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Cass leaned back in his chair, the glow of the monitors casting faint blue reflections across the lenses of his blue light glasses. He kept a carton of mango juice on the desk beside his keyboard, condensation pooling into a ring on an old case file.
He shouldn't have been doing this. It wasn't part of any current case, and no one had asked him to look. But curiosity had always been his weakness, a persistent itch that never quite left him alone once a face or a name lodged itself in his head.
The photo was still open on his secondary screen. She was mid-conversation with a man he didn't recognize, tall, angular, fair hair cropped close to the head. There was a familiar ease between them, but Cass didn't know if it was trust or history or simply habit. And that was the part that bothered him.
He rolled the chair closer, fingers brushing across the keyboard as he opened the recognition interface. He uploaded the image, aligning the man's face with precision, adjusting the parameters for angle and exposure. "Now, who is this handsome?" he murmured.
The system began its search, rows of data streaming across the screen. He took a long sip of juice and leaned back, watching the bar crawl across the display. The minutes stretched, filled with the soft ticking of the wall clock and the rhythmic click of the cooling fans.
When the result appeared, it was almost anticlimactic — a single match blinking at the top of the feed. Cass leaned forward, brows furrowing as he opened the file. The image loaded slowly: a group of young recruits in uniform, lined up in front of an old concrete barrack.
Die Bundeswehr. German Army Training Division.
He dragged the cursor over the photo, zooming in until the pixels blurred. There he was: same jawline, same eyes, just younger. The blonde hair was shorter, his expression lighter, almost naive in a way that felt incongruous with the man in Eleanor's photo.
At the bottom of the image was a list of names: Private Class of 1995. Cass adjusted his glasses, scanning down the roster. No labels on the individuals, no easy answers. "All right," he muttered under his breath, cracking his knuckles. "Let's make it easy for both of us."
He opened a new window, cross-referencing the entire photograph against the list of names using his system's secondary recognition mode, a trick he'd written himself to catch inconsistencies across archival records. The machine began cycling through faces, matching structure points, iris patterns, minute discrepancies in bone ratio.
When the result finally came back, his pulse quickened.
Match found: Jannik Seidel.
Cass grinned, a smile, satisfied sound leaving him as he tapped the desk. "There you are." He typed the name into his secondary search engine, hooked into German news outlets, military archives, and personnel lists.
