The Drifter

C H A P T E R 1 3

C H A P T E R  T H I R T E E N
Leaving a Trace

With one glance at the profile of "DeliaQuentin01", I could confirm that it was her official YouTube account.

Not a fake one.

"That's her real account," I voiced to Mr Havens. "Her own account. She always playing those songs during her breaks or when she's walking into work. She's always playing songs like those in her headphones. As soon as she steps into the cinema, she's yanking out her headphones and if I'm already inside the ticket booth, I can faintly hear the music."

Her favourite singer, as everyone who had her on any type of social media account knew, was Beyoncé. She was beyond infatuated with her, but whatever Beyoncé video she showed me, I always noticed she had liked each video and I'd seen her scouring her account details once before, noting that her YouTube username was quite mundane for someone as imaginative and wild as Delia was. And that's the evidence I had to validate that it was Delia's official YouTube. It would be too much for Delia's abductor to execute all that for just a single comment that had the vast potential to be overlooked.

As I glanced back at my phone, I refreshed the page and checked the comment. It was still there, but now the timestamp had progressed by a few minutes, of course. No one had replied to that particular comment and commenced a string of comments, but neither had anyone liked or disliked the comment. Perhaps I had been the initial one to spot the comment. Perhaps the abductor wanted no one to notice it? But then why would they even bother posting it? It was a taunt.

Was it a coincidence that I had noticed it during my internship?

Mr Havens glanced around the room, rubbing his chin as his eyebrows furrowed together. But then he turned back to me and gazed at the phone in my hand. He said nothing before announcing, "We can trace the IP address... LEONARD!" The holler of Mr Jackman's name caused me to physically recoil from the loudness considering mine and Mr Havens' proximity. He was virtually bellowing it in my face, though he directed his glance towards the true recipient.

Mr Jackman's head shot up above the computer monitor and instinctively, I held my phone out for him to view the comment. When his eyebrows furrowed, both Mr Havens and I nodded. It was then when his fingers reached impressive speeds to type at his computer. My presumption of it being an email was more than probable considering I was beginning to understand his role as being the main communicator between different teams and even the police, whilst Mr Havens was the main boss.

"It shouldn't take too long. Do you know about IP addresses?"

It has been briefly explained to me via Arianna who was a techno whiz, but all I knew was that it was related to computers and every computer had an IP address to identify itself. And it can be tracked, apparently, which in turn would provide us with who owns the computer that the comment was typed and sent on, and that would therefore supply us with the exact location of the laptop and possibly hint to us who the potential abductor of Delia was. That was, of course, to say that the abductor wasn't as clever as we were hoping they were.

"Email sent," Mr Jackman confirmed. He flexed his fingers repeatedly for a few moments until there was an immediate bing emanating from his computer to indicate that a new email had been received.

"Yeah," I hastily replied. "It has to be from Delia's abductor, doesn't it?" Mr Havens, I realised, typically used the phrase "abduct" (and variations) instead of "kidnap", so I was beginning to adopt that dialect.

At home, Aunt Mia was picking up on the amount of jargon I was slipping into my discussions. Occasionally she's had to ask me to either slow down or explain, in layman's terms, the definition. Other times she'd simply nod and continue the conversation as usual, hoping to comprehend the rest of the conversation so she could deduce what the word translated to.