I’d caught Skye’s wrists, but my seatbelt kept me from moving around. It really made me struggle against the bindings as I tried to keep the screaming and sobbing hacker from tearing me apart. Jo almost leapt over the hood as she crossed to the passenger side and opened Skye’s door. She put her in some sort of hold, and Skye struggled briefly before calming. It must not have been a choke hold, but it did look like Jo had an arm around her neck and under the smaller woman’s armpit.
I let her wrists go, noticing the purple tint on her skin of instant bruises where I’d been holding them. I didn’t know what hurt worse, the shock and furious beating of my heart, or the fact that I must have put her in terrible pain to have squeezed her wrists so tightly. I was starting to gray out, the anxiety dumping gallons of adrenaline into my bloodstream. I pulled a wad of tissue from the seat and held it over my ear. I didn’t know if it was bleeding, but I felt something wet.
Soft murmuring could be heard, but I was losing focus, my brain going to that dark place where it retreated when it got overloaded.
“…I said look at me.” Soft hands held my face, and I could feel thumbs rubbing the backs of my eyelids, forcing one to open.
“Don’t touch my eye,” I groused.
“Look at me,” Johanna said again, her fingers working the back of my jawline, near my ear.
My eyes opened against my will, and I stared into Jo’s gaze.
“He’s toying with us. With you and Skye. She flipped out and now she’s taken off,” Jo told me. “So I need you to suck it up and we need to find her and get to the hospital before he dumps the phone.”
I sat up slowly. Somewhere, somehow, she’d undone my seatbelt. I could feel something against my ear. I touched it, puzzled to discover the adhesive edge of a bandage against my earlobe.
“Where is she?” I asked, seeing the town car empty.
“I told you, she flipped out. But she calmed down enough to realize she’d been played. I think he was trying to buy himself some time or something,” Jo said, talking about Mephisto.
That didn’t make sense to me entirely. If he wanted to buy time, he could leave the phone on and put it in a janitors trash bin, or just turn it off, break it…unless he was so sure of himself that he thought his VPN connection was impenetrable. Was it? What was I missing here?
“Did she say where she was going?” I asked.
“A lot of incoherent stuff. I think with everything going on…” Jo stepped out of the backseat, closed the door, and walked over to the driver’s side and got in, “…I think getting that email spooked her, and now she’s worried that you hate her.”
“I was more than a little shocked. What I think Mephisto has done is use a little bit of truth mixed with a healthy dose of her fears to engineer this. Look here,” I said, feeling around for my phone so I could show Jo the email he had sent me.
She took it over the seat back and then handed it back to me very slowly.
“You really are a piece of work. You didn’t get a good enough look before?” Jo asked me.
She didn’t sound hurt or angry, just…indifferent? Something was off in her voice.
“What are you talking about?” I asked her, confused.
“Mephisto asked if you wanted to see more pictures and you told him yes. I can’t believe you sometimes. It’s one thing to be a man whore, it’s another to perv over Skye. She literally thinks of you like a big brother, and that stunt you pulled at the police department today was over the line! Talk about messing with a girl’s feelings when she’s already on an emotional roller coaster!”
“Can you explain this to me while we drive?” I asked her, worried about losing time.
“Oh my God, are you even listening?” Jo was almost yelling now, but she started the car and pulled into traffic.
“Mephisto is still using the cell phone, which means he doesn’t know we’ve cracked part of his encryption. I was trying to keep him using it longer so we could track him down. Seemed simple enough to agree and say yes. Besides, he also emailed me earlier, threatening me and the company directly.”
“I saw that, but wait, you’re changing the subject. You weren’t really asking for more pictures of her?” Jo asked, now puzzled.
“No,” I said. “I just wanted him to continue using the phone while I figured out what he was up to. Besides, the picture I saw of Skye earlier was enough for me to know that seeing even more would be a distraction. I would have deleted them after figuring out if there was a pattern to when and where they were taken, maybe to see if he hacked her phone directly, or maybe they were pictures sent to somebody else who in fact was Mephisto or was hacked by—”
“Jarek! Stop. Ok, so let’s pretend I believe you about that for a second, the police department…”
“You’re the one who told me to comfort her,” I told her, confused about that as well.
“You walked up behind her and wrapped your arms around her, pulling her close. That’s not a big-brotherly thing to do. You’re so emotionally aloof that seeing that shocked me. You know how many times I’ve seen you give someone other than your parents a hug? I mean, I’ve hugged you, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you initiate a hug.”
“Well, we were talking boundaries. I figured she needed a hug and that was the only way I could think to comfort her,” I told her.
“You could have put a hand on her arm, you could have given her a quick hug and told her everything is going to be ok…you pulled her to your body,” Jo said, her voice starting to revert to normal.
“Is that a body language thing?” I asked her.
“And an emotional rollercoaster when her brother OD’d and her sister-in-law is missing with blood all over, getting called to the police for questioning…it messes with your head. It would anybody’s,” Jo explained.
“So the hug was sending the wrong sort of body language?” I asked again, not sure why she strayed so far from the question.
