Page 9 of Love Me Darkly
“Mateo Garcia. I looked into you when I heard that this UNSUB had struck in New Orleans. I have to say I’m impressed. For anyone to bring in every suspect they’ve ever chased alive! Man, you’re a legend.”
Mateo grimaced, having never accepted praise well. “I don’t know about that. And now I feel at a disadvantage.”
Donovan clapped his shoulder with one large hand. “We’ll be spending a lot of time together while you’re in town, so that won’t last long. Before we get started, I want to introduce you to someone.”
He steered Mateo to an open door that led into a dark, cramped office space. Inside, a set of desks sat pushed together in a half-circle, holding several keyboards and monitors. The screens displayed various programs running simultaneously, lines of code too convoluted for Mateo to make any sense of. A woman faced the screens, her fingers flying rapidly over the keys. A set of large headphones covered her ears, keeping her from hearing their entrance. Mateo could hear the whine of electric guitar and the bass of drums. How she managed to avoid going deaf with it turned up so loud, he didn’t know.
“Darcy!” Donovan called out. He slipped a pen out of his jacket pocket and tossed it in her direction. It bounced off the top of her head and landed somewhere in the shadows.
Swiveling in her chair, a waif-thin girl in her twenties faced them, pulling off the headphones with a smile. Her pale blonde hair was streaked with pink and purple strands, and a pair of black cat-eye glasses sat on the bridge of her freckled nose. A nose ring punched through one nostril, while a silver barbell adorned an eyebrow. She wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with "Metallica" across the chest, and its short sleeves displayed a mishmash of tattoos covering one arm in a sleeve. She wore a pair of Converse, black to match the shirt.
“Oh, you are so dead,” she said, narrowing her eyes at Donovan.
“Behave yourself; we have a guest. This is SSA Garcia from D.C. He’s our lead on this case.”
“Welcome to the epicenter of the universe,” Darcy said, indicating her screens.
Mateo struggled to keep up as she continued talking, her words spilling out a thousand miles a minute.
“I’m Darcy Hart, your friendly neighborhood intelligence specialist. I can assist you with everything from tracking your suspects and setting up surveillance to infiltrating classified information or destroying someone’s entire database. I could even tell you where the celebrity of your choice is at any given moment using global positioning satellites, which is how I’m feeding my Pedro Pascal obsession. Don’t tell. Not that you would tell anyone who cares or would do anything about it, you know? Unless you happen to know Pedro Pascal? Gosh, what a babe.”
“Enough,” Donovan said with a chuckle. “We don’t want to scare him off. Garcia, I’ll make sure you get Darcy’s number so you can have direct communication with her.”
“Call anytime, day or night,” Darcy added. “I never sleep anyway.”
“Have you at least eaten today?” Donovan asked.
The desks holding her screens were littered with empty energy-drink cans and crushed Hot Cheetos bags.
“Breakfast of champions,” she declared, jerking a thumb over her shoulder to indicate the mess.
“Real food, Darcy. Not this junk.”
“Let’s get started,” Mateo interrupted, anxious to brief everyone and get moving.
The conference room went silent as he approached the wall where the images from the crime scene had been hung.
“I trust everyone here has had a chance to go over the details of the case, so I’ll jump right in. While our latest murder did not turn up any new evidence, the crime scene in Little Rock yielded a clue. Near the body, a matchbook with the word Solstice printed on it was found. It was also marked as being in New Orleans.”
“Solstice is a nightclub on Bourbon Street,” Donovan offered. “Maybe our UNSUB has been there recently.”
“And before he turned up in Little Rock,” Williams added. “Which means he’s been here before. He might even live here.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Mateo replied. “The crime scenes show no discernable pattern, so it’s difficult to triangulate a specific location.”
“Solstice is a nice place, but it’s also a stomping ground for some pretty sketchy peeps,” Darcy chimed in. “Maybe our guy has some dealings there.”
“Maybe. But we can’t exactly go in there and ask if they’ve seen him. We don’t have a description beyond the basics of the profile. However, there must be a connection. We just have to figure out what it is. Darcy, I need everything you can get me on Solstice. Who owns it? Who does business there and what are their connections? Who’s on their payroll?”
She nodded. “Done and done.”
“And what about the victim? Any progress on her identification?”
“I’m running photos of her from the crime scene in all my databases. I’ll let you know as soon as I get a hit.”
“Williams, get in touch with Little Rock and find out if they’ve made any progress identifying their victim. I’m certain she’ll match the profiles of the others, but any new details could push this case forward. Once we know who she is, I want to know everything about her.”
“I’m on it,” Williams replied.
