by Jeff Miller
She clicked on iCloud and got a log-in screen. The username was [email protected]. The password field was blank. “Ms. Fox, do you know his password?”
She was crying. “I don’t,” she blustered.
Apple forced iCloud users to adopt complicated passwords—they had to have at least one capital letter and two nonconsecutive numbers. There was no way Dagny was going to stumble upon Adelmo’s password by guessing. Fortunately, there was an icon next to the browser’s omnibus that looked like a lock. She recognized it as belonging to the program 1Password, which stored usernames and passwords for multiple websites so that a user only had to remember one password. She clicked on it, and an empty password field popped up.
“No idea what his master password could be, Ms. Fox?”
“No,” she cried.
Dagny glanced up at the posters on the wall. One showed a picture of Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton. She typed Dalton into 1Password, and when that didn’t work, she tried AndyDalton, andydalton, Bengals, CincinnatiBengals, and a dozen other permutations. The next poster was for the band Django Django. She typed Django into the field, and then DjangoDjango. Neither worked. There were eight more posters on the wall, but she held out little hope for any of them.
Romeo had said that Adelmo was supposed to meet a girl at the park. “Ms. Fox, who was Adelmo dating?”
The woman shook her head. “Nobody.”
Teenage boys and their secrets. Dagny minimized the browser and opened the Mail program. She scrolled past e-mails from boys until she found one from a girl: Jessica Marigold. She maximized the Chrome browser, hit the 1Password icon, and typed Jessica. A window popped up, showing a series of black dots under the password field for Adelmo’s iCloud login. She right-clicked on the black dots and chose “Show Password” from the options. The dots turned into letters: Jessica16. She typed Jessica16 into iCloud and was presented with a screen of icons. One of them read “Find My iPhone.”
“This is good, no?” Diego asked.
“This is good,” Dagny said. “If his phone is on.”
She clicked on the “Find My iPhone” icon. A map appeared, along with an animated compass. The status line under the compass read Locating. “Please,” she whispered.
A street map flashed onto the screen, along with a green dot. She clicked on the dot, and a bubble read Adelmo’s iPhone. Under it, the words: Located less than a minute ago. She hit the plus sign to zoom in, and then pushed the Hybrid tab so that they could see a satellite image overlay the street map. The green dot was in the middle of a large wooded area next to Hillsborough Park.
She unplugged the laptop. “Ms. Fox, I need to borrow this.”
“You found him?” she said, with more hope than was warranted.
“I found his phone.”
“You found him?” she said again, begging for affirmation.
“It’s a good sign,” Dagny said, hoping it would appease her. She carried the laptop down the steps and out to the Corvette. Then she pulled out her iPhone and opened the settings.
“What are you doing?” Diego asked.
“Tethering the laptop to my phone so we’ll stay connected while we drive.” After turning on her phone’s tethering, she clicked on the Wi-Fi icon in the task bar of Adelmo’s computer and selected “Dagny Gray’s iPhone network” from the list. She handed the laptop to Diego. “You’re navigating. Keep refreshing the status of Adelmo’s phone.”
“In case he moves?”
“In case his phone does.”
He called out directions as they drove. “The dot isn’t moving.”
She had hoped that it would, since dead bodies lay still. “Keep refreshing.”
The gardens at Hillsborough Park were gorgeous, filled with blooming flowers of endless variety and color, surrounded by fresh and fragrant mulch. All of this flora formed the periphery around three tennis courts with sagging nets, a basketball court with a busted hoop, and playground with a seesaw surrounded by cones behind a sign that read UNDER REPAIR. Some teenage boys were shooting hoops at the good end of the basketball court. A woman was pushing a toddler in one of the swings. The park’s gardener was driving his maintenance cart along the path that meandered through the gardens.
Dagny parked the car, pulled out her creds, and held them high as she ran toward the gardener. “Stop!”
The gardener turned his head and stopped.
