by Grilz, Jon
Lockhart cleared his throat. “You’re participation in this investigation isn’t official. Just tell me what you see.”
Mendez stared at Lockhart out of the corner of his eye as he plugged the flash drive into his laptop. The professor mumbled to himself, “Nothing strange about any of this… standard formatting… hmm…” The professor paused. “These equations…” The professor stopped speaking altogether, but his eyes continued to dart from side to side, and the computer cursor jumped around the screen at a pace that Lockhart couldn’t follow.
“Professor?” Lockhart asked.
No answer.
Lockhart raised his voice. “Professor!”
Professor Mendez stared at Lockhart with a confused look, as if he didn’t realize Lockhart had been standing next to him the entire time.
“I take it there is something of interest on these drives, Professor?”
“Uh…yes, well, no…uh, I mean…it could be…but, uh…” Mendez stammered.
Lockhart snapped his fingers in front of Mendez’s face. “Is there or is there not?”
“Well, no, there isn’t actually anything yet. These are just preliminary equations, but I’m a bit taken aback.”
“Why?”
“Because they are brilliant. Where did you get these? Are these from Michael?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss details of this case, Professor. I’m here for your assistance, not to swear you in as an honorary G-man. Can you tell me what the equations are and what someone would want them for?”
The professor shook his head. “The truth is that it will take time to study them before I can come up with some more concrete answers.”
Lockhart had no particular place to be at the moment, until a call from Agent Her asking about the recovered flash drives changed his plans. “I gave them to Chief Donaldson,” he fibbed, forcing a trip back to Crayton to put the evidence in the chief’s hand.
Professor Mendez requested more time from Lockhart to further study the drives, but Lockhart informed him that it was out of the question. After the professor handed the drives over to Lockhart again, Lockhart said, “Ideally, I’ll be back in the morning, and you will have time to examine them then.”
As Special Agent Lockhart turned to leave, he noticed Mendez still staring at his computer screen, lost in thought. “Professor? Are you all right?”
Professor Mendez shook his head. “Yes, yes, I’m fine. I look forward to speaking with you tomorrow.”
Chapter 30
One the third day, Lockhart packed his bags. When he’d returned the night before, Lockhart had handed the flash drives recovered from the Weber house rubble to Chief Donaldson, using the excuse that he’d held on to them for safe keeping until they could be locked up. He now planned to take the flash drives from the law enforcement office safe, bring them back to Professor Mendez at UMD to see if there was anything that could land him a spot back onto the case, then drop the drives at the Duluth office with some excuse and, if it came to it, catch his late flight back to DC. He ate breakfast with Joy and Jill in their dining room and was helping to clear the dishes when he got a call from Agent Her.
“Agent Lockhart, I need to see you right now.” There was an even, demanding tone about his voice. Clearly, he was all business.
“What about?”
“Professor Hubert Mendez, Michael Weber’s teacher at UMD. You interviewed him last week, and now he’s dead.”
Nothing had been moved or knocked over inside of Professor Mendez’s apartment. The lock had not been tampered with, and the door was left ajar. A neighbor had called the police when they’d heard the gunshot around four in the morning. The identification of Mendez by the landlord raised red flags with the FBI computer system. Her called Lockhart from his car on the way to the scene.
From the middle of the floor in the apartment living room, Lockhart could see almost completely around the apartment. The room was modestly decorated: simple micro-fiber couch, stone-tiled coffee table with a metal frame, and an entertainment center stocked with a small television and stereo system. Pans hung from hooks in a small, open kitchen. A computer desk in the corner of the apartment had a set-up that looked far more expensive than the rest of the furniture combined. There was also a drafting table with several papers scattered around it, but nothing that looked like it had been tossed during a search.
Lockhart looked back to the floor, where the body of Professor Mendez had been found. Stooping down to his haunches, he noticed that there was no way anyone could have seen the crime from outside. The angle of the shot and blood splatter revealed that the shot had come from near the door and the professor had been on his knees. The third floor apartment was on top of the hill overlooking Duluth and Lake Superior. With no walking paths, Lockhart couldn’t imagine the angle a person would have had to be at to see anything from outside the apartment.
The crime scene investigators had given the go-ahead to remove Professor Mendez’s body, so all that was left was the splatter from the initial impact and a macabre pink semi-circle where the blood had gushed from Mendez’s head, saturating the white carpet. The coroner estimated that the wound had been inflicted by a 9mm handgun, and he ascertained from the powder burns that it had happened at close range.
“Looks like a serial now,” Agent Her commented over Lockhart’s shoulder. Lockhart nodded solemnly.
“I already spoke with Director Chalmers. You’re back on the case, in consultant capacity, unless we somehow rule out the obvious connection between this murder and Michael Weber’s.”
“Well, for starters it looks like we can change Michael Sr.’s cause of death. Clearly it wasn’t suicide,” Lockhart said.
“Probably, but I’m not getting the connection between all of this. Michael Weber and his teacher are executed, while Mr. Weber is killed with a homemade bomb? It doesn’t add up.”
