xp_logs | Bleeding. Doug and Marie-Ange

Late night in the office, and over dinner, Doug and Marie-Ange make a breakthrough on two of the five W's regarding Jennie and Marius. Where... and Who.

Doug leaned back in his leather office chair from the glow of two triptych monitors that he had put together to make a curved bank of six monitors. Stretching his arms for the ceiling, he rolled his neck, hearing several pops. Leaning back forward, he looked at the clock on his desktop and winced. Another late night in the office, and he'd forgotten to eat again.

Getting up from his desk, he padded down the hall and leaned up against the doorjamb of another office. He grinned in slightly punchy fashion and indicated the cheap plastic globe on her desk. "Spin the globe, Angie, it's time to play 'what country's food are we eating tonight'. Thirty-nine different countries in delivery distance, and if it's not here in half an hour, we get ten bucks off the bill."

Looking up from the ADA documents she'd been trying to summarize, Marie-Ange snickered, and gently spun the globe, just for the sake of seeing what came up. "Have you eaten at all today?" She asked. "Perhaps we should add "care and feeding of the staff' to Mark's job description and have him go get lunches like secretaries used to do twenty years ago."

"Hm?" Doug said, momentarily distracted by the spinning of the globe. He shook his head and scrunched his eyebrows up in concentration. "...maybe?" he answered after a long pause. "I seem to remember Amanda trying to force-feed me a bagel." He thought again. "That might have been yesterday morning, though," he admitted sheepishly.

"You are going to waste away to nothing but a pair of sneakers and your glasses." Marie-Ange scolded gently. "Were you quite serious about randomly picking? Because the globe seems to have stopped on somewhere in the Caribbean." She prodded it gently. "I suppose Cuban could do, if nothing else. Do we have a menu for the Cuban deli?"

"Angie, we have menus from -everywhere-," Doug replied, ducking out to fetch the appropriate menu from the folder of menus by the office kitchenette. "Deli Cubano," he said, handing the menu to Marie-Ange. "I already know what I want," he said with a chuckle.

Ordering took almost no time at all. It never did, if Doug placed orders over the phone. Marie-Ange was torn, for a moment. Go back to her office, and finish her work, or take a much needed break. "What are you working on?" She asked, out of lack of anything much else to talk about.

Doug waved a hand, displaying a bit of frustration, but only because Marie-Ange knew his mannerisms well. "I've been working on trying to find Jennie and Marius, since Remy asked," he replied. "And they're not on the grid -anywhere-. It's getting a little vexing. They can't possibly be that good at disappearing. They're definitely -not- in France, that much I can say for certain. But that leaves, oh, the entire rest of the planet to cover." He didn't want to think about the alternative, that two Xavier's alumni were lying forgotten in a ditch somewhere.

Marie-Ange leaned against the kitchenette counter, frowning. "If they are not in France, much of my knowledge is not going to help. If you were a teenager, and had run away from your school and parents, where would you go?" She asked thoughtfully. "I suppose they have checked the hospitals, and some of the shelters?"

Doug pursed his lips, then chuckled dryly. "When I was a little kid, and I thought my parents were being unfair and I thought running away would make them see it my way, it was always someplace silly like down the block to one of my friends' houses. You know, the first place my parents would think to look." He shook his head. "Wherever they are, they've obviously done a good job of covering their tracks, and it's not someplace they'd obviously go."

Marie-Ange shook her head. "And they, neither of them, are little children." She frowned, pulling out her braid and rebraiding the ends as she thought. "Jennie, I could see in a shelter, or a youth hostel, but Marius? No. No, Marius grew up wealthy. I think he would want to keep up the style of living he was used to, yes? So, where do you go if you are young, and used to being rich and trying to earn money?" She looked up at Doug, meeting his eyes. "What would you do, if you needed to earn money fast?"

Doug flipped a hand almost dismissively at the question. "Vegas," he said simply. With his mutant powers of pattern recognition, and body language, he could make a killing at the... His eyes widened as he had what he was starting to call a "click moment", where several seemingly unrelated pieces of a puzzle suddenly fit together and showed him a solution. "Monaco," he said softly in wonder. "The footage we got from Interpol, worrying about the possibility of a mutant gambling ring. What's Jennie's power?" he asked rhetorically, already halfway down the hall to his office.

"Luck. Probability. -Merde-. They are gambling." Marie-Ange nearly lost one of her shoes standing up suddenly. "They must be. Do you still have the video?" It was a question did did not need answered. Doug archived everything he possibly could, and what he did not, Remy or Pete did. "Oh, and .. she would know how to get past any guards, Jennie grew up in Las Vegas, no?"

Doug was hardly listening as he entered his office. Sometimes the answer really -was- that obvious. They'd know soon enough. Picking up a headset from where he'd laid it on his desk, he fitted it to his ears and lowered the boom mike to his lips. "Wake up," he told the computer, his elaborate screensaver disappearing from the six screens. "Archival footage, Monaco," he instructed, and a folder of video clips opened on his desktop. "Sort by timestamp."

