by Jeff Gunhus
When he opened his eyes he let out a disappointed groan that his attempt at teleportation had failed. He was still in his short-term rental unit in Southeast DC, just a shabby motel room with a small kitchenette. The place was a dump. Poor lighting. Stains on the carpet. Dirty water coming out of the taps. It’d been a shithole to begin with and he’d just added to it. Pizza boxes and fast food wrappers littered the floor. Empty beer bottles stood in formation on the counter like they were lined up in front of a firing squad. He had the money to stay at the Four Seasons, but he was working. When he was on a job, it was all about staying places where people knew better than to ask questions. Besides, he’d stayed in worse places. Much worse.
Harris looked through the information on the thumb drive Libby had provided him. He didn’t expect to find anything he didn’t already know, but he hadn’t gotten this far in his career by cutting corners. He dutifully went through every file, reviewed each photo, read every word of every report. When he got to the end, he went back up to the first folder and read through it all a second time.
Neither pass added anything worthwhile to what he already knew, a fact that pleased him. Although there wasn’t an official seal anywhere in the files, he recognized the FBI’s layout. He wondered whether Libby’s father had been the one to give him the information. If so, he guessed there might be some data missing, data which might be the essential ingredient to tracking down where the second camera had sent the video images.
Harris opened the photo of one of Catherine Fews’s severed legs and zoomed in on the image. The resolution degraded quickly and the picture turned blurry and dark. The photographer had botched the job. He decided a trip to the morgue to get a look at the body would be his next step.
Harris closed the file and sipped his beer. He needed to see who was on the case for the Feds. Maybe if Mason had chosen the right agent for the job, he could just hang back and see where the FBI led him.
11
Allison smiled as Richard reached over and caressed her arm playfully. She knew exactly what that touch meant and she was more than open to the idea. She slid her feet backward under the sheets until they were intertwined with his. Richard’s caressing fingers went from her arm, up her shoulder, through her hair. She felt his warm body press up behind her and she moaned softly, the urgency building in her. She wanted his mouth, wanted to feel his chest against her own. She rolled over and opened her eyes…
…to an empty bed.
She stared at the bedcover, an entire side without a wrinkle in it since her habit was to sleep on only one side of the bed. She reached out and placed a hand in the center of it. The spot was cold to the touch and the emptiness brought tears to her eyes. The image of Richard’s broken body sprawled on sharp rocks flashed in her head. A casualty of the Arnie Milhouse case but also a casualty of her bull-headedness and her willingness to take risks. In her semi-awake state, her brain jumped to the other casualties she’d laid at her own feet, times when her choices had put men in harm’s way and gotten them killed. The faces of the four men on the tactical team in Louisiana came to her, an odd mix of images, one second their official photos from their personnel files, the next their burned and mangled bodies.
Allison sat up and clawed for the bucket next to her bed, heaving into it. It wasn’t the first night since Louisiana that the guilt had woken her up this way, and she doubted it would be the last.
The shrink the Bureau sent her to after Arnie Milhouse had told her it was typical of most agents to have difficulties after killing in the line of duty. Arnie wasn’t her first. There was the time before when she’d saved Richard’s life in the field by killing Harvey Madel. She’d made the mistake of being honest with the shrink that time, only to have the supposedly sealed conversation thrown back in her face during her first meeting with Clarence Mason. Allison did have trouble dealing with the shooting. She had trouble with the fact that she liked the feeling of power and justice it gave her. From her studies, she knew most people experienced remorse even when killing to defend themselves or to protect a loved one. She must be missing that gene because she didn’t waste one second on Madel. Or Arnie Milhouse. Or Sam Kraw. Maybe it was that the human mind was only capable of bearing so much guilt and all that she felt for Richard and the four tactical guys made it impossible to feel anything for the bad guys.
It was a nice thought, one that bestowed on her the benefit of the doubt and ascribed human traits that could make her feel better about herself. But it didn’t explain Madel. No one had died then. The only real conclusion was that she felt no remorse because she was happy to put the sons of bitches out of their misery when she had the chance.
She wiped her mouth and sipped some water from a glass on her bedside table, a throwback to her childhood when her father always made sure a glass was there. She wasn’t sure when it started, but it was part of his ritual to bring her a glass and a goodnight kiss, something he did without fail all the way through middle school and high school. He offered to stop doing it once when she was in tenth grade, asking if it was foolish of him. She told him he could stop if he wanted to, that she didn’t care. Then once he left the room, she cried like a baby, not really sure why, but unable to stop. The next night, there was a glass of water on her bedside table. She cried one other time as well because of his small, quirky gesture. It was after she quit the United States Naval Academy. Her father hadn’t said a word the entire ride home, unable to find the words to soothe a daughter who’d been raped by an instructor and then discarded by an institution they had both thought they loved. But that first night at home, as she lay in her bed clutching the covers to her chest, doing her best to hold herself together, her father knocked softly on the door. She didn’t answer but he came in anyway, glass of water in hand, and set it on her bedside table and kissed her cheek. He didn’t say a word as he left the room and he didn’t have to. She cried herself to sleep that night not because she was alone, but because she felt loved.
