Murder Theory

by Andrew Mayne

  My roadside camera caught a sheepish photographer being escorted out of the woods while a deputy held on to his camera.

  While some news trucks have gathered by the overlook where I guessed they’d want to do stand-ups, Ward has established a media base camp two miles away at a ranger station. His deputies routinely chase off anyone on the ridge trying to take photos.

  Ward himself has made regular appearances and said precisely nothing to the frustrated media. All he says is that it’s an ongoing investigation and they’re working with other law-enforcement agencies.

  While he clamped down on his own deputies after the leak of the photos, other people have been talking. It’s hard to keep a secret like this from your friends and family.

  All the large details I planted have made it into the news, including several that I didn’t. Oddly, Ward has started circulating a sketch of a person of interest.

  I panicked when I first heard about this. Did someone get a glimpse of me? Was I going to get arrested in my motel at any moment—a strange replay of what happened back in Montana?

  Thankfully the sketch looks nothing like me. In fact, it bears a strong resemblance to the actor Lance Henriksen—which makes me suspect that someone decided to put himself at the center of attention by claiming to have seen something.

  I get up from my computer and decide to take a walk around the motel. While leaving the screen takes a certain amount of willpower, thanks to the wonderful world of open-source software and GitHub, I was able to cobble together a Python script that grabs frames as they come in, finds faces, and categorizes them.

  I’ve counted 314 unique faces in the media area. One hundred and two inside the outer perimeter. And twenty-seven at the crime scene itself.

  I’ve been able to attach names to less than half of them through public records and social media. The others I’ve given titles like Kentucky State Police Sergeant 3 or County Official 8.

  What I’ve been paying the most attention to is anyone who doesn’t look like they belong. However, so far everyone seems to know everyone else and I’m able to identify which agency they work for.

  There’s no way that Jekyll is local to here. The only outsiders that I’ve seen on the crime scene are FBI agents, and they seem to know each other. None of them is connected to the other crime scenes from Gallard’s files, as far as I can tell.

  That said, I haven’t been watching twenty-four hours a day. It’s possible I’ve missed someone. I’ll have to go back and identify all the faces later on to be sure. My biggest area of focus, other than watching for some random interloper on the crime scene, has been studying the faces of the people in the media area. As I watch them watching the crime scene, I’ve wondered whether Jekyll could be posing as a freelancer. Heck, he may actually be a freelance photographer who works these scenes under different names. That would give him a reason to go there and help him slip under the radar.

  I’d bet anything I’ve already seen his face—he could have been holding a camera or doing something innocuous while he surveyed the area.

  When the deputy caught the photographer in the woods, I got excited until I was able to look him up and rule him out. No surprise. Jekyll is cleverer than that.

  I step outside into a cold breeze and stretch, letting the bracing wind wake me up. The glowing signs of a Waffle House and a Taco Bell beckon to me in the night. I’ve already had my fill of Cracker Barrel takeout.

  I walk down the narrow strip between the parking lot and the rooms, catching a glimpse of the few inhabitants of the motel. In the five rooms with their lights on, four of them have their televisions playing. I can never stand to have one on in the background, but I guess that’s one of the ways that I’m wired differently.

  The newspaper dispenser by the office has a copy of the Lexington Herald-Leader with the headline “Police Silent about Butcher Creek Butcher.”

  I have to say that I’m disappointed that the media ran with “Butcher Creek Butcher,” because it’s so redundant. Oh well.

  The newspaper also has front-page stories about previous crime sprees in the area that I had no idea about, going all the way back to the time of Daniel Boone.

  My phone buzzes, and I realize it’s Jillian calling me.

  She’s already sent five unanswered text messages.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I ask.

  “I know you’re real busy, but Sheila has been calling me, trying to get hold of you.”

  Damn. I’ve been putting off my office manager for too long. In fact, I haven’t spoken to her in three days. “Did she say what about?”

  “Other than the fact that you’ve been MIA? No. I just assumed that you’re working on the Butcher Creek thing. Are you trying to track him down?”

  “Uh, in a roundabout way.” I check the time. “Let me call Sheila. Bye, love you.” I hang up in a hurry and probably increase the odds that my clothes will end up on the front lawn.

  “Cray, where the hell are you?” Sheila demands the moment she answers.

  “Deep-cover thingy. What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on? You’re about to lose the lab and everything else if you don’t get your ass back here ASAP.”

  “Hold on. What’s the deal?”

  “General Figueroa. He’s been trying to reach you. Apparently, he’s pissed and coming here.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Damn it. Jekyll could show his head at any moment. While my cameras can still capture him on video, physically capturing him could prove impossible if I’m a thousand miles away.

  I want to call Figueroa myself, but I know trying to placate him over the phone at this point won’t work. Clearly Todd the Rat has been getting into his ear. I can only imagine what he’s been telling him. Time to go back to Texas and solve yet another crisis.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  BLACK OPS

  Todd Pogue drops into a chair across from me in the conference room with a stack of folders, waiting for me to ask why he’s here. I just look up from my laptop and nod, then return to work. General Figueroa is due to arrive any moment, and I don’t want Todd to know to what degree I’ve been aware of his machinations.

