Framed: A Jarek Grayson Private Detective Novel (Grayson Investigative Services Book 2)

by Boyd Craven III

  “Well, that isn’t the end of the world. The world is lucky that there weren’t fancy camera phones back in my day,” Annette grouched.

  “Back in your day, women did use razors to shave, didn’t they?” I asked innocently, curious if it was straight razors back then.

  Skye busted up as Annette spewed curses. I took that as my cue to exit and pushed the door open, holding it for Skye. She hopped in the front with Johanna and I slid into the rear. The difference between the Lincoln and the truck was immediately felt as we pulled away. The ladies talked, and I got my tablet out to check for updates, but I drifted, my mind chasing possibilities and ideas. I was going—

  * * *

  “Wake up, Jarek,” Skye was saying, pushing on my shoulder.

  I shook my head and unbuckled my seatbelt. Must have been more excitement than I realized. Or maybe, just maybe, I had just been relaxed and tired. I’m going to go with the latter, although the former was more realistic. It had been a stressful day, and I’d been overwhelmed with stimuli.

  “I’m up. Sorry,” I said, getting out of the car and joining the two of them in the parking ramp across from the police department.

  “Nervous?” Jo asked Skye.

  “A little bit,” she admitted.

  Our phones both went off, and Skye and I both opened the screens and started to read. Isn’t technology a great thing?

  “It’s from Mephisto,” Skye said. “For both of us.”

  “Telling me to get you back online to them,” I said.

  “Actually, to him,” Skye corrected.

  “Do we tell Susan about this?” I asked the ladies.

  “No,” they both chorused.

  “Not yet, anyways,” Jo finished. “We don’t know for sure it’s linked.”

  “It’s only been a day, and I really am worried that my brother is going to go through withdrawals in the most painful way possible—”

  “They wouldn’t do that to him, would they?” Jo asked me.

  I considered lying, but I knew that I was horrible at it.

  “From what I’ve read, they give him just enough of the methadone to wean him down and off the heroin. There’s going to be withdrawal symptoms that’ll include nausea, vomiting, tremors, sweating, fevers, short-term dementia, and if the subject is unlucky, death.”

  “Oh God,” Skye sobbed, but thankfully she grabbed Jo.

  I contented myself with walking behind them. It wasn’t a hard thing to do when the scenery in front of me was so distracting. We crossed at the walkway and were soon inside. I felt myself tensing up. Loud, lots of people.

  “Third floor, detectives’ offices,” Jo said, taking my arm and pulling me gently towards the elevators.

  I never got over how badly a concentrated volume of people in a confined place smelled. Many of the folks here had been here for a while, and I’m not talking the police. I was talking about witnesses of various crimes, those who were waiting on booking or were being questioned before getting fingerprinted. The noise of the main room was huge. It was overwhelming on the best of days, and I’d only been here a few times, but it seemed even more intense today.

  “Hey, you’re supposed to be the one comforting Skye, not the other way around,” Jo whispered into my ear.

  Skye was standing next to me, hugging herself and rubbing her arms as if she were freezing. I could see the muscles in her bare arms and neck twitch, making the dark black tattoos ripple. I breathed in deeply and stepped behind her, wrapping my arms around her. She stiffened for a second, and then leaned back into me. Her chest hitched and she made a quiet sobbing sound just as the elevator door dinged open.

  I let her go, and the three of us got in after a puzzled-looking detective I didn’t recognize came out. Jo mashed the up button and then shot me a look. Anger? Was she mad at me? She was giving me a funny look, and I couldn’t figure out what it was or why.

  “I spend half of my life confused,” I told nobody in particular as we rode up to the third floor.

  “You confuse me sometimes, Jarek,” Skye said, as the elevator stopped and she stepped out.

  “You…I don’t get you today,” Jo said and stepped out.

  I almost didn’t make it before the door closed. Something had happened, and I’d missed out on it. Jo had suggested I comfort Skye, so I did. Now both of them were acting like I did something weird. I’d have to figure out what I did wrong later on and then beg forgiveness. It usually worked, especially when I was telling the bald truth. Especially with Johanna.

