by Kenneth Eade
Lance Butler waited until Williams had safely exited the neighborhood before he pulled out after him. After all, Lance knew where Williams was headed. He didn’t want to be seen by the mysterious stranger who, Jack had observed, was watching Williams. Lance was an ex-Minneapolis PD Officer who made a decent living tracking down cheating husbands and wives and digging through people’s trash and through computer databases. This job was not only good money, it was a chance to be a part of something bigger – to help solve a murder-for-hire case.
Lance kept an eye on Williams' Prius all the way to the Mall of America and onto the parking ramp. Williams exited his car, nervously spinning his head around like a bird, then made his way out of the structure in a fast walk, looking over his shoulder like a convict who had just broken out of jail. Lance casually exited his car and blended in with the rest of the people making their way to the mall as he followed Williams.
Across the country in Milpitas, Myron Talbot was just waking up and Paul Beeker was already alert and on the job, waiting in his car about a block and a half away.
***
Brent was at work early, poring over the Internet and telephone records he had secured with the subpoenas. Someone had to have screwed up somewhere. It can’t be this easy to hire a killer. He spent hours going over the records, comparing those of Marsen’s to Williams' and Talbot’s, but couldn’t spot any patterns except for the fact that they had directed posts to each other. Since the will challenge was dropped, however, they had ceased all communication. Perhaps Talbot had made a mistake and broken one of the killer’s rules. Or maybe the killer just wanted to get rid of Brent. The answer had to be somewhere. Brent’s freedom depended on it.
Hannaford had subpoenaed Marsen’s hard drives and computers to examine them for information such as browsing history and temporary folders. Not surprisingly, they were all missing. No hard drives; nothing but shells that used to contain the Internet life of David Marsen (aka 'Flusher'). Somehow, Brent had to get his hands on Williams' and Talbot’s computers. He couldn’t ask Jack to do it, because that would involve an element of illegality that neither he nor Jack would be willing to entertain. But if he could expose the murder-for-hire scheme, he might be able to use the full strength and resources of the federal government. Brent called Angela right away to follow up on the idea.
“What do you think, Angie? Is it do-able?”
“If you can gather enough evidence for a warrant, we might be able to get it done.”
“Maybe there’s one of your buddies already going after this Erasure.onion, and whatever we can give them will be enough to push it over the edge.”
“I’m already way ahead of you on that. I have inquiries out to everyone I know.”
After speaking with Angela, Brent began to feel less hopeless, and threw himself into gathering evidence that could be used to secure a warrant. Warrants had been signed on less information, but the government had no reason to care about Brent and his plight. If it was an Internet porn site, there would probably already be dozens of undercover agents already on it. It didn’t matter that Angela was a federal agent. She was not a policy maker. In order to get the government to help, they had to be manipulated into thinking it suited their interests.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The preliminary hearing was usually the place where the prosecution shined. After all, there was nothing for them to do except to parade a minimum of their witnesses (usually police) past the judge and convince him that there was enough probable cause to hold the defendant to a trial. It was somewhat of a bad joke for the defense, because although it gave the appearance of a procedure that was designed to protect a defendant’s rights, it was a sort of Kangaroo court where the prosecution always “won,” in the sense that 99% of the time the judge found that there was enough probable cause to hold the defendant to answer. In Brent’s case, it would be the bad joke before the ultimate bad joke – the trial in which he had no defense – except for two enthusiastic expert witnesses who were building their version of a 3D virtual corpse; a ‘no 3D glasses necessary show’ for the jury.
Even though there was no hope for a dismissal of the case at Brent’s preliminary hearing, Richard Hannaford, being the eloquent master of legal theater that he was, he could not hold back his cross-examination. It was like a dam overflowing its spill gates. “Don’t waste your fervor here, Richard: save it for the trial,” Brent had told him, knowing full well that it would not make a difference.
Hannaford cross-examined the police, who were the only witnesses, with a fury. But it was all useless, in that the police officers in a preliminary hearing were allowed to testify as to the hearsay of what the lay witnesses had told them. When the smoke cleared and Richard had toasted his final peace officer, it made no difference to the judge (although it was entertaining). Even the Bailiff paid attention instead of reading his Popular Mechanics magazine, and the judge listened instead of snoozing off with his eyes wide open. At the end of the hearing, Brent was held to answer and an arraignment date was set on the information that the D.A. had already readied to file.
As the clock ticked down to the final trial date, the meter kept running on the surveillance in San Jose and Minnesota, with nothing more relevant to report than a couple of guys who went to and from their workplaces, and occasionally went out on the weekends. No mysterious “ghosts” (or even ghostly apprentices) ever appeared.
