Stolen Power

accusation so he could strike again and some poor unsuspecting victim.
A bit more digging and I was starting to get a profile of Chase Martin that suggested he was a scammer from way back. Despite a fairly unimpressive grade point average, he had managed to land a place at a pretty good college, all thanks to a reference from some wealthy lady he did gardening for on the weekends as a teenager, and it seemed she had paid his tuition fees as part of the bargain. She was a former academic and a patron of the college, no doubt he charmed her into thinking of him as the son she never had. That, or he was providing some other services for a lonely divorcee which she paid for with something other than cold hard cash.
While at college, he managed to buddy up to rich kids with connections so that, despite barely passing, he managed to land a very sought after position as soon as he graduated, with the family investment firm of one of his supposed friends. After 10 years, he started his own firm and managed to con a bunch of clients into following him. His former employers tried to sue for breach of contract, but he had it well planned and they couldn’t quite pin it on him.
Poor investment choices led to most clients returning to their former firm within the year, but that didn’t matter, because now he had his formula: scam his investors, get his payout, move on.
His love life followed a similar pattern. Chase Martin certainly was shaping up to be a nasty piece of work.
From what I could see, it seemed that he’d run the yearly scam for five years—setting up a new company in another country, convincing suckers to invest, and then declaring the business bust.
“I’ve just found something.” Casey stormed into my office, frantic, waving her phone in the air.
“The new iPhone?”
“Ha ha, very funny. I’m gonna need a pay rise for that!” She grinned mischievously. “Any chance?”
I laughed.
“Oh well, maybe you’ll change your mind after you see this. I’ve turned up something on the case.” She smiled. “A photo.”
She turned to my computer, tapped a few keys and brought up the internet on the screen.
“How did you know my password?” I asked.
“Are you serious?” she asked. “It’s ‘Claire123’. You’re like an open book, Jack.”
“A good book, I hope? A five-star book?”
“Something like that,” she said with a smile.
I shrugged. She was probably right.
“The computer said I needed a password at least eight characters long,” I said. “So I tried ‘Snow.White.and.the.Seven.Dwarfs,’ but it was already taken.”
“That’s a terrible joke. And you didn’t deliver it well either, Jack. Not that you ever do.” Casey shook her head. “However, I did hear an expert on the news this morning say that in five years computers will have completely replaced paper. Well, I thought, that guy has never tried to wipe his butt with a laptop.”
“Ha ha! Your joke was so much better than mine.”
“They always are, Jack, but don’t give up.”
Casey logged into her Facebook account and clicked on a link.
“I spent the morning looking at all the photos that were tagged with this location, or any location around the area, and painstakingly studied each photo. There were over a hundred photos tagged near the playground, and I studied each of them. Most of the photos were of kids on the swings, kids climbing trees, kids running around chasing a ball.”
“Sounds creepy.”
“If I was an old man that lived alone and I was studying pictures of children in playgrounds, then yes, it might’ve been creepy.” She tapped a few more keys. “Look at this photo.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“The picture is of a girl about to come down the slide, but look closer, over her right shoulder.” Casey tapped the keyboard again, and zoomed in on the background.
“It’s a van parked near the playground.”
“And standing outside of that van is a little girl, and she matches Millie’s description. Blonde hair, white coat, looks around five years old.”
I sat forward. Casey was right. We had a lead.
The picture was blurry, the face of the girl wasn’t clear, but it had to be Millie. She was outside the playground gates, looking at the back of the van, of which the door was slightly ajar. I stared at the photo, but couldn’t make out what she was looking at.
“Any other photos?”
“Not that I could find. I even contacted the profile of the person who posted this, but they only took one photo that day.”
“Who does the van belong to?”
“The van has a faded sign on the door for an old mechanic shop called ‘The Top-Notch Service Garage.’ I searched the internet for it, but found nothing. Then I called around the old-fashioned way, and found that the garage went out of business five years ago, and they operated out of two places. A gas station in Lincoln Park that has since been bought out by a large corporation, and a small warehouse in North Chicago, around an industrial area.”
“And who bought the new warehouse?”
“It was never sold.”
I thought for a moment, then reached for my book of contacts.
I picked up the phone, dialed the number of an old contact who lived in North Chicago. Jason Chapman was a former cop who owed me a lot of favors, and his knowledge of the area, and the people who lived in it, was second to none.
“Hasn’t been activity in that area for years. It’s dead over there. All the warehouses closed after some sort of safety scare, chemical spill or something, can’t remember the exact details, but I think the new owners couldn’t afford to clean it up,” Chapman spoke quickly. “Probably five years since that place was used, and there