| Cyber-Gumshoeing |
| Summary: | Douglock gathers information on the homeless girl formerly known as 'Marie' |
| Date: | 2016-08-16 |
| Related: | (2016-08-16) Advice from Matt Murdock |
| NPCs: | urRamsey, multiple copies of the D0UG74$ fork |
| Scene Runner: | NA |
| Social/Plot: | Plot |
| Players: |
 .. .. |
Having just returned from New York City with a picture of the elusive Marie's face and some curious observations of her lawyer, Douglock goes to Doug's room - he still can't think of it as his room yet - seeing it as good as any other place to do this as any other.
Sitting down at the desk, Doug prepares for his task by unarchiving D0UG74$, a gamma fork that served well as a satellite watch dog in the past and makes several copies of him.
("So, let me know if anyone comes knocking on the door and needs me,") he says to urRamsey before establishing a satellite uplink and gliding up it as if it was a reverse zip line, carrying his forks in toe.
("Yes sir,") is urRamsey's reply as his primary departs. In control of Douglock for the time being he turns on the computer and pulls up a stream of classic cartoons from the 70s to watch while he waits.
In orbit, Doug sets the original D0UG74$ to watching over this satellite and then jumps from one to another round the world, leaving a D0UG74$ copy in each to monitor his signals and to watch for signs of 'authority figures' questioning his activity. After circling the globe in a jagged route Doug glides down from a Canadian television satellite toward the computer network of the office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Seattle, Washington and begins probing to see if he can find any back doors left by previous hackers for him to take advantage of.
Unfortunately for Washington, the FBI has been hacked more times than it even knows much less would like to admit. Douglock has no problem making his way into their system.
Doug's first task, once he is in the system, is to find an agent who is on the ropes anyway. Shallow searches of personnel files being marginally less secure than records about private citizens and investigations and all he ends up finding an Agent Davidson who has had a number of short assignments and a few internal investigations flagged on him but still has an active agent status.
(This would be so much easier if I had legitimate access. Maybe Pete can help with that,) Doug thinks to himself as he brute force hacks Agent Davidson's password and uses his profile to take his subsequent actions.
First… to the face recognition program. He uploads Marie's picture into temporary memory on the system and runs a search…
Though Serenity is good at avoiding the cameras in Manhattan, she's not perfect. A rudimentary facial recognition search finds CCTV glimpses of her all over New York. And then he catches a big hit, a child services file for a girl identified only as Marie. It's a shoddy file. It was never followed up on to search out her true identity, but there she is with two foster families listed. They didn't know how old she was so the file hasn't been closed even though she's been missing for three years. The foster parents of record at the time of her disappearance were Natlie and Kyle Mason who are currently caring for two girls: Michelle Williams and Corrine Garner.
Knowing that an attempt to wipe the memory blocks would be too suspicious, Douglock sends a query though the back link for a visual and gets an image to replace Marie's picture with and encrypts that then deletes it normally so that if the FBI does recover that sector they will see the image his eyes were seeing at that moment back in Westchester county.
Next, less important maybe but important enough, he pulls up and records the address for the Masons.
After that Doug again sends Marie's picture though FBI software, to de-age her to about a year or two younger than her scant records from the foster system. Again the original is replaced (with the same image), encrypted and deleted and he runs the de-aged picture though facial recognition… he is certain someone knew her before she was found by the foster system but to be certain he has the system expand its searches to include news paper articles and any digital school records that the FBI has access to though Homeland Security.
Luckily for Douglock, the private school in Brooklyn where Serenity attended has several online archives of old school photos. In the images of the music program events, he finds a younger Serenity in a chorale photo. The Bay Ridge area school ends up having several other images of her online. Finally he gets lucky with an image that is tagged with the names of the girls in it which identifies the girl as one Serenity Monroe.
Again he replaces, encrypts and deletes the image he used. Next, Douglock erases the records of Agent Davidson's account sending queries into the facial recognition system and its use of the photo manipulation software. Finally he slips back out of the FBI system and retreats about half way around the world bringing the diligent but quiet gamma forks along with him.