  “Skye Erickson?” somebody yelled, and Skye nodded. “Susan, your four o’clock,” he shouted and pointed us towards one of the interrogation suites.

  “Jo, are you going to sit in there with her or—”

  “You,” Skye told me softly. “I want you in there too.”

  “Ok, if they let us all back there,” I told her, wishing I wasn’t needed.

  “Hey, you guys made it,” Susan O’Hara said, coming out of the closest suite. “Come on back.”

  I followed, feeling every step that I was getting closer and deeper into a situation I didn’t know enough about. I still don’t know why she wanted me in on the interrogation to sit with her. Moral support? To see if it sounded like Mephisto was involved or not? I swallowed, and when Susan opened the doorway into the starkly furnished room, we all entered.

  The table was an old oak one, scarred from thousands of hands and handcuffs, I’m sure. Coffee stains were everywhere, and the room stank of old sweat, almost poignant in its sharp odor.

  “Your brother, Dustin…” Pete Ralston started out.

  The whole gang was here. Two chairs were on one side, two on the other. I elected to stand and pulled the chairs out for the ladies. Jo flashed me a grateful smile before sitting. What I didn’t mention was that it would also let me leave the room in a hurry if I so chose, and I had a straight line of sight to the exit. For some reason, being on this side of the glass was unsettling.

  “Has he woken up again?” Skye asked.

  “You haven’t gone to the hospital to check on him yet?” Susan asked, surprised.

  “No…I just…I don’t know. This is all so scary, and I can’t believe that my brother would do something like this…” Skye said, stammering.

  “Any luck on the DNA?” Jo asked.

  “Same blood type, but DNA itself takes a few days if you have the lab rush it. All I can say is the toothbrush and the blood have the same blood types. Wait, are you three working on this case? On the side?” Pete asked, looking hard at me.

  I said nothing and kept my face as stoic as possible. Johanna would answer somehow. She always did when I hesitated, knowing that was her cue to talk. Funny that she always knew the right words to use when she chose to.

  “We’re working on a case that involves Skye. An old boyfriend is trying to blackmail her with an old picture,” Jo told Susan.

  Pete looked at Jo blankly, so Jo ignored him and focused on Susan. “We don’t think there’s any involvement, but yes. We are working on something involving Skye.”

  “Involving a pict—”

  Pete shut up when Susan jabbed an elbow lightly into his paunch and then leaned back and whispered to him. His red, indignant face calmed, and he blew out a deep breath.

  “Got it, sorry. Thank God they didn’t have camera phones when I was growing up…”

  There was a mental image I could not get out of my head. Pudgy Pete Ralston, lying on his back, his greasy bald spot on the pillow as he wore Skye’s thong…his mustache coated in donut sprinkles and his hairy body—

  “Oh God,” I muttered. “I think I just grossed myself out.”

  “What?” Skye asked, turning to look at me.

  “Nothing, just…”

  My tablet buzzed on silent, and I took a couple steps back to pull it out of my suit pocket. Since Skye was really the only one who used it to video me, that meant the alert was in my personal email, the secret one. Sure enough, it was from Mephisto. It was a pictu
re that had been recently taken. The three of us were walking into the police department.

  To: Jarek Grayson

  From: Mephisto

  Subject:

  I have eyes and ears everywhere. I know about the junkie in the hospital. Tell the little whore I want her online, in control of her former botnet and zombie servers in the next twenty-four hours.

  Also, I understand you’ve been around the block as well. If you’d like to keep your precious firm off the radar, you’ll comply as well. Say perhaps, some of the encryption crackers you wrote for the NSA? I expect to hear back from you soon. Say, the next hour.

  -=Mephisto=-

  “Pete,” I said, interrupting them. “I need to use the computers you allowed me to access for the Taylor case. Are they available?”

  “Uhhh, should be. I think there’s only one of them in there, now that the task force is over…”

  “Jo, show Susan the resume, I have to go do something real quick,” I said, already walking out the door.

