Dead Drop: A Girl's Guide to Homicide

by D. A. Brown

  “Yeah, you look like you’re really keeping an eye on crime here.” Her shirt sleeve had crept up her arm, exposing part of her tattoo.

  “I don’t know why you think we don’t all know your left arm is covered in ink.”

  “It’s personal. I don’t share it with anyone.”

  “Well, at least not now, since no one’s seeing you naked. But I’m assuming you’re not counting on that for the rest of your life.”

  “Leave it alone, Tommy.”

  “Just trying to be helpful, Beni.” He depressed the button on the seat to move it back and stretched out his legs. “I’m going to keep checking for cracks in my eyelids. At my age, it could happen any day and then you’re screwed.”

  In the corner of the parking lot, a figure disappeared between two cars.

  “I think that’s her. What is she doing?” Sophia got out and walked closer, then turned and got back into the car.

  “She’s peeing between those two cars.”

  “Of course she is.” Stinson turned off the car and got out.

  Victoria stood up, adjusted her clothing and walked over to Sophia and Tommy.

  “Detectives, so nice to see you.” She extended her hand.

  “Hey there, Victoria.” Stinson put both hands in his pockets. “I’m coming down with a cold. Wouldn’t want to give it to you.”

  Sophia said a quick prayer. Please don’t expect me to shake your hand.

  Victoria turned to Sophia.

  “So, I’d like to tell you a story, if I could.” Victoria began walking north through the parking lot.

  “Whoa, Victoria where are you going?” Sophia went after her.

  “Up here detective, where the men come.” Victoria moved in the direction of an area near the freeway entrance that had been fenced off to keep people from clamoring up the concrete supports to set up camp. A small hole had been cut near the bottom of the fence. It wasn’t visible from the street and it wasn’t likely that department of transportation people checked the area very often, since it was populated heavily by homeless ‘urban campers’ who didn’t welcome the presence of noisy city workers. Sophia waved Stinson over. Victoria slipped through the gap in the fence and stood on the other side like a triumphant explorer.

  “What are we looking at?” Sophia peered up into the space between the bottom of the freeway and the support. An abandoned sleeping bag lay partially shredded in the corner. Stinson pulled out a small flashlight and shone it up into the cavity. The light caught something glinting.

  “That is where they come at night.”

  Stinson looked at her, inadvertently shining the flashlight in her face. “Ok, when you say this is where they come at night, are you speaking literally or figuratively?”

  Sophia shook her head.

  Victoria threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, you are such a rogue, detective.” She slapped him on the arm. “Figuratively, of course. I’m not the tramp you think I am.”

  “Victoria, we really have no idea what you are talking about.” Sophia began to shiver in the wet and cold.

  “At night, I’ve seen them. These pathetic little men climb up there and stay for only a moment. They usually have one of those things.” She put her finger to her head as though she was trying to solve a difficult problem. “One of those computers. They’re portable.”

  “You mean a laptop?” Stinson said.

  “Yes, a laptop. They carry a laptop up there and then come back down and get into their cars and drive away.”

  “Well, what do you think they are doing up there?” Sophia asked while Tommy climbed up the steep concrete incline in his new Bruno Magli’s.

  “I have no idea, dear. But I saw that man up here last week.”

  “Who?”

  “That man who died.” Victoria cocked her head and looked at Stinson.

  “The man who died in Rainer Valley?” Sophia asked.

  “Yes, dear. I didn’t know he was once a police officer.”

  “Where did you see his photo, Victoria?”

  “In the paper or on the news. Frankly, I don’t recall.”

  Stinson climbed to the top of the concrete embankment and sat on his haunches. Snapping on a pair of latex gloves, he reached up into the area where the base of the freeway met the concrete wall and pulled out a small box.

  “I’ve got something.” He turned and displayed the box.

  “Bring it down.” Sophia pulled out her notepad. “When did you see the man, the man who died?”

