2020-08-03 - Building Evidence

Esme wasn't a detective for nothing. She had gotten a hold of Abitha's number but hadn't quite been able to convince her to meet and still wasn't positive on where she was staying. So Esme did the next best thing. Lingering. She carved out sporadic times of the day - normally around meal times to scope out different places in town she thought the Control Pad owner might hang out. No luck so far, but Esme wasn't giving up any time soon. Currently, she's found herself a table by the window, presuming to read over something on her phone but she's keeping an eye out the window and on the front door to clock people coming in. Maybe today would be her lucky day.

Coffee was the order of the morning. After spending a fair bit of time in the hospital with August the previous night, then doing a fair bit of digital creeping to corner Ravn for a conversation, Abitha was flagging. She figured stopping in for a quick pick-me-up would probably be better, then she could meet her streaming schedule and sleep like the dead after. Everything was fine.

Still in her white hoodie with bulb as air tee and skinny jeans, the small gamer pushes into the Espresso Yourself cafe area, making a beeline for the front counter to order something with far more shots than the lauded creators of lattes intended and cut with far more sugar than was probably healthy.

Ah ha, there she is. Esme casually looks up from her phone when Abitha walks in and puts in an order. She's on duty, wearing a pair of dress pants and a short sleeved shirt, gun and badge unfortunately visible. "Long night?" She asks with a raised brow, setting her phone down. Mostly curious, and offering a friendly enough smile.

’Long night.’ Just about covered it. As Abitha had learned earlier that very night, you sneak up on people with life threatening super powers probably once.

Abitha jumps out of her goddamn skin, the combination of the jarring comment and seeing it was a cop has the gamer’s hands turning into curled claws before she even knows what she’s doing herself. Electrical discharge blossoms to life and crawls down along both hands and arms, her short ponytail poofing out straight behind her. A fluorescent array in the ceiling pops and showers sparks as the sudden ballooning of energy in the area fries the element.

Bright green eyes stare almost saucer-wide at Esme, but for the moment, she holds her ground, breathing hard.

August’s fiancée was gonna be so mad at her.

Esme isn't entirely unfamiliar with the strange, though she hasn't quite been honing her own abilities that she learned about not too long ago. In fact she barely flinches at the display Abitha puts on. Merely looks curious, mildly interested. "You wanna have a seat, Miss Machinae?" She asks, moving right along like a bulb didn't just explode. Though she does spare a bit of a glance towards the barista before lightly kicking out the chair across from her. "It'll only take a few minutes. I promise."

Abitha seems to realize what she was doing, a look of panic made at the barista. She starts to wildly shake her hands, like this was a T-Swift video, swearing in faux pain like the electricity actually hurt. It was a horrible act that wasn’t fooling anyone. The arcs of lightning fade, though.

“Damn, that coulda really hurt someone! Guess I just got shocked! Ha!” She speaks stage loudly, then turns a glare on Esme. She takes one step toward the woman, appearing non-threatening, but whispers through gritted teeth, “Ok, if it wasn’t clear after I ignored your first three calls, I’m not talking to cops. What do you want?”

"Yeah. Probably some electrical issues. Might have to get that checked out. " Esme commented idly. She held a smile as Abitha whispered at her. "Well, if you hadn't ignored my calls we'd have been done already." She countered easily enough. "All I wanna do is ask you a couple questions about your misfortune. You answer my questions, you won't ever have to hear from me again unless you get yourself wrapped up into something else." Motioning to the empty seat across from her again. "Please, join me. And of course, bring your coffee."

Abitha gives Esme a wide-eyed, tilt-headed look that seems to say, 'Oh I'ma get my coffee.' before narrowing her eyes again. She looks Esme down then up. After a moment she holds up a finger.

"We're not getting past word one unless you tell me if you're with Liu's people." It seemed a simple enough thing to inquire, but Esme likely felt something else at work, Abitha's powers not totally packed away yet.

Esme narrowed her eyes ever so slightly as she felt that telltale sign of glimmer working, though it didn't feel like it quite manifested perhaps? "The only people I'm with is me, myself, and I. And whatever shred of the law is left in this damn down." Esme said plainly. "All I wanna know is who you pissed off enough and what over, for them to feel the need to burn down a game store of all places. There has got to be bigger fish to fry, yeah?"

There's a moment of Abitha inhaling, then sighing through her nose, her look intense, but a feeling of frustration coming from her. Whatever she was looking for, she didn't get, but... Well she couldn't tell the woman was lying, so maybe that was how it worked? It was a new thing, like a finer control of her emotional reading, and she wasn't quite sure she had the hang of it yet. She walked to the counter and retrieves her coffee, then unceremoniously sits down at Esme's table. "Yeah, there's gotta be. I don't know who that is, or why it was me. Two cops tried to shake me down for credit card info, and I said no. Next night..." She lifts a hand and makes a wavy-fingered motion with her hand to imitate fire. "The way they acted, the timing, no way I thought it was coincidence. Your captain knows the cops and the people that burned my place down are involved." There, the most succinct way she could state it all. She was playing ball, even though it's the same info she could get normally, Abitha would think.

"Were they trying to get specific credit card info? Or just anything you were willing to give up?" Esme asked, tapping a bit on her phone and pulling up a little Note app. "I've got a suspect, but he's playing hard to get. " She allows, looking back up towards Mac. "Let's pretend I haven't read your report already. Tell me about the guys shaking you down. What'd they look like. All that good stuff. If you saw any tattoos they might have. She leaned on the table lightly. "And anything at all else that you might have thought didn't matter then but looking back was out of place or suspicious prior to the cops trying to shake you down." Esme studied the younger woman for a beat.