  On the flight back to Austin, I tried to figure out what Todd’s angle was. Why did he seem so sure he could go around me and win over the general? Somewhere over Arkansas it hit me: the general’s aide, Lieutenant Osman.

  Osman has visited the lab a few times but always acted unimpressed. For some reason, he hasn’t taken to my sparkling personality or my government research. I’m certain that Todd made contact with Osman behind my back and bent his ear, probably telling the lieutenant that everything he suspected about me was true.

  While it would look bad if Todd went directly to Figueroa after I talked to him, undermining me to Osman would be equally effective. Osman could tell the general that his “insiders” had been informing him that Dr. Theo was incompetent and not following directives—technically true. This would then set Todd up in the perfect position, not to get his own lab, but to take over mine.

  If the DoD decided to investigate me, I’d be given a few options. The least painful one would be to let the lab continue under the supervision of someone else—likely Todd.

  Diverting my attention from Jekyll at this point is killing me. It’s only the fear of losing the lab that got me onto the plane. And while the lab feels increasingly like a noose around my neck, I’m not sure what I’d do without it.

  One thing is sure: I’m not going to let Todd take it away from me. I’ll burn it to the ground before I let that prick have it.

  I finally acknowledge Todd’s presence. “I’m glad you’re here. We have some things to go over with the general.”

  “That we do,” Todd replies.

  He either suspects I have no idea he’s the reason behind the visit, or that I’m going to try to defend myself in front of Figueroa when the general broadsides me with Osman’s inside report.

  I thi
nk what Todd wants more than anything is for me to accuse him of going behind my back in front of the general, making me look like I don’t have control of my office.

  What I plan to do is to sidestep that entirely. Hopefully I can bluff my way through the terrorist-gene-project checkup. Thankfully I did a little more planning than Todd knows. It might be enough if my other plan doesn’t nuke him from orbit at the beginning. The trick is to control the general’s attention. If I can’t do that, I could be out of the lab in an hour. If the general is feeling particularly aggressive, he could have me audited and even put under investigation for misappropriation of funds.

  While I have clean books, as far as I know, if Todd really is the son of a bitch I suspect, he could have put some booby trap in there I don’t know about, like ordering ten MacBooks sent to my house, billed to a DoD project.

  Sheila opens the door, gives me a smile and Todd a cold nod. “The general’s here.”

  Todd starts to stand up, then realizes I’m still sitting and falls back into his seat. The moment his butt hits the chair, I get up and walk around the table and greet Figueroa as he walks in.

  “Cray,” he says with no warmth. Osman is behind him.

  “General. Lieutenant.”

  All right, let’s see if my gambit works . . . I call to Sheila in the hall, “Could you make a copy of the T-gene report for Lieutenant Osman?” T-gene sounds so much better than terrorist gene.

  I notice Figueroa take a sideways glance at Osman right after I say this. Todd is behind me, so I can’t see his face; I doubt it’s happy.

  I take my seat across from Figueroa and close the lid of my laptop.

  “You have a T-gene report?” asks Figueroa.

  I wait a moment, pretending to be surprised by the question. “Of course. You asked for that, right? I hope it was okay that I went ahead and did an expenditure from the general account on feasibility.”

  Next step, pretend to be afraid that you were too proactive.

  In about two seconds, I’ll know if I was right about Todd’s plot . . .

  Osman speaks. “You’ve moved forward on the T-gene project?”

  I hold up my hands. “Wait? Was I not supposed to do that?”

  Osman flashes a glance over at Todd, then returns his attention to me. He wants to speak but doesn’t want to look too obvious. He turns to Figueroa.

  “I would like to see that report,” says Figueroa.

  “Yes, of course.” I slide a folder out from under my laptop. It’s not too thick, and little more believable than the bullshit file the FBI gave me back in Atlanta. “It’s probably better if we discuss this after we go over some security issues at the lab. If that’s okay.”

  “Security issues?” asks Todd.

  I ignore him and speak directly to Figueroa. “I need to disclose certain things to you as our compliance officer. It’s really embarrassing and could be a serious issue.” I slide another folder out from under my laptop. “We may have a breach in our network.”

  “A breach?” The general’s face turns grave. “How serious?”

  I pull a printout from the folder. “I don’t know. I’ve just contracted a security specialist to take a look. I was going over our server logs and noticed a large amount of traffic going out over our network to a VPN.”

  As a government-backed lab, we have an extremely well-protected network, and we have to follow an exhaustive list of rules about what we can and cannot connect to the network, the apps we use, and what data we bring out of the lab.

  While reluctantly flying back to Texas, I started to think about the last time I spoke to Todd. What was going through his head? What did he think I was going to do?

  I realized that Todd might have assumed that I would have been impulsive enough to fire him right after the meeting. Todd being Todd, he would have done whatever he could to protect himself—first and foremost, making copies of all the emails and files he could, not to mention whatever research he had access to. Or in case this little plan of his to oust me worked and he was afraid I was going to be spiteful, he wanted to make sure he had backup copies of our data.

