Dark Web

by T. J. Brearton

  Without another word, the detective named Swift suddenly walked out of the kitchen. Mike heard him leave by the front door.

  Mike felt his heart turn cold, and his hands form into fists. He found himself thinking back to earlier times, back to the days when he’d been young and free in the city and pain like this couldn’t touch him. Running around with guys like Denny Ford, guys like Bull Camoine, owning the night, taking what they wanted.

  Back then, there had been nothing to lose.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Can you tell me where this email came from?” Swift asked.

  It had been two hours since he had left the Simpkins place, and it was now going on ten in the morning. The clock was ticking on the three young men from the Hyundai. They were being kept on ice in the back rooms of the sub-station, given meals, kept sequestered from one another, but time was running out. Like Mathis had said, they needed to be formally charged, booked, and dropped at the county jail to await arraignment. Janine Poehler was still performing the internal autopsy on the body, Brittney Silas had dusted for latent prints and turned over the laptop to the police officer now sitting in front of Swift. Kim Yom.

  Yom was with computer forensics, a cyber-crime specialist. She was Filipino, with a Korean surname. Or, was it the other way around? Swift couldn’t remember. She’d made the drive up from Albany through the severe weather in record time. Added to which, she’d attended the latest National Cybercrime Training Partnership a year before, so she was alright in his book.

  “Here’s what I’ve done,” Kim said. She had two laptops in front of her. She referred to the one on her left. “After I fished this email out of the trash, I began at the bottom and worked my way up in the headers. First we’ve got original arrival time, a couple of months ago, you can see that here. Content type is plain text. But then already, in this next line, we have a problem. Most everyday emails are MIME. That means Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. That’s a formatting protocol to encode any attachments and alternative representations in a single email. But this email is more dynamic than that. Okay, we can see here the ‘To’ field, it’s to you, and the ‘From’ field, it’s from this address. There is no X-sender, or X-originator or X-originating IP. Ah, but in the Received; here is where we would find the gold.”

  “Please tell me about the gold. Before my head explodes.”

  “The series of ‘Received’ headers are the trail we follow. This trail tells us where the message was sent from, and along what path or series of servers it traveled across the internet. And this is why we started at the bottom, as each mail server adds a received header to the top. So, you see all these? On and on and on?”

  Swift bent forward and squinted at what to him looked like hieroglyphics. “Uh-huh?”

  “That tells me that this email was bounced all over the world. There is no discernible return path. It’s completely covered up. This email came through the deep web.”

  Swift looked blankly at the screen. The deep web. He’d heard the term, but couldn’t remember where. Part of him felt foolish for asking, but he asked anyway. “The deep web?”

  Kim pushed back from the desk and turned in her chair to better face him. “In a nutshell, everything you and I see and do on the web is just superficial. What the everyday user accesses — Amazon, email, even porn — that’s just surface material. Like, cutaneous. The deep web, also called the dark web, is ninety-percent of the internet. Subcutaneous. Beyond that, really; the guts. It’s where you’ll find the black markets for prostitution, gambling, murder for hire; all that good stuff. It’s where hackers go to rob bitcoin and Target and create massive viruses. Or, I’ll give you another analogy. Think of it like the water beneath the ground. You’re standing on dry land, but there’s an enormous aquifer beneath your feet.”

  Swift considered this. It described how he felt to a tee.

  “Great,” he said laconically. “So the email is useless to us.”

  “I’m sorry detective. It could take months to track down the source.”

  “Well . . .” He looked at her and his eyes conveyed If months is what it takes . . .

  She looked back at him like he was crazy. It was a look he’d become familiar with over the years. He smiled. “Okay, let me ask you this: this is pretty big league stuff, right? Hacker stuff. You think some guy who might have an anger management problem, maybe a drug problem, a deadbeat, is going to know how to do all this stuff? Hide his . . . whatever you said?”

  “I really can’t make that assessment, Detective.”

  He looked at her, hoping for more, but she was a stone. “Okay,” he said. “Then please tell me more about the victim’s activities on his computer.”

  Kim seemed happy to change track. She turned to face the second laptop, her own.

  “Okay. Here I’ve cloned the hard drive to my computer and gone through the registry. I’ve been able to recover almost every deleted file from when the computer was first purchased and activated, which was only three months ago. Pretty normal stuff.”

  “Like what? What normal stuff?”

  “Like there are a handful of school assignments. Just Word Docs. One Power Point presentation for an oral report, and one spreadsheet for a math class. Other than that, there’s nothing. But the internet cache is loaded. It looks like he spent most of his time online. I’d say ninety percent of the time the victim was actively using the web.”

  “Doing what, mostly?”

  Kim Yom’s slim, delicate fingers fluttered over the keyboard for a moment and Swift watched as the internet browser opened and brought them to a website. The front page of the site depicted a bloody, Mafioso scene, a man in a classic mobster hat and trench coat, holding a tommy gun, stood over a fallen body.

  “What’s this?”

  “This is ‘The Don.’ Very popular game.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, building and managing a criminal empire, killing off your competition, that sort of thing.”