Marie-Ange followed a few steps behind, only to backtrack hastily as the buzzer from the office's front door sounded. "The food is here, I will be right back!" she yelled, hoping Doug wasn't already too deep into the video footage to not hear here. Or that if he was, the smell of the food would bring him out of his hyper concentration state when she came back.

---

Doug had indeed been in his "hyper concentration state", but he had eaten mechanically when Marie-Ange put food in front of him while continuing to scour every bit of footage from the casino in Monaco. So far, everything in the footage had seemed entirely normal. No furtive glances from any of the patrons, nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Doug's typical zoned-out state was now so familiar to Marie-Ange that she had more than one way of dealing with it. In this case, pulling his plate of food away so he had to look away from the screen to get it. "What are you seeing? Tell me how I can help?"

Doug blinked rapidly and shook his head roughly to try and bring himself out of his fugue. He grabbed the plate back and continued to eat before turning back to the screen. He indicated the screens, where footage from several different angles was running simultaneously. "Mostly I'm looking for anything unusual," he said. "Someone who looks overly nervous and furtive, that sort of thing."

"How can you see anything on all those screens?" Marie-Ange pulled her chair towards the desk, leaning in to try to look closer at the screens. "That gives me a headache just trying to look at them all at once. How can you follow -anything-?"

Doug pointed at three camera shots that were enlarged compared to the other ones, but carefully did not touch the screens themselves. "These are three different angles of the same table," he explained. "So it's not like I'm trying to watch the entire casino floor all at once. That would probably be beyond even me," he said with a wry grin.

"But nothing here is out of place for you?" Marie-Ange asked. "How do you even know what clips to pick? They gave us.. I am sure that they gave us at least a week of tape. How much do we need to view to know if they were there?" She hoped it was not the whole thing.

Doug shook his head. "I have clips matching up with the time frame of large payouts from the house," he explained. "That's what Interpol is most interested in. Nobody is really interested in Grandma winning a couple hundred euros at baccarat. What we're looking at is payouts of five thousand euro and above. The big hits." He paused in his explanation as something on the screen pulled his attention. He leaned forward sharply, his elbow brushing up against Marie-Ange's. He swallowed and tried not to show the jolt it had given him. Tapping one of the secondary camera angles with a stylus, he whispered into his microphone, bringing it to the center of the display. Tracing a hasty rectangle on the screen, he tapped twice in the center and the edges straightened out. "Enlarge," he murmured, and the indicated area filled the screen.

Marie-Ange went tense at the contact, torn between edging away slowly and trying to play it as if she had not noticed. "So.. this is just one of the large payouts?" She asked, knowing she was just repeating what Doug had already said. It was something to say, to keep talking rather then sit in awkward silence.

Locked back in on the happenings on the monitor, Doug completely missed Marie-Ange's reaction, struggling to keep his own breath under control. It had been almost like an electric shock. It wasn't so easy to shake off, though. Doug thought it might have been the first time the pair had touched since their breakup. "Yeah, big payout at the blackjack table," he said distractedly. He peered at a trio of young people at one of the tables. Something felt...off...about their body language. He drew another rectangle and repeated the enlarging process.

"But that is too many people.." Marie-Ange said, leaning in to try to look at the screen. "And they are still too small to make out. Why do casinos not use better cameras? Or why did this casino not use them?" She asked, and then shook her head slowly. "Although, If I were going to play a casino and take much of their money, I would pick one I knew had less security than the others, yes?"

Doug shrugged in frustration, and as he leaned forward as well, his shoulder brushed up against Marie-Ange's for a second. He very carefully did not shy away violently. He tapped the screen with his stylus. "Enlarge," he said. "Enlarge." He leaned back and made a vexed noise. "Get in too close and the footage gets all grainy and impossible to make out. Ugh."

Marie-Ange frowned. "Can you ... move the screen? That is, can you make it face the other way?" She stood, and moved in front of Doug's desk, only a touch too fast to be completely natural. "Perhaps I can.. then it is not just pixels? It may still be rough, but not so blocky.."

"Hm. That might help," Doug said slowly and consideringly. "And the screens are pretty easy to move," he continued, indicating how each of the screens could be moved around on a set of articulated pivoting metal arms. "Just show me how you want them."

"Just so that I can see and stand up." Marie-Ange said. Once the screens were moved to face where she was standing, she leaned against the desk, and concentrated on the paused image.

In front of her, only a few feet high, the figures and blackjack table appeared in ghostly semi-solid form. She made a small noise, and the image started to focus itself. The marks on the cards, the sharp edges of the table coming into clarity.

"That's great," Doug said. He stood up as well and walked around the image. He frowned and leaned closer. "Can you enlarge this half of the table?" he asked hesitantly, waving his hand around the image to indicate where he meant.

For a moment, Marie-Ange looked at Doug in disbelief. It was hard enough to make the image from a video. She had to guess at so many details that weren't visible, and try to fill them in with just a guess. "I can try..." She said. The first construct dissolved, the figures falling into the table, and the whole scene collapsing into varicolored ectoplasm.

