Killerbyte (byte Series Book 1)

by Cat Connor

  I hurried through the expansive office to a desk at the far end and a computer. I sat down and checked the number written on my hand from the bug. Mac inspected the display boards and read all the current case information. It took twenty minutes to follow the trail left by the GPS transmitter number. It was part of a consignment of devices sent for destruction. Four weeks earlier ten devices, including that one, arrived at the Richmond field office. Agent Tim Gardner signed them in. Six hours later he signed them over to a company called Dataraze. All ten devices appeared accounted for at that point. Two days later Tim Gardner received a written report stating that all ten devices had undergone destruction at the Dataraze site.

  I needed to know more about this company. They had government contracts and had done so for ten years. There were no reports of anything going missing but, then again, if we hadn’t found this bug there still wouldn’t be anything missing.

  “Mac, ever heard of Dataraze?” I looked up when he didn’t respond, and saw he was reading a bunch of papers. “Mac?”

  He turned towards me. “Yeah.”

  “Have you heard of a company called Dataraze?”

  Mac chewed his lip as he thought, “I think they are a subsidiary of Global Underwriters. I’d have to check to be sure.”

  “Okay.” Global Underwriters was a company I knew. Aidan was an assessor for Global Causality, another of their subsidiary companies. “The date on the destruction receipt is the same day Carter turned up in DC, I need to check Caine’s day planner.”

  “When you are done, you need to read this stuff,” Mac said. He thumbed through more papers.

  “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

  I needed to be able to say it wasn’t possible for Caine to have had anything to do with the GPS bug defying destruction. I opened his day-planner and went back four weeks, then opened mine. With both screens open at once it was easier to see how the day had gone. We’d been close to wrapping up the Blue River case; that morning we’d had a staff meeting. Everyone involved was there. I looked down the list of names, all bearing checks stating they had shown up.

  Caine and I had a short meeting afterwards. He then met with our legal department. I went to meet Mac for coffee at four p.m. Caine logged a call from me at six p.m. I returned to the office at eight-thirty p.m. Caine was here, there is no way he could have made it to Richmond and back that day. And the previous two days we were in Baltimore.

  The Unsub had been using others; if it was Caine, why would he have to be anywhere near Richmond? So where and when did the GPS bug disappear, and why wasn’t it noted on the destruction report? I checked back on the destruction order, and then looked up Dataraze’s contract. This was the fifth year in a row that they had won the contract to handle the destruction of electronics and not just secure-paper destruction. I wanted to visit the company in person. Find out firsthand what their security procedures were and who last handled that shipment.

  I erased my activity on the computer and logged out. Annoyance burgeoned. I still couldn’t rule out Caine, even though I was his alibi. I joined Mac. “Find anything?”

  “Four descriptions: None of them matching and only one with scratches on his neck. Cat hair.”

  “Cat hair?”

  “Yep, cat hairs were found on the clothing of all the bodies and from the bedcovers in my guest room.” He passed me a forensics report.

  I skimmed over it; he was right, and they said it was from the same cat, apart from some hairs taken from Mac’s cat for comparison. “Our killer may have a cat.”

  Caine didn’t have a cat, or at least he never spoke of one and sure as hell never had cat hair on his immaculate dark-gray suits.

  “Ketamine and cat hair.”

  “There’s something else, Ellie, on the list of possible suspects. Kevin, Holly, Aidan.”

  “Are you there?”

  Great. My brother and my friends; they don’t seem to think this is a stranger thing then.

  I wondered why my parents weren’t on the list. If Mom were a smarter insanity-ridden person, I would’ve picked her first off. That one was a no-brainer.

  “Yep. But cleared within the first twenty-four hours.”

  Kevin had a cat. Holly had a cat. Aidan had a cat. We knew Carter was a dealer, but why did all the bodies contain ketamine and why drug Mac? It made less sense now I knew more, if that was possible. Why kill a DEA agent? I sat on the edge of the boardroom table in the middle of the room, wondering if I could be any more perplexed. Why kill FBI agents? I felt an urge to give myself a slap on the head but resisted because my head had enough trouble.

