AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It’s Opal info. She just gave it to me,” I grunt. “Work your magic.”
“It goes without saying, but cover your tracks, Chase,” Atlas orders, abandoning the card game to join us at the computers. He’s as invested in getting answers as much as me. “Don’t want anyone tracing her name back to our location—her safety comes first.”
“You got it, Prez.”
Punk pulls out some beers from the fridge, handing one to each of us. I take it from him, needing something to take the edge off as I anxiously wait to get answers.
Chase’s fingers fly across the keyboard at lightning speed. A series of code scroll across the screen the deeper Chase gets into the dark web.
Atlas distracts me while we wait. “It’s good to see Opal opening up. It’s a healthy step.”
My lips turn up a tad. It is good she’s finally confiding in me. “I don’t know everything yet.”
Atlas lays a heavy hand on my shoulder. “It will come. Give it time. Hopefully, Chase can find something to help us.”
Chase’s fingers slow as he hits a final key.
The screen fills with a photo of Opal and the heading from the Utah Department of Public Safety readingMissing Persons.
Finally, we have something solid.
A missing person’s report isn’t shocking. Opal confessed the night we met she ran away from home as a teenager. Seeing a missing child report with a younger version of my woman’s face smiling back at me really hits home. Crimes were committed against a child. And the perp is still at large.
What horrors did she face causing her to flee her home to find safety on the streets?
Chase looks up from his seat expectantly. “Am I hacking into the FBI database to access her internal case file?”
I give a stiff nod. “Proceed. We need those insider details.”
Chase cracks his knuckles before his fingers breeze across the keyboard. The garage falls silent as he works, none of us wanting to disturb him while navigating such a delicate cyber hack, cracking through the FBI firewalls.
Punk hands me another beer as we wait. I nurse this one, sitting down at the card table with the guys. Hovering around Chase won’t make him go faster, and it could impede his work.
After an hour of playing Sheepshead, Chase waves us over.
My eyes scan the document on the computer. “What does the file say?”
“Olina Allred. Age seventeen when she went missing from her home in Bountiful, Utah. Raised by a single mother, Shelly Allred. Father is unknown. According to the agent’s notes, the father didn’t even know she existed. They ruled him out as a suspect.
“The file states Shelly is a functioning alcoholic who supports herself working as a clerk in a retail store and entertains a lot of men in her apartment. Several of the names Shelly gave as potential men who could have taken her daughter were cleared. The others were a dead end—possibly aliases used instead of their real names.
“Olina is a bright student, perfect grades until her sophomore year of high school. Grades dipped but came back up before dipping again. School counselors and teachers assumed it was related to her mother’s drinking issues that caused Olina stress…”
There’s a ball of anger kicking around in my gut. “If the school knew her mother had a drinking problem, why wasn’t Child Protective Services called in to investigate?”
“No mention of CPS ever having been contacted,” Chase answers.
Chase reads the entire missing person’s file, but we learn nothing new. The only hint there may have been something unsavory happening in Opal’s private life was a statement from her culinary teacher. The teacher tried to speak to Opal when she became despondent, fearing someone may have been hurting her, but she couldn’t get her to confide in her.
“That’s it?” I clip in a hard voice. “There’s nothing about the mother’s boyfriend or the abuse Opal endured.”
“Nothing,” Chase answers. “The file doesn’t even mention the mother’s boyfriend.”
Unbelievable.“What kind of half-ass investigators were working on the case?”
Chase scrolls through the file. “Looks like a rookie—Special Agent Grayson—was handling it with a senior investigator overseeing him. The senior agent has since retired. Honestly, I’m thinking authorities chalked up Opal’s case to a runaway, deciding to invest their time on cases with potential abducted victims.”
“She was a kid, for Christ’s sake. Doesn’t matter if she was a runaway—they dropped the ball on this case,” I bluster.