“I need your cart!” she shouted.
Diego was standing by his car, seemingly unsure of what to do. “Bring the laptop,” she shouted to him.
The gardener was a little old man, with patches of white hair dotting his otherwise-bald dome. A retiree, she figured, volunteering his time to make the city’s garden beautiful while everything else fell apart. He looked at her creds and said meekly, “Something going down?”
“Perhaps,” she replied. He ceded her the cart, and Diego climbed aboard. She grabbed the laptop from him and studied the satellite image on the map showing Adelmo’s phone. After getting her bearings, she drove the cart along the path and turned onto a dirt trail that headed into the woods. The iPhone dot was about fifty yards east of the trail. She parked the cart. “We walk from here. Don’t walk on the trail; stay on the grass next to it.”
“Why?”
“Because the trail may have evidence.”
He followed her to a flat, grassy clearing in the woods. “It looks like it’s in the center on the map,” he said.
“That’s not always as precise as you would think.” She set down the laptop, walked to the center of the clearing. Dropping to her knees, she ran her fingers through the thick grass, searching for Adelmo’s phone. Diego dropped to the ground and did the same.
A flash of light sparkled a few feet in front of her. She fished through the grass and spied a woman’s diamond ring. She opened her backpack, grabbed a Ziploc bag, and turned it inside out. Wearing it as a glove, she lifted the ring from the ground, then inverted the bag and zipped it closed.
“That’s evidence?” he asked.
“Everything is evidence,” she replied, placing it in the pocket of her backpack. “Keep looking.”
He worked his way left while she worked her way right.
“Is this something?” he called, pointing out a mound of freshly turned dirt.
It was something. Dagny sprinted back through the woods to the gardener’s cart and opened the trunk. There were two long, wood-handled shovels, and she grabbed both. She raced back to the clearing and handed one of the shovels to Diego.
She shoved the blade of the shovel into the dirt and stepped down hard on it to push it in farther. It gave easily. She tossed the dirt to the side and shoved the shovel in again. Diego did the same. Two feet down, the dirt still gave easily.
“Deep hole,” he said, and she nodded.
Three feet down, the frayed edge of a rope appeared. “Stop,” she said, and he obeyed. She opened her backpack, withdrew two pairs of latex gloves, put on one, and gave the other to Diego. Dagny kneeled down and tugged at the frayed rope with one hand while scooping the dirt around it away with the other. She followed the rope down to a metal ring in a piece of canvas. The rope wove in and out of a series of holes that lined the top of a large bag.
As they uncovered more of the bag, she noticed a tear sliding down Diego’s cheek. “We don’t know anything yet,” she said. Even she didn’t believe it. It seemed likely that they’d be pulling Adelmo’s body out of the ground in a matter of minutes.
They dug some more, and when the bulk of the large bag was exposed, they pulled at its sides to lift it from the hole. The bag was about four feet deep and three feet wide—large enough for a body that was folded the right way.
Dagny loosened the rope, opened the top of the bag, and looked inside.
Cell phones. A ton of them.
“Oh, my.”
Diego leaned over the opening of the bag. “There must be a hundred phones in there.”
The magnitude of the crime was large
r than she had imagined. She closed her eyes and brought her palms up to her forehead. There was simply too much to do and not enough manpower or time to do it. Although she still hadn’t found any bodies, she had a bag of gadgets full of volumes of information, all of which would need to be extracted and analyzed. But first, she had to process a crime scene.
She turned to Diego. “Do you have Beamer’s number in your phone?”
“Yes.” He handed her his phone.
“Go back to the cart and get a garbage bag from the trunk. Remember to stay off the trails.”
“Okay.” While he sprinted off, she scrolled through his contacts, found Beamer’s number, and touched it.
“Father Vega?” he answered.
“Special Agent Dagny Gray, actually.”
“I can’t tell if that’s good news or bad.”