  “Well, there are a lot of them who come here. Let me think…” Victoria looked out at the northbound on-ramp. “I believe it was a week ago. Yes, that’s right. He came here with a woman, but she stayed in the car. He didn’t actually go up there,” she said pointing under the freeway. “He stood near the street, down there.” Victoria pointed to Sixth Avenue.

  “Can you describe the car?”

  “It was white. Sort of large and probably American. A sedan, not one of those giant gas eating things.”

  “And the woman?” Stinson had climbed down and stood next to Sophia. In his hand was a small steel box, the lid opened.

  Victoria glanced into the box. “She was caucasian, probably in her 40’s, with a little fat around the middle. I only know that because at one point she stepped out of the car when she saw me. I was only passing through to my sleeping spot. She gave me a stern look. Which, I might add, I did not appreciate at all.”

  “What did the man do?”

  “Sweetie, I was busy. I didn’t pay that close attention. I was looking for a place to sleep.” Victoria hiked up her skirt. “But I believe he was taking pictures of something. Or someone.”

  Sophia pulled out her phone and called Jess.

  “Do you remember seeing any cars at the homicide scene?”

  “Why are you calling on the homicide, Beni?” Jess lowered her voice.

  “I’m not working it. Tommy and I are out on another case and I just thought of something and wanted to run it by you. Might be helpful, who knows?”

  “So do you remember any car?”

  “I only remember an old light colored Chevy Caprice parked right out in front. You know the kind. Big, old boat. It’s kind of a popular car in that neighborhood so I really didn’t think much about it.”

  “No word to anyone about this, ok?”

  “Ok, but the chief was crawling around here after you left. Spent a half an hour in Pierson’s office, and now Pierson looks even more pathetic than usual. I don’t know what’s going on, but people are in a serious mood around here.”

  “Thanks for the heads up.”

  Sophia hung up. Tommy had opened the box and pulled out a thumb drive.

  “My, that’s a strange thing to attract such odd group of men to this god forsaken place.” Victoria had sidled up alongside Tommy.

  “Yeah, it is.” He looked at Sophia and then, realizing Victoria was practically in his lap, he stepped aside.

  “I want to take a look.”

  “You think we need a search warrant?”

  “For what? It’s not evidence of anything, as far as I know. It’s out in a public place and no one’s claiming ownership, right? I don’t see why we can’t plug it in and take a look.” He walked over to the car, grabbed an evidence envelope from the trunk and dumped in the thumb drive.

  “Victoria, these men you see coming out here. Is that all they do, just climb up there and go to this box?”

  “With those computer things, yes.”

  “And would you recognize any of these men if you saw a picture?”

  “Well, I recognized that one poor fellow, didn’t I? And I also recall seeing that policeman.”

  Tommy looked at Sophia.

  “What policeman?” He closed the lid on the box and placed it on the hood of the car.

  “He’s one of those types that talks on TV a lot. And I’ve seen him with your Chief of Police when they appear at events for the homeless. But mostly, I’ve seen him on the news, talk
ing about murders and such. I do find the shelters are very good about keeping us all abreast of the news.” Victoria picked up her bag of belongings. “Oh, and there were two others with him that night. I couldn’t see the one person, but I recognized the man in the nice suit.”

  Stinson sighed. “Jesus Christ.”

  “No dear, that fellow with the same name as the actor who married dear Elizabeth Taylor.” She paused and then smile. She clapped her hands together.

  “Burton. Yes, his name is Burton.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sophia and Tommy dropped Victoria off at the shelter with a promise to call her in the morning. She bummed a couple of cigarettes from Tommy and insisted he hold the shelter door open for her.

  “I think we need to take this to ICAC. Didn’t you go to the academy with George Anderson, the forensics guy down there?” Sophia said as they drove toward headquarters.

  “Why not just plug it into one of ours?”

