David Wolf 01 - Foreign Deceit

by Jeff Carson

  “Yeah.” Wolf nodded. “I can’t get into it. I was hoping to get your guy to help me.”

  “Good, give it to Paulo. He will be able to help you. If he can help me with this pig,” he slapped the side of his dirty cream-colored desk top monitor, “then he can help you with a brand new computer like that!”

  “I hope,” Wolf said.

  Chapter 25

  “Porco miseria.” Lia plucked a slip of paper off her desk. “I have to go see Marino. Let me get you started with Paulo.”

  “Ciao!” Paulo stood up from behind two giant flat-screen monitors on his desk.

  Wolf estimated his age at about fifteen years old, but then again he wasn’t good at estimating ages past twelve years old, Jack’s current age.

  Paulo was dressed in plain clothes, wearing a black t-shirt that had two 1950s style American hot rods smashing into each other. His jeans were faded, baggy in the mid section and skin tight in the legs, a popular look Wolf had noticed propagating through the youth of Italy. He wore thick red plastic framed glasses and had a spiky hairdo. Silver rings on three fingers and a bright red plastic watch adorned his arm, which extended to shake Wolf’s hand. It was a firm handshake, and he held Wolf’s gaze as they shook.

  “Piachere,” Paulo said.

  “Hello. Uh, do you speak English?” Wolf asked.

  “Yes, yes! I am not very good,” he said with an impressive American accent. “But, I learned in University.”

  “Great,” Wolf wondered if college for Paulo was done pre or post puberty.

  “Well, what’s up?” Paulo pointed at the computer bag slung on his shoulder.

  “I would like to get into this computer, but I don’t have my brother’s password.” Wolf wore a pained expression as he pulled out the thin Macintosh laptop.

  “Pfffffffft, okay.”

  “Do you think you can do it?”

  “Yes, no problem.”

  Lia looked satisfied. “Paulo can do anything with computers, and programming, and the internet, and, all things that confuse the rest of us.”

  Paulo was blushing ferociously but also tilting his head back proudly. He opened the computer and pushed a few buttons simultaneously, all the while his attention unwavering from Lia.

  “He’ll take care of you,” she said slapping Paulo’s back. “I have to go talk to Marino, I will be back, hopefully soon.”

  Wolf looked around. “Okay, sounds good. I’ll be here.”

  Lia walked away back across the room and down the hall. Wolf caught himself staring and turned back to Paulo, who was now standing at his desk watching Lia leave the room.

  “Mmmmmadonna.” Paulo breathed, turning to Wolf with a conspiratorial look. “She is beautiful, eh?”

  “Yes, she is,” Wolf agreed with a resigned smile. “Okay, what’s happening?”

  “Oh, yes, you can pull up that chair there. I am going to create another administrator account on the computer. It takes a few seconds. Then I can go in and access all the files.”

  “Okay, sounds good.”

  Wolf waited and watched Paulo work his magic with the computer. The computer screen looked to be displaying lines of code, a sight Wolf was completely unfamiliar with. He felt proficient enough with a computer, but he was watching a master mechanic rip the hood off of a car and dig into the engine. A tweak here, a command there, and soon they were inside the computer with a normal view Wolf was more accustomed to.

  “Okay, I’ve created a new admin account, and changed the password to your brother’s account, allowing me to log in as him. I’m going to fire up a few of his programs. Otherwise, what would you like to do?”

  “I’d like to look at his documents, I guess. His emails, the latest activity. Try to find some clue as to what was going on before last Friday.”

  Paulo tapped the keys for a few minutes, opening windows and programs. “Well, wait a minute, this is interesting.” Paulo was looking in the Skype program.

  “Why?”

  “Well, you haven’t logged in on this computer at all since you got here? Obviously not … never mind.”

  “No, I haven’t. It was closed when I found it in John’s room. I tried a couple passwords to hack in. No luck. So, I gave up and just left it to charge.”

  “Okay, okay. Well, there are messages on Skype from another person to your brother on Tuesday. Two days ago.”