  “You know what?”

  Mac gave me his full and undivided attention. “What?”

  “I’m lost.”

  “Check this out.” Mac handed me another pile of paperwork. “Surveillance records.”

  I skimmed over the opening paragraphs then stopped. “They have to be fuc’n joking.”

  “I think they’re serious.”

  My mind came to an abrupt halt; short of a swift kick nothing was going to be operational again tonight. As I clutched the white paper in my hand, the black typeface leapt at me: Aidan Conway, electronic surveillance transcript, sheet one of twenty-five.

  Don’t kill the messenger. I calmed my inner turmoil before speaking again, “How did they get authorization for the wire taps?”

  Mac frowned at me. “I haven’t seen anything else relating to Aidan.”

  “Find any surveillance ordered on Holly or Kevin?”

  “Nope.”

  I took the pile of papers over to the photocopier. I needed to take a copy to read when we had more time.

  “Mac, can you check the file these were in? There has to be an official request for this surveillance.”

  I stapled the pile of copied paper, folded it into thirds and shoved it in the waistband of my jeans.

  “There is nothing else that mentions that surveillance.”

  I handed him the transcript to return to where he had found it.

  “I can’t discount Caine to my own satisfaction.” I couldn’t believe I thought the thought, let alone said it aloud, “Could he be setting up Aidan? And why the hell would he?”

  “Fuck knows.”

  “If it isn’t Caine, then he has no clue about the GPS device we found – if I give it to him—”

  Mac stopped me. “Working for a company that is under the same umbrella as the Dataraze Company is not sufficient evidence to incriminate Aidan.”

  I almost smiled. “Ah, the voice of reason.” I thought back to Mr. Parker telling me about Doc. “You find anything suggesting anyone spoke to Doc Tompson?”

  “No.”

  I searched the whiteboard on the wall in front of me for some reference to Doc and found nothing.

  Didn’t anyone bother checking into the McDonald-McClaren connection?

  DEA was a possibility, perhaps part of the investigation landed in their jurisdiction. I wracked my brain trying to think of a friendly face in DEA I could approach. It dawned on me that none of them would be too friendly seeing it was my fault Roy was killed.

  Flag that for later.

  Copies of the post-it poems were stuck in order of discovery on the wall. I read them one by one until I came to the one no one mentioned to me, the one from the hospital in Lexington. Bile rose as I read it to Mac, “‘I’ve seen you in my dreams, Voodoo doll manifests, That I tear at the seams, Threadbare from my handy work, I make another stitch, Just enough to keep you breathing, As I torture this digital bitch.’”

  “It’s one of his better efforts,” Mac commented.

  I could feel his eyes on me even though I was still facing the wall.

  “Yes, it is.” I read it again. As I torture this digital bitch. “Computers? Surely they must’ve brought back the victims’ hard drives for analysis!”

  “Let’s get looking.”

  Mac and I pored over piles of notes and reports until he found something, “Okay, here,” he pa
ssed a summary to me.

  “Apart from Carter, all the victims’ computers contained a key logger, the same key logger.”

  “That makes sense. How else would he find them? The FBI had trouble tracing these people, but this bastard tricked people into downloading key loggers and waited for the information to fall into his lap,” Mac said.

  “He hacked into our chat room and went about getting key loggers onto everyone’s computers?”

  “Looks that way.” Mac shook his head. “He knew everything that was going on … these machines were infected months ago but not all at once.”

  “Jesus, Mac, they checked your drive too and the same key logger showed up. Did you read the rest of this report?”

  “No.”

  “Says this is a custom-designed key logger: They think he created it himself, so it was undetected by all the spy software we run. It was traced to our poetry community, to pictures in the album of someone called Poetman.” I placed the paper down on the table. “No way could this be Aidan, he can’t even operate a video player!”

  “We don’t know a Poetman.”