  Swift grunted. He leaned in and squinted at the image. “Can we play it?”

  “We need to create a username and password.”

  “Yeah, but, doesn’t he have one? Stored in memory? Just click that button there, ‘play.’”

  Kim glanced back over her shoulder at Swift. “Passwords are stored in log-in cookies. I’d need to use his computer.” She was asking permission.

  “Don’t sweat it. Let’s just take a peek.”

  Kim once again turned to the laptop on her left. With latex gloves on her hands, she brought up the same web page and clicked the start button. They waited a few seconds while the game loaded, a blood-red progress bar inching across the lower portion of the screen. Once it had fully loaded, they were looking at a rendering of a New York City neighborhood. The volume was faint, but Swift could hear the sound of traffic, cars honking, even birds in the trees.

  Trooper Bronze and Trooper Day were in the office, both of them opting to pull double-shifts in order to stay with the case. They drifted over towards the machine to have a look.

  “I’m familiar with this game,” said Kim. “You don’t need to download anything; it’s all on the company’s servers. Which means that whatever actions the victim took on here, we’ll have no record of them from his laptop.”

  “Can we search for the names of the three suspects in the box?”

  Kim shook her head. “Each user comes up with a code name for themselves. See?” She pointed a pink-nailed finger at the screen. Swift saw the name “Fresco.”

  “That was his nickname,” Kim said. “We’re in his game.”

  “What’s that?” Opposite the name and other stats was a smaller window.

  “That’s chat.”

  “Chat?” Swift knew what online chat was, he just hadn’t realized that it had integrated with computer games. He supposed it made sense. “So, he’s playing with other people from around the world, and he’s able to chat with any of them?”

  “If they’re
online, yeah. More than chat, they can interface with each other wearing headsets, talk to each other. There’s also this inner game email here, too.” She made a few quick movements on the mouse pad and a new window within a window opened, showing a chain of emails.

  “Let’s look for emails with other players.”

  “No problem.” Kim selected one of the four tabs on top of the email window; Reports, Messages, Tributes, All. She clicked on Messages, and a list of names appeared. Swift read a few of them. Mickey 2 Nines. Lefty Guns. Dixie Normous. They ranged from tough, mafia-sounding names to the silly, lewd, and sometimes completely obscure. One name was all alphanumeric symbols. The other was a nonsense syllable half a dozen characters long — HYLPMR.

  “Can we print all of these out?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Swift leaned back from the laptop, stretching, feeling the knots that had settled in his upper back throughout the morning. Driving, hunching over tables, standing around in the cold, it all took its toll, and he wasn’t getting any younger. The two troopers stepped back and gave him space, as he rolled his neck and his shoulders for a moment. He brought his attention back to Kim and the laptop.

  “Okay,” he said. “So, what else can we do? How can we find who he was talking to? I need to place those kids in this game and find something they said to him.”

  But she was shaking her head. “That’s not possible. Unless he took a screen shot of something, but I’ve found absolutely none. It’s possible he uses his phone for this game, too, so I’ll have to go through that next. Otherwise, we’d have to get a federal warrant, fly to San Francisco and lift the data from their thousands of servers.”

  Swift sucked his teeth for a moment. Then he dropped his palm onto the desk next to Kim and looked into the computer screen at the tiny objects moving around behind the open email window. The miniature buildings in the neighborhood, the tinny, faraway sounds of the streets, as if he was looking through a portal to some other world. Which of course, he was.

  He turned to look at Kim. “You think he would’ve given out his physical address?”

  “It’s possible. A player can be friends with another player one minute, have an alliance with them, and then be enemies the next. In the game, and in their own minds, their reality. These games are becoming more real to kids than their everyday life. On the other hand, kids are always told not to give out information over the web. And, in my experience, they’re pretty smart about it. It’s possible he offered his information, but I think, if anyone found out where he lived, they did it another way.”

  “How? Why? What makes you say that?”

  “Because this computer has been hacked. The basic operating system firewall, a network filter, was breached two days ago.”

  Kim turned her face from the screen and her dark brown eyes looked up at Swift.

  He gazed back, unflinching. “This laptop was hacked?”

  She nodded.

  He instantly thought of Mike Simpkins. “By someone who came into his room and . . .”

  Now she shook her head, “No. By someone remote. Through the internet connection. The Simpkins have broadband and a decent router. There’s plenty of signal pumping through their home.”

  “How, though? I mean, I don’t know the first thing. They just zero in on an email address and then, what? They connect to the computer and take it over?”

  “Yes and no. That’s what an IT person might do if you call them up and give them your passcodes because you’re having a problem and you let them control your computer remotely. This is different. They came at this computer from a different route. From the deep web.”

  That phrase again. “Jesus,” Swift muttered.

  Kim looked at him straight-faced. “Personally, I think Jesus would be impressed. I consider Him a libertarian.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “So let’s recap,” Swift said to Deputy Alan Cohen over scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast at the local diner in New Brighton. Time was absolutely critical, but so was food, and so was delegation. They were later than the usual breakfast crowd, but the two cops still drew stares from the other patrons. The crime had come too early to make the news, but there were other ways of getting information, especially in a small town. Swift smiled at a few faces, aware of their curiosity. Then he dismissed them from his mind.

