PIVOT

Questions: Continue

"Archer was nineteen years old at the time, he was already in college, Dav."

"I still think we should check him out though." Davina had a strong gut feeling that he was the real killer, but had no solid proof.

"Even if you're right, it's still not enough for him to kill his own mother. It takes a different kind of hurt to kill your own mother." Vera rebutted, and she would know.

"You're a lawyer, stop thinking everyone is wired the same way as you." Alex reminded them, just as Tanner was exiting his room.

"I found something guys."

He walked over to the bed with a tiny laptop in his hand.

"What is that?" Connor asked him with somewhat of a genuine concern in his voice. He finally looked away from his phone and aligned himself with Davina. Despite knowing that he had just spent the entire time texting other girls, and as much as it grieved her, she always loved when he gave her an ounce of his attention. No one understood her enough to tell her that it wasn't healthy to bask in that twisted comfort.

"Something you can't afford"

They hovered about the screen but could not understand the yellow and green words thereon. Everything was encrypted.

"At first, I peeked in the loopholes of an outdated government information system for any registration of her citizenship or her son's, or even a record of his birth certificate. I found a number of things."

He typed in a few commands into a window at the bottom of the screen and a website appeared. It looked like a regular Google search, like it was all legal and the government was at fault for improper security.

"Apparently Carrie registered her citizenship in 1987 at the age of twenty-one after marrying Jason Jane, but there are no legal documents to say that the marriage happened."

"How is that even possible?" Tanner pointed at the screen where a list of names and social security numbers were aligned with annotated zipped files. Beside Carrie's name was nothing. Nothing at all.

"That's not all, she must have had one but there is no data input of a green card ever being issued to her. But somehow, she is officially registered as Bulgarian American which makes no sense. It's like she was a foreigner that appeared in America and magically became American, without papers."

What made no sense was the fact that he had access to this information, but none of them questioned him.

"Do you think someone was manipulating the system?" Conor asked, pondering the possibility. There were all kinds of possibilities when it came to fallacies in the government. This was just a rather unusual one.

"Nah bro, this was the 80s I don't think—" Tanner paused and suddenly remember his own saying, "It's possible."

Vera leaned back in the chair and folded her arms. The irony of their situation was rather.....ironic since the information they found was that there is no information. How unprofitable. "What about her son, did you find out who the father is?"

"Surprisingly nothing. Another thing though," Tanner entered a few more commands on the command line in the window at the bottom of the screen and another website surfaced. "So I ran a deep sweep check on every organization's employee database from the time of Archer's birth to when Carrie started working for Nella and guess what, she never worked anywhere else."

Alex was the most unsurprised. She leaned back in her chair with her arms folded, more dedicated to proving to Davina her point than opening herself to realize this isn't about her. Moreover, the case just became more difficult.

"She never even went to the hospital or a clinic. If she did, she didn't use her real name."

"This makes no sense." Davina huffed despairingly, burying her head in her hands out of sheer frustration. She must have caught the flu at least once, or had some other reason to go to the hospital. Unless she was a meta human.

Conor took this opportunity to console her, massaging her shoulders like he hadn't been flirting with other women all night.

"She was married like you said, maybe this Jake guy did all the work and she stayed home."

"Jason, not Jake." Alex corrected him.

"Whatever."

"Guys, that's not even the strangest part of all this. Although there are no records of Carrie going to the hospital throughout those ten years, I found a research paper published by Venburke Regional Hospital in 1985 about a twenty-eight -year-old woman who gave birth to twins but one of them ended up dying. The article said that the babies were born premature with lung disorder and respiratory disease. One of the babies died in surgery."

"When does it end?" Alex groaned and disappeared into the kitchen.

Davina's head snapped up, "Wait, do you think it was her?"

"It was her." Tanner confirmed, turning the computer slightly so they could all see. There was a blurry picture of a woman on a gurney with tubes attached to her every which way. It definitely looked like Carrie.

Davina shrugged away Conor's hand that was still lingering on her shoulder and sat up. With furrowed brows she drew for the case file and began skipping through the pages once again. It was uncertain whether or not she found what she was looking for when she closed the folder and threw it aside.

"Guys what if this was the baby Carrie was talking about?" Well.... "Remember how Sheela said she was always talking about buying a home for her and her baby? What if she wasn't talking about Archer, but the baby that survived?"

"I think you're onto something, that would definitely give Archer a reason to want to kill his mother." Alex added and all the speculations seemed to shift completely towards Archer Jane. "If the article was published in 1985, that was a whole year before Carrie started working for Nella Fowler. That means she was already in Venbruke."

"You're correct," Tanner said before closing his computer and getting up from the bed, "but it also adds to our maze. Why did she come all the way to a tiny town like Venburke to have her babies and why wasn't Jason there with her?"

"This is frustrating." Davina said for the nth time and still, none of them notice it wasn't really about the case anymore. Not even Conor.

"Let's just finish the reports then we can try to figure this out. I tracked Jason down and surprisingly, he lives here, in Venbruke. He moved here three years ago and currently works at Venburke Regional Hospital as a Physio Surgeon."

That was the nth red flag.

"By the way, how did you gain access to all those government systems? I mean I know you like computers but what you just did is scarier than it is impressive."

It was Conor who finally counted Tanner's hacking abilities as a thing to be grasped. But Tanner, like every other cybercriminal and those who pretended to be them, told him the code.

"You're a Lawyer, if I told you I'd have to kill you."