He leaves without another word.
“I’m going to get some food on.” Cowboy also rises to his feet. “An army marches on its stomach.”
Honor signals at Duty and jerks his head toward Stormy. “Come on, let’s go get our shovels out.”
I wait to see what everyone else is going to be doing, but Snatcher indicates that Piston should start the video rolling again. I hate watching it, but can’t pull my eyes away from the woman on the screen, trying to see any clues that we might have missed.
“What’s that?” Bolt stands. Taking over the control from Piston, he winds it back a few seconds, then starts it playing again and pauses. “Is that a tattoo?”
So many of us crowd toward the screen it takes a moment for each of us to get a good look. When I get there, I’m slapped on my back by Thor. “You were fuckin’ right, Road. That’s part of a swastika on his wrist.” The he, in this instance, is the man holding the tablet that Swift is reading from.
A thought occurs to me. “With all this super-duper technology around, have you ever thought about tracking devices?
“She didn’t have her phone with her.”
“Nah, I mean one implanted.”
Piston barks a laugh. “A GPS tracker? Doesn’t exist yet, Road. When it does, we’ll be the first to know. Make our jobs a fuckin’ lot easier.”
“Yeah, get our clients to chip their kids like they do their dogs.”
I feel a bit stupid. “I thought I heard—”
“Myths, Brother.” Snatcher shakes his head. “It’s all about battery power and how to recharge it.”
“You can have a microchip, but that only stores information.” Thor waits until I confirm I understand with a dip of my chin. “We’d be all over that shit if it existed. And we do have tracking devices, on our bikes, of course, and we can use them set in pins if we think we need to use them, or Swift could have worn one on a necklace. But seriously, I don’t think we thought there was much danger of something like this.”
“You ever thought you’d be kidnapped as you were a Satan’s Devil, Road?” Snatcher asks.
When I’m about to reply, of course I didn’t, I realise he’s got a point. And Swift, in particular, would believe she was invincible.
There’s a knock at the door. When it’s opened, Igor appears.
“I’ve found something on the security feed. I sent it through to here.” He nods at the remote still in Bolt’s hand.
“What we looking at, Prospect?” Preacher asks, his face lined. He waves for Igor to stay.
“Wait a sec. Watch here.” Clearly used to the devices in here, Igor uses a laser pointer, aiming it onto a taller building a couple of streets over. “Keep looking here. There it is, see?”
There was a definite glint from the roof. Someone using binoculars, perhaps?
“Brute’s gone to check it out,” Igor says. “It was from last week, so unlikely he’ll find much.”
“Good thinking, checking it out. But that’s how they could have seen Swift coming in and out, and assumed she was a club whore not a member.”
It’s at that point when Pip re-enters the room. He asks Igor to round everyone up again. When they arrive, things finally start coming together.
Pip kicks it off. “Okay. So I’ve spoken to Dengra. When the baby was born, Saul Kincaid turned up. Dengra wouldn’t let him near the kid at first. Obviously he was suspicious as hell, but Saul vowed he had no connection to his brother, that they’d parted ways some years before. But he’d somehow heard he’d fathered a boy shortly before he’d died. As he had no remaining family and seemed to have a good job and no connection to crime, he allowed Saul to see the baby. From then he became a doting uncle. He showed no inappropriate moves toward his daughter, and to be honest, reading between the lines, she blamed him, her father, for getting the man she loved killed. I think it’s fair to say that Saul Kincaid befriended her as he wanted revenge. He was a regular visitor to their house, then just disappeared. They haven’t seen him for a few weeks which is unusual.”
“How would he have found you, Prez?” Snatcher asks.
Pip’s face darkens but shakes his head.
Duty takes over. “Been looking into Saul Kincaid. He wasn’t the angel he led Dengra to believe. All the background information he provided had been fake. He hadn’t been an upstanding citizen working a decent job, he’d been