  “Oh, hell no. I have no idea what’s on this thing but I know enough that it needs to go into a cold machine. It could have a virus or a whole slew of stuff on it that we don’t want to pass on to the city network. That’d get us both canned.”

  “Well, let’s just head down there and see if he’s in. Hopefully, he’ll do us a favor.”

  “And while we’re down there, I want to run by evidence and check out Halifax’s laptop so we can take it to the guys on the Secret Service task force. I want them to do a forensic analysis on the hard drive.”

  “You got a warrant I don’t know about, Beni?” Stinson pointed the car south onto I5 and then took the Airport Way South exit.

  “It’s definitely too late to ask for consent.”

  “We can talk a judge into a warrant. Don’t worry about it.” Stinson said.

  Sophia held up the evidence bag with the thumb drive. “I guess we should see what’s on this thing first. Halifax’s computer isn’t going to walk out of the evidence unit.”

  Detective George Anderson was probably just shy of fifty-five. He could have retired two years earlier but he loved his job and it only required him to sit in front of a computer all day long, which meant he wasn’t likely to hurt himself and then have to go out on a disability retirement.

  He was exactly where Sophia expected to find him, sequestered in a windowless room tucked in the corner of the Internet Crimes Against Children unit. He spent his days looking for some of the worst images imaginable. Although Sophia thought it would be awesome throwing pedophiles and child pornographers into jail, it meant having to look at those pictures and videos day after day. An old timer had told her once, “Once that crap gets in your head, it’s there forever. There’s no going back.” It was hard enough to deal with sexual assault cases, but at least she didn’t have to see it replayed on a computer monitor every day.

  Anderson leaned back in his chair. He wore a black polo shirt with the initials ‘ICAC’ above the left breast pocket, and khaki BDU pants.

  “Well, I’ll be damned. What brings you two into my den of depravity?” George stood up and extended his hand to Tommy and then to Sophia.

  “A favor.” Tommy smiled.

  “Of course. No one comes in here to just hang out.” George laughed.

  “I still don’t know how you do this shit day in and day out. I’d eat my fuckin’ gun after I put one in the head of any one of these monsters you babysit.”

  “A strong faith helps.” George smiled. “And you’re not the first guy to threaten to eat his gun after spending time with me.”

  “Probably a couple of women, too.” Stinson chuckled.

  “Still the same old Tommy Stinson.” George sat back down and tipped back in his chair.

  “Hey George, remind me to buy you a beer someday so I can hear those stories.” Sophia smiled and took a seat at an empty desk.

  “He’s a freakin’ Mormon. Maybe you could buy him some fancy sparkling water or something.” Tommy said.

  “No worries, Detective Benedetti. And yes, I’d love to regale you with some Tommy Stinson lore.”

  “Ok, spare me the threats to expose my complicated past. We need a serious favor from you.”

  “Can you take a look at this?” Sophia handed the evidence envelope to George.

  “You have a warrant, I assume?”

  “Nope.”

  “A case number?”

  “It’s a little complicated,” Sophia said.

  “I’m generally not a fan of complicated but try me.”

  “This thumb drive was in a box under the freeway. As far as we know, it doesn’t belong to anyone, so we figured we were good with looking at it without paper.”

  “Sounds like a dead drop.” George opened the envelope and let the thumb drive drop on his desk. “How did you come to get this?”

  “A dead what?” Tommy looked at Sophia and back to George.

  “A dead drop. It’s an anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing practice that takes place in public spaces. It’s sort of a new take on an old espionage trick used during the Cold War mostly. Now, it’s popular with gamers and artists and…” George paused.“Cretins who traffic in child pornography. They load their pictures on a thumb drive, another user comes by, uploads what’s on the drive and then leaves their own stash for the next guy.” George put on a pair of oversized glasses and picked up the drive. “Although they tend to be a whole lot more discreet. Must be a newbie. No one with an ounce of brains would leave a drop somewhere the cops would find it.”

