Courts and Cabals by G.S. D'Moore (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

He was trying to look for patterns. Just like humans, supernaturals always succumbed to patterns. Pattern recognition solved crime. Knowing the MO of a serial killer helped police narrow down a victim profile, and perform analysis to identify behavioral triggers, where the sicko might live, and even his hunting ground.

That’s what Vernon was attempting to do. If the evidence was to be believed; none of the students had done it, none of the faculty were involved, and Cameron Dupree couldn’t have pulled it off. The next, most likely, possibility was that the kid was the target all along, and this wasn’t some weather-permitting fluke. It was a long shot, but he needed to see if anyone else had been similarly targeted.

Searching lightning strikes wasn’t the way to go. He got tens of thousands of hits for that day alone, and it didn’t even tell him if anyone was involved. It was a dumb move from someone with little network experience, and it cost him nearly an hour. He was on a flight to Nebraska tonight, so he needed to make today count.

His next search was more defined: magically-generated storm system involving lightning strikes. He expected that to narrow down his search, and it did, but it wasn’t quick. He still had two dozen potential incidents to investigate, and it was closing in on lunch.

“How do the data crunchers do it?” he was so bored watching the little circle spin on the screen as the data loaded. He was used to being on the move all the time. If this experience taught him anything, it was that he was never leaving the field. He wasn’t built for office work.

Working through the two dozen storm systems took him past lunch. He had to individually pull up the data on the storms, from three independent systems, and review it. The big filtering software the UN used could only get him so far. By the time three o’clock rolled around, he’d flagged half a dozen incidents as fitting a possible pattern. Two of those had cases open for them. One was from a field office in Moscow, and the other in Australia. The time differences didn’t help. It was one in the morning in Russia and five in the morning in Australia. Both offices were closed, so he couldn’t talk to the agents in charge. However, he could read their notes.

They were surprisingly informative. “Two kids . . . roughly Dupree’s age . . . near miss . . . no other data available,” the latter was code for when an investigation came up with diddly squat.

The lack of information actually helped him. By the time he looked up from reviewing the case files it was ten past four. He needed to leave for the airport in twenty minutes if he wanted to make his flight to America’s heartland. Instead, he picked up his tablet and marched toward the person who put him on this mission in the first place.

It was almost quitting time, so the Director wasn’t excited to see him. She never stopped working, but others did, which meant she had five o’clock deadlines to meet.

“Ma’am,” his drawl was thicker than usual with excitement, as he closed the door behind him without permission.

She just cocked an eyebrow at him, and pointed at a seat. “Found something?”  he was surprised that she sounded so surprised.

He knew she’d allowed him to work his shit out over the last few days. The opportunity to review everything and give it a second look with a fresh set of eyes, one step removed from the investigation, was the whole point of this exercise. She wanted him to get over it, get his head straight, and go kill some wendigos. She didn’t expect the data he shoved in her face.

“I’ve got two more cases nearly identical to St. Vincent’s,” he started. “They’re all over the globe, and still open, so our algorithms didn’t catch them. Even worse, they would have remained open as cold cases because there is no way in hell they’re going anywhere. Like St. Vincent’s, there’s just no leads to follow up on. They’d end up in some basement server and lost to all but the cyber gods in a few weeks. We never would have been able to connect the dots,” he was so excited his normal drawl slurred his words together, making him difficult to understand.

The Director didn’t say anything, she just reviewed the data. Her eyes darted from chart to chart, report to report. Vernon’s had been the most thorough of all the open cases because he’d ordered the physical for Dupree. The other agents had made cursory visits, tested some mages, and checked to make sure the victims were okay. Everyone was fine, so the cases were being put on the backburner.

“What’s your threat assessment?” she finally spoke.

“I . . . I don’t know,” he admitted with a huff of frustration. “Whoever did this knows our database protocols . . .”

“Don’t,” the Director held up a finger. Her skin was aged and wrinkled, but that finger controlled billions of dollars, and directed trigger pullers that took hundreds of lives. “This isn’t an inside job. This is not some spy movie, Agent Dud. We aren’t even spies,” she leaned back in her chair. “We’re law enforcement, and the connections you’ve made are thin at best. They’re actually nonexistent. You’re trying to prove a positive by the lack of information on a topic. It doesn’t work like that, and accusations like the one you nearly made are inappropriate and downright dangerous.”

He picked up what she was throwing down. Accusations of espionage in the greater WRA team would lead to a massive review of the program. Internal affairs would tear through every data point over the last thirty years looking for discrepancies; and there were always discrepancies. In the politically fragile