  “Okay,” Wolf said expectantly, “and what does that mean?”

  “Well, okay. Look here.” He pointed toward the little logo on the bottom of the screen. “If there was someone who was trying to get hold of your brother with some messaging on Skype, say, on Tuesday, then I would have just logged into his account and a bubble would have shown up on the icon showing how many messages he had missed since he last logged in.”

  “Okay.”

  “But there was no bubble that popped up on the icon.” Paolo was tilting his head with wide eyes. “But, if I go into his account and look at his recent conversations here on the left, look what someone is saying to him.”

  --Hey man, you there? 9:12 PM

  --What’s happening? Are we doing this interview or what? Let me know … 9:53 PM

  —You okay? You there? 10:09 PM

  Wolf shook his head, not getting it yet.

  “So, the most important part is here,” Paulo pointed. “Look at the date these messages were sent. This was Tuesday, September, 18th, three days after your brother’s death, at 9:12 p.m. local time … or, how many hours behind is Colorado?”

  “Eight.”

  “Okay,” Paulo looked at the ceiling for a second, “so that means between 1:00 and 2:00 in the afternoon, your time, on Tuesday, someone was trying to get hold of him, looks like for an interview. But he wasn’t answering. However, Skype is telling us these messages have already been looked at, because there was no indication on the icon that there were unread messages!”

  Wolf nodded. “Which means someone was on the computer looking at these messages at some point before we just looked at them, otherwise there would have been unread messages.” Wolf was finally getting the significance. He sat back hard in his chair, putting his hands on his head.

  “Exactly,” Paulo said. “Someone has opened this computer and looked at Skype in the last few days, after your brother’s death. So, what do you think they were looking for on this computer?”

  “I honestly have no clue,” Wolf said. “Can you somehow tell? Can you see what they did on it?”

  “No, not unless I had pre-loaded key-stroke recognition software on his computer. But, we can infer some things, just like we did now.”

  “They probably got on the computer to erase something, right?” Wolf asked.

  Paulo raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Okay, let me check. It’s actually more difficult than people think to erase all evidence of a file off of a computer. We’ll see if this hacker knew more than just the log-on-trick, which is actually quite basic.” He rolled his eyes as he dove back onto the keyboard in a flurry.

  Paulo’s fingers were a blur entering commands on the screen. Wolf marveled at the strange sequence of letters, numbers and punctuation this wunderkind was commanding at mach speed.

  “Ahhhh.” Paulo had a pained expression. “Well, either they cleaned it completely, or they simply didn’t erase anything. There’s no trace of any files that were recently erased. It’s more likely they didn’t erase anything.”

  Lia came around the corner and walked to the desk. She looked pained, avoiding eye contact with Wolf. “So, any luck?”

  Wolf gestured to the laptop “We’re in, and we’ve seen that someone else has been looking at the computer in the last couple days.”

  “Really?” She leaned forward, pressing her firm stomach against Wolf’s shoulder.

  “Yeah. According to Paulo, these Skype messages tell us that someone was on the computer sometime Tuesday night or later.”

  “Ma-donna. What else?”

  “Well,” Paulo said looking down a
t the way Lia leaned on Wolf, “we can’t find any indication that anyone erased anything. We have to get online and do some work. Your brother was what, a blogger?”

  “Yes,” Wolf answered.

  “Okay, he probably did things more online than off. What’s his email address? A gmail account?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Good. Give me a few things, and I’ll do some work. I want your email address, his email address, his blog name, your Facebook account login … you do have a Facebook account, right?”

  “Uh, yeah.” He squirmed. “I don’t remember how I log in, though.”

  Lia smiled at his obvious discomfort.

  Paulo shook his head, “Just give me the blog name.” And with that, Paulo shooed them away.

  Wolf and Lia walked away. “How was your talk with Marino?” Wolf asked.

  She avoided eye contact. “It was fine.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes. It’s fine.”

  “Okay,” he said. She was preoccupied with something.

