Chasing Fate (Sentinel & Guide)

Chapter 39

[Arc 2 will get a lot more into how sentinels and guides work, as well as Fate's past. I hope you enjoy!]

Detective Anton Rinat was a very tired man. The fast-paced television series were all lies. Most of his day was spent hunched over a stack of papers like any other pencil pusher. It was rare for anything urgent to come up, and of course, processing anything through the lab took ages from red tape alone.

Usually.

This was a particularly unusual situation.

A few months ago, everything had been going as usual. He'd closed a missing person's case for a local journalist. Marina Timms had gone missing sometime during her walk home from the local bar. She was young, beautiful and popular. Her columns were generally whatever mismatch they needed to fill the entertainment queue on their website. She had plenty of friends, including a boyfriend with an airtight alibi.

While he was pulling his night shift at the volunteer fire department, she was out celebrating a coworker's promotion to editor. She left the party alone as her apartment was only two blocks away from their gathering. When Marina failed to text her check-in to her boyfriend he put in a report.

They pulled out all the stops, combed the rivers and drainage, sent out the dogs and put the boyfriend's crying face all over the news to see if they could get anything. After exhausting all lanes of investigation, he was forced to shut it down. Missing, presumed dead.

It wasn't a fun thing to do, but it was unavoidable. He'd just taken her file down to the archives for processing last week. He thought it'd sit there with the others, waiting on some young buck in cold-cases to review in a decade or so. Instead, it was sitting on his desk with a brand new object of interest.

Marina's mother received a package with no return address. Inside was nothing but a thumb drive and a photograph of Marina and her friends from college. It looked like a parcel that had gotten lost in the mail. Marina's mother paid to have the thumb drive reformatted in hopes that it would give her some solace as she grieved for her missing daughter. Instead, she found something far more insidious.

The drive was chock full of notes and audio files circling around 27 different cases. There were even photos and some hidden camera files. The time stamps on the files were also from far after Marina's college graduation. It seemed that the young woman wasn't simply an entertainment blogger. She was onto something. What it was would take a while to discern. All of her notes were cryptic, in a sort of code that wasn't readily understandable to the first read.

The only thing he did know was that there were two files dated the week before Marina went missing. One was a text file with coordinates. The other was a video of Marina saying goodbye to her family.

Anton pinched his nose. It made no sense at all. The digital team was combing through the video data to see where it was recorded and came up with nothing, while the coordinates led to a piece of forest ten miles into a natural reserve. It wasn't guaranteed that going out there would find them anything but old condoms and bear shit. They needed a sentinel to really investigate.

And they really needed to investigate. The 27 cases listed had two key things in common. First, they were all cold cases from across the country. Secondly, each and everyone was a case of a young guide.

This was now a NOGS situation. The second he got verification about the cases he had to contact Jack, even if it was his presentation party. Now, eight hours later he'd gotten confirmation from the lab downstairs that the prints on the package matched Marina's, and the sentinel on duty verified that the slight scent of blood on the thumb drive was a direct match to Marina, and also no more than a week old.

"Jack, it doesn't make a lick of sense. I hate to ask you this when you just flew in yesterday but looking at this... We're working against a clock."

Jack shook his head, "No Anton, it's not a problem. I'm not even sure I'll be able to sleep tonight after hearing all this. Go on and send what you can to my case book and I'll give it a look over. We can meet at the park entrance at 0900. Get some rest first."

Anton let out an empty chuckle at that, "0900 it is, Jack. You get some rest too. We need you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to comb that location. And your guide too. Heard she was some kind of powerhouse. We could use all the help we can get."

Jack's eyes darted to the bed where Fate was still resting peacefully, oblivious to the ugliness of the world for a few more hours. He'd known that eventually they'd need to pair up and help investigate dangerous situations like any other Alpha Prime pair. He just didn't think it would be the moment he got her home. Who knew if she even had forensic-site training?

Still, there was no avoiding it. If he didn't do everything to investigate this now, a bigger danger would threaten the entire region. It was best to explore every single avenue presented. After all, if Marina spent hundreds of hours compiling these hitherto unrelated cases, she had to be onto something that she just couldn't let go. It probably got her into more trouble than she could take on her own.

The best-case scenario was that she was in hiding and this was a cry for help. The worst-case was.... Well, they'd have to take it one step at a time.

"Of course Anton. We'll see you then." Jack sighed as he clicked off his phone. He checked the time. It was already nearly 3 AM and he hadn't even taken off his shoes. The reserve entrance was another forty minutes up the highway, so to get there in time they'd have to get up very soon. Not to mention the explaining he'd need to do before they set out.

Jack stifled a sigh as he stood. He changed into his pajama pants with maximum efficiency, forgoing the shirt now that they were in the relative heat away from Bent Valley. He climbed happily into bed and stuck his arm out as he had for the past week, smiling as Fate subconsciously latched on like a koala and nestled in.

As he closed his eyes he cast a sensory net around his room, stretching his sensitive hearing even further over the house and surrounding woods before deeming it locked up tight. He withdrew his senses to focus on Fate's slow and steady heartbeat. He could hear it muffled by the pillow, and feel it through her pulse points pressed along his bare shoulder. At the very least, all was right with the world for the next few hours. With a last indulgent smile, he drifted to sleep.