👤New target: ????, ?? (The Abduction of Chase)

Chase Miller disappeared three days ago.

The 18-year-old senior was last seen at 6:25PM by his teammates in the locker room of the Silver Creek High School soccer facility.

From reports that were later confirmed, he had stayed a bit longer texting with his girlfriend.

The last message he had sent to her read: “I gotta hit the showers. Talk to u in a bit.”

Nothing was out of the ordinary that particular day for Chase, except the fact that no one saw him again.

———————————————

Flyers went up the next day.

“HAVE YOU SEEN CHASE?” with a photo straight out of his yearbook.

Local news ran highlight reels of his life on repeat, while occasionally a teary-eyed parent, coach or affected friend called out for anyone who knew anything about his whereabouts.

The message was clear: Chase Miller was popular and loved.

And the bad man responsible would get what was coming to him.

———————————————

It was perhaps a not-so-innocent curiosity that made you want to dig deeper.

You pulled up his socials (more so for the alluring view), but you didn’t have to scroll far to find posts that aged poorly considering the circumstances.

A small-town boy spouting conservative takes and leaving a few insensitive comments online wasn't anything unusual, per se.

But a monicker stuck, “Terry the Fairy.”

Apparently, an inside-joke between him and a couple of his mates referenced under an anti-LGBT propaganda post.

It made you wonder: Who was Terry?

———————————————

Boys like Chase don’t just vanish.

Whereas his parents might have expected a ransom call, or, the police, signs of an unfortunate, violent altercation - you had a feeling that there may have been another motivation involved.

One less obvious, and harder to speak aloud.

Passion.

Studying his photos, his lean, athletic frame, his piercing blue eyes and easy, confident smile. It is all that he inspired ...to people predisposed to a certain inclination

And you had your first lead: Terry.

———————————————

You started with the school district’s public-facing site, still running an outdated WordPress build.

Using a known exploit, you got access to the private posts and, from there, found a subdomain link pointing to an unprotected file directory on the school server.

Attendance logs, schedules, grades, computer logs, Wi-Fi passwords, you had access to everything you could possibly want.

░░░░ ACCESS GRANTED ░░░░§

You pulled up Chase’s schedule for that day, but nothing stood out.

He had soccer practice after school, which meant he, his teammates, and their coach were among the last still on campus that evening.

You compiled a list of names.

No one named Terry.

It was a dead end.

…

While closing the dozen or so tabs from your “investigation”, your eye picked up a curious detail in the Wi-Fi logs.

Two devices exiting the network within seconds of each other at 6:48 PM.

23 minutes after Chase was last seen.

No other network activity after that.

Since Chase’s phone was never found on the premises, one of those devices had to be his.

And, whoever the second one belonged to, had to have been with him when they both left the school.

The police had already questioned all of his teammates and the coach.

Also, no faculty was likely at the school during that time according to the schedule.

You isolated the second device ID and ran a query across the remaining logs.

The device connected to the Wi-Fi at the same time nearly every day between 3:20 and 4:40 PM and dropped off around 7:30.

Except for one day, when it clocked out a little early...

Of course.

You went back to the staff records, this time scrolling past the administrative, support and faculty personnel until you found exactly what you were looking for.

      Name: Terrence Knoll

      Position: Custodial Staff

      Department: Maintenance

      Employee ID: 47821

      Date of Birth: 05/17/1978

      Hire Date: 08/12/2011

      Shift: Evening (M–F, 3:30 PM – 07:30 PM)

Nice to meet you, Terrence.

Or do you prefer to go by, Terry?

———————————————

The world assumes monsters are obvious.

And this makes it easy for one that’s Terry-shaped to slip by unperceived.

Terrence “Terry” Knoll lives a quiet life.

Too quiet.

Unmarried, childless, no known family beyond his elderly mother with whom he still lives with, in a modest house just a few miles from the school where he works as a janitor.

The district's records don’t go that far back to confirm it, but it’s likely Terry once walked those same halls as a student.

———————————————

There’s a silver lining for anyone who has been bullied, in that their torment ends with childhood, and then adulthood offers a kind of deliverance.

The best years are ahead.

Terry wasn’t that lucky.

Born and raised in a small town, during a period where his sexual predisposition was more than just frowned upon, he likely endured a miserable youth.

Not being particularly bright or otherwise able to surpass the shortcomings he’d been dealt, he found himself working as a Janitor, 30 years later, mopping the same halls where the seeds of his undoing were first sown.

And “Terry the Fairy” never stopped being harassed or bullied by the very beings that he couldn’t stop lusting after.

All evidence was circumstantial, of course.

And mostly intuition drawn from someone with a not-so-dissimilar predicament in life.

Still, it was enough to steer the police in his direction as a primary suspect in the disappearance of Chase Miller.

And that would’ve been the story of Terry the Fairy.

The unaccomplished cousin of Pogo the Clown.

Not a tale worth retelling.

But did it have to end so predictably?

Until law enforcement caught up, the game was still on, after all.

You set up your VM inside an encrypted Arch distro, routing all traffic through TOR relays.

Then you sent Terrence a short anonymous email with a Telegram link.

“I know what you did, Terry. t.me/+UUC0r5Iz7nc2ZDk0”

Twelve minutes passed before the ping.

terrence.knoll joined the group.