“Another young man disappeared last night. We tracked his cell phone to the woods behind Hillsborough Park. It was buried in a bag with about a hundred or so other cell phones.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I figure each phone came from a victim. So, we’re dealing with a mass murderer, most likely. I need help.”
“Jesus. What can I get you?”
“This is a crime scene. It needs to be processed. Hair, clothing, fingerprints—anything we can find.”
“Anything visible?”
“No, but we’ll need to comb it. Tape it off.”
“Tell me you’re taking the lead and that you’ve got a team for this.”
“The team is me and a priest in over his head. I don’t have an official investigation. In fact, I’m technically suspended from the Bureau. I’m not even supposed to be looking at this thing.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“So, I need your help. I also need you to keep it quiet. So you can’t tell your chief.”
“Christ, Christ. Why?”
“Because he’s not going to take direction from an agent gone rogue, and I need to be in charge right now.”
“So, you need me to get together a team to comb through Hillsborough Park for evidence of a serial murderer and not tell my boss.”
“Yes.”
“What else do you need? A unicorn?”
“Do you have a Cellebrite?”
“What’s that?”
“A machine that lifts data from cell phones.” They were expensive, so it seemed unlikely that Bilford had one.
“No, we don’t have anything like that.”
Everything was going to be harder without the Bureau’s resources. “You have phone chargers?”
“Not a hundred of them.”
“I need a safe place to store and process evidence. The Bilford Motor Inn won’t cut it.”
“You can’t use the station and keep the chief from knowing. It’s a small force.”
“You have a nice house?”
“Holy Christ.”
“With a good basement? Door that locks? Something secure?”
“You want to use my basement? To run a secret investigation?”
“Hey, you’re the one who sent Diego to me.”
“I don’t know about this.”
“You have a wife? Kids?”
“No.”
“Good. Look, John, once we find bodies—even one body—the Bureau is going to make this thing official, I’m going to be reinstated, and you’ll have your basement back. We’ll brief your chief and work in tandem to find this monster. But until then, I don’t want to scare away the people we need to help us, and I don’t want politics getting in the way of finding this guy.”
“I could lose my job, Agent Gray.”
“You do, and I’ll get you another job. A better job. You can call me Dagny.”
“It sounds like you’ve barely got a hold on your current job, Dagny, and you’re going to get me a new one?”
“Three people. Two, even. Just you if that’s all we can get. Some tape. Evidence bags. Plaster, cameras. And your basement for maybe a week. Probably less.”
He sighed.
“Please.”
“Give me thirty minutes.”
“Great.” She hung up.
A Cellebrite was too expensive for Bilford, but Cincinnati probably had one, she figured. She texted Beamer’s uncle and asked if she could borrow one. He promised to deliver it that night, no questions asked.
Diego returned with the garbage bag. It was large and heavy—designed for volumes of cut grass and leaves, not evidence gathering, but it would hold a canvas bag full of cell phones fine. She grabbed the bag from his hand and held it open. “Lift the canvas bag carefully, and set it down in here.”
“Okay.” He held the top of the bag closed with his left hand while scooping his right under the bottom, and set the canvas bag into the plastic one. “What now?”
“We’re about to descend into a process of enormous tedium,” she said. “I’m going to ask you to do as little as possible. Don’t take it personally. You’re not trained in law enforcement, and some lawyer would point that out down the line if he thought it would get him reasonable doubt. This whole area is a crime scene.” She stopped to think. “Burying this bag out here, instead of burning it or throwing it in a river . . . that tells us the unsub wants our attention. If he wants our attention, maybe he isn’t being careful with footprints or hair, or clothing or fingerprints. It’s a fresh scene, so there’s some hope.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Dagny pulled her wallet out of her backpack and handed him a credit card. “We need every phone charger you can find. Hit Walmart, Target, the Verizon store, wherever, and buy them all out. Every make and model. Hit Goodwill to see if they have older ones the stores don’t carry.”