  Wolf left her to her thoughts and went to the window. He opened the manila folder containing the police report and his stomach sank. It was all in Italian. Of course. He would need a lot of translating done for him. And things were always lost in translation.

  “Twitter! Haha!” Paulo blurted.

  Wolf looked to Paulo who was holding up his arms in triumph.

  Wolf shoved the papers back in the folder and joined Lia at Paulo’s desk.

  “I went into your brother’s gmail account and checked the activity. Looks like someone erased a few messages on Tuesday night at 11:37 PM. So, the question is, what was erased? So I went onto your brother’s blog, thinking there might be a hint there. Nothing. It looks like he hasn’t done a blog post in a couple weeks. He has a different contact email address on his blog. He runs it through gmail as well, so I checked that email account. Nothing there either. They could have erased some stuff there. I could probably hack into his blog, but … well, let me move on.

  “I checked his Facebook account through his blog. It looks like there wasn’t any activity on there. But, that could have been erased also. The login and password information was, again, stored in the browser settings.

  “But, Twitter!” His eyes lit up. “It looks like he tweets a lot. A lot. Your brother was a pretty big deal online I take it. He has 172,839 followers on his account and he’s following 320 people.”

  Wolf shrugged.

  “Right. Well, the point is, that shows that he has a pretty popular Twitter account with a lot of clout. Basically, he has 172,000 fans listening to his every word. So anyway, I logged into his Twitter account, and it looks like someone removed some of his tweets.

  “But you can’t just erase tweets from the web. Especially if you have 172,000 followers. People are constantly retweeting his stuff, or replying to it. All traceable, and never erasable. And on the night of your brother’s death …” He punched a couple keys and a tweet was displayed from someone who was apparently a cat wearing a watermelon on its head.

  ”It’s a response to your brother’s tweet. It looks like he posted a picture, but it’s been erased from his account. But it was a picture of Jupiter by the description he gives and the responses, and he says he was at the Merate Observatory.”

  “You can’t show the pictures?” Wolf asked.

  Paulo shook his head. “Can’t. They’ve been erased.”

  “But he was there at the observatory that night.” Wolf whispered.

  “At 11:17 PM, according to the original tweet,” Paulo added.

  Wolf stared at the screen and shook his head. “How about phone records? Can we get access to both John’s and Matthew Rosenwald’s phone records to see what they said that night? Or earlier in the week as well? We’ll also need to find Rosenwald’s car.”

  Paulo sat back and looked at them. “Yes, I’ll call the phone companies to get the records next, and I’ll see if I can get a triangulation of where his phone is at. I’ll check credit card activity for both of them as well. I’ll look up the car registration too. These things could take the rest of the day. I’ll get cracking on it right now.”

  “Give me a call when you have more information.” Lia walked to the front of his desk and leaned both hands on it.

  Paulo lit up. “Of course I will, Mi Amore!” He added a quick sentence in Italian that caused Lia to roll her eyes.

  “Shall we go?” she asked Wolf.

  “Sure. I think we need to go back to the observatory.”

  Lia bit her lip and looked at her watch. “It’s just after 5:00 pm, what are the chances he’s still there?”

  “Vlad seems to be a late worker. I’d say pretty good.”

  Chapter 26

  As they exited the main room to the stairway to hell, a voice called from across the room, “Lia, David!” Rossi put his phone to his ear, said a quick goodbye to someone, and waved them over. “What are you guys doing?”

  They explained the situation to Rossi as quickly as possible. He stopped them numerous times, asking them to expand on points, and go over others again before egging them on for more details. Finally, he looked to Wolf with folded arms and a furrowed brow. “Okay, so what are you going to do at the observatory?”

  Wolf was taken aback by the question, “Well, we’re going to get the real story from this son of a bitch, Vlad. He’s hiding something from us about Friday night.”

  “What did you and Marino just talk about, Lia?”

  “Uh, he was wondering about what was happening.” She glanced at Wolf, then the desk.

  “And?” Rossi asked.

  “He said … he said that David’s brother would be released tomorrow, and he wanted him out of the picture.” She pointed at Wolf.

