Storm's Cage by Mary Stone (uplifting novels .TXT) 📕

She jabbed a button. “The fourth guy in Alton Dalessio’s kiddie porn ring.”

Joseph’s blood turned to ice. “Wait, what kind of follow-up?”

Leaning against a handrail, she quirked up an eyebrow. “What do you mean? What other kind of follow-up would there be? The tech lab has been going through those videos for the past few weeks. Ever since we took down that farmhouse. Dalessio tried to run all the electronics through the dishwasher, but Portia and her team recovered about five-hundred gigabytes of data.”

“The videos. Right.” To Joseph, his voice sounded as if it had been projected through a cheap radio from the eighties.

Joseph had been to more murder scenes than he could count, some of which had occurred in an un-air-conditioned house in the middle of July. Between his time in the military and his tenure with the FBI, he’d seen bodies in almost every state of decomposition. He’d witnessed the gruesome start of an autopsy after the body’s rib cage had been cracked open like a walnut.

But he’d never seen a video of a young child being sexually assaulted. He’d never wanted to see one of those.

If Amelia had noticed his sudden panic, she didn’t react. Her voice remained monotone as she continued. “Now that Carlo Enrico’s dead, the videos are the only thing we’ve got to find the fourth guy. Enrico told us that he’s a detective in the CPD, but that’s all we got before he died.”

Joseph took in a deep breath to calm his frayed nerves. “Right. The detective. I remember.”

Silence descended over them like a shroud, but Joseph wasn’t inclined to break the spell. One by one, he took his thoughts and memories of Sawyer, of Dan, and he tucked them in a box in the depths of his mind.

Neither of them spoke for the rest of the trip to the tech lab. A middle-aged woman with silver-streaked blonde hair greeted them at the door, and she introduced herself to Joseph as Portia Wingrove. Though her name was familiar, and though she advised him that she’d been with the FBI for most of her adult life, he had yet to work with her in person.

Portia led them to a pair of monitors at the end of a lab table that spanned the length of one wall. Glancing between the computer screen and Amelia’s expressionless face, Joseph eased himself into an office chair.

As much as he didn’t want to be here to see the photographic evidence the tech lab had amassed, he refused to show how much it rattled him.

He couldn’t. Any semblance of weakness would lessen the control he held over his and Amelia’s relationship.

“Sorry we couldn’t make it yesterday.” Amelia’s voice ripped him back to the present. “Our suspect is in the wind, and we were trying to catch up to him. Have you and your team found anything new?”

Portia scooted closer to the glowing keyboard and began to type. “No need to apologize, Agent Storm. We found something, but it isn’t earth-shattering, so it’s okay you waited an additional day.”

A slight smile made its way to Amelia’s face, but the pleasant expression disappeared as her gaze flicked over to Joseph. “Agent Larson has been helping us on this investigation. But with Carlo Enrico dead, these videos are the only chance we have to find this detective.”

Portia tapped a few keys. “That’s what Agent Palmer said. A friend of mine in Cyber Crimes, Agent Redker, took over most of the investigation, but he told me to keep you and Agent Palmer in the loop.”

As an image of a naked man in a ski mask appeared on the screen, Joseph sunk his fingernails into the armrest of his chair. The victim had been cropped out of the still, but the edge of a mattress and a set of flowery pink sheets were plainly visible.

Joseph’s stomach turned as bile stung the back of his throat.

To his relief, Portia’s disgusted exhale was enough to ground him and ward off the bout of panic.

“This is the best image we have of him standing upright, with his feet on the floor.” Her blue eyes shifted from Amelia to Joseph. “We have a few more that we used for comparison, but this is the one we used to calculate his height. That whole warehouse is still sealed off, so a couple of my team went to the site and took a few measurements.”

Clearing his throat, Joseph straightened. “Right, yeah. We did something similar to this with a snuff film about six years back. It helped us narrow down the suspect pool quite a bit.”

Portia offered him an appreciative half-smile. “So, you’re already familiar. It’s mostly trigonometry, but we needed a reference point to start.” She pushed the cursor to the mattress and then to an exposed pipe that ran along one cement wall. “These were our two reference points. It’s a standard twin-size, so we had one of the team stand in approximately the same spot so we could have another image to refer to. The placement of this pipe helped us pin down which room this video was filmed in.”

Amelia’s chair squeaked as she tucked one leg beneath herself. “What did you find?”

“From our calculations, this man is somewhere between six-three and six-six.” She pulled up a separate image with lines and triangles drawn over the photo. “It’s not exact, but that height itself narrows down what we’re looking for.”

Amelia plucked at the black fabric of her sleeve. “Well, we know he’s a detective, at least according to what Enrico told us. I’ve got no reason to think he was lying, so we could at least narrow down the suspect pool to tall detectives in the CPD.”

As Portia opened another widow—a record of current detectives in the Chicago Police Department—she pointed to a list of names. “These are all current CPD detectives who are six-two and over. From there, we ruled out all African American and Latino men since our suspect is clearly