“Why do we need to charge the phones?”
“Because they’re full of information. We’ll be able to figure out who owned them, which will give us a list of the missing. The last e-mails and texts they sent will give us a timeline for their disappearance. GPS data, calendars, social networks—put it all together, and you get a narrative.”
“And all it takes is a process of enormous tedium.”
“While you’re at it, pick up fifteen power bricks, ten extension cords, and every whiteboard you can find. We’re setting up shop at Beamer’s house.”
Diego nodded and started toward the parking lot.
“Wait,” she called.
He turned around. “Yes?”
She pointed to the pile of dirt they had extracted from the hole. “Give me one nice footprint in this dirt.”
He walked over to the pile of dirt and stepped down into it. “To compare?”
“Yes. I don’t want anyone to get excited about finding your footprints in the woods. Remember, walk off-trail on the way back to your car.”
“Will do.” And with that, he left.
Dagny planted her own foot in the dirt next to his. She pulled her Canon DSLR from her backpack, took a picture of the hole in the ground, then backed up and took another picture to give it some context. Circling around the hole, she photographed the scene, moving a bit farther out with each pass. Along the way, she snapped and bagged a cigarette butt, a candy wrapper, an inch-long piece of flannel fabric, a toothpick, a coffee-cup lid, and a Livestrong bracelet. There were a few sets of footprints smaller than hers. She thought about the diamond ring. Maybe it had been intended for Jessica Marigold. She called Romeo’s cell phone.
“Hello?”
“It’s Special Agent Dagny Gray.”
“Oh, hey. Did you find Adelmo?”
“Not yet, but I’m looking. You said he was meeting a girl last night. Was it Jessica Marigold?”
“Yes, that’s her name.”
“Was she at school today?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t go.”
“Can you call someone who would know and find out?”
“Sure.”
“Another question: Is Jessica related to Don Marigold?”
“Yeah. She’s the sheriff’s daug
hter.”
Adelmo had been playing with fire. “One more thing.”
“Yeah.”
“Was he going to propose to her?”
“Adelmo? He didn’t say anything about it.”
“Is it something he might have done?”
“He’s stupid enough to do something like that. He’s all into her, and she’s just fooling around with him. He’s whipped, for sure.”
As she hung up the phone, three officers emerged from the woods. She had meant to tell them to stay off the trail, but it was too late. The first of them looked to be in his late twenties. His blond hair was trim and neatly parted, and he was short but cute in an Eagle Scout kind of way. He dropped a large duffel bag on the ground and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Dagny.”
“Nice to meet you, John. How’s your uncle?”
“Talking about retirement.”
“Hope it’s just talk.” The other two officers were even younger than Beamer. This was good, because it meant their training was fresh. She told them to tape off the trail to reduce entry, scour the parking lot for evidence, and lift the trash bags from their cans and place them in fresh, marked evidence bags. “Don’t walk on the trail on the way out,” she said. “We need to minimize the damage we inflict on the scene.” Before they left, she had them stamp their feet in the dirt next to Diego’s footprint.
As they jogged off, Beamer seemed confused. “We going to pick the trash?”
“At some point, we might have to. We’ll keep them in your basement for now.”
“Figures.”
“We’ll be gone in a week. You ever cast prints?”
“I think I did it on a case once.”
Maybe it was something she should do herself. “I’ve been circling outward from the hole. You can take over while I cast?”
“Sure. Plastering equipment is in the bag.”
She kneeled down, opened the duffel, and withdrew a six-pound bag of Hydrocal plaster, a two-gallon jug of water, a set of mixing cups, two spatulas, and a roll of plastic bags. There were five distinct tracks she had already spotted. One looked like it belonged to a dog, one probably belonged to Adelmo, one may have been Jessica’s, and two were unknown. One could be the unsub’s. She carried the materials over to the first set of tracks, loaded some Hydrocal into a mixing cup, added water, and stirred the mixture with a spatula.