  Wolf stood still, not reacting.

  “David,” Rossi glanced to Marino’s closed door, “we have to be careful about your next moves. Your brother’s remains are released tomorrow, that means you can get the belt with the belongings, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Wolf said. “When will the body be released?”

  “Marino said first thing in the morning,” Lia said. “Then he wants to talk to you after that, to try and persuade you to go home … cooperatively.”

  “I’ll go home cooperatively when I find out who killed my brother. And it’s looking like Vlad had a hand in this whole thing.”

  “David, let me finish.” Rossi put his hand on Wolf’s shoulder and stepped closer. “Marino has pressure from higher ranking officials to make this situation go away. They don’t like that a police force from another country is coming in and helping with a closed investigation. I know that is not what is happening,” he said quickly, “I’m just telling you what Marino must be thinking about right now behind that closed door. It’s important that we do this right. Right now you have the testimony from a worker at an observatory that he didn’t see your brother the night of his death. That’s it. He could be telling the truth, he could have been locked in his office the entire night, never seeing a single soul outside of his office. However, if you had the belt, and we could show that it was Vlad’s somehow, then we actually have a piece of evidence. Or we need to find Matthew, which Paulo is working on right now, like you said. But right now, you are just risking some sort of ugly international incident if you go over there right now.”

  Wolf took a deep breath. “So what do you propose I do instead?”

  “Eat,” Rossi said with zero hesitation.

  “What?”

  Rossi touched both of them on the arm, “You and Lia come to my house, this second, and have an excellent meal with my family. We will talk this out, on full stomachs!”

  Wolf stared at Rossi’s motionless bug eyes and broke a smile. He looked to Lia, who seemed all on board with the idea, then nodded. “All right. That sounds good, I guess.”

  “Oh-kay!” Rossi pulled his coat off his desk chair. “Now let’s get the hell out of here before Marino’
s office door opens.” He marched between them, out of the room, and disappeared down the stairway.

  Chapter 27

  Two miles into the tunnel, Wolf’s back pressed into the seat letting him know they were gaining altitude at a good rate. He leaned discretely, keeping a white-knuckle grip on the Jesus-bar, to catch a glimpse of Lia’s dashboard gauges.

  No more than five car lengths behind Rossi, she was doing one hundred sixty kilometers per hour, a straight one hundred miles per hour. Wolf thanked Rossi for the nice round number for his calculation, then held his breath when the car rocked side to side as they blew past another train of cars.

  They slowed to breathable speed as a series of flashing signs indicated a sharp turn, which turned out to be the end of the tunnel. The view was stunning, looking down on Lecco from what was at least a thousand feet up the steep Alpine mountain. They continued onward and upward for another few minutes, switching back and forth along a tight-cornered road gouged into the side of a steep green slope lined with tall pine trees of a kind Wolf had never seen.

  Wolf craned his head to see the distant valley floor through the trees. “This seems to be far from town, and a really nice area.”

  “Yes, they moved here a few years ago, when Valerio’s father died. He and his family were left an inheritance, and they didn’t hesitate to move to this nicer area. You’ll see his house. It’s quite beautiful.”

  Wolf couldn’t help but think for a moment about his own father’s death, and how it had caused quite the opposite effect on his own family.

  Rossi finally slowed as they pulled up to a bush lined property. They waited as gate lights flashed yellow, and an ornate weave of wrought iron slowly swung inwards.

  A dog pranced with wagging tail in front of Rossi’s Alfa Romeo, and Wolf sucked in a breath as Rossi pulled in, pushing it aside with the bumper of his car.

  Lia stopped and they stepped out onto the cobblestone driveway. The air was crisp and clean, smelled of pinesap, and was a noticeably cooler than it had been on the distant valley floor. As they followed Rossi along the side of the house to the entrance, they had a fantastic view of the city below. Lecco sprawled like a model city on a gleaming Lake Como. It was so steep, Wolf imagined he could run and jump and land smack in the middle of the lake below.