  I startled two detectives who were making out in the middle of the room. Apparently this room was out of the way enough that the couple felt comfortable engaging in such activities. I ignored them and booted up a computer as their shocked expressions went right over my head.

  “Excuse me?” the woman detective asked.

  “Don’t worry, your husband doesn’t have me on retainer,” I told her.

  I heard the woman spit some harsh words out and the door slammed. Alone at last. I pulled a thumb drive out and waited for the contents to be read and then rebooted the computer. I kept a Linux operating system on a bootable flash drive. The fact that the pictures came attached meant that Mephisto or someone with him was close by. By the angle, it looked like the traffic camera at the corner had captured us walking indoors, but it could have also been from the parking ramp.

  “Come on,” I complained as the computer rebooted slowly into the new operating system.

  It was one that I’d had all kinds of custom goodies installed on. It was one of my secret weapons I’d used earlier in life. I could go and take any computer with an internet connection and reboot it. Make it exactly what I needed, and all it cost me was the weight of a flash drive to unleash hacking from anywhere. Rebooting sucked and took time though.

  “So if you’re not working for her husband, who are you working for? You’re that retarded private eye or something, aren’t you?” a deep, masculine voice said over my shoulder.

  I almost jumped out of my seat backwards in shock.

  “Easy there, sorry.” A heavy hand fell across my shoulder and kept my chair from flipping over.

  “I’m not working on a case for the cops right now,” I told him truthfully. “Pete Rolston told me I could use this terminal.”

  “Ohh, well that’s ok. He’s a good guy. It’s just that Ronnie and I…she’s going through a divorce, and she worries her ex-husband will do anything to try to take the kids away. We thought we were being discreet.”

  I turned and looked at him. Gods, did all cops have to be big and huge?

  “I’m not retarded either. Autistic, and I don’t like to be touched. Sorry, it’s a thing,” I told him, watching the computer start reading the thumb drive and initializing the operating system.

  “Ok, sorry. I’ll be out of your hair.”

  I spared a glance, and he gave me a brief smile and headed out. When the door closed softly behind him, I took stock of the room. It’d changed since it had last been used as a conference room for the Taylor case. Two of the computers were gone, and many of the chairs had been stacked into three neat stacks at one end of the wall, the folding tables half disassembled and left on the floor littered by blank sheets of copy paper. No one else was in the room, and that was the important part.

  I opened up some Perl scripts and started to work. I accessed the department’s main computer using the Linux box that was now part of its trusted network. I didn’t have to hack into the traffic cameras; I was now part of the system, and all I had to do was find the feed and how the internet traffic was routed to it. I found that within moments and found the file dump where all cache was held. I looked at my watch and took a guess and narrowed it down to a five-minute window and then looked.

  I found it within minutes and then right-clicked on the file and went to the properties to see where it was accessed last. Nothing useful came up, and I opened a screen for the command prompt and started another script running. I tried the file again, and this time I saw an IP address. I checked the host IP and saw it wasn’t anything remotely close. I followed it back and saw a pattern right away. The department had been accessed by what it thought was a remote terminal connection, like when the cops used their laptops from their cars. Somebody pulled the file off and emailed it to me, but it wasn’t on a department computer, or anything. It looked like the VPN Skye used to hide her own email.

  I’d been waiting for something like this, and I’d already written a script to counter the effects of the VPN hopping. I’d been playing around with it because I really hated somebody having a trick I didn’t know how to see through, and Skye’s had been a good one. Still, I’d never had a chance to play with it live.

  The first IP address was the hospital, which didn’t surprise me. Its Wi-Fi signal was wide open, and you could reach it from blocks and block away. I’d run into a few bozos who thought that using it would be good and dandy. It was a wide open network, and the one guy who thought he could hide there found that I’d taken control and had used his webcam to follow him.

