The Unknown Informant

“Since the task force has only officially been operational for a few days, do you think we’ll get much in the way of new leads or tips from confidential informants?”

“Nope. I’ve gone over the cases that fall under the Cincy office and everything seems pretty tightly coordinated. The local police are working their sources and the undercover agents seem to have a good grasp of the revised priorities. It’ll take a while for anything new to surface.”

“Not true,” Darren contradicted as he walked into the office and shut the door behind him. “Check your email. Something interesting came from an anonymous source. We suspect it might be a tip from an undercover detective associated with one of our cases, but there’s no way to trace it.”

“I’m listening.” Chaz leaned back in his chair as Darren perched on the edge of the work table that took up most of the center of the room.

“The tip is that gangs in the southwestern part of the state are uptight because something big is supposed to happen.” He shrugged. “It’s pretty vague and we can’t narrow down where the tip came from or what cities it’s talking about. It only came to my attention because another analyst I know ran the name of a known gangbanger and it was attached to a file we were working on before the task force was formed. I pulled our reports and that name connects to another name, both in our jurisdiction.”

“This ‘something big’ could be anything.” Chaz studied Darren carefully. “What do your instincts tell you?”

“Expansion, maybe?” The other analyst looked worried. “I want to keep an eye on these two gangbangers. Individually, they’ve caused a lot of trouble and we haven’t been able to define their networks. If they’re working together,” he shook his head, “Ohio might need to form a new task force to target whatever is still standing after Operation Extinguish JC ends.”

Jesse jumped in to say, “We might have a more immediate problem than that.” Both men turned to him. “Who knew to send the tip here? This didn’t come through our public hotline or another law enforcement agency. That means it’s from one of our normal informants. Why didn’t he go through his handler?”

“Because he doesn’t trust him.” Chaz rubbed a hand over his face and through his hair. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling while he digested the information. Eventually, he looked from one man to another. “This is what we know. The tip affects our jurisdiction but might or might not affect the task force, which means we can’t pass it off to another team to analyze until we figure that out. It involves well-established gangs, and this informant thinks it’s a big deal. And he doesn’t trust his handler, which means we can’t either. Where do we start?”

“Smoke out the starting point of the rumor.” Darren stared at his team leader. “That will give us the name of the handler and clarify the threat.”

One glance at each other said they were all in agreement.