Back at home, Agent Appleton entered in all relevant data that Mr. Henry gathered from his decryption efforts. The FBI crimes database provided relevant police reports or other interesting information based on name, location, and other identifying markers. The more information that Agent Appleton provided, the more possible matches he would get from the database.

He discovered Nigel Watson was reportedly involved in a shooting incident in Milford recently. Two red flags came to mind. Nigel has the same last name as Ellen, a friend of Sally Lewis, with whom he attended high school. If Nigel was involved with The Collective, that could explain Ellen’s hacking. Agent Appleton made a note to follow up with this connection, but for now the shooting incident was the most interesting. He pulled up Detective Foster’s report, which contained the facts as well as some personal observations that Nigel was being evasive. Two other teenagers were also involved but didn’t seem suspicious.

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Other recoverable information found on the laptop led Agent Appleton to an app on Rocky’s phone. Although encryption was used, an additional IP address found in the logs revealed another point of entry for The Collective’s infrastructure. Agent Appleton was able to make additional correlations using an FBI database and found several that led to Nigel Watson. This was the evidence that he needed to implicate and create a connection to Rocky.

Time to pay Nigel a visit.