However, the Erasure.onion website proved to be more than a casual interest to the feds, who obviously did not recognize it as one of their own and either were interested in knocking it down as a fraud scam or peeling the layers of that onion to see what was really beneath. This was the deep net; a dark place where all the scumbags you could imagine trafficked in drugs, kiddie porn, and every nefarious activity that could have an Internet presence. The government either despised it or they needed it as fodder for their crime-busting activities. Either way, it didn’t matter. The evidence that Brent had gathered from the subpoenas, as well as Jack’s statement of the “confession” he had obtained from Williams, proved enough for an Assistant U.S. Attorney to stick his neck out to apply for a search warrant.
At precisely 5:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (8:00 a.m. Eastern), agents from the FBI and ATF raided the respective residences of Myron Talbot and Jeremy Williams, taking with them anything that remotely resembled computer hardware. The next step would be a little trickier: trying to examine the evidence in one case for use in yet another case that the government could not give a crap about. However, since they had taken more of an interest in the Allen Bekker murder than the local cops had, there was a chance that Jack might be able to weasel in an inspection of the hard drives - or, at least, have access to the reports.
Brent was surprised that Erasure.onion had not dispatched Talbot and Williams, but he supposed that they had calculated that the frame they had tightened around Brent was air-tight, and that they were so anonymous that the only perpetrators who could be found to be prosecuted were Talbot and Williams. Once the government had locked up and thrown away the key, they could look all they wanted for co-conspirators, but would come up empty-handed.
***
As the trial date drew dangerously closer, Jack was finally able to convince Detective Gray that he was going to look stupid if he didn’t at least have his own expert look at the hard drives and the feds’ report. Gray called Jack into his office to give him the good news, and then the bad news.
Jack met Detective Arnold Gray at his West Los Angeles Community Police Station in Beverly Glen. Gray’s office did not see a lot of action. Most of the crimes he investigated were burglaries and domestic disturbances. Maybe that could explain the reason why the Bekker case had been languishing on his desk. Since the FBI had taken an interest in it, Gray’s sense of competition had been aroused, and he had finally let Jack into his inner sanctum. Gray’s office was filled with pictures of his kids in various stages of their past youth. He was in his mid-fifties, with about ten or so years
left to go on his retirement.
“What have you got for me, Arnie?”
“Here’re the reports on the hard drives. They’ve been wiped clean,” Gray said, sliding them across his desk to Jack.
Jack fought back his disappointment. “Did they have an expert try to reconstruct everything that was deleted? Browsing history and temporary files?”
“Yes, and they came up with nothing. The department’s not going to spring for an independent expert on this one, so if you want the computer stuff, you’ll have to subpoena it.”
“They haven’t given it back yet, have they?”
“No, so I suggest you get those subpoenas served before they do give them back and they wind up getting lost or destroyed.”
“Say no more. Thanks, Arnie,” said Jack as he made his good-byes brief and ducked out of the office, then called Hannaford to give him the news.
***
Hannaford had the subpoenas in the case of People v. Marks drafted, signed, emailed out, and served on Talbot and Williams with lightning speed. He sent Jack, with the proofs of service on Talbot and Williams, to serve the FBI, and they turned over the useless evidence to him in compliance with the state subpoenas. All the efforts finally paid off, and Jack was given the computer equipment in compliance with the subpoenas.
Jack called Brent, excitedly, and told him: “I’ve got the hard drives.”
“Good. Take them over to T.J. I’ll meet you there.”
Timothy Jones (or “TJ” as his friends called him) was a computer geek who handled a good part of the San Fernando Valley's small business computer needs. Brent had met TJ on another case and had remained in contact with him. TJ’s office was in his house. It was a computer lab with every type of hardware you could imagine – wires, cables, and huge multiple monitors: a tech geek’s Disneyland.
When Brent arrived, Jack had already delivered the hard drives, and TJ had loaded them up. He gave Jack and Brent a crash course in file recovery as he examined the disks for any missing files.
“A computer that’s hooked up to the Internet uses DNS servers to resolve host names to IP addresses,” TJ explained. This meant absolutely nothing to Brent and Jack. “That probably means nothing to you, but these queries are stored in a cache, and when you clear your browser history, the DNS cache is not touched. So that’s where you would normally go to look for them.”
“That’s great!” exclaimed Brent.
TJ typed some commands in and looked at Brent and Jack with disappointment. “See, the problem is that when the computer is restarted, the DNS cache is cleared.”
TJ typed in some more commands. “Next, we inspect their routers to ascertain all the connections that were established.”
A bunch of gibberish appeared on the screen. “See this list of IP addresses? These three match both routers.”
TJ quickly looked up the addresses. One was Hotstocks.co, the other Attorneys.net, and the third he was unable to trace. “That’s probably their TOR browser connection,” he said.
Brent’s head sunk halfway to his lap. “Don’t be discouraged,” TJ said. “We’ve only just begun to fight. The temporary files are here somewhere. We just have to use recovery software to find them, just like we would look for any deleted files.”
“Yeah, but the FBI already did that and came up with nothing.”
“I know. I saw the report. But the FBI doesn’t have the Wizard of Oz.”