  Swift was glad Cohen was able to join him. Cohen was enthusiastic, and Swift needed a sounding board right about now. The only negative rumor on Cohen was that he had terrible flatulence, and no one liked riding in a deputy cruiser with him. He would try to hide it, they would say, which was worse. A straight-up ripper would at least let you know what was coming, instead of the virulent sneak attacks that led to rolled-down windows and caused Cohen to whistle a tune like he didn’t know who’d dealt what.

  “We’ve got a family who moves up here from Florida two months ago, in the middle of the school semester,” said Swift. “The wife is able to take a job mid-year as an art teacher at the college in Plattsburgh. They’ve got three kids, two in school, one just a baby. The husband is out of work, trying to start up a business here, or get freelance work as a camera-type guy. Photography or something. The teenager is in some ways atypical, possibly an undiagnosed Asperger’s case. In other ways, seems pretty normal. He plays a game regularly, called ‘The Don,’ with other players all over the world.

  “This morning, at just before three a.m., he leaves his house in the middle of a snowstorm. We don’t know why. Both father and mother say laptop was open and switched on when they checked the room for him, and that game was on the screen. Brittney Silas secured and documented the room and seized the laptop, and we’ve been going through it.

  “He goes outside in his pajamas. So, either he rushed out, or he’s got some kind of mental state he’s in that doesn’t remind him to put on warmer clothes, or he’s under duress of some kind. Because the car that shows up while Lenny Duso is standing there in the road — we don’t know that it just arrived in town. Those three could have been here earlier. Maybe they were returning to the scene of a crime.”

  Cohen was nodding, his gray-blue eyes shining as he absorbed what Swift was recounting.

  “You arrive first on the scene in response to Duso’s emergency call,” Swift said to Cohen. “You arrive approximately five minutes after the call. You assess the scene and put out the APB for further assistance. Then you call your Sheriff, Dunleavy. Dunleavy calls my captain, Tuggey, who rouses me out of sleep — I’m on call. Tells me to check it out, looks like a homicide, Sheriff’s Department is willing to T.O.T. I call my evidence tech, Brittney Silas, at the okay from Tuggey to get whoever I need, and he’s making calls, too. I arrive approximately twenty-five minutes after the emergency call, Woodruff about thirty minutes, Silas, about thirty-five, forty minutes. Sound right to you so far?”

  Cohen nodded. “Sounds right.” He forked some hash browns into his mouth.

  “Okay. I do the initial walk-through with Silas when she arrives. We’re now forty-five minutes or so from the emergency call. With me? And we spend ten, maybe fifteen minutes before I leave her to process the scene up to the body. There’s not much — everything is covered in snow — and we’ve got a description of the runaway car from Duso; working the scene for tire impressions wouldn’t be worth it anyway — it’s a main artery, there are tons of tracks, and there’s the goddamn snow. So, we’re pretty quick on the process. It’s more the body we want to get into as evidence; we have that taken by the on-call service. Meantime, now, I’ve gone over to the Hamiltons, spoken to the neighbors there, and then on down to the Simpkins once we’ve got a solid idea that it’s their kid. Troopers were ready to go door-to-door anyway, but it worked out that way. Point being, I’m at the Simpkins house at least an hour and twenty minutes after the call. Still with me?”

  Cohen nodded again. “Still with you.”

  “So, let me ask you: how long does it take to drive from that spot on 9N to exit 30 on I-87 where my
troopers picked up the three kids?”

  Cohen narrowed his eyes and chewed his food, swallowed, and said, “I see where you’re going. ‘Bout twenty minutes, thirty in the snow, forty if you’re barely crawling.”

  “Exactly. So, what were those kids doing for a whole extra hour?”

  “Could’ve stopped at the gas station. Gotten something to eat. Messed around.”

  “But they fled the scene. They wanted to get away.”

  “Maybe they thought they did. Maybe they’re just kids and it was out of sight, out of mind for them. Time for a soda.”

  “But the gas station is closed between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.” said Swift. He hadn’t been eating while he talked, and his food was getting cold. He picked up a strip of bacon and chewed on it, took a sip of his black coffee. The food was greasy, the coffee strong, and he savored both tastes. He’d skipped breakfast and now his stomach growled in anticipation. He tucked into the meal and started after the eggs, watching as Cohen nodded.

  “That’s definitely interesting,” said Cohen. “Who else do they know in the area? This ‘we came up for a surprise visit’ is obvious claptrap. But, maybe they did know somebody, and they laid low there for an hour.”

  “Totally possible.”

  Cohen looked around, seeming to gain mental momentum. “Something else I was thinking; maybe it’s nothing.”

  Swift pulverized more bacon with his teeth, his gaze inviting Cohen to continue.

  “Well, I was thinking about the family’s situation.”

  “Yeah? Me too.”

  “They sound like they’re on the ropes financially.”

  “Uh-huh. The dad started talking about lack of medical coverage. The kid had some special needs.”