“Connection being the key word there,” Lockhart said as he tapped a power cord that ran from the wall socket with the tip of his shoe—the power cord to a laptop computer.
Lockhart slid open the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the small wood patio. A single dead plant sat in the corner, its bare branches twitching in the cold lake winds. He thought on the series of events that had just taken place and felt a mild paranoia of being followed. He called Chief Donaldson to make sure the flash drives were still in the safe. Donaldson assured him that they were as safe as anything could be.
Special Agent Lockhart decided to volunteer and go to UMD to interview other teachers and students about where and when the professor was last seen; if nothing else, he had to know if there were any witnesses who could place him in Mendez’s office, a place he had neither authority nor authorization to be.
He casually mentioned to Agent Her that he should have the flash drives inspected. After all, they had been in a fireproof safe at the point of explosion when the Weber house had been destroyed and the possibility of their presenting a new lead. Agent Her agreed and chided himself out loud for not having had the drives inspected sooner.
Fortunately, at the college campus, Lockhart wasn’t able to find anyone who could put him at the professor’s office. Unfortunately, he also couldn’t find anyone to place anyone else at the Professor’s office. The computer logs showed that Hubert Mendez had logged out of his computer at seven p.m., almost two hours after Lockhart had left his office, but it also showed over three hours of inactivity on the school network. The professor hadn’t touched it since before Lockhart had arrived with the flash drives. To add insult to injury, there wasn’t a laptop in the office either. Lockhart had hoped that power cord in the apartment belonged to a laptop that would be found elsewhere, but he was wrong.
In the large, open seating room across from the office of the university newspaper, Lockhart was slumped into one of the chairs, browsing through his e-mail when he got a call from Agent Her.
“They’re gone, Lockhart.”
“What?”
“The fl
ash drives. They’re gone.”
Chapter 31
The air in the Crayton law enforcement office was filled with more cursing than Lockhart had heard in quite a while. Agent Her fumed over what he called “the ineptitude of local law enforcement and disregard for the proper chain of evidence.” It was déjà vu for Lockhart, and he wondered if he had looked so foolish when he’d had his little meltdown at the original crime scene.
It didn’t help that Chief Donaldson had used the term “little fella” when he’d asked Agent Her to calm down and had only fed the agent’s ire with the whole situation. At that point, Lockhart had to separate the two men—or, more accurately, to pull Agent Her outside.
A few minutes of fresh air served their purpose, but they didn’t help to make Agent Her look any less foolish. As the chief pointed out—or, tried to point out—the safe was still intact, and the double tumbler was still in place. The safe itself was a holdover from the 1920s and weighed over 500 pounds. There were 2 spinning dial tumblers with 100 digits each, from 0 to 99. The safe had been reset when the last deputy had resigned, and, as procedure dictated, every new police chief and deputy selected their own combination. Deputy Lind and Chief Donaldson only knew one of the combinations each.
“You have a gun rack without so much as a padlock,” Lockhart pointed out, “yet you have a dual combination on your evidence safe?”
Deputy Lind shrugged at the comment. “Tradition I guess—kind of a callback to those Cold War nuclear subs, right? It’s kind of cool knowing only you and one other person are able to open it, and it would take both of us to open it. Besides, it’s not like we have to use it that much.”
The chief was right about the condition of the safe: the sides and door of the safe were all unharmed. Inside the safe, there was a checklist hanging on a clipboard, logging the date and time that the flash drives were left within the presumed safety of the two-inch thick steel walls.
The wind outside blew loudly, as if mocking the whole scene. Agent Her had to lean in to talk confidentially with Lockhart in the parking lot. “Do you trust the police chief and deputy?”
The same thought had already occurred to Lockhart. It seemed to him that there was something going on within the town itself. The Weber’s were less than cooperative in the investigation into their son’s murder, and the townspeople had all but destroyed the site of Mikey’s execution. Now, evidence had disappeared from a safe that had not been drilled or otherwise destroyed—a safe that only Chief Donaldson and Deputy Lind knew the combinations to, and one that could allegedly only be opened by the two of them together.
“When I first got here, I had no reason not to trust them. They didn’t exactly seem like the most competent of men, but look at this place. Almost 700 people and 2 active duty peace officers, 1 of which is full time. Then again, we aren’t exactly dealing with a town populated by dangerous criminal minds.” Lockhart paused. “But now? Now I just don’t know. There is definitely something going on here, but it still matches the profile of the earlier cases.”
Agent Her rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’ve heard about your Jack the Ripper Theory.”
“Jack the Shooter,” Lockhart corrected.
“That doesn’t make it sound any better.”
“Regardless of what it sounds like, in seven of the cases, following the execution, there were fires at either the victim’s residence or place of business.”
“Were any of those caused by fertilizer bombs?” Agent Her was quick to ask, even though he already knew the answer.
“No,” Lockhart admitted reluctantly.
“Were any of the fires directly linked to the murder investigations?”