“What’s the Wizard of Oz?”
“The Wizard of Oz is a special recovery program I designed myself that helps locate and reconstruct any deleted files, including traces left from the Tor Browser Bundle. You just let me and the wizard see if we can find the scarecrow’s brain.”
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
While TJ was off to see the wizard, Jack continued his investigation and Brent and Richard prepared for the trial. Brent had compiled notes, questions for voir dire of the jury, and cross-examination and direct examination questions like he would for any trial and had turned them all over to Richard, keeping a copy for himself.
In the middle of the preparation Jack called Brent to check in.
“We found Mr. Bean.”
“What, that’s great, Jack!”
“Not really. But you’ll see what I mean. We’ll be in your office in half an hour.”
“You have him?”
“Yes, the police kicked him loose, but he agreed to come talk to you when I told him how much trouble you were in.”
***
Jack ushered Mr. Bean into the office like a policeman with a prisoner and practically thrust him into the client’s chair in Brent’s office.
“He’s an actor,” said Jack.
“An actor?”
Mr. Bean fidgeted nervously in the chair, and flashed a “Mr. Bean” face to prove Jack’s point.
“Brent, meet Bradley Smith.”
“Smythe,” Bradley corrected.
“Come on, Bradley, you’re not British. Bradley looks so much like Rowan Atkinson, the actor who plays Mr. Bean, that it’s the only thing he can play.”
Mr. Bean nodded. “Sadly, I got stuck in this role, but, unlike Atkinson, never got anything out of it.”
“Who hired you?” asked Brent.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“They hired me off my web site, paid me in bitcoin.”
“You take bitcoin?”
“Paypal too.” Bradley grinned, like Mr. Bean.
“Cut that out, Bradley!” ordered Jack.
“He never knew who hired him.”
“They just told me to give you that message –you know, that everything is not always as it seems.”
“He received an encrypted message. Nobody’s been able to trace it.”
After Brent and Jack sent Mr. Bean on his merry way, Jack laid out the rest of the bad news.
“We also found out the identities of the guys who were following Stock Sleuth and Truth Seeker.”
“Wow! Who are they?”
“It’s not really ‘wow,” Brent. It’s the same as Mr. Bean. They’re both private investigators, hired through their web sites anonymously to watch and record movements.”
“Let me guess, they were paid in bitcoin.”
“And their clients never had any more contact with them.”
“What for, Jack? Just to mess with me?”
“Or to scare you off.”
“Which didn’t work.”
“And which now puts you in the current mess you’re in.”
***
Brent went into his meeting with Hannaford with less confidence than ever. He sat in the chair in front of Hannaford’s desk, as he watched Richard light a cigar and chew on the end of it.
“Brent, I think we should get one thing clear,” Richard said, blowing smoke rings in the air.
“What’s that?”
Richard removed the cigar from his mouth and looked at Brent intently. “I appreciate all this work, and I will look at it all. But I have to be the only lawyer on this case. You can’t be quarterbacking it from the client’s chair.”
“I know, Richard.”
“And you have to trust me.”
“Oh, I do.”
“We have different styles and different perspectives.”
“Richard, please share with me what you think our defense is, because I have no idea.”
“That’s easy. We don’t have a defense.”
Brent looked at Richard, open-mouthed, and Richard continued. “Usually, you have a defense to present. For example, if it was self-defense, you admit the killing and then show that it was justified self-defense.”
“Nobody on the jury’s going to think that this was self-defense.”
“Exactly. So then, there’s the ‘I didn’t do it’ defense. In that case, you use the facts that lend themselves to exoneration.”
“Yes?”
“Unfortunately, there are none in your case. They have eyewit
nesses with you standing over the body and your fingerprints on a bloody knife.”
“So what’s left?”
“Well, there’s just the good old-fashioned reasonable doubt defense. We exploit any inconsistencies: mistakes in police procedure, anything that could help us argue that the People have not proven the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Okay. I know that, but…”
“But we don’t have any of that, either.”
“So what’s your suggestion?”
“Simple, my boy. That was the reason for the cigar. It’s my demonstrative tool.” He flicked the ashes into the ash tray, then sucked on the cigar and blew out a generous amount of smoke. “We blow smoke up their ass.”
Ah, the smoke up your ass defense. I feel so much more confident now, thought Brent.
“Of course, we could take the deal. Plead to voluntary manslaughter with an 11-year cap. You’ll do eight years.”
“And get disbarred. What makes that a deal?”
“The mandatory sentence for second degree murder is 15 years to life.”
“I’ll take door number one.”
“Good. We’ll subpoena the two ne’er-do-wells - who will take the Fifth, of course; but not until after I have planted the seed in the minds of the jurors that they’re responsible for Bekker’s murder, implying that they are behind the murder of David Marsen, and set up you, the lawyer with the nearly unblemished record, as the perfect pasty.”