  I tried to think like Todd and foresee what Todd would do. I was disappointed at how predictable Todd was.

  Two hours after my last in-person meeting with Todd, he started copying files from the lab and sending them to a server that had a very similar name to the one we use for backing up our data.

  Our backup is with a service that uses a URL named MonolithArchive. That night, data started uploading to Mono1ithArchive—in which the lowercase l is transposed with the number 1.

  It was a very sneaky maneuver and only possible because Todd has administrative controls over the lab network. He was hoping that, on the off chance I decided to inspect our server logs, I’d read right past the typo.

  I almost did. But when I refused to believe that Todd didn’t do something dirty, I checked the IP addresses and realized that he’d added new permissions.

  Figueroa takes a look at the list of addresses on the printout. “What is this?”

  “Not all those are our servers.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Simply put, someone uploaded a hell of a lot of data from our computers to a foreign computer.”

  “Foreign?” blurts Todd. His face has lost its color, but he’s clinging to this word, hoping I think it’s the Chinese or the Russians.

  “I mean foreign as in not ours,” I reply.

  Todd glances over at the printout. “It looks like Monolith to me.”

  “That’s what I thought. But someone used a server spelled with the number 1 instead of the lowercase letter l. It’s very deceptive.”

  “So, you were hacked?” asks Figueroa.

  “That’s what I thought at first, but then I started looking at the rest of the server logs and checking for evidence of a worm. I can’t speak definitively, but I think this may have happened inside the lab.”

  “Are you telling me that one of your employees did this?” asks Figueroa.

  I look down at my hands. “I’m embarrassed to say that it looks that way. Only a few have network access. Todd and I are the only ones with full admin privileges, but it’s possible someone observed our passwords.”

  I watch Todd out of the corner of my eye. He’s sweating.

  This whole experience is worth it to see what he’s going to do next.

  “Any idea who?” asks Figueroa.

  I shake my head. “I trust everyone. I guess that’s the problem. If someone has been leaking information behind my back, then I guess I’m guilty for not paying attention.”

  Figueroa glances over at Osman, who now looks uncomfortable himself. I’ve turned his back-channel communication and uploading into a possible security breach. While Osman didn’t do anything wrong that I know of, he’s now thinking Todd is damaged goods.

  “We have some new people,” says Todd, finding the strength to speak and probably fearing that his silence is suspicious.

  “Like who?” I ask, baiting him.

  “Darnell is a good guy, for example, but he may not understand the protocols.”

  Wow. He just threw the kid under the bus.

  “I don’t know, Todd. I’m not ready to point a finger at anyone right now. Our best bet is to change our passwords and let the forensic investigator go over our logs as well as our computers at home.”

  “Our personal computers?” Todd says with alarm.

  “Well, yes. We’ll need to give him full access, passwords and everything, in order for you and me to be ruled out. After all, someone used one of our passwords.”

  “You don’t know,” Todd shoots back.

  I wasn’t expecting that visceral of a reaction. What else does Todd have on his computers that he’s afraid of exposing?

  He probably uses incredibly tight security on his home computers. When he concocted his plan to upload lab data, he was thinking in the worst-case scenario the FBI might seize his hard drives and try to acce
ss the data, but they’d fail because of encryption.

  What he never conceived of was that I would corner him in a way that not giving the government access to his computer would make him guilty in the eyes of Figueroa and Osman.

  “Do we need to shut down the lab?” asks Figueroa.

  “I don’t think so. At least, not if we can trace the leak.”

  “Are you sure it was someone who works for you?”

  “I don’t know, General. But we should start by investigating me first, then move on down.”

  I don’t know in a scientific way, but I know.

  Todd looks visibly ill. His little scheme has now put him in the crosshairs. He could be going to jail for a long time.

  The smartest thing he can do is go home, wipe his computer, and refuse to participate with the probe. I think that’s what’s going through his head right now.

  “We’ll do everything we can,” I tell Figueroa.

  He nods. “Can the rest of you clear the room?”

  As Osman and Todd leave, Todd glances back at me with hatred in his eyes.

  After they’re gone, Figueroa looks right at me. “What’s really going on, Cray?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  INTENT

  Do I lie to General Figueroa? Telling the full truth about my recent side project and my avoidance of the T-gene research could be enough to make him pull my funding on the spot and have me investigated . . . if he so chooses. Yet lying to him will only exacerbate the issue. I’m stuck between a rock and a weird moral area—says the guy who just three days ago was sawing corpses up in the middle of a Boy Scout camp.

  I decide to stick to small truths. “Running a lab is hard.”

  Figueroa stares at me for a long moment, possibly inviting me to elaborate. I leave my statement as is.

  “T-gene?” He taps the folder. “What am I going to find?”

  “Everything so far. I did a meta-analysis of the genomes we have of known, captured, or killed terrorists. I then cross-referenced them with the locations of certain genes associated with the behavioral inclinations we’re looking for—sociability, oxytocin response, adrenaline response. Plus, some other possible correlations based on the different kinds of profiles we have of terrorists. Some of them travel to other countries to fight. Others build bombs,” I explain without explaining anything.