Justice Unserved, Nadia Siddiqui [brene brown rising strong .TXT] 📗

It all starts to click. The woman on the other end of the phone, Josephine but called Jo for short, works at the hospice center just outside of town where the loud mouth’s father lives. Until now, Emma Claire has been annoying, but he felt that it was mostly for a good cause. He couldn’t touch her father until she was out of the picture and frankly she was just too young to be bothered with. Emma has too many friends and is involved in too many groups. She’s exactly the sort of person that people would raise hell over if she were to go missing. She is practically untouchable but if what Jo is saying is true and she’s hired some fancy reporter, she might be making waves that Sheriff Crane can no longer ignore. “Thank you Jo, I’ll handle it.”

Sheriff Crane ends the call and ducks back into the room. “I want you to put a tail on that newest group of thugs that have been making trouble under Main Street Bridge, alright? Make sure this isn’t something tied to them. I think the timing of their appearance is just a little strange. I have to run an errand, but I will meet you back at the station.”

Sheriff Crane is already on the phone again before he reaches his cruiser, calling various informants that he has around town that he knows will do absolutely anything for him in an attempt to find out just who this person that Emma has brought on board is and what they know about him. Infuriatingly, nobody seems to know a thing.

  4

E mma Claire takes Nathan “Hank Pettyfer” on a small tour of the town. He’s cramped inside of her small two-door car but he doesn’t complain. He will need to find a way to distance himself from her to check in with his handler at the company shortly, but he knows they still have a little bit of time left.

She has wasted no time in showing him all of the houses of the people who have had crimes committed against them and from the case files that Nathan was given previously he mentally assigns a name and a case number to each of them. His real goal here is to draw just enough attention to the pair of them that a certain local police sheriff will catch wind of their movements and decide to stop by. The sheriff might think he’s done a wonderful job of keeping himself anonymous and for most people perhaps he has. Though cases like this are the bread and butter of the company he works for Nathan doesn’t know how their selection process works or what all it entails. He doesn’t know how they assign each one to a member of the Does or why they pick who they do. It isn’t Nathan’s job to ask questions, he just wants to get the rest of the pieces of this assignment in order. He knows the next puzzle piece to fit in will be making contact with the sheriff so that he can look him in his eyes.

It’s always been the most surefire way of triggering his little visions. Each member of the Does has been blessed with a unique gift; perhaps, in a time before he can even remember, that is why he was chosen in the first place. Perhaps those same gifts were why they were all chosen to become what they are now. For Nathan it’s the ability to have insight into a person. He can look them in the eyes and sometimes he will be shown an image or a memory or something that might have happened or will happen in the future. It’s not something he can fully control, but the closest thing to a guaranteed trigger that he has found so far is looking a person straight in the eyes.

Emma Claire shows him around one of the old nursing homes that her father used to be in, explaining to him that they moved him out of concern for his safety. She comments about how tricky it was to get his insurance to agree to it but finally she managed to swing it. She says frequently that they are all each other has and if she didn’t have to work as much as she presently does then she would have been happy to look after him herself. Emma has recently been looking into ways that she can shift her career into a working from home situation in order to accommodate his growing needs and demands, but it’s a process. Nathan feels for her. He cannot remember if he had parents or what they might have been like, but he’s certain that, in another life, he might have ended up like Claire. The level of adoration and empathy that she is capable of feeling is something he finds fascinating.

Nathan takes special care to make note of the security cameras and other features that are available. In each of the places that Emma shows him around the town he makes mental notes of the traffic cameras and other things that no doubt the company has already matched with dates and locations. All things to have figured out who the killer and sadistic bastard is. Each crime is able to be matched about a week apart from some related police case. Just enough time for the rest of the people in the town to have moved from one big ticket item in the gossip train and on to the next big ticket item. At least he was crafty whenever it came to that. Finally Emma finishes her tour and Nathan makes an excuse about how he wants to get to see the town a little better on his own and the pair of them agree to meet up in a few hours in order to