  “No, we don’t. We know of an Addict_man. And the last name Carter used was Addictedtolove. He was the last one I banned, right before he came knocking on my door.”

  Mac looked at his watch. “Anything else you need to see?”

  “Not right now. Right now I need to be in Richmond to check out this Dataraze place, I want to know how and when and who liberated the GPS device from its designated destruction path.”

  “Don’t suppose there are tunnels all the way to Richmond?” He looked quite hopeful for a second.

  “Nope.” I replied, putting everything back where we found it. I watched raindrops run down the window. We’d missed something. Evidence, we’d missed some evidence. “Mac, did you see a report on the DNA?”

  “Nope.”

  “Now that’s odd. What the hell happened to the DNA sample?”

  He shook his head. “I saw zero mention of it. But I found something about Summers, that guy at the hospital who caused all the commotion.”

  “What?”

  “Aidan and I were out there with him – he saw us both, but he did not identify Aidan as the person who paid him to find you.” He looked at the papers in his hand. “Caine asked him if he could identify the person. Summers said no. We were both right there. He didn’t even glance at Aidan.”

  “We better head back.”

  Rain pelted against the windowpanes. It would be a wet walk back to the tunnel. We left the room, taking the stairs this time to avoid encountering anyone in the hallways. I had difficulty with the whole concept of Aidan being a serious suspect, especially as Caine reported Summers did not know Aidan. Almost as much difficulty as I had with Caine being a suspect in Mac’s eyes. I’m okay. I just need to find whoever was responsible for stealing that damn bug. Rain dripped steadily as we left the building.

  Washington was still dark and scary as we hurried back up Pennsylvania Avenue to our secret tunnel and safety. Wouldn’t it be cool to live in the tunnel and never have to deal with people? Tunnel life appealed to me. Hell, I’d be happy in a mountain cave. Anywhere that didn’t have killers and conundrums that taxed my achy, tired mind would be good.

  “Things aren’t always as they seem” became a haunting phrase that tormented my thought processes and yet provided no answers. The disappearance of the DNA, the only actual physical evidence, ate away at me.

  Nineteen

  Keep The Faith

  The journey back to Virginia through the tunnel was as uneventful as the journey to Washington, just wetter.

  The Aidan thing festered in my head. The murders were messy. Especially Carter’s; the killer had left slash-type incisions, the blood pattern all over the kitchen and the type of wounds indicated that the killer would have blood on him somewhere, possibly a lot of blood. Aidan came to visit Holly that day. He didn’t have bloodstained clothing. He said he had a job out in Lexington and wore a mid-gray suit and a lemon shirt. No blood on him. My mind toyed with a possibility that made me feel icky. He was wearing a suit that day, when we saw him. Aidan carried spare clothes in his car, a pair of jeans, tee shirt, sweatshirt and a pair of steel-capped boots. Sometimes being an insurance assessor was a messy job.

  I pulled the plug on that line of thought. What struck me as very odd though was the lack of human trace evidence. They found cat hair but never any human hair. Did the killer not have hair? Or was his head covered at all times? I would’ve expected to find a few human hairs especially if there was a struggle. I scratched him. Therefore, there was a struggle. If indeed it was the killer and not some other person. Unless we find him we won’t know.

  I found my internal ‘kill’ switch and turned off all thoughts regarding the murders. We were almost back at Mobil and would have cell phone reception shortly. The tunnel blocked our cellular signal; as soon as we emerged from the underground parking garage we would call Bob to come get us.

  Rain poured from the night sky as we left the parking garage. Large puddles lay on the asphalt, gleaming under the soft glow of security lights. We intended to hide the bike in the wooded area close to the entrance of Mobil. Visibility wasn’t great through sheets of torrential rain but as we neared the pre-arranged point to leave the bike, I was stunned to find Davy waiting for us, right where we’d left him. He’d turned the truck around to face Gallows Road.

  “Anything exciting happen?” Mac’s conversational tone suggested he expected Davy to be there.

