Page 4 of Identify
“No,” I agree. “Even if we got a couple undercover agents posing as dates, what’re the chances we’d get one of the people involved? We don’t know how many there are or when they strike, if there’s a type of girl they prefer, nothing.”
“We need to start cross referencing with missing persons.”
“That’s what I’m thinking too. I’ll draft a CRRFSR now.” A cross reference record filing system request (CRRFSR) is the easiest way for us to get information from multiple databases at the same time to show trends and or commonalities in current and past cases. We just list the parameters we’re looking for. The form itself is simple, the acronym not so much. “Single, actively dating, lives alone or with multiple housemates—”
“Under thirty,” Mack adds.
I raise a brow in question.
“Stronger likelihood of finding someone with no kids and younger brings ‘em a bigger bang for their buck.”
I snicker at him, even though it’s not funny. Maybe morbidly funny. I never thought my sense of humor would develop to where I’d find such a thing humorous. Yet here it is, rearing its ugly head again. File it under the things we do to cope with the ugliness we see day in and day out.
“Do you think they’re going underage?” I ask.
He thinks on it for a minute. “I say no for now. If we don’t get a hit in the eighteen to thirty range, we can always expand to under eighteen.”
I feel a small amount of relief at the thought of not having minors involved even though it’s uncertain. Modern day slavery situations are bad enough, but somehow it chips away at my soul more when kids’ lives are at stake.
We spitball a few more ideas, adding income, education, and religion to our CRRFSR. Basing that information on profiles from other HT cases in the past and what seems to be the most plausible. I send it off to research and records, then settle in to read the file again, this time in greater detail. Meanwhile, Mack peruses other cases to see if they used dating apps in the past to lure women into trafficking traps and what we might be able to glean from them.
Situations like this, we rarely have a lot to go on considering we only get data on cases when we catch the traffickers and/or rescue the women. There are thousands of women that go missing every year and whose abductions never return valuable prevention intel. Once these girls go missing, it’s doubtful we’ll ever find them.
One of the last pages in the file is an artist’s rendering of what the suspect may have looked like. Since his profile disappeared off the dating app’s site, the girl had nothing else to go back on aside from memory. I’ll have to requisition warrants to search the archives for the dating site they used and hope for remnants of the deleted profile. I make a few copies of the artist’s depiction and slide one over to Mack.
“You know this looks like your friend, the one that’s getting married,” he says.
“David?” I look at the sketch. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Man, it absolutely does. If you couldn’t vouch for him as your best friend, I’d bring him in based on this alone.”
Mack looks like he’s all brawn, but the man is scary intelligent. Reminiscent of the actor Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) in his physique and appearance, except with hair on his face and head. He’s rarely wrong when he has a hunch, so I look at the sketch from a few different angles, trying to see what he does in it, but I can’t.
“I don’t see it. Sorry.”
He pulls up a random picture of David online and flips his screen around so I can see it. The resemblance is uncanny. In my mind, there were zero similarities between the man in the sketch and David. But seeing them side-by-side in print, I can’t deny it.
Could be a coincidence. I just need to prove it. Which gives me an idea I should have thought of before now.
“I’ll bring this over to research and records and see if they can run facial recognition on the sketch and match it to anything in any of the databases.”
“Good idea. After that I say we go talk to the girl, review her story one more time. On, and tell Jenny I said hi.”
Jenny works the intake desk in research and records, and she has a bit of a crush on Mack. Most women do. He shamelessly feeds into it with every single one of them, even though he’s not interested. And they eat it up.
I nod in response and head down the hall to the elevators. Research and records takes up the entire space, a few floors above us in the building. While the bulk of our records are electronic, there are still originals of files dating back fifty years or more that we haven’t digitized. Partly because we’re a smaller branch office and don’t have the manpower to do so, and partly because the government moves slow with most things.
I took Jenny out a couple times last year, but nothing came of it. For a few reasons: one, she doesn’t really do it for me. Two, since she has a crush on Mack, I don’t really do it for her. Three, I don’t like to date. Hookups and one-night stands? Sure. But dating is tough since most women don’t understand the lifestyle—long hours, canceled plans, secret phone calls and trips, little explanation on my whereabouts. My guess is its hard for anyone to stay trusting under such circumstances.
And the fourth reason, the one I hate admitting to myself and that I’ve never admit to anyone else, I’ve got a crush on Quinn, the ex of my best friend, David. But even if I liked to date, I could never date her because of David. It would weird him out, I’m sure. And if they ever slept together, it would creep me out even more.
Mack had a solid relationship with a woman named Daria for a while, but they broke it off after a year. She owns a bar in town, and we have lunch there often. Multiple times a week. He won’t admit it, but I think he still loves her, which is why he’s not interested in anyone else.
“Jenny, how’s it going?” I call out to her as I reach her desk. She looks up at me with a smile, we parted as friends and on good terms, but I also think she’s friendly toward me so I’ll put in a good word for her with Mack.
“Hey, Reed. It’s all good here, how are you?”
“Can’t complain. Mack said to tell you hello.”