  The second IP address was…Here? I double-checked and nodded. Made sense, except that was it. It was accessed from the Wi-Fi at the hospital…I got a sinking feeling and pulled my tablet back out. Right at the bottom of the message was what I’d been afraid of…

  ~Sent using Samsung S6 LTE

  He’d used a cell phone and probably dumped it. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I went looking for the MAC address of the device in the VPN hopping. I found it and then switched to a different script, trying to triangulate the phone. It wasn’t working fast enough, and I was ready to start hacking back into the police’s database when I realized I was still sitting within their trusted network. When I pulled my USB drive, all records of what I did were dumped when the computer rebooted. The last thing I wanted to do was cause any trouble for Pete and Susan, but this was hot. I got into the mainframe and ran the phone number.

  I was surprised to see it was still active and copied the location to my phone. I wished I’d had time to make a tracking script like Skye did for us on the Taylor case, but I needed to get Johanna, and we needed to get to the hospital in almost no time flat. I rebooted the computer, pulling the thumb drive.

  “Get what you needed?” Pete said, opening the doorway and almost scaring me enough to trip me up.

  “Yeah. Hey, are they done in there?” I asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I need them.”

  “Something come up?”

  “You could say that.”

  * * *

  “Jarek, what’s the hurry?” Jo asked, struggling to keep up with me as I almost ran across the street at the crosswalk.

  “I told you, he’s close by. We need to hurry.”

  “Mephisto?” Skye asked.

  “Yes. He was at the hospital no more than ten minutes ago.”

  Something clicked. I was missing things, not seeing the bigger picture. I pulled out my tablet, pulled up the email, and handed it to Skye as we reached the town car.

  “Sit back here with me, I need your help on this,” I told her, taking the tablet back.

  She pulled out her twin of the device I had. “Now what?” she asked.

  “Sending you the MAC address and phone number. I want you to set up a tracker like you did for the Taylor case. The phone was active last time I pinged it.”

  “What do you need me to do?” Jo asked, buckling in.

  “Drive, drive now,” I told her, almost franti
c.

  “He’s at the hospital,” Skye muttered to herself. “Of course he is. That’s how he knows about Dustin.”

  “Are you talking about me back there?” Johanna asked, looking over her shoulder as she backed the car out.

  “No,” Skye said.

  “Yes,” I answered at the same time.

  Jo slammed on the brakes, making us both almost drop our technology.

  “Hospital? If anything changes, you two let me know. I’ll be there in ten. Don’t screw with me, Jarek,” Jo told me.

  “It’s still active,” Skye told me.

  “It’s a burner phone,” I told her, pulling up the account details that were on file.

  Cash customer, prepaid minutes, Wi-Fi data only.

  “It’s a damned expensive burner phone,” Skye said. “Close to eight hundred dollars,” she said bitterly.

  “I know what you mean,” I told her. “But he’s already proven that he’s going to be a little hard to find.”

  My tablet buzzed, and I saw it was another email that had come in.

  Want to see the other pictures the whore sent to me?

  I thumbed in Yes and hit send.

  Then I heard Skye’s email alert go off on her tablet. She read it and chewed her lip and then looked at me.

  “I was mainly curious to see if he’d slip up,” I told her, knowing that if we could keep him using the phone longer, we had a real chance of finding him before he decided to dump the phone.

  The fact that he hadn’t dumped the phone was something of a shock to me, but then I thought about it. He felt so secure in his little VPN hopping script that he might not be hiding all that hard. Maybe even in plain sight. At least I knew what sort of device I would be looking for. I just hoped that I had enough of a chance to match a face to it before I let Johanna loose on him. Eventually I’d have to involve Susan too.

  “You’re working undercover with the NSA?” Skye all but shouted. “And you’re setting me up?” she almost shrieked, launching herself at me.

  I was buckled in and couldn’t move fast enough as her nails raked at my eyes. I jerked my head back, my arm coming up to protect my face. As it was, she scored a mark high on my cheek and one across my ear. I was shocked at the sudden turn, and I heard car horns start blaring as Jo struggled to get us on the side of the roadway safely.