“Yes, totally wrong. Imagine you took a picture of yourself to send to a boyfriend…then have your boss and big-brother figure see that on a big screen, and suddenly he’s all affectionate and hugging you when you’re feeling vulnerable,” Johanna said, turning the corner.
I kept scanning the side of the road, looking for Skye’s form.
“But I didn’t take the picture,” I told her, “so I don’t understand…”
“It’s part of that empathy thing. You’re going to have to trust me. Shit, I should have seen this coming. I even read you wrong, Jarek.”
Now Jo sounded apologetic.
“I spend half of my life confused, but you’ve shed some light on the subject, and I think if I can slow down long enough to think about it, I can—”
“There she is,” Jo said, swerving into the far right lane, reminding me I never buckled my seatbelt back up after she’d calmed me.
I started to fumble with it as the car came to a rest.
“Do you want me to?” Jo asked, turning.
“I think it should be me,” I told her, my heart already starting to race.
Skye was power walking and hadn’t caught sight of us yet. She was more or less walking in the direction of the hospital, wiping at her eyes. She looked…disheveled? I slid out the passenger side door and walked faster.
“Skye,” I told her.
She stopped as if somebody punched her and turned slowly to see me walking up. Her eyes got huge, and she cried harder, if that was even possible. She fumbled with her purse and pulled out her tablet.
“Here,” she said. “I’m sorry this didn’t work out.”
“It hasn’t worked out because we haven’t found Mephisto yet. I’m really hoping you will hop back into the car so we can finish working on the tracking program—”
“Wait, what?” she asked me. “I thought you were here for the tablet. I’m confused.”
“That too,” I told her. “Get in. It’s faster to ride than it is to walk.”
My ear stung in the cooling autumn air,
and the wet chill let me know it wouldn’t be long until the winter came and dumped snow.
“But your…”
I was already walking back to the car, having ignored the offered tablet. I got in the passenger seat.
“Are you coming?” I called, seeing her standing there.
“What’s going on?” Jo asked me quietly, so her voice wouldn’t carry past the car.
“I’ll let you figure it out so you can break it down and explain it to me again later on. I’m a bit overloaded,” I admitted.
Skye walked over, and when she got to the car, she closed the rear passenger seat and instead got in next to Johanna in the front.
“So are you two ok?” Jo asked me.
“My ear hurts,” I said.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Skye told Jo, ignoring me for the moment.
“He wouldn’t let you quit, would he?” Jo asked.
“He never came out and said it, but he wouldn’t take back the tablet,” Skye said.
“Because Mephisto got into your head,” I told her.
“I’m sorry about your ear, although the bandage looks very…masculine,” Skye said and then made a hiccupping sound.
I felt it and shrugged. It was a bandage, probably one of the cloth Band-Aids that were kept in every car because I really didn’t like the feel of latex.
“Please give me more warning next time you want to scratch my eyes out. That would be good for our next sparring practice. Actually, that’s twice in a day I’ve dodged injury mostly by myself,” I told them, feeling oddly proud.
“Mostly,” Jo agreed. “Skye, do you have that tracker app you were working on?”
“Give me a few,” she said, already bending her head to start working.
“Jo, can you talk to her about what we talked about? I don’t think I could get that meaning across without it sounding worse than it already must be,” I asked her.
“I would, but we’re here,” Jo said, pulling into the drive to the hospital and taking the turn for the parking ramp.
“Got it,” Skye said, and my tablet alerted.
The program was the same as before, but as I looked at the many floors of the building, I wondered if we’d have to check each of them. The display would show us how close we were in relation to the target, but not the up and down part.
“Good job, kid. You ready?”
“Wait, can we see my brother when we’re done looking for Mephisto?” Skye asked.
“Of course,” Jo said.
“If nothing else goes wrong,” I said, fumbling for my phone, realizing the hour Mephisto had given me had probably come and gone.
Besides, I wanted to keep him active and engaged.
To: Mephisto
From: Jarek
Subject:
Working on Skye. What do you want from me specifically?
PS, nice try with telling her I was NSA. She almost believed you for half a second.
I got a reply back almost immediately:
I want to talk to you about your encryption algorithms that retire PGP.
I quickly responded with: That might be worth going to jail over after all. I’ll have to think about it.
I had developed an alternative to PGP in order to figure out how to reliably crack it. Very old news, but very black hat. Nobody was supposed to even know about it. Jo didn’t even know about it. I had signed some non-disclosure agreements promising not to ever talk about it, or I would face jail time. Jail time was all fine to joke about with Mephisto, but the truth was, I’d die in prison.
A lot of what I do skirts or outright breaks the law when it happens over a computer. What might be legal one day is made illegal another day.
“Earth to Jarek,” Jo said, waving her hand in front of my face, startling me to a stop.
“You hear me?” Skye asked.
“No, sorry,” I admitted.
“He should be right inside of there,” Jo pointed.
“Unless he’s somewhere above us,” I told them.
“Has to be in there. It’s the cafeteria, and as far as he’s moved in a straight line, he has to be there. There’s patient rooms above us,” Johanna said.