  “We didn’t find it. A rape victim took us to it.”

  “So we should be good without a warrant, right?” Tommy said.

  “Is this connected to the rape?”

  Sophia spoke up. “Oh, no. Not at all.”

  “Are you expecting to go forward with a case on this? Is this going to be evidence?” He knew how hard defense lawyers fought child porn cases, and mishandling of evidence was often the focus of many a suppression motion.

  “We don’t know. It may be nothing, completely unrelated.” Sophia didn’t look at Tommy.

  “Look, I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, guys. You wouldn’t be bringing this to me if you didn’t think it was going to lead you to someone or something. I can take a look. But if there’s anything bad on here, we’ll have to stop and get a warrant.”

  “It’s a deal, George.”

  George looked at Sophia.

  “I can live with that,” she said.

  George got up and walked over to a stand-alone tower while donning a pair of latex gloves. He slid down a cover, inserted the drive and clicked it open on the desktop.

  “There’s just a readme.txt document on here. I’m guessing it’s just instructions on using the drive.” He opened the file.

  “Nothing special on here. Pretty much what I expected.”

  “There’s nothing on there? What’s the point?”

  “You might have grabbed the drive in between shares. The last guy may have just taken something but not left anything.” George closed the drive window.

  “Well, that blows.” Tommy put his hands in his pockets and slumped into a chair. “Not that I wanted to see a bunch of naked kids, but I was sort of hoping it was going to lead us to our guy.”

  “So you are working this as a case.” George looked at Sophia.

  “Not anymore. We got pulled off by Chief Burton.”

  “Burton?” George furrowed his eyebrows and frowned.

  “Yeah, he pulled us off from SAU but not ICAC. This has always been a case better suited for you basement dwellers. What if we went forward with, say, a referral from SAU? What if you guys took a look?” Tommy said.

  Sophia looked at George. He smiled slyly.

  “I hate that guy, Burton. And he absolutely hates this unit. Won’t approve any training or overtime. He’s made some pretty serious enemies down here. Why does he care about this case anyway?”

  “He’s friends with the father of our victim, Stewart Halifax. And Halifax has been less
than helpful from the beginning on this case.”

  “Is that the kid who went missing a couple of days ago?”

  “Yep. And as soon as she showed up with her idiot brother, Burton shut down the case, pulled us off and put the fear of God into our sergeant.”

  “Aside from the fact that he’s a pussy anyway,” Tommy added.

  “And how does this drive play into things?”

  “Our witness puts Burton at the scene along with Halifax.”

  “Really? Of course there could be a number of reasonable explanations as to why he was there. That parking lot is across the street from headquarters.” George pulled up the browser window and started typing in the address bar.

  “There’s too many coincidences right now. Too many fingers in this pie for me to believe he doesn’t know something.” Tommy said.

  George turned his chair towards Sophia and Tommy. “I have an idea but it’s going to be a huge gamble.”

  “Can’t get any worse, right?” Sophia said.

  “We could load a software program on the thumb drive that would install secretly on the computer of the next person who tries to dump something on it. I can put a keyword logger on it and then I can access it remotely. We could probably pull an IP address off of it, get a warrant for the records and identify the user. It might take a while to pull it off. These guys are usually pretty sophisticated about these things. Smart guys will scan the device for malware before taking anything off of it. If that happens, we’re screwed, and they’ll probably ditch the drive.”

  “We could set up on it, watch it for a while to see who shows up. I’d love to catch one of these assholes in the act,” Sophia said.

  “The only problem will be the warrant.” George flipped a ballpoint pen through his fingers like an experienced baton twirler. “That will be tricky.”

  “Could you guys open a case, maybe on the down low or at least until we have enough to go above Burton, and convince them we’ve got some legitimate bad guys? The chief of all police is not going to want to be caught up in a scandal that makes the department look like they’re protecting a child raper.” Tommy had started pacing.