Inciting Investigations

Chapter 13

Birdy Anders

Birdy stared at the board in frustration, her feet pacing her throughout the room. Neither Julian nor Badger were there to help her at that point, and she hated to think that she was somewhat glad for that fact. She was so frustrated by the fact that she couldn’t figure out anything.

She knew some baseline information for the case that she had been able to scrounge up from some old police reports, but even those were sometimes a bit vague and lacking in critical detail. She had practically nothing to go off to even begin trying to figure out Tempest’s identity or anything else about him, let alone where he was in the world.

Every single police report and anything else that she could find to be used as some type of evidence usually had to do with her brother. His supposed death, his kidnapping, and tons of other stuff. Although she was grateful that there had been care put into the little crevices of the idea of finding her brother years ago, that stuff didn’t help her right then.

What she needed right then was to find some actual evidence on the man that she was looking for, and unfortunately for her, that didn’t seem to be in high stock. The closest thing they had found so far were some old security tapes from around town that somewhat matched the description of what Badger said he had looked like. But even those weren’t concrete because of the horrible camera quality on every single one of them.

Even if they had been able to use that as some type of conclusive piece of evidence, they couldn’t because it didn’t lead anywhere. It was just random places around, nowhere in particular. It didn’t even show him getting into a car or going to an airport or something. The tapes had been an exciting discovery at first, but was ultimately just another disappointing dud that led absolutely nowhere. Birdy wanted to just rip her hair out.

Nothing was leading anywhere, and although it had only been about a week since even starting this investigation, she already felt like giving up and calling it all quits. She knew there would be tough spots, but she guessed that she had been holding out hope that something big would come quickly that would show her that this was the right thing to be doing.

She wanted to cry because everything felt hopeless, and she didn’t even know why she had bothered in the first place. Every time that she thought something like that, she would try to remind herself what she was doing this for, what she was really doing this for.

This was all for her brother, and truly her entire family as a whole in the big picture would benefit from this, from him being caught and brought to justice. Then, they would all be able to actually heal from everything that they had all gone through. Or, at the very least, Birdy herself would be able to heal from all that she had gone through in those times.

Birdy tried for the millionth times in the past couple of hours to just go over everything one last time before going to bed. Besides, it was a weekend, so it wasn’t even like she had to wake up early for school the next morning. She thought to herself that it would be selfish for her to have the luxury of sleep when she could be working on this all night. She might’ve also thought it was selfish for her to get sleep when her brother still sometimes couldn’t.

She thought that there had to be something there. There had to be something that she was missing. Maybe there was some tiny detail that had somehow slipped her eyes because of her hazy and sleepless mind. She knew logically that she probably wouldn’t catch anything that her brain couldn’t catch without sleep if she didn’t give it sleep. But she was too far gone into this to care about the logic of what her body may or may not need.

Birdy pushed her mind into another working cycle of sifting through every single thing she had found, both on the computer and in real life, so far. Her fingers brushed over the documents and the keys on her board as she scrolled endlessly to see what could’ve possibly been updated on a years old case where the victim had already been found.