Nobody Cares by L.J. Breedlove

Author:L.J. Breedlove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Alaska mystery, Talkeetna, MMIW, Native Alaskan, Alaska police, missing women
Publisher: L.J. Breedlove
Published: 2021-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Joe Bob Dixon had his laptop and Jason Tremont’s desktop computer — which wasn’t a half-bad one, he conceded, probably because it needed a fair amount of power to be able to monitor surveillance cameras. And the Sheraton apparently had a safety-conscious surveillance systems designer. They seemed to be in the right locations. What was slowing him down was that the facial recognition software he’d tweaked to his satisfaction was on his laptop. He couldn’t move it to the desktop. And the surveillance camera footage couldn’t be ported to his laptop either.

With a lot of swearing, he figured out a work-around, but it was even slower than usual, and facial recognition work was damn slow to begin with. Still, he was a night owl. And during the quiet of the middle of the night was when he got his best work done.

Computer work had always been just a fun geeky thing, a hobby. No one had ever told him he could go to school and do something with it. Probably just as well, he thought. Someone might have told him how to hack at 13, and he’d be serving time instead. But he’d grown up following his dad around the oil fields, from job to job. And computers, and computer games, was how he had any friends at all. But what he knew was oil fields. And so, when he turned 18, and graduated from high school, he decided working in Alaska in the oil fields would be an adventure.

It was that, he thought wryly. But for a southern boy like him? The North Slope was just too damn cold. Still it was good money, and the schedule allowed for a lot of play time in Anchorage — a city that saw to it that the men who worked the Slope had a good time when they were on leave.

But one day he saw an ad for becoming a state trooper. He liked the notion of not having to go back to 30 below weather — he might never have made the change if he’d seen the ad in the summer — but the cut in pay was a bit off-putting. Then he thought, what the hell, he could always turn it down.

He took it. He still wasn’t completely sure why. He’d been at work in the Talkeetna office for about six months, when he got exasperated with his partner’s complete cluelessness for using a computer, and did a search for him.

And now? Three years later, he was respected statewide for what he could do with a computer. Computer forensics, they called it. It made him laugh. Because that was what you did to dead bodies — and for him, computers were alive, and they talked to him. He was better with computers than with people. He understood computers. People? He didn’t understand people.

He knew Paul hadn’t liked him at first. Didn’t like the invasion of Okies and Texans, and Joe Bob just shrugged it off, because it wasn’t personal.

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