The second image took longer to form, rough shapeless almost humanoid figures rising out of the existing remains of the first slowly. Marie-Ange frowned, hands buried in the end of her hair, mentally filling in her best guess at the details. A shadow became a hairband, oddly shaded lines became bracelets, or rings. Hair filled itself in, faces became more distinct, if doll-like and vacant in expression.

Doug shook his head. "No, that doesn't look like them," he said after a moment of analysis. "Back to the footage." He maneuvered the monitors back to their original curved line, and queued up another piece of footage, beginning the process all over again.

---

Seven clips later, Marie-Ange half wanted to scream. Or cry. She'd thought enlarging the video was a good idea, and it was, but after so many clips, she was tired, and her head and neck were starting to hurt. She'd given up on standing after the first three, and was slumped in the spare chair, her elbows on her knees, and chin in her cupped hands. "Another, yes?" She asked tiredly.

Hearing the weariness in Marie-Ange's voice, Doug's matter-of-fact runthrough of the video clips faltered. He turned from the monitors to look at her. He flexed his hand several times in indecision before reaching out and placing it gently on her knee. "It's up to you," he said quietly. "If you tell me you've reached your limit, we can stop and come back to it tomorrow. This isn't worth overexerting yourself, the footage will still be there in the morning." He yawned and looked at his wristwatch. "Besides, I'm plenty tired myself. We've been at this for quite a while."

"I think I have enough for at least one more." Marie-Ange said. She was tired, and sore, and her head was starting to throb, but she'd had headaches before, and would again. She pulled her chair closer to the screen, and stared down the video clip. As they had several times before, the images pulled themselves out of the floor, details only filling themselves in once the clip itself had been reproduced.

Doug stood up and walked around the images again, trying to get a feel for the scene from every angle. There was something about this one that seemed like they might have something. "That group," he said definitively, pointing at a trio of young people sitting at the blackjack table. Yes, he knew they were looking only for Marius and Jennie, but there was something about the third person seated with them... "Enlarge them."

Marie-Ange was in no state to question Doug's request, and so, once again, the images slumped over as if they were made of wet clay, features and clothes and limbs sloughing off into the wispy ectoplasm. And then, almost while the image was falling apart, it began to reform, a foundation of rough humanoid figures appearing, and then clarifying into a group. Two men, one with what Marie-Ange filled in as dreadlocks, and a young woman with long pale hair.

"That? Is a truly hideous dress," Doug said with a shudder. "Are you sure that's right?" he asked jokingly. There was something wrong about the dreadlocked man, something that Doug couldn't put his finger on due to the grayscale nature of the footage. And the mystery third figure almost looked like...Doug shook his head. The only person he could recognize whose eyes glowed like that would be... "Enlarge him," he said suddenly, pointing at the third figure.

Marie-Ange pinched the bridge of her nose, and closed her eyes tiredly. "That is not Marius and Jennie. That man does not have a breathing mask, and she is probably blonde." She opened her eyes again, to examine the image closely, just for the sake of humoring Doug. "And if I make these images any larger, you will be able to count Manuel's fencing scars."

And then she fell silent, mouth open. "Please tell me that is not Manuel..." she said quietly. "No. That cannot possibly be Manuel de la Rocha."

Doug stuck his tongue out in concentration and looked at the trio again. "No, it is Manuel. I don't know what he's doing there, but he's obviously with them. Look at the body language, how close they stand to each other." He leaned in. "And there's darker hairs coming out from under the blonde ones. It's Jennie, all right, she's just wearing a wig. They're trying to go incognito."

Marie-Ange shook her head. "What if.. this only looks like Manuel because I am trying to guess at the details? I fill them in as I would in a painting, I do not know for sure if that is what is really captured by the film." She shrugged tiredly. "And I am tired and making some guesses. It looks like Manuel, but ... what if it is not?"

Doug frowned for a moment before shaking his hand in a negating fashion. "Too many details add up. Big payout at the blackjack table, something like..." He checked the papers he had strewn on his desk briefly. "Twenty five thousand euro." He pointed at the group of young adults. "Three people who look very much like Xavier's alumni. Yes, Marius does not have a breather, but maybe he finally adapted to his mutation. The girl looks very much like Jennie if she were trying to disguise herself a bit to escape notice. And that -has- to be Manuel. The scars, the glowing eyes..." He shrugged. "It may not be one hundred percent, but it's pretty close in my book."

"Worth investigating further, perhaps." Marie-Ange agreed. "But in the morning? If I do not get some sleep..." She yawned, covering her mouth with her hands. "I will not be any use tomorrow at all. But, I would bet money that the third person was Manuel. Even with my made up details.." She relaxed, and let the image dissolve as she turned to face Doug's monitors. "He looks a bit like Manuel on the video too, I think."

Doug covered a large answering yawn of his own with both hands. "No, it can wait a few hours," he said. "Sleep is good." He made an abortive motion to touch Marie-Ange's arm gently, but pulled his hand back suddenly and turned to his workstation. "I'll just send Remy an email and give him what we came up with," he said quickly to cover his nervousness. "I'll see you in the morning."