“There were investigations into the fires themselves, but as the people were already dead and the fires were tightly contained, there was no direct link drawn between the two. None of the murders occurred at places that were then burned down, so we couldn’t prove that it was to destroy evidence of the crime.”
Incredulous eyes stared at Lockhart.
Then something occurred to him. “Unless…”
“Unless what?” Agent Her asked.
“Unless it wasn’t to destroy evidence of the crime.”
“Then what were the fires supposed to destroy?”
“Information,” Lockhart said, suddenly alert with a new energy. “What was on the flash drives?” This time it was Lockhart asking Agent Her a question that he already knew the answer to. The problem was, even though he knew there were equations on the drives, he had no idea what the equations were for or what they added up to mean.
“I don’t know. We didn’t have time to analyze them before they were, uh…let’s call it stolen.”
“What if the information on the drives was also on the professor’s missing laptop?”
“How would information from Michael Weber’s flash drives get on Professor Mendez’s laptop?”
Lockhart had almost backed himself into a corner with that one. “I don’t know. Maybe he e-mailed him.” He decided not to press the matter further for concern of where the questioning could lead. The real problem was that there was another body, but they weren’t any closer to getting solid answers. The only evidence that could have provided some kind of link between Mikey and Hubert Mendez was gone. All they had left in terms of new information was the execution of Professor Mendez himself.
Agent Her had grown far more cynical in the short time since their first meeting when he’d more or less just sat in a police cruiser, monitoring a bar. Maybe it was because an agent of superior rank was in charge of the investigation, or maybe he was just biding his time. Either way, Agent Her informed Special Agent Lockhart that he would be going back to Duluth to reexamine the crime scene and interview potential witnesses at UMD. He told Lockhart to likewise go to the Duluth FBI office to work on Mendez’s background info and any other link that could be found between him and past investigations.
As Lockhart was far more interested in Mendez’s computer accounts, he agreed to go back to the offices, but he took it upon himself to go to the FBI’s computer experts instead of continuing to wade into the dark waters of insubordination. Technically, Agent Her had been appointed the new lead on the investigation by Director Chalmers and, like it or not, Lockhart was to take his orders from Her.
The entire process of gaining access to Professor Mendez’s computer accounts was far less difficult than Lockhart anticipated. The university was unexpectedly and incredibly cooperative. A highly respected, full professor had been killed, and it was the prerogative of the school administrators to show exactly how much they wanted the killer found and brought to justice. No doubt their concern was future student enrollment numbers as much as the justice system. Their way of helping turned out to be as simple as getting access to Professor Mendez’s e-mail account, which made Lockhart’s search as easy as clicking on the sent messages icon.
There, at five a.m., the approximate time of the murder, was a message sent from Professor Mendez with “URGENT” in the subject line. The message itself was password protected, and it had been sent to Dr. Heath.
Chapter 32
“Joy, put a call into the chief and deputy. We need to talk to Dr. Heath ASAP.” Lockhart was nearly at his car by the time he made the call to Joy. His first instinct was to go himself to speak with the teacher, but Crayton was too far of a drive, time was of the essence since there was always the chance the teacher could take off. Plus, he needed to verify that Dr. Heath was still in town at all.
Joy stammered before telling Lockhart more bad news. “Darren, we just got a call. Mr. Heath’s house is on fire.”
An explicative bounced around the walls of the enclosed parking ramp, drowned out quickly by the sound of tires squealing on smooth, slick pavement.
By the time Lockhart got back to Crayton, the fire had been put out. As Dr. Heath lived just outside of the downtown area, firefighters were able to use water to put out the blaze. The men in their thick yellow flame retardant gear poked at
the remains with long poles, checking for hotspots and areas that might not have been fully extinguished.
That was it. There was no way that Lockhart would be able to keep things simple. The FBI would take over the town. There had been two deaths and two fires in two weeks; it was too much. The news would run with the story, and the town would be locked down in the hopes that the killer was still around, even though Lockhart knew he wasn’t.
The call to Assistant Director Chalmers was more about getting formation than giving it. Lockhart informed his superior of the situation, and Chalmers had questions, which was to be expected.
“Has Dr. Heath’s body been recovered?” Assistant Director Chalmers asked.
“No, sir. No sign of a body yet, but there was an explosion preceding the fire, so they are searching for remains.”
“Has the fire department established the cause of the explosion?”
“No, sir. They are still containing the scene.”
Silence on the other end of the phone made Lockhart feel that Chalmers was about to hang up, but he couldn’t let it happen; he knew it might be his only opportunity to get more information, vital information that hadn’t been deemed necessary earlier in the investigation.
“Sir? What was the nature of Dr. Heath’s research?” It was a shot in the dark, but it was the biggest hole in an investigation that could be described generously with a Swiss cheese metaphor.
“You know I can’t go into detail, but for the sake of what remains of this investigation, let’s just say he was working on energy research.”
Lockhart paused and wondered how far he could push things before it would be considered insubordination. He decided to risk it. “The kind of energy research that would cause a house fire?” As soon as the question left his lips, he tensed and waited to see if he’d receive an answer or a scolding threat.