“Alright, Lin,” I say into the headset. “What’s the next address on your list?”
“Sending it now.”
Evan drives a couple of blocks away from the ninth location to the next one as I reach out with my bots to check the potential van sighting. Wrong plates again, but I slip some bots inside to check the interior anyway. This one has all the rows of seats installed, and from the recent melted ice cream stains, it looks like it belongs to someone with kids. Not our van. I shake my head as Evan glances over at me. He sighs and we start driving to the next spot.
“No luck?” Lin’s voice asks in my ear.
“Not the one,” I reply. “Next time for sure.”
I should really stop saying that, it’s the fifth time and I think I might be jinxing us. I pull my cloud back in tight. Louise thought that Jeff wouldn’t have a good way to spot them without the implant’s overlay, but I’m erring on the side of caution just in case he’s figured out what we didn’t think of. If he’s even still in the city. Lin got facial recognition hooked up to traffic feeds from all the major routes out of town, but that’s not foolproof.
We get near the next parking lot that has a potential match from Lin’s satellite imagery, a cheap looking motel in an industrial part of town near the airport. Evan stops at the red traffic light two blocks out and we’re close enough to reach out. The van is missing its license plates. That’s a good sign. I slip some bots in through the crack of the passenger side double door. Empty cargo area, no seats, this could be it. The passenger seat is littered with empty soda bottles and fast food wrappers. One of the wadded up burger bags has a receipt, with a little effort I uncrumple and manage to read it.
“Lin, where is Hays, Kansas? Is that on the way here from Denver?”
“One sec,” she says. “Yeah, that’s right on the route he took. Did you find it?”
“Yeah, pretty sure this is it. No gear though,” I tell her.
Evan pulls over to the curb as we approach the motel and stops the truck where no one could see us from any of the windows. I start reaching out to the motel rooms, hoping without much hope that we’ll find him in the most obvious place. None of them have anything that looks anything like our gear. Or anyone that looks anything like Jeff.
“Well, he did have a couple of days head start on you,” Lin says. “He probably got it set up somewhere.”
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“Yeah, you’re probably right. We’ll keep looking around.” I start giving the place a more careful sweep with my bots, just in case. “Hey Evan, while I’m searching the motel, you want to start checking what else is around here? Start with what’s within walking distance.”
“Storage units,” Evan says, pointing out the giant billboard advertising an Eazy-Stor facility a couple of miles down the road. “Those would be perfect. Help me check those when you’re done.”
He’s right, a storage unit would be ideal. Private, powered, and almost certainly anonymous for the right price.
“On it,” I tell him as I finish with the motel. No gear here. No traces that make me think Jeff had stayed in any of the rooms either. “I’ll start on the north side, meet you in the middle.”
The garage doors in front of each unit leave plenty of gap to slip bots through. Most of them are full of boxes, furniture, and junk. One looks like a shrine to Elvis. A couple are used for storing drugs. If I were interested in stealing a lot of weed, I’d be in luck today.
“Unit 47,” Evan says. “You need to see this.”
I spread my cloud that way. Evan has a couple of eyes formed there already, I form a few dozen more. The scene is grisly.
WARNING! NOREPINEPHRINE/SEROTONIN LEVELS INDICATE MURDEROUS INTENT! THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU KILL ANYONE!
Well, at least my artificial conscience is working.
“We found him, Lin,” I declare, forcing my voice to sound much calmer than I actually feel. “Or at least where he was.”
Three young men lay dead on the floor, naked and bound with zip ties. Their heads are open in the back. Maybe it would be more clear to say the backs of their heads are missing. Their brains too. Blood is splattered everywhere. A chainsaw lays discarded nearby. I lose focus for a moment as I imagine Jeff sawing through skulls. They must have been drugged unconscious, the cut lines are too clean for them to have been struggling. Small mercy, that. A big roll of plastic sheeting props against one corner of the room, half of the contents of it still on the roll, the other half flopping around the room. Some of it is duct taped to the walls. Like he was going to use it to cover the walls so he could clean up the scene, then decided not to before he finished.
Our gear is gone, if it was ever there. There’s no sign of Jeff. I search the scene as carefully as I can with my bots, looking for anything that would help. The men’s faces are generally untouched, other than the blood on them. I commit images of each of them to my index.
“I’m going to need to get in close,” Evan says. His voice sounds resolved even though his vitals tell me he’s nervous. “I want to take a look at the bodies with the medical bots.”
“Alright,” I say, matching his feigned resolution, “but we better wait until nighttime when there are fewer eyes around. The last thing we need is someone seeing us. Bad enough this was our family, worse still if we end up getting this thing pinned on us.”
“Good thinking man,” he says.
We head back to the truck to make ourselves scarce until dark.