Doug then establishes new forward connections, ending up in a server bank in Kingston, Jamaica before taking a final satellite hop to New York where he walks past the private school's firewalls as if they weren't even there and he looks for the records they have on Serenity Monroe, whether archived or active.
This is where Douglock finds the treasure trove. The school's old files on Serenity are still completely intact. Serenity Angelica Monroe. Born: July 24, 1998. Mother: Bethany St. Claire Monroe (alumnus) Father: Kingston Lee Monroe. Entered the school Fall, 2004. Transcripts show all As. Graduated the lower school in the Spring of 2011. Advanced to the middle school, Fall 2011. The transcript terminates after the 1st quarter of Serenity's 8th grade year. There is a notation in the file that Serenity has been removed from the school for personal reasons. Those personal reasons are not listed in the file.
(Aha!) Since the mother is an alumnus Doug expends the marginal effort to look though the school's archives for her records as well.
Bethany St. Clair attended the school 25 years prior to Serenity. Parents: Walter and Marie St. Clair. The address listed on both Serenity's file and Bethany's file is the same, a home on 70th Street in Brooklyn. The mother's academic records are not nearly as exceptional as her daughter's. Serenity would no doubt have been the valedictorian of her class had she graduated.
Seeing as that's likely all he'll get, Doug hops back to Jamaica and then retraces his way back to his body, retrieving all the forks who have been monitoring tirelessly without becoming bored since it is not in their nature.
Less concerned about traces on the succeeding searches, Doug doesn't disturb urRamsey and instead searches for information on the last known residence information to see when Bethany and Serenity vacated their home in Brooklyn and its current status.
The home at the address is currently listed as the property of The St. Clair Trust, managed by Howard Kildaire. The home is currently listed as unoccupied. The home is listed as having been unoccupied since August 2012. A cursory search of the records for that period will show headlines for the arrest of Kingston Monroe on charges of embezzlement.
Doug quickly reviews his mental copy of the school transcript and what there was of the foster system record that he got from the FBI, believing he is seeing a correlation with the date the home went unoccupied.
The date of the home becoming unoccupied matches precisely with the date of the arrest, which matches the opening of the foster record for Marie with only a few days separation.
Doug uses the resources of the property management computers that he is residing in for the moment to run a Google search on Kingston Monroe to see if there is any public information on the man's current status.
Kingston Monroe is currently living at a different address in Brooklyn and running the business which he was accused on embezzling from. News records from the time period confirm that he was released from prison only 6 months after his conviction when new evidence was produced to prove that he had been framed. His business seems to be doing well.
Doug follows the links that are surely in the stories to the webpage on Mr. Monroe's business to find out what it is that he does that he was accused of embezzling from.
Kingston Monroe is now the majority owner and CEO of Monroe Holdings which owns a realty company and a construction firm. Monroe Holdings also holds the trust for a sizeable investment portfolio that was opened after Kingston got out of prison.
Satisfied with this, Doug steps out of this system and hunts for the systems of the New York State Child Protective Services and slips though its sieve-like firewall. Once ensconced he looks for the full record on 'Marie' using the names of her foster parents as a guide so he can be certain he finds the correct record.
Marie's file is really poor. It's like no one cared enough to dig into the matter or she just got assigned to an overworked agent. Marie was turned over to social services after an accident which put her in the hospital and left her with no known family. After she left the hospital she was placed with a foster family and returned a month later. She was placed with the second family where she was when she disappeared from custody.
And he steps out of that network and moves closer to home. A quick probing finds that yes indeed, there is a backdoor in the Westchester County sheriff's office computers with a 'signature' Ramsey touch.
(Nice to see that we're similar that way also,) he thinks to himself as he slips into the system and searched the New York State Police records on the accident through the 'proper channels' within the system.
The police report on the accident is simple. The car and a single occupant were burned beyond recognition. The one survivor identified herself as Marie after waking up in the hospital. The cop writing the record indicated he believed the girl was faking amnesia for some reason. No follow-up is listed. The accident was listed as due to natural causes.
Hampered by the laziness or over worked status of the state police, Doug flips out of the system after cleaning up any foot prints his presence may have left and returns to his body fully.
As the scene fades Doug says, ("Oh, I always liked this episode, Ookla's people are great,") to urRamsey.