Stolen Power

“Legal is not the same as moral.”
“It’s the game. Money’s a game. Life’s a game. Everything is a game.” He reiterated. “And listen, I’ll pay you one-hundred-thousand if you can find my daughter before the money drop. If not, I’ll pay you fifty thousand to make sure the drop goes well. But we can’t get the cops involved or the FBI. No one but us is to find out.”
“Just another game,” Casey muttered under her breath so that only I could hear.
I grunted in response.
“I’m going to need a list of the investors and anything else you think might be relevant.”
“Because it was an open investment, the list is publicly available,” he responded calmly as he opened his laptop. “Anyone could access the list of investors and their names.”
I walked across to the bookshelf, and picked up another picture of Millie—happy, smiling, and carefree, wearing a dress with several big colorful pineapples printed on it.
“Alright if I take this?” I asked.
Chase shrugged, “Sure.”
Even though I’d only just met him, I didn’t like Chase Martin, not one bit. I didn’t like the way his hair was slicked back, I didn’t like his arrogant smugness, and I didn’t even like the look of his long horse-like face.
But I would do everything to save Millie Martin. We only had five days, and I was going to have to act fast, real fast. If I didn’t, well, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

Chapter 4


As the clock ticked past midnight, Casey and I left the penthouse, descending to the chilled streets of Chicago below.
It was refreshing to be back in gritty reality after the sterile sanctuary of Chase’s apartment. Everything up there was so false, a contrived pretty picture of the world that bore little semblance to the truth.
The street outside the apartment building in the Gold Coast was unusually quiet, but it was the early hours on a Sunday morning. I looked around to see if I could see anyone watching us, any hint that someone had eyes on Chase’s place, but I didn’t see anything unusual, apart from a drunken fool trying to sleep in the middle of the road. I walked across, gave him a gentle push with my foot, and he snapped awake, confused about where he was. Casey and I helped him to his feet, and he made it across the rest of the road before falling back down. The gutter was a better place to sleep than the road.
I considered that my good deed for the day, almost like we were guardian angels for the drunken fools of the world. There was no shortage of them in this city, but I could empathize, I’d spent my fair share of time with the bottle.
Despite our good deed, Casey and I were silent until we were in my Chevy truck, doors closed and locked, and no one else around. I checked over my shoulder looking for anything unusual, then the mirrors to see any movements. Nothing.
I took a deep breath, allowing the familiar smell of my truck to focus my mind. I spent so much time in here it was like a second home.
“Thoughts?” Casey opened her tablet to review her notes.
“It’s someone that knows Chase and his routine. They’ve probably been monitoring it for weeks to find out that he goes to the playground with his daughter on a Saturday morning. Or maybe they were already familiar with it.” I started the engine, turning on the heater. “And there were no screams. Nobody saw anything unusual, and there was no fuss. Millie wasn’t forced to go anywhere or do anything. She went willingly.”
Casey nodded then punched some more details into her tablet, quickly pulling up the information she was after.
“Ok. Ruby Jones—the Instagrammer. Twenty-five. Tall, pretty, redhead.” Casey scrolled through the details. “Describes herself on social media as an ‘influencer.’”
“One of those,” I groaned. “Someone who tries to influence others through social media so that they can feel good about themselves.”
“Exactly right. She has literally hundreds of photos of her and Chase in the past year, but none with Millie.” Casey opened another page on the publicly available social media profiles of Ruby Jones. “Oh, interesting; her last post, posted at 9:15am on Saturday, is a picture of her with the view from Chase’s apartment in the background, and she has written: ‘Excited about this fresh, new start.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Everything these influencers do is cryptic. It’s designed to get you asking questions, make you want to know more. She’s baiting people to ask questions, but she hasn’t answered them.” Casey bit her bottom lip. “Perhaps she’s talking about a fresh start without Millie. She clearly doesn’t like the girl.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well,” Casey said, scanning the page, mentally collating the information and sorting it into a single thought. “Not only are there no pictures of Millie, but she uses the hashtag ‘#kidfreeandlovingit’ a lot.”
“Subtle.”
“Indeed. And she has a few posts and comments about dropping friends who settle down and start families. ‘Boring’ apparently.”
I nodded and ran my hands around the smooth steering wheel of my Chevy. The sensation helped focus my mind.
I did a lot of thinking in my Chevy. It was almost a mobile office for me, especially when time was of the essence, and the pressure was on. When the constant thoughts running through my head got to be too much, I would often jump in the driver’s seat, turn up the tunes, and drive a hundred miles. That’s when an idea would often leap into my head, a thought that had been brewing could come to the surface and get worked out.
“With social media,” I turned to Casey. “Can you see what’s posted at a particular location?”
“Anything that’s publicly available, yes.”
“Look at the park,