The side of Abitha's lips pulls into a flat line as she considers Esme's question, green eyes fixated on the policewoman even as the gamer is lost in recollection. After a moment, She pulls out her phone and starts to fiddle and go through some pages.

"Lemme get your email." She asks as her thumbs guide her through creating a ghost account, share a copy of the files to it, and then gets ready to enter Esme's. "Cause 'Pretend I didn't read your report' sounds cool, but probably means you don't know much of anything yet. I didn't see Javier take notes, and he seemed to take one of the revelations personally..."

After everything's set up, she sets the phone down and sips her coffee. "They showed me a picture of the guy they wanted the credit card info of, said he bought a PS4 from me. I don't know how they knew that, but I didn't recognize him. When they were leaving, they said some shit like, "You should have helped us when you had the chance." No one seemed to think that guy was significant, so I haven't really done a deep dive to see if that's even true. Acne Face was Harvey Liu, dog fight gambler. I didn't get the other officers info, but he's on camera." She takes a breath, another sip, eyes looking at the top of her mug as if trying to seem dismissive.

"The next night, when I was getting a drink across at the Pourhouse, different guys broke into my shop and burned the place down when they couldn't find what they were looking for." Sip. "I built my own security system, they couldn't crack my PoS, find the recorder or wipe anything."

She pauses for a long moment again, "And I've mind-melded with Javier and August already in the last week over shit that's gone down, so... Pass if you want info that way."

Esme rattled off her email address - a personal one, not the precinct one. She had very little trust for anyone in the department right now so it was better to be safe than sorry. "You gonna send me a picture of the guy they're looking for?" She asked, mostly curious to see if that was part of what she was emailing or not. "I'm sure I can pinpoint who it was for my own benefit. You're right. I know very little and I'm trying to get the big picture so I can put all the pieces together. Because I know there's more to all of this that just what I see." She frowned a moment.

"I don't suppose you saw a sniveling, scrawny blonde in your shop at all during the days leading up to it?" Esme asked as she made a couple more notes on her phone. Esme shook her head and offered up another smile. "I've no interest in any kind of mind melding or otherworldly tactics. I trust your word. "

Blink. Abitha looks surprised at that question, “I mean... The second officer was blonde. He seemed like he just wanted to impress Liu. Wasn’t as forceful as Liu. The said something like ’Unit 409 in service’ as they were leaving. Javier said a name... started with an H, that it might be.” Again, Abitha fiddles with her phone, seems to be messing with a slider and a video feed, then makes an expanding motion with her finger, she flips the phone around to show Esme, “You talking about this guy? And no, I didn’t get a picture, the one they showed me was really blurry to begin with.” The bit about a personal email was a sword that swung both ways in Abitha’s opinion. Dirty cops could be a concern, or Esme still might be one. Abitha wasn’t sure she was getting that feeling, though.

Esme looks down at the video and nodded. "Yeah. That's him." She scowled lightly and made another note. "Send that to me too please." Straightening, she focused back on Abitha. "Just knowing he was there will be very helpful for me." Offering a smile. "I'm sorry to have cornered you like this but I want to put all the nails in this coffin and bury it about 100 feet under ground before any more buildings start burning or more people start getting accosted." She tapped a couple more things into her phone and then stowed it away in her pocket for now. "Anything else at all you can think of that might help?"

“Link’s already in your inbox.” Abitha comments wryly. It was a complete account of the nighttime hassle and from the time the criminals broke in until the cameras gave out from the heat. “And I think you’re a little late. August’s been stabbed, some bartender has been shot, at least two of Sparrow’s friends have gotten shot at or run off the road.” Abitha rattles off the list of disturbingly related events blandly. Seems her idea of the cops doing something wasn’t the best.

“Liu has gambling problems in his past related to dog fighting, and does a lot of deep web black market deals...” Abitha leaves that one hanging out there, gauging interest. Honestly, she didn’t even know where she was going to go with that info. Pulling a thread on the deep web was liable to get you hacked or for the whole tapestry to unravel.

"Thanks." Esme nodded, planning to add the video to her 'review and then send to forensics' pile that was steadily growing. Her brow furrows as Abitha rattles off the incidents. "Well, unfortunately I've been out of the loop until just recently. But now that I'm in it? I'm gonna put a stop to this or die trying." A bit over confident maybe. She sighed. "Hopefully without the dying part though." Glancing off a moment out the window and then focused back to the woman. "Gambling and the Dark web, huh? Good to know." She sits back in her seat. "We don't have to get into that whole can of worms in the middle of a coffee shop. But, you've been extremely helpful Miss Machinae." She slides a 5 dollar bill over to her. "A reimbursement for your coffee. And the inconvenience."

Abitha reaches and slides that five-spot back toward Esme, "Yeah, thanks but, we're all in this." She sits back and sips from her cup again, "If you know blondie, I could take his info, see if I can find stuff out on him like I did Liu. If there's any common threads or anything?" She asks hopefully, wanting another direction to dig, "You can text me at that number you were calling. I'll respond next time." Surprisingly helpful, this one. At least now.

Esme gets to her feet, but leaves the five on the table. "I already know there's a thread...but if I can't make him see the light with what I've already got? I might just take you up on that. Keep an eye on that phone." She flashes another smile before heading back out into the heat.