  “It did. About a half hour ago, four police cruisers pulled into the hospital after a refrigerator truck.” Davy rocked back on his heels and jammed his hands into his jeans’ pockets. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would ya?”

  I wondered if either of us betrayed our thoughts with our facial expressions. Something in Davy’s tone hinted that we might indeed know something.

  I dragged a cell phone from my pocket and called Bob. “We’re back, what’s up?”

  “I’m at the hospital, in the Gray parking lot. Been here the whole time. There’s another body.”

  I groaned. “Anyone figured out we aren’t there?”

  “Not yet. Use the Gray entrance. Keep away from the emergency department entrance, there are cops all over.”

  “Will do.” I hung up and pocketed the phone.

  Mac chatted to Davy, and tried to say nothing about our predicament.

  “Mac, we should go. Bob’s waiting.”

  He shook Davy’s hand. They did the man-hug thing again. Davy turned to me. “Look after him.”

  “Always.”

  Mac grabbed my hand, and we disappeared into the trees that lined the road. We walked along Gallows Road until we were level with the Gray hospital entrance. Police flashers lit up the front of the emergency department.

  Darkness and rain provided cover as we slipped across the road and into the parking lot, where Bob waited at the far side in deep shadow.

  Mac flung the back door open, and we clambered into the warm car.

  “When did they find it?” he asked his Dad.

  “Twenty minutes ago.”

  “Should we go in and pretend we were always there?” I wondered aloud more than asked.

  “Nope,” Bob replied. “I’ve already told Caine that I have taken you out of the hospital and that the Unsub must’ve been confused this time ‘cos he dumped the body in the wrong room.”

  “Poem?”

  “Oh, yeah, another gem from the freak. I wrote it down for you.”

  “Was it one of the missing bodies?”

  “I got a good look at it. I don’t think he was an FBI agent.”

  Twenty

  A Stranger With You

  “What the fuck are we doing?” I yelled at Caine across the bedroom.

  “Settle!” he snapped.

  “I want to know.” I let the annoyance resound in my voice. I knew I bordered on outright anger, but dammit, I had a right to be angry. “It�
��s fucking Tuesday morning … that watery shit coming in through the curtains is sun … bodies have been turning up for over a week!”

  “We’re doing everything we can.” Caine turned to Mac. “Can you calm her down before she ends up back in hospital?”

  “Ellie’s fine and we want answers.” He was respectfully forceful.

  Caine leaned forward, and rested his head in his hands. “I have forty goddamn agents and as many police officers and state cops I can get my hands on, not to mention DEA, and this prick keeps slipping through the net.”

  Yeah, let’s not mention DEA. I wish he hadn’t said net. I wish the theme to Dragnet wasn’t playing in my head. Just the facts ma’am. I shushed it.

  “Where are the other bodies?” I was prepared to believe we still had one and a half unaccounted for, one and a half FBI agents.

  “We haven’t found them yet. That truck at the hospital was empty, yet another decoy. The body dumped there wasn’t transported in the truck. It was LostAdam from your chat room.”

  Let’s not dwell on hospitals either, lest someone realizes we weren’t there at all.

  “Jesus!” I threw myself back on the bed and stared up at the swirled-plaster ceiling. “Do we at least know what kind of vehicle he’s driving?”

  Someone must’ve seen a car in this area before we found the tree body. It’s easier if I don’t think of him by name.

  I’m okay.

  “Out of the four vehicles sighted in this street last night, the only one that didn’t belong was Mac’s brother’s car.” Caine paused. “About that, Mac ...”

  I half expected Caine to say that Eddie was now a suspect; made as much sense as Aidan being a suspect.

  “Eddie was stopped leaving the street and it was apparent he was drunk. He’s being held at the local police station. They’ve impounded his Beamer.”

  I turned my head to see a grin spread across Mac’s face. “Hearing that almost makes up for having this Unsub still roaming Fairfax.”

  “He’s quite pissed about the whole thing.”