Dantes' Inferno by Sarah Lovett Read Free Book Online

too good? Had his lust to bring in Dantes blinded him to the possibility of a collaborator? If a collaborator existed, Sweetheart wanted his head.
    The FBI would be monitoring the movements of the psychologist, Dr. Strange. She’d passed the profiling project’s security protocol, her credentials seemed clean enough, but the timing of her visit to Dantes was going to interest them keenly. He imagined they would keep an agent on her for the next twenty-four hours.
    Sweetheart had his own way of tracking human subjects.
    He shifted his body to face another monitor, this one a flat screen mounted directly on the white wall. He typed in a search string for Strange, Sylvia.
    The computer fluttered its eyelashes—flirting with offers of infinite data—the blink-blink of information flashing across the screen. Within forty-five seconds he was looking at M ultiplex pr O files S ystems A nalys I s K it data.
    MOSAIK was his baby; her specialty was agent-based, multitiered profiling.
    Quickly, he screened past the basic (and now familiar) biographical data, which included medical, academic, professional and legal records, as well as geographic and personal history. Bits of information registered:
    Ht: 5 feet, 9 inches; Wt: 141; eyes: brown; hair: brown; skin: olive; scars: left eye, left hand; tattoos: NA; moles: right shoulder, right breast
    Profession: psychologist, forensic
    Marriage status: divorced
    LINKS: relationships, personal
    LINKS: history, sexual
    Heritage: Irish, Italian
    Â 
    hospitalizations, general: tonsillectomy, 1977
    hospitalizations, psychiatric: 1981, Los Angeles, CA
    LINKS: evaluations, psychiatric.
    The data flow was never-ending; it documented her extensive research on prisons, on attachment disorders, on psychopathy; the foster daughter who had been rescued from a barrio on the border of Mexico and Texas; the love affair with a psychiatrist now dead of cancer; her engagement to an investigator with the New Mexico State Police; a long-ago marriage so brief it hardly registered; the tentative relationship with her mother; the father who had deserted his wife and daughter many years ago.
    Sweetheart gave MOSAIK a verbal command and a new screen appeared:
    Father: Strange, Daniel, Danny; born 1940, CO, Colorado Springs
    REMARKS: missing person
    LINKS: Strange, D, military; Army service record
    LINKS: training record CLASSIFIED
    LINKS: Vietnam; Cambodia
    LINKS: Strange, D, POW
    LINKS: covert operations; special ops
    LINKS: CIA
    LINKS: Strange, D, missing person
    LINKS: global tracking, current status CLASSIFIED
    He was fishing.
    As he stared at the screen, he calculated which piecesof information would provide him with the most leverage.
    Sweetheart knew Strange was investigating her father’s whereabouts—she’d hired a private investigator named Joshua Harold. She’d even visited morgues to eliminate the possibility that Daniel Strange was a John Doe. With one command, Sweetheart could pull up the entire file . . .
    He scrolled past screen after screen, ignoring data on DNA and voiceprint and fingerprints, momentarily excluding the photo library, video storage, linguistic samples, GIS mapping of mobility.
    He reached into a glazed ceramic bowl and selected a salted plum candy. The soft tech hum provided background for his thoughts.
    Sweetheart typed in a new name: Carpenter, Mona Suzanne .
    He added relationship modifiers: client; deceased.
    He gave a verbal command.
    As new information filled the screen, Sweetheart thought of Dr. Sylvia Strange, the catalyst. It interested him . . . this connection between Strange and Dantes had just taken an unexpected turn: suicide; two women separated by three decades; each had taken her own life. Dantes’ mother. The doctor’s client.
    This morbid connection between Dantes and Strange made her valuable—it also made her vulnerable. Especially if another bomber was loose in LA.
    10:09 A.M. Sylvia hunched inside the