Hall of the Mountain King ch 10

I.

Five days ago, Gus Keller, the Special Crimes Investigation Bureau (SCIB) investigator, had received a list of five women who might…or might not…match the partial thumbprint that he had rescued from the spoon Taran Tula had been using to eat a hot fudge sundae.

That list was as follows:

1. Michele Bravo – fingerprinted as a child as a military family member
2. Amanda Cooper – arrested for shoplifting
3. Rita Ellison – an employee of a defunct civilian military contractor. She’d been fingerprinted when she’d applied for a top secret clearance
4. Sophia Sanchez – a sergeant in the US Army
5. Debbie Morgan – an employee of a current civilian contractor to the military

He had elected to start with Michele Bravo.

He had begun his search on the web, conducting a search via Google. He knew the parameters – someone who had been a “military” brat, lived in Germany, and was 30 years old.

Interestingly, there were only a half dozen Michele Bravos to be found. One of them wrote erotica, another was a travel writer for an online webzine. Gus clicked on that link, and was brought to the website GhostGuns.com.

This was the woman’s profile page, complete with a brief biography and a photo. The photo was a three quarters shot of a woman, dressed in fencer’s garb. She was standing side on to the viewer, with her head turned to face front, in a pose Keller thought looked rather sexy. She had long blond hair, a narrow face with a pointy chin, and no breasts to speak of on a slender torso. She definitely wasn’t the Taran Tula he’d seen, even if she’d put on a hundred pounds.

He read her bio – she had indeed been a military brat…she was the Michele Bravo of the fingerprint….just not his Michele Bravo.

He passed on to the next woman on the list, Amanda Cooper. He found it difficult to believe that a woman of Taran Tula’s abilities would ever have been caught shoplifting, but one never knew…

II.

Three days later, Keller had completed the list, and none of the women looked even remotely like Taran Tula. He’d found photos of a couple of the women on the web, and he’d had to visit three of them, in person, tracking them down to their last known address.

Keller relaxed in his hotel room after his last failed trip.

It didn’t make sense. One of those five women had to be Taran Tula.

Keller rubbed his eyes, trying to think.

Then, he powered up his computer and returned to the website of his first choice, Michele Bravo. He stared once again at the photo. It was clearly a publicity photo, not something casual. What if…what if that photo wasn’t of Michele Bravo at all? He’d heard they did that sometimes, these internet writers. They used some headshot other than their own to maintain their anonymity.

So…he’d better go see this Michele Bravo in person, just to make sure.

He looked at the webpage with closer attention. There was a link on the page to a blog. He clicked on it.

The blog was being updated every day…the woman was visiting caverns in Northern Virginia. And she’d be going to the Endless Caverns the next day.

Keller looked at his watch, then pulled up directions on the computer. If he left now, he could drive to this New Market, Virginia place in just a few hours…he’d be there by noon, certainly.

Keller nodded sharply. He threw his clothes back into his suitcase, packed up his laptop, checked out of the hotel, and hit the road.