“You wouldn’t do it.” the bartender stared at Caroline, panting: “This is a police station.”
“Do what?” Caroline laid back on her chair and asked as if nothing happened: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. ”
“This is a violation of the Division’s code of conduct.” the bartender spoke through her teeth and with her hands clenched into fists: “You can’t treat suspects this way.”
“This is a civilian police station, no one here works for the Division, not even me.” Caroline said: “But you did just assault and attempt to kill me and a civilian law enforcement officer. So, what I think is, the battle we had at your bar should be looked at this way: I and Thomas back there were aiding local civilian police investigating a local crime matter that involved superpowered criminals, you attacked us and tried to get us killed. We fought back and kicked all of your asses but still barely escaped. And what you just experienced is probably just the remnant of my power in your body acting up, which I have no obligation to relieve you of, because you’ve been such a pain in the ass to us this whole time.”
The bartender continued panting while staring at Caroline, her eyes flickering as if she was thinking about something.
“So, what do you say?” Caroline exchanged looks with Detective Kuhn and said: “You want to do your job for a better boss and better food? Or do you want to try your luck with the actual Division, or be let outta here and see how those who own your former boss will treat you? I am not familiar”
“What do you need to know?” after a long sigh, the bartender relented: “And I want to be safe right away. I don’t care what you offered to the men, when you find out what the ledger says, I want myself out of here and in actual safety.”
“A wise choice.” Caroline smiled: “And I assure you, it will be the safest place for you, more than you will ever imagine. ”
“Why don’t you tell us how to read that ledger?” Detective Kuhn let out a gentle sigh of relief.
--------------------------------
“The correct way to read the ledger.” Caroline and Detective Kuhn walked into the lab in which Thomas was still talking with some of the lab tech, and with a piece of paper in their Detective Kuhn’s hand: “It’s coded according to an old version of the yellow pages. Do you happen to have one of those at this precinct?”
“Yeah, yeah, I believe we have some in the archive room.” one of the techs took a look at that piece of paper handed to him by Detective Kuhn and said: “It kinda makes sense now - we thought they were all addresses and phone numbers. Damn you Thomas, you can’t just nerd-snipe us like that.”
“Hey, when presented with a coded puzzle, just say no!” Thomas laughed out loud.
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With the help of a very old and dusty copy of yellow pages and the lab techs, Caroline and Thomas were able to read through the whole ledger and decipher almost all information written on it - it contained a long list of names to different places, descriptions on their addresses or how to find them, the persons of contact, history of trades and sales, and even potential next points of sales to which whoever that was in charge of the sales of these “special products” were planning to expand to.
“Wait, this ‘Corin Place’ in Woodside, is it the same as THE Corin place in Woodside? Where the civil war of the Corin family took place?” Caroline pointed at one of the “potential next points of sales” entry and asked.
“Let me check.” one of the lab techs did a search on his tablet and nodded: “Yes, seems so - wow, around twenty bodies found? No wonder they need a lot of tech support backup.”
“Owen, can you help us put these places on a map?” Detective Kuhn said to one of the lab techs: “We’d want to map out some suspected routes of distribution, and see if we can find a central dispensing base.”
“On it.” the lab tech took a few pictures of the notes of which they wrote the decoded address, and then used a handwriting recognition software to convert those note entries to actual texts, parsed them as addresses, then located them on a map and finally projected the map onto a big screen in the lab. This was a map of all the surrounding area, spanning across multiple cities, with red dots signifying different addresses.
“Well, I wished Jason could have stayed slightly longer in engineering school.” Caroline stared at the screen and chuckled.
“Okay - these places are all pretty dispersed, so they could be using some pretty sneaky way of distribution.” Owen narrowed his eyes and said: “Where’s the bar where you said that you found this ledger?”
“Here.” Thomas pointed at the screen while looking at a piece of note he had in his hand: “This is also one with a quite a lot of sales - which is understandable, the place is crawling with vamp - I mean junkies.”
“Yeah - assuming that smaller points of sales are extended from older, more established points of sales, we can add weight to the map.” Owen input some more numbers into his tablet, and some of the dots on the map grew bigger while some grew smaller. There was one particular dot that was particularly big.
“Hmm, we should look at that. That could be the source.” Caroline pointed at the biggest red dot.
“Nonono, not there.” Owen said and drew on the map, which got displayed on the screen as a blue circle in an relatively empty place surrounded by a few mid-sized dots and had some bigger red dots in the outer layer, including the biggest red dot: “I would check here - organized drug dealers rarely deal drugs in locations close to their source to avoid attracting attention, but they would start with smaller points nearby and then expand from their. This area kinda fits the pattern.”
“And it’s an area of abandoned warehouses and data centers.” the other lab tech said: “Kinda fits the profile.”
“Good, good.” Thomas patted the two lab techs on their shoulders: “You’ve been too helpful, thank you very much!”