The clock glared at her, the digital numbers showing it was just after three in the morning. Late enough that she should be fast asleep, too early to just pack it in and get up for the day. Even so, she knew there was no chance of falling back to sleep so she took the second option and dragged herself out of bed.
The file from the Fews case was spread out across the length of her breakfast table, which she supposed could double as a dining room table if she was ever home for dinner or had guests over. The Georgetown apartment was new in the last year, a chance to start fresh. The rent sucked, but the location couldn’t be beat. Only a few blocks off Wisconsin Avenue, she was within walking distance of restaurants and bars. Not that she took advantage of it that often. At least there were great runs to be had crisscrossing Georgetown University, or through the maze of brownstone mansions belonging to diplomats and politicians, or down to the waterfront along the steady-flowing Potomac.
She waited impatiently as her Keurig gurgled its way to a perfect cup of coffee. What had once seemed a delightful extravagance was now just part of her morning routine, the thirty seconds to make a single cup sometimes feeling like an eternity. The machine finished and she took the first sip a little too quickly, burning the tip of her tongue, but still relishing the all-important first taste of morning coffee.
Turning to the table, she looked death and depravity right in the face. Hours of study had given her very few details about either Catherine Fews’s life or her death. Clearly, she’d been using an alias as there was no record of a Catherine Fews until she suddenly appeared in official records four years earlier. There were no run-ins with law enforcement, not even so much as a speeding ticket. Not until her murder case was opened, anyway. The FBI computers had been unable to find a match in their vast archives of any record showing what the woman’s real name had been. It was the first mystery Allison intended to solve. One surprising data point was that at the time of her death, Catherine Fews’s net worth was over two hundred thousand dollars. Either turning tricks with th
e DC elite paid far more than the FBI did or someone was funding her for the videos up front. She didn’t think the money came from Catherine using the videos for blackmail on her own, but she couldn’t rule that out either. She figured the other team, the real investigation, had likely already chased the money to find the source and had come up empty. Allison needed a different way in.
Most of the documents Mason had given her didn’t shed much light on Catherine Fews’s life, just her death. Close-up photos of her severed limbs hanging from the bondage cords on each bedpost. She was no pathologist, but she knew enough to be dangerous. Using a jeweler’s loop, she magnified sections of the photos, looking for details that might tell a story. Just like the other dozen times she’d looked at them, she found nothing except frustration at the photographer who had done a crappy job of memorializing the scene. She wondered if it was someone young, someone overwhelmed by the scene. Still, it was sloppy work with shadows in important areas, blurs in others. She didn’t want to admit it, but her first visit in the morning needed to be the coroner’s office to look at the remains herself.
Allison picked up the eight by ten of a very alive and very beautiful Catherine Fews and stared into the young woman’s eyes. She tried to imagine how it was possible that a young woman with so much potential ended up as a prostitute. Allison realized that if she wanted to know how Catherine Fews had died, she needed to know more about the life she’d led.
“What happened to you?” Allison said, her voice echoing in her empty apartment. Allison sat at the table sipping her coffee, rereading the file and feeling a new determination seep into her blood, not just to stop this man from killing again, but to avenge this young woman who must have caught a hard break somewhere along the line. And catching a hard break was something Allison could relate to. So, there at her kitchen table, at three thirty in the morning, the thing that happened at some point in every case happened. It was no longer just a case. It was personal. That usually meant the killer didn’t stand a chance.
12
Jordi Pines squatted behind a bank of computer monitors, his eyes twitching between screens as his fingers flew over the keyboard on his lap. Allison stood quietly off to the side, letting him do his magic. They were an unlikely pair, brought together by a mutual distrust of authority and a fervor for ending the careers of serial killers. Her intuition had pointed them in the right direction on the Kraw case, but it was his unique search algorithm that had been the real breakthrough.
Grossly overweight from countless hours at his computer fueled by pizza, Cheetos and Mountain Dew, Jordi wore tacky Hawaiian shirts, decorated his room with skulls and Dungeons and Dragons memorabilia, and showcased no noticeable internal filter when he spoke. It was as if he had gone down a list of geek programmer stereotypes, dutifully ticking off each item.
He had an English accent that made the socially awkward things that came from his mouth seem somehow funny instead of creepy. But the really odd thing was that Jordi was from New Jersey and had never even been to England. When Allison asked where his accent came from, he looked at her like she was crazy and asked what accent she was referring to. Allison knew that genius sometimes came wrapped in a little bit of crazy and Jordi Pines had the crazy side of that equation working. She never brought up his accent again.
“You right bastard,” he muttered at the screen in front of him. “You think you have me? Take this, bitchness.”
It’d been over ten minutes of this one-sided conversation with his computers. As near as Allison could gather, someone smarter than Jordi had protected the data he was trying to access. If there was one thing Jordi couldn’t stand, it was coming across someone smarter than himself.
The speaker made a harsh, grinding noise and the monitor flashed red. Jordi grabbed a handful of popcorn from the bowl next to his computer and threw it at the screen. “Fuck off, you twat.”
