Suspicion

Delilah Knox had been in town for less than a day and already had a list of red flags pinned to her motel room wall like a detective in an old noir film.

At the center of the board: Mark Donovan.

It wasn’t just a gut feeling. Delilah never trusted instinct alone, she trusted patterns no mater where they led. And Mark’s name had come up far too often to be coincidence.

Sure, he wasn’t close to Gabriella or Dawn, not directly, but he had been in several classes with Phoebe. But all of that was all to be expected, they went to the same school after all. It would have been more odd to not have this connection. No it was the three girl’s posts on social media that had rung alarm bells in her head when it came to Mark Donovan.

Naturally, she investigated any one who were in the photos that weren’t named Phoebe, Gabriella, or Dawn. Most of them lived in New York City or were obviously there on business. But one photos at the Met with Dawn showed a blurry person the background as if they were photobombing Dawn.

The problem was the blur looked unnatural. Luckily she was able to undo it enough to get a facial recognition read, and got Mark Donovan. Now, what were the odds some kid from their school, who was definitely not traveling with those girls ended up in the same place as them to photobomb them?

This wasn’t the only thing wrong with the photos however. To the untrained eye, they looked like typical travel shots. The girls laughing in Times Square, posing in front of a mural in Brooklyn, sitting at a diner booth. But Delilah noticed things: awkward posing, lifeless expressions if you zoomed in close enough. No movement. No candid shots. Just one stiff picture after another.

Her tech contact confirmed that the IP address behind the posts didn’t ping from any major city. It came from here, from the small city they’d vanished from. That meant someone was posting them locally and faking the road trip. Someone who had access to their phones. Or… to them.

Delilah looked out the window of her motel room, phone in hand. She tapped through Mark Donovan’s social media again. It was bare. Too bare for a teenage boy. No photos. No recent updates. Almost like he was hiding in plain sight.

She made her way to his street one afternoon, parked inconspicuously, and watched.

She saw him. At least she did through the shadows on the window she determined was his bedroom. The odd thing was, he never seemed to be alone in there. There was always at least three other figures, but she could only see their silhouettes. What was really odd was the silhouettes looked like they were naked.

Unfortunately, it was not strong evidence strong enough to contact the police and get a warrant, but then again she was a private investigator. Illegal searches and info gathering didn’t exactly bother her. No she had an entirely different issue at hand.

The problem was that about 45 year old grown woman sneaking around a teenage boy's house wasn’t exactly conspicuous. No, she needed someone his age to go in and get the info she needed. Perhaps befriend him and walk right in. Luckily teenage girls were almost always strapped for cash. The question was, were to find one who was willing to cooperate.

She started a search for a Facebook group that might exist for Mark’s school. That would be a good place to start. Mark Donovan wouldn’t know what hit him.