She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,156

racing right now!”

Reid reluctantly lowered the gun, thumbed the safety back on, and placed the 9mm back in his holster. His face flushed with anger.

Dunk steadied himself with his cane and came around the table. He took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. “She’s here. I don’t know for how long, though.”

I took the note and studied the address. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “I’ll see what I can do on those other names. You’ve earned it. My boys will take you back to your car.” He started toward the two Escalades parked outside. “Holy shit,” I heard him say again. “My boy, Jack Thatch. Can’t believe you actually pulled the trigger.” He laughed. “He who cannot die pulled the trigger, my hero.”

3

Dewey Hobson had eluded him.

David Pickford was willing to admit that.

To grow as a human being, it was important to understand your limitations, your mistakes, and even your failures. And he had failed to find Dewey Hobson in the four years since deciding to do so. In his defense, the Charter files on Hobson were thin, not like the others. There were false leads, too. When Elfrieda Leech graciously told him Dewey Hobson was hiding in Tennessee about halfway between the Great Smoky Mountains and the Cumberland Plateau outside of Mascot, she fully believed he was there. She wasn’t wrong about that. Dewey Hobson had been there, for nearly six years. He called House Mountain his home. But when David and his team arrived four years ago, in April of 1994, he had moved on, leaving nothing behind but an empty two-room cabin, some old dishes, and a few burnt out logs in the hearth.

Hobson learned to live off the grid, and this was largely to blame for Charter’s inability to locate him for nearly twenty years.

Even if someone uses false identification, they leave recognizable patterns behind.

A man who loves to eat tuna sandwiches doesn’t stop loving tuna sandwiches just because he changed his name once or twice. Spending patterns were like fingerprints, and an analysis of spending patterns through bank records and credit histories was a fairly simple process for Charter. This was how they found some of the others.

Tracking someone with no bank accounts, no credit history, no utilities in today’s modern world proved to be another animal altogether. Some would say it was an impossibility. If a man learned to live completely off the grid, he left no trail, no fingerprints, he became a ghost. And that was completely true. Dewey Hobson eluded them, eluded him because of this. That was until a few months ago, when David had a realization—rather than focus their search on where Dewey Hobson might have gone and done, focus the search on where he might go, what he might do, once he got there. While this was a large country filled with vast amounts of wilderness, there were only so many places where someone could live off the grid but still be relatively close to civilization to purchase supplies.

In college at Penn State, Dewey Hobson had been an avid reader. David suspected this was partly why Hobson chose to live off the grid. If he could pass his time with nothing more than a good book for company, and be happy, he could live in a hole in the ground with a thatch roof and be perfectly comfortable. Much like the man who ate tuna sandwiches, though, Hobson’s reading patterns off grid would be the same as his reading patterns on grid, and that was where David told Charter to focus their efforts when he took it upon himself to find the last few original test subjects and put them down like the expired lab rats they were. Most believed libraries didn’t track the books checked out by their patrons due to privacy concerns. That was only partially true. Libraries did track this information, but they kept the data private, safely tucked away in computer databases accessible only to employees and the most skilled of hackers. Charter employed its share of skilled hackers, and these databases were, well, an open book.

As a kid, a teenager, and later an adult, Dewey Hobson had been an avid reader of Agatha Christie, Robert Ludlum, and Philip K. Dick. He also read every Western by Louis L’Amour. Hobson wasn’t alone in his love for these particular authors. They wrote some of the most popular books in existence. However, this odd combination of suspense, science fiction, and Westerns was different. Most people