Widening the Net

Cather Hargreaves sat hunched over his computer, typing in yet another request. Right now he wished he could have Toni helping him, but he was working in databases of sensitive information, and privacy regulations made it impossible for him to bring Toni in unless she were actually assigned to deal with a technical problem in access to it.

Even searching them without a work-related reason could be risky, since it could be construed as a breach of privacy. But he was fairly confident that, given the situation, he could justify it in the interest of this young woman’s safety. Already he’d heard some unsettling stories of the unintended consequences of sending everyone home when not all homes were safe havens. Of course he was working on third-hand information — he hadn’t actually talked to Brenda about her friend — but he had no reason to believe that Lou would deliberately exaggerate the risk level of this young woman’s situation in hope of motivating him.

Unlike some people I’ve known, who’d ratchet up the emotional content of their request because they thought it would get me to treat their lack of forethought as my emergency.

So far, he’d largely drawn blanks. He’d verified the locale in which this young woman’s phone was registered, but could not get into the databases that would give location metadata for calls and texts. Apparently that required a warrant issued by a judge, unless one could make the case that the person was in such immediate danger of life and limb that there was no time to go through the normal procedures.

Which I don’t know. Brenda’s afraid she could be in an emotional pressure-cooker that could drive her to self-harm, but we have no actual proof. Until I can get actual location metadata for where her phone is now, the only thing we have to go on is her parents’ past history of ordering her to dump a friend solely on the basis of that friend’s father being a clone, and one admittedly panicky e-mail. For all we know, she may have been able to arrange a safe place to stay, but that situation is not conducive to her being able to casually text or e-mail friends to reassure them of her safety.

Back in his San Bernadino days, he knew a couple of judges who’d tend to be sympathetic to intervention in family-law cases like this. But up here on the Moon, everyone was carefully screened, so you just didn’t have the sort of dysfunctional families that produced the cases that made you cringe just to think about them. So while there were a couple of judges, since human beings being human, they did from time to time need recourse to a court of law, neither of them were apt to see the facts Cather could produce as evidence this young woman could be in danger under her own parents’ roof. If anything, they’d probably see her as the problem, and make remarks about adolescent angst.

And I was really hoping to give Lou something solid, at least enough to tell him whether Brenda should go ahead and e-mail her friend, see if she needed some bucking up, or if any contact would merit extreme caution, perhaps even the mediation of someone who had no obvious connections with any clones.

It would’ve been so much easier if the young woman in question had been from somewhere in Southern California. He still had enough connections in the EMS community down there that he could’ve put out some discreet feelers, at least find out whether she was with her parents or elsewhere.

Instead, he was left trying to figure out what his next step would be. And while Toni was a world-class hacker, she was supposed to be a white-hat hacker — and right now he simply didn’t have enough solid information to put her on the case.

On the other hand, she could give her some pointers. He’d have to ask her tonight, see if there were any angles he’d overlooked.