers to flush out the five women.”

She hated that idea, but she wanted to float it to Sarge and Robin. Both of them were shaking their heads.

“So why are we not calling this one closed?” Pickett asked. “For me it is a gut sense that something bigger is going on.”

“Agree,” Sarge said, nodding.

“Completely,” Robin said.

“So,” Pickett said, “we need to change this focus to a conspiracy focus. We don’t know the crime, but we know something is happening.”

Both Sarge and Robin nodded.

The part that was bothering Pickett the most was that these women actually hadn’t committed any real crime. At least that they could find.

“So,” Sarge said, “with that focus, what about tracing how those fake ids and backgrounds are done.”

“Will has two people on that,” Robin said, nodding. “It bothers

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