Witches and Witnesses

by Lily Webb

  A realization struck me like a spell: if the police had taken Adam’s computer, that meant I had a good chance at getting access to it. I wasn’t sure what the rules were for things like that, but since I was Head Witch, it was possible Mueller would have to tell me any and everything he knew — and maybe even let me poke around on Adam’s computer myself — which meant I might get to have a little chat with this Erebus character.

  But if I wanted any hope of accomplishing that, I’d need technical help and luckily for me I knew just who to call: Flora Gemwood. She might not deal with the tech side of things herself, but she had to know someone at the FBI who could. The Bureau had to have dealt with things like this before. They could even run digital forensics or something along those lines on Adam’s computer — that stuff was above my know-how and pay grade — so it would be worth it to ask.

  I shoved back from Virgil’s desk and forced myself to my feet. “Then it sounds like you and I have a goal in common. I have a feeling we’ll be in touch again soon, Virgil.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Give the Head Warlock my well wishes, and congratulations, Miss Clarke,” he said, nodding at my stomach. I rubbed it defensively.

  “I will, and thanks,” I said, and headed for the door.

  Chapter Seven

  Back outside Bellerose Enterprises — and before Umrea could get a single word out — I raised a hand to silence her and pulled out my phone to dial Flora’s extension at the Messenger from memory. She stared at me with a puzzled look as the phone rang.

  “Hello, this is Flora Gemwood. Who’s calling?”

  “Flora, thank Lilith, you answered. It’s Zoe.”

  “Oh, hey. I heard about all the drama with Heath, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Well, maybe not fine, but I’m coping. Anyway, listen, I need your help with a certain something. Something, er, sensitive, if you catch my drift.”

  “Hold on a second. I’m gonna step out of the office and call you back on my cell so we can talk more,” she said and hung up without waiting for an answer.

  I stood staring at my phone’s screen until Flora’s name and cell number appeared. I tapped to answer the call. “Hey.”

  “Hey, okay, I think we’re clear now. What’s going on?”

  “I’m sure you already know all about Heath’s predicament. I don’t think he did it, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of who did before the Supreme Court shows up tomorrow.”

  Flora gasped. “Wait, the SCOTUS is coming? Goodness, this is serious.”

  “I would’ve thought you’d known that, given your, you know, other job.”

  “It’s the first I’ve heard of it. The Bureau is usually the last to know things like this. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, though. This is exactly the sort of thing we have the Court around for. Anyway, how can I help?”

  “I just left Adam Highmore’s lawyer’s office. He told me