“How’s it going?” Allison asked.
Jordi looked up in surprise and Allison realized he had forgotten she was there. Once he dove into cyberspace, the real world faded for him. He’d shared a story once of another analyst who came into their shared office to find a small fire in one corner of the room and Jordi hard at work programming, oblivious to the smoke rising around him. Since then, Jordi had been given his own lair in the basement of the Hoover building since no one really wanted to work in the same space with him. Uncle Sam wasn’t sure how to best use Jordi Pines, but he knew he wanted Jordi on his side instead of out in the world available to the highest bidder.
“Any luck?” she asked.
“There’s no luck involved here, love,” Jordi said.
“So, you’ve got something?”
Jordi scrunched up his nose as if a terrible smell had entered the room. “No, not really. Come have a look.”
Allison slid around behind the desk, stepping over old pizza boxes. Jordi sized her up as she did so. “Have you put on a few pounds? Your boobs look bigger for some reason.”
When they’d first started working together, that was the kind of comment that had shocked her speechless. But it was just Jordi being Jordi, unfiltered and prone to say the damnedest things. It helped that Jordi was gay. Unless he’d converted overnight from his predilection for large, hairy men, she knew there was nothing sexual about the comment.
“No,” she said. “New bra.”
He stared at her breasts and then her hips. He didn’t look convinced. “If you say so.”
Allison hit him in the shoulder. “Careful, I’ll drag you out of this dungeon and force you to come to the gym with me.”
“And then you’d be responsible for my heart attack, wouldn’t you?”
“You’d be fine. It’s just a matter of time before I break you down.” Allison said as she leaned in and tried to decipher the data flashing on the screens. “So, lay it on me. Are you able to figure out where she sent the videos?”
“No,” Jordi said. “The first analysts were right. The way it was set up is untraceable.”
“This is the part where you make fun of the other analysts for missing something obvious,” Allison said, “proving that you’re better than them.”
“That I exist on an entirely different plane of existence than them,” Jordi corrected.
“Exactly.”
“Not this time,” Jordi said. “Look at this.” He typed a few lines and the screen flashed lines of code at them, none of which made any sense to her.
“Oh, yeah,” Allison said. “I see what you mean now.”
“Smart ass.” Jordi pointed to the screen. “It’s set up to go through the dark web.”
“You mean like the Silk Road, bitcoins and all that?”
Jordi looked impressed. “Yeah, you’ve got it. That’s more in the news nowadays. What people don’t realize is that the dark web is about five hundred times larger than the world wide web everyone is used to.”
Allison’s mind reeled at the idea. “How is that even possible?”
“Oh, it’s possible,” Jordi said. “The world has a way of wanting to keep its shit secret. Wasn’t long after we figured out how to share everything that we figured out how to not share anything.”
“So, our call girl had to be pretty high tech then, right?” Allison said. “Or she had help.”
“Not really,” Jordi said. “This goes through TOR, a free software program that a ten year old could use. It’s free, simple and impossible to break.”
“Even for you?”
“This thing takes what you’re sending and breaks it into application layers of encryption.” Jordi’s hands sliced the air, mimicking data packets rushing through the air. “It bounces it around a randomized sequence of over five thousand relays all over the world, with each relay only able to decrypt one part of the data and that data is only the next step in the relay circuit. By the end of it, the final relay to the destination doesn’t even know where the message came from. It’s…it’s…you know…fucking brilliant.”
Allison shook her h
ead. “So how do you unravel it?”
“That’s just it,” Jordi said. “There is no unraveling it. You want to know where your videos are? They were blown up into millions of encrypted pieces, scattered across the globe on random computers, then anonymously reunited and reformed. They were everywhere, then they ended up somewhere, but even the computer that received them has no idea where it came from.”
“Maybe not,” Allison said. “But the person who received them knows who sent them.”
“Not necessarily,” Jordi said. “She could have just set up a dummy server somewhere and sent the videos to herself.”
“I don’t think so,” Allison said.
“How do you know?” Jordi asked.
“Because you know computers, but I know people. When you’re scared and you have an insurance policy, you send it to someone you trust. A best friend. A family member,” Allison said. “Trouble is, the original investigation already canvassed all of Catherine Fews’s friends here in DC. Just acquaintances. Nothing strong enough to warrant that kind of trust.”
“So it comes down to her alias,” Jordi said.
“But the other team already searched all the databases we have access to. No match for either facial recognition or prints,” Allison said, reaching out and digging through the bowl of Skittles on his desk, picking out all the red ones.
“Those other guys are pukes,” Jordi snorted, staring down her hand as if he might swat at it.
“You found something?” she asked, tossing the candy in her mouth.
Jordi picked up his Skittles bowl and put it on the other side of his computer, out of her reach. “No. Nothing yet,” he admitted. “But I wrote this killer little program that’s crawling through all these restricted access databases to see what I can turn up. It’s breaking about a dozen civil liberties regulations, but if those NSA assholes are allowed to do it, why shouldn’t I?”