That said, it is a hub community with a well-sized, full-service police force, including new facilities and elbow room, which Joe Gunther’s four-desk, single-room office downtown did not.

Leaving the crime search team outside to process Lemuel Shaw’s stolen car, Joe and his unit repaired to the PD’s detective bureau and the hospitality and resources of their erstwhile partner, Lieutenant Detective Ron Klecszewski, who had conjured up pizza and doughnuts alongside the requisite bottomless urn of coffee.

Now, many long, intense hours later, most of it spent online and working the phones, they had transformed a conventional response team into an officially sanctioned task force, including the aforementioned New Hampshire deputy sheriff from Cheshire County named Fred Houston. He’d arrived in the night driving a cruiser loaded with $100,000 worth of ICAC equipment designed to get into and drain the contents of any smartphones, tablets, and computers. A quiet, bespectacled man in his forties, with thinning hair and a disarming smile, Houston had been given an office to himself to spread out a bank of open laptops and mysterious black boxes, into which he methodically downloaded the contents of the electronics found in the Mercedes.

Joe had spearheaded the creation of this newly configured unit, enacting his stated plan to gather all appropriate blessings. Thankfully, everyone contacted knew one another, were used to emergency upheavals, comforted by Joe’s reliability and by his squad members’ having already been awarded Homeland Security TFO federal certifications.

Interestingly to Joe—and he hoped telling of Houston’s character—the New Hampshire ICAC officer had not waited for the ink to dry on all this protocol. Upon first being told of the mere likelihood of an alliance being born, he’d headed to Vermont with his gear. He was not a man given to scrutinizing bureaucratic fine print when a child’s life might be in jeopardy. It turned out, according to Collins, that Fred Houston had been chasing child sex traffickers for over twenty years, replacing—as had Joe and the entire VBI—the standard turf and agency parochialism with a true sense of mission. But not zealotry—both ICAC and VBI acted as support organizations, offering manpower and expertise to all law enforcement organizations in need. Neither tolerated grandstanding by their personnel.

The sun had risen by the time Joe appeared in Houston’s borrowed doorway and leaned against the jamb. “I don’t know if you heard,” he informed his new partner, “but we’ve been blessed by Vermont’s Homeland RAC, who’s supposedly calling his New Hampshire counterpart as we speak.”

RAC was resident agent in charge, who in this case represented Homeland Security Investigations for the state.

“That’s good,” Houston replied, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms above his head. “’Cause we definitely have something to move on here. I usually make two-pronged attacks in these situations. The first to unlock everything and get an idea of what I’ve got. The second to completely drain them so we can see what they contain—photos, contacts, texts—deleted and not, not to mention access any archives in the cloud. Also, geo-locations, visited internet sites, time stamps. That part takes longer, as you can guess. And I’m doing the infotainment system off the car, too, along with its black box—to see what it tells us, especially after Lemuel Shaw reported the Mercedes stolen. By the way, I heard you were asking about why the car went missing for so long. I called around and discovered that after one attempt, the powers that be gave up, figuring the GPS was busted. Human error, once again.”