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While that was going on, I did a little research on this Stephen character. I had some idea of who might associate with the Viper. I started with looking into the Viper before he had called himself the world’s most dramatic super villain name I’d ever heard; when he was just Sofia and Sam’s dad, when he was just Eduardo Reyes.
I dug into his past, searching for traces that might have been missed. Eduardo Reyes, a name that brought chills to my spine, a man who had caused so much pain and suffering. He had lived a double life for years – a loving father and husband by day, a savage crime lord by night.
The water treatment thing wasn’t a lie. He had been a salesman when Sofia was a kid, selling filtration systems. That probably worked as a perfect cover to launder money. I wondered what his sales pitches were like. Did he smile and charm his clients? Or was he the stoic, focused man that Sofia had described in her stories? Whatever he was like, there was no doubt about the darkness lurking beneath the surface.
He needed to bankroll himself somehow, even if his chief interest was killing people for fun.
In my quest, I stumbled across smaller pieces that painted a picture of the monster Sofia and Sam knew as their father. Newspaper clippings, public records, and even an old high school yearbook photo found in the depths of the internet; they all pointed to the ordinary life he once had, before he plunged into the abyss of crime. Even though I had a singular focus - find Sofia - every tidbit of information shaped my understanding of our formidable enemy.
As I dug deeper, my screen flickered with countless news articles from a couple of decades ago, each one painting a picture of the man before he became the monster. Eduardo Reyes, community leader. Eduardo Reyes, family man. Eduardo Reyes, philanthropist. But as I went back further into the past, his image began to tarnish.
I found an old police report - a bar fight that ended with two broken noses and Eduardo walking away without a scratch. Another report about a missing shipment of firearms that was never resolved. A string of disappearances in his neighborhood when he was still a teenager, all unresolved and quickly forgotten.
By the time Sofia was born, Eduardo had cleaned up his act just enough to remain under the radar. He got married, had two kids and painted himself as the community pillar. But beneath the façade of respectability lay a cold-blooded sociopath with a penchant for violence.
And now, years later, his children were entangled in this twisted, deadly web he'd spun.
As I dug deeper into Eduardo's past, the computer beeped— the trace on Sofia's call had finished. I held my breath as the results loaded on the screen. The call was routed through multiple proxies before bouncing off a tower in the heart of Miami.
"Well, that's something," I muttered, mapping out a fifteen-mile radius around the cell tower. It wasn't much, but it was a start. I sent the location to Grayson’s phone and fired up another trace for good measure. With a few keystrokes, I called up satellite images of the area, scanning rooftops and alleyways in a spiraling pattern.
He called me straightaway.
"Got something, Grayson," I clipped, my voice a low murmur in the otherwise quiet vehicle. The tension was a palpable entity now, feeding off each passing second.
A pause, before Grayson's voice echoed through the speaker, "Tell me."
"Miami. Traced Sofia's call to a cell tower here. Downtown area." I quickly explained, my gaze scanning over the map that had sprung on screen.
“Big place.”
“Yeah, and we can’t just go in guns blazing. Look how that went last time.”
“But we can’t just do nothing…” Grayson’s frustration was nearly tangible.
“Of course not. We need to be smart about this. Surveillance, recon, that sort of thing.” I tapped on the keyboard, pulling up a traffic camera from the intersection closest to the tower I’d traced Sofia’s call back to. “We’ve got assets we can use.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment before Grayson spoke again. "All right. I'll get Teo and Sam ready."
"Good." I breathed in deep, my heart pounding in my chest. "A lead is a start."
"Jace?"
"Yeah?" My voice was hushed, my attention split between the call and scanning the feeds.
"We'll get them back," Grayson's voice came through low and husky.
"We'd better.”
He hung up, and I got back to work.
As I delved further into the connections, mapping out the complex networks of Eduardo's operations, a name caught my eye. A business partner from his early years in the trade seemed to be recurring too often in the documents for it to be a mere coincidence. Ryan Matthews. With a child. Stephen Matthews. This couldn’t be that easy, right?
I narrowed my eyes at the screen, tracing the connections. Stephen Matthews cropped up in several places - a mention in a property deal, as a beneficiary in a will, as a co-signer on an offshore account. Each instance was years apart, but each connection was with Eduardo Reyes.
The name 'Ryan Matthews' was like a beacon in the sea of data, its recurring appearance in Eduardo's dealings more than just a coincidence. Maybe this was it. The lead we needed to crack this case wide open. All paths were starting to converge, and it felt like everything was coming full circle.
I quickly pulled up every record I could find on Ryan Matthews - property records, tax returns, old news articles. Each piece of information was another puzzle piece falling into place.