A chill passed through me, and I put my phone away and made sure the tablet was securely stored in my suit coat pocket. Skye handed me her tablet for a second and dug through the little clutch she called a purse. She pulled out a tiny aerosol spray bottle and thumbed the cap off. She stored the cap and took the tablet back. It was fine for her to have her hands full, but I didn’t have hands when it came to field work. I was slower on the uptake, and other than today, I was usually a hindrance in field work.
I got that, but there were some things, like the network takeover at the library, that took someone like me to be there to initiate it.
“Let’s go,” I said, moving to line up behind Johanna.
“Are you going to be ok in there?” Jo turned to ask me.
I could see through the glass walls and the glass double doors. There were hundreds of people in there. Patients and visitors, doctors, nurses.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, already feeling anxious.
“Skye, keep an eye on him. If he gets overloaded, he’ll just go over. I’m going to keep an eye out for Mephisto.”
“Maybe I should keep an eye out for Mephisto. He might end up being somebody I know in real life,” Skye said.
“But what are you going to do if you recognize him?” Jo asked.
“I don’t…” Skye stammered.
“If it helps, I can sit right here on the bench, then no one has to watch me,” I told them.
In truth, as much as I wanted to be inside, it’d be sensory overload. A thousand times worse than any bar or restaurant. I’d be exposed to crying babies, the germs of a thousand patients—every conceivable fear of mine would be highlighted in such a cramped, overloaded space full of humanity.
“Actually,” Jo started, “that works out well. You sit tight.”
Skye gave me a little wave and followed Jo into the glassed-in enclosure. I watched for a while as they walked, eventually losing sight of them in the press of bodies as people got their food. The thought of so many people enclosed with that food made my stomach queasy, but I was getting extremely hungry. So I wouldn’t look out of place completely, I pulled my tablet out and made myself busy. The LTE connection down here was almost non-existent, so I hooked up to the free public Wi-Fi and made sure the tracking program was still running.
It was, and I was almost startled to see that Mephisto was walking towards me, according to the display. I looked around, almost in a panic, wondering where the ladies were. I couldn’t see them, but when the glass doors opened and the display showed me Mephisto was leaving, I was confused. A blonde-haired woman in a bright yellow sundress walked out, hand-in-hand with a small girl. She was thumbing something out on a touch screen phone.
With a start, I realized that she was walking my way, and I checked the display. Mephisto was a woman? I thought Skye had said…
“Do you mind if we join you? These heels are killing me, and I’m waiting for Becca’s mom to meet us down here,” the woman said.
“Of course,” I said, scooting to the far edge of the bench.
The woman gave me a look, one that showed I had acted in a manner that she found weird or odd, and she had the little girl in pigtails sit on the far side of me. Maybe it was the look of concentration on my face, or the pure jolt of adrenaline that the hacker was sitting right next to me. I looked from the tablet to the glass doors, hoping to see Jo and Skye. I checked the readout again, and it showed Mephisto right next to me.
“That’s a nice phone,” I told her, stowing my tablet.
“It’s nice. I just got it back yesterday,” she said politely.
“Can I play Swampy?” Becca, the little girl, asked.
“But I…ok. Don’t get it sticky,” she said, handing the phone over.
“I’m Jarek. I’m just waiting on some friends als
o.”
“Rita. I’m waiting on my sister. We’re up here visiting Becca’s dad. How about you?”
“I’m looking for Mephisto,” I told her seriously, trying to look at her for a reaction.
I wasn’t expecting surprised laughter.
“You’re looking for the Devil in the hospital?” she snorted. “I knew there was something different about you.”
“Sorry, I get that a lot,” I admitted.
It was the truth, but more importantly, I remembered a study that I had read. Uncontrolled bursts of laughter was not a good indication of a lie. Rita had burst into all-out giggles when I asked her about Mephisto.
“Becca wouldn’t be the Devil now, would she?” I asked.
“You’d think so, some days,” Rita grinned at me. “What do you do, Jarek?”
“Do? Well, I like to work out in the mornings, take self-defense on Thursdays. I work until 5 p.m., unless it’s a big case. Then I have takeout or heat up dinner that my housekeeper makes in advance for me…sometimes I go out and meet women for mutually beneficial trysts. Why, what do you do?”
Her giggles and smile stopped as her jaw had dropped at that point, and I realized that she knew nothing about me. I groaned, ready for another awkward moment, and then she started to laugh again.
“I meant as in work. I’m just passing the time here, not trying to get your life history.”
“Oh, uh…I’m sort of a P.I.”
“Like Magnum?” she asked me, sobering up.
“I don’t know who that is, although we do have Magnums in the equipment storage. I don’t like to use them, they’re louder than the normal load outs and they have a lot more recoil. I hope to never have to use one, because my friend Johanna—”
“Whoa, I got him water!” Becca crowed triumphantly, holding the phone up.
The phone.
“So, has your phone left your sight lately?” I asked her.
“That’s an odd question,” Rita told me.
There, I could see halfway back from the door Johanna’s head walking our way. Skye was so small, I couldn’t make her out at all.
Framed: A Jarek Grayson Private Detective Novel (Grayson Investigative Services Book 2) Page 9