To Love A Witch

Chapter 3

  

Jake grabbed a beer from the fridge and plunked down in front of his computer. He had the sneaking suspicion some critical details had been left out of the background briefing for his current zone assignment.
Time to rectify that. He wiggled his fingers and prepared to do some hacking. Not that he needed an excuse, but it was for a good cause.
First he accessed files at the Franklin County Youth Detention Center. Their security was absurdly lax, but some thoughtful soul had computerized twenty years of inmate records. His red-haired girl said she’d been inside fourteen years ago. He should be able to find her.
He ran a quick scan through the current inmates. It was entirely possible she was fifteen and a good liar.
Unlikely, though. The look of her right after she’d yanked off her ball cap was imprinted on his brain. Furious, surrounded by cascades of flaming hair, and sexy as hell. He was pretty sure his sexy-chick radar didn’t point at fifteen-year-olds.
Confirmed. No hot redheads amongst the current residents. He did see Tattoo Boy, though. In for three years. That sucked. Jake couldn’t imagine living in puke green for that long without losing his sanity.
Pulling up the historical records, he scanned for the younger version of his fiery witch. He almost missed her—red hair wasn’t obvious in black-and-white mug shots—but that was the same face. Fairy-dust features, big eyes, and a really big chip on her shoulder, even then.
He clicked into her detailed record and got his second big surprise of the day. Romy Daniels. Romy was the name of the woman who ran Delinquent Drama. He’d kidnapped the adult in the room. Whoops.
Her own darn fault for hiding in the back row and looking prepubescent.
The story in her file was exactly the kind of thing Sentinel was supposed to prevent. A series of foster homes, and then locked up at fourteen for repeat arson offenses. No one would take in a kid who set fires while everyone else was sleeping.
He tried not to beat on his laptop; it was just the messenger. Witches with fire talents usually came into their power as young teens—and it tended to involve a lot of accidental firestarting. Romy probably started fires while she slept and her control was at its lowest.
The cure for that was a couple of training sessions and careful monitoring, not three years of lock-up in a concrete hell.
He sent Duncan a pretty insistent instant message. A few minutes later his friend’s face popped up on-screen. “Hey Jake. Long time, no see. When are you going to come ogle babes on the beach with me?”
Jake grinned. Duncan never changed. “I need to know the inside dirt on what happened in this zone for the last couple of decades.”
His recruiter and long-time friend frowned. “Why, what’s up?”
“I followed an alert today. Found my witch in juvie.”
Duncan winced. “Hate it when that happens.”
“It’s the second time in three months. And this time my witch wasn’t in lock-up, she works there. Dunc, she spent three years in juvie as a teen. Arson.”
“Fire witch?”
Jake nodded. “Yeah. At least four reported firestarting incidents in the year before she got put away. How did they miss a fire witch in this zone for that long? She should have been setting off alerts left, right, and center.”
“I don’t know. There were some rumors about the old guy who monitored that zone. He had a higher rate of reported false alerts than most of us.”
Meaning he decided the kid setting off the alarms wasn’t really a witch in need of help. Jake tried to keep a lid on his temper. Duncan was just a messenger, too. “What else?”
Duncan squirmed. “Now we’re moving into the territory of really unsubstantiated rumors, but almost all of the witches he found were boys. Sentinel keeps that kind of data pretty quiet, though.”
That did it. “What the hell, Dunc. Two-thirds of witches are girls. No one thought it was a bit strange when he didn’t find any?”
“Some of the old-guard monitors have old-guard ideas. That’s why I recruited you, remember?”
Jake definitely remembered. Duncan had followed him around for three months, getting him drunk and talking up the benefits of doing your civic witch duty while having an awesome time seeing the world. He’d been a little restless, and a lot bored, so he’d signed on.
He scowled into the monitor. “Some of that old guard still works in Sentinel headquarters. Are they covering for the old fart?”
Duncan sighed. “Probably. Jake, don’t do what I think you’re gonna do.”
Jake put on his best innocent face. “And what would that be?”
“I can’t believe you think I’d still fall for that face.” Duncan laughed and toasted Jake with a beer. “If you do that which shall not be named, be careful. I hear they just installed a new firewall.”
For all his beach-sloth ways, Duncan heard a lot. “Thanks, pal. I’ll catch you later.”
Taking a swig of his beer, Jake prepared to hack the Sentinel system. Their security was not at all lax. It was, however, a bit overconfident. They expected everyone to come crashing through the front door. Any good hacker knew that was just plain stupid.
Or at least they did once they grew up. He’d done plenty of front-door crashing in his teenage years.
Duncan was right; Sentinel did have a new firewall in place. Fortunately, it was the same one as the New Mexico Police Department, and he’d finessed into that just last month. A couple more finger wiggles, and he was in.
Viewing personnel files for Sentinel employees was probably several kinds of illegal. That didn’t much bother him, but he did have his own sense of ethics. He kept his nose out of Duncan’s file, however much fun it might have been to snoop.
The historical records were supremely well organized. Sentinel was good at paperwork. Jake located the file for the previous monitor of the New Mexico zone. Alvin Minton. He’d held the post for forty freaking years. That was some serious longevity.
His personnel file held hints of issues. A couple of suggestions that his incident reports were lacking in detail. One letter of reprimand for slow follow-up on a yellow-alert case. Yeah. Some poor kid sat in a mental ward for three months while Alvin took his sweet time following up.
Jake toggled over to the main Sentinel database. HR records might sometimes circumvent the truth, but data didn’t lie, and Sentinel was obsessive about keeping good data records.
He pulled up all the alert and incident reports for the New Mexico zone during Alvin’s tenure. Deciding not to hand-count forty years of data, he dumped everything in a spreadsheet and ran a series of formulas and calculations.
Fifteen minutes later, he stepped away from his laptop, his temper just barely leashed. He’d hoped Romy had been the one kid that had slipped through the cracks. Far from it. Alvin had dropped more kids down the cracks than he’d kept out.
In forty years, there had been 167 alerts. Alvin had written up eighty-one of them as false alarms—and every last one was a girl.
Jake knew what could happen to witch kids with uncontrolled magic and no one to stand up for them. Alvin was dead, but someone at Sentinel was going to answer for this.
He would have gone to the mat just for Romy and the three years she lost, but she had eighty friends. And he’d bet not all of them had survived as well as his redhead.
He sat back down at the computer. By the time he walked into Sentinel headquarters, he was going to know what had happened to every last one of them.