Page 4 of Protector Unmatched

“If I’d said no, Logan would have known that something was up.”

Pearce rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure, that was the reason you let him drag you back to bed.” He sighed. “That man of yours is insatiable.”

Winter smiled. “He is.”

Clearly, his admonishment went right over her head. Lost cause!

“Well, you’re here now.” He pulled up a window he’d been working on earlier and directed Winter’s gaze to it. “I’ve already narrowed the search down.”

“Wait. What did you do?”

“I went into the census. Since 1880, more than thirty thousand girls were named Daphne in the United States. The name was most popular in 1962.” He glanced at Winter. “There were over eleven hundred babies named Daphne that year. But any Daphne born back then would be too old now. You said she was maybe in her late twenties, early thirties?”

“Yes, but I’m horrible at guessing another woman’s age, so you’d better do a wider search. Maybe from twenty to forty, just to be safe.”

“Okay, no problem.” He switched to another window that showed the Department of Motor Vehicle database for Maryland. He’d hacked into it earlier and left himself a back door to easily get back in. He started typing in his search criteria. “Let’s see: female, age twenty to forty, first name Daphne.” He hit the enter button and watched a little wheel spinning.

“There shouldn’t be too many, right?” Winter asked. “Even if there were a thousand Daphnes born each year for twenty years across the U.S., they can’t all live in Maryland. I mean, it’s a small state.”

“True. But we can’t be certain that she’s from Maryland, or that she has a driver’s license here. If there are no viable hits here, we’ll have to go through the neighboring states’ DMV databases. But let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.” There was no need worrying about something that might not be an issue.

Ding!

The computer chime indicated that the search was done.

“Fifty-four records,” Pearce read. “You said she had black hair. We could narrow the search further.” He was about to type something when Winter stopped him.

“I wouldn’t do that. It could be dyed, and her DMV record could show a different color.”

“Good point. Then let’s go through the records.” He turned the screen a little so that Winter had a better view of it. “Can you see?”

“Yes. Let’s do it.”

Slowly, Pearce pulled up the driver’s licenses of the women in the search results. The first woman was black.

“Eliminate all black women,” Winter said immediately. “She was definitely white.”

“Okay.”

The next photo showed a white woman. Winter leaned in closer. “No, she was way prettier. And her face wasn’t round. Next.”

With every photo, she made other comments that eliminated woman after woman. The possibilities dwindled fast.

“Wait,” Winter suddenly said, and pointed to a photo. “This one looks a little like her, but her hair is all wrong. Can you save that one and we look at her again?”

Pearce nodded and pasted the woman’s record into a separate folder. “Done.”

Five records further and Winter stopped him again. “She looks familiar. But the hair is too short. It makes her face look so different. But if her hair were longer, it could be her.”

“Okay, I’ll put her in the saved pile.”

They had only ten more records to go through. Several of those belonged to African American women, one to an Asian woman, and one to a woman who had a kiwi-sized birthmark on one cheek.

“Nope,” Winter said.

The rest looked nothing like the woman Winter had seen in her vision.

“Okay, back to the two we saved,” Pearce suggested, and opened the file, then placed the two driver’s licenses side by side.