Day Fifteen:
We had The User in Houston. I called him The User, short for “Username,” because after it comes a blank. Police had tracked him for days down from Dallas, confiscated his mail addressed to five aliases, unearthed a lease under a sixth. We updated his file, then poured ourselves another round of drinks. Excellent position.
They called me and my team because we have boxes spread across the nation. I do the security and surveillance conference and trade shows year-round, press palms with the top cops. I have imprinted on my retinas thirty-seven shelf feet of true crime procedurals and memoirs written by premiere hostage negotiation experts. We were in excellent position when we discovered the Joy Indian Spice Table Lunch Buffet hidden just five blocks, walking, from our Days Inn.
On the way back to our rooms, my camera tech, Todd, admitted to not remembering the name of the missing girl.
“What part of the story are you in?” I said.
“The part where it gets good?” ventured Todd.
The User had kidnapped a beautiful, tragically gullible eighteen-year-old girl from her Dallas front yard, right from under her parents’ noses. She was Mary, A.K.A. Bluebird_982, a Caucasian blonde, vivid in her photo as the red letters that spelled above it, MISSING.
From Todd’s mouth to God’s ears about this story getting good. We’d been on this stakeout too long and all we had were pages of online chats between Bluebird and The User from before he swiped her. Some real psychology there.
Bluebird_982: Do you ever wonder about what other people are thinking?
User_0000: Sometimes.
Bluebird_982: Do you ever wonder about what I’m thinking?
User_0000: Right now?
Bluebird_982: Yes.
User_0000: Sometimes.
Bluebird_982: I’m happy :)
Later that night, her parents played the video from their doorbell. Bluebird willingly got into the User’s 2013 silver Lexus and just drove away. That’s the last anyone knew of them, until six weeks ago when police scanned The User’s car parked near the downtown Houston American Eagle. She needed stuff. Bluebird was alive.
Day Thirty:
Houston’s a hell of a place for a stakeout. Sweltering air you hate to move through or breathe. You stay inside your hotel, fattening on the minibar and stress.
Our boxes do commercial and psychological surveillance on ten downtown Houston hotels alone. How many seconds between the first activation of the keycard lock and the TV turning on? What’s the demographic of guests who try to open the window only to discover it slides just five inches? How many times do they try to open them further, and with what strength? Who never opens the shades? Who never turns on the TV? Who never leaves?
The intel we could provide would be crucial in finding The User and Bluebird. The law believed that if we could invade as much privacy as we knew how, we could find the User in one of the hotel towers with her. A pattern of movements in a hotel room, a particular manner of entering the new space where you will live the night. We would target The User by his habits as he switched Houston hotels, using fake photo I.D.’s and credit cards fanned out like a royal flush and moving on, always moving on. Amazingly, no one remembered seeing Bluebird, the five-foot eleven beauty, trusting as a puppy.
Seven Months in Houston:
Watching everyone’s movements, maybe The User’s, days too late. When you enter a hotel room, how quickly do you get the TV on, so you don’t feel so suddenly so alone? What if you’re always alone, always ready to move? I could see my sons’ rooms on my own boxes, the little guys, but time-shifted from my own clock. They either slept, or the room was empty.
I either slept, or Bluebird’s location was unknown. Always, there was someone other than my own to look out for. I slept like a hungry ghost at the Days Inn, day-in, day-out. I wouldn’t rest until The User was checked into the Graybar Hotel. The police were running out of manpower. Expense accounts that would bankrupt larger counties were being drained for the rooms where we crouched over our boxes, sensing and sleeping our tense sleeps, waking not knowing where we were. Neck injuries just from looking up the height of the hotels’ mirrored facades, scanning for the room where The User might be keeping Bluebird.
Month Eight:
Deranged by sleeplessness and endless Joy Indian Spice Table Lunch Buffets, we came up with something: Boxes fitted into the doorways of every hotel in Houston. The boxes could determine the age and gender of people on their way in. We tuned the boxes for high selectivity: young female adults accompanied by older adult males.
I designed Box Two, having read up on the spooky proximity between certain music and assault and mayhem. The box listened directly over through the air, at 500-meter distances, and simultaneously searched streaming service plays in the area for The Beatles.
Ten Nights Watching Heat Maps:
The zones of listens to The Beatles didn’t match the first boxes’ alerts to young women entering hotels. Then, one steamy, wet, pre-dawn we got a girl with a man entering a Marriott and twenty-five minutes later, The White Album starts up on the sixth floor. We made the calls, boxed the SWAT team’s heartbeats bouncing through the hotel doors, and, seconds later, the music cut off and the 2013 silver Lexus is spotted leaving the zone. Two hundred and thirty-one days in, we activated Part Two of our plan: Vehicular Pursuit and Paint Packeting.
It was supposed to go down remotely, paint packeting from a pole positioned on the side of the road, but the packetrex packets wouldn’t fire accurately in any test. So, we scrambled our chase car, with Todd at the wheel and three of us set to lob paint at the Lexus racing down the sunrise highway. As Todd pulled ahead of The User at eighty miles per hour, I lowered my window and leaned out, two paint packets in my hands.
The highway wind hit so fiercely it took something from me, as though I’d suddenly lost something—my wallet, Bluebird’s name, all of my hair. I tossed the packets. They made perfect arcs over the asphalt. In the moment before they hit, I saw her. Bluebird rose up from the back seat in partial silhouette against the rear window, seeming calm, yet curious about a man leaning out of the window of the car ahead. The packets struck. Bluebird disappeared behind a splatter of brilliant lilac. The User wove across the highway, and Todd made evasive action into a nearby Texaco. But The User continued on, his wiper blades stroking pink lilies across the windshield.
“It got faster at the end,” Todd said.
Month Eighteen:
We had The User on video beneath his baseball hat in a Wichita, Kansas Recreational Vehicle dealership, purchasing a top-of-the-line Winnebago. We have boxes in every one of those. Excellent position.
I loved this. I didn’t know where it was going and then by the end it makes it clear that you should have seen the end coming. All the themes brought together perfectly. I also liked how there is a little bit of a tie in to the latest version of Futureness thematically. There’s this possibility that they are happening in the same world. Really intriguing. I’d pay more for my subscription for more of this. Amazing work.