“Maybe it fell out somewhere at the scene. Lost in the woods.”
“No, Dad always kept it on him just in case there was an accident so he could get it to call for help to avoid a situation like that.” She couldn’t contain her excitement. She was such an idiot for overlooking that detail.
Understanding dawned in his eyes. “You think it’s still on him.”
“I do.”
“The GPS might not be on.”
“It’s worth looking into.” Payton was willing to follow any lead at this point. She pulled up her boss’s number and dialed.
“Payton, everything okay?”
“Hey, boss, I’m fine. Hey, I was looking through the car report. My dad’s phone isn’t listed amongst his possessions. I think when he got taken, it was still on him. Can you check to see if the location is on?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks.” Then another idea struck. “Can you also email me the list of his phone records?” Maybe she’d see who he’d talked to last. Maybe someone he’d recently talked to could help. Couldn’t hurt.
“I’ll get it taken care of,” he said then hung up.
“You’re right, the only connection I can see on these other addresses is that they are abandoned-looking buildings in the same town as the bases that were struck.”
“All army bases?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is someone targeting army bases? And all in the west?” Payton wracked her brain trying to make a connection between these buildings and base attacks. “And no one knows what was stolen or if anything was?”
“No.” Payton could see the evident strain on his face at that statement. He hated not knowing. He’d been looking into this matter a lot longer than she had.
“And no witnesses?”
“No, we’ve checked security footage, log books, computer personnel, everything. These people are ghosts. Either they are all different people coordinating so they are staying under the radar, or they are doing everything remotely.”
“That would take a highly trained person to break into several bases’ data systems. They’d have to know what they were looking for and get out so they wouldn’t raise an alarm and still have enough time to cover their tracks.”
“Or several someones. We aren’t ruling anything out.”
“How spaced out were the attacks?”
“A few weeks.”
“So enough time to get from one location to another.”
Alex set down the laptop, giving her his full attention. She was on to something; she could feel it. “But if they are getting on the base, they need time to scope it out, know where the main server is. That would take a lot of coordination. Time. Every base is different.”
Payton bit her lip in thought as she considered his words. “Unless someone already knew the layout of each base and told them where everything was.” Alex just stared at her blankly. “Think about it. These people, however many there are, knew exactly where to hit with limited time. There’s no evidence of them being on the bases. As you said, no footage. That takes someone who knows the system or at least has access to it. You said security got beefed up after the second base attack?”
“Yeah, once we made the connection.”
“If they were breaking into the system every time they were scoping a place out, they would have gotten caught, which means they knew beforehand which bases to strike and where. Long before the first attack.”
“Shit, I never thought of that.”
But she bet her father had figured it out. “It was planned out. Coordinated. Which means they were looking for something. Something specific.”
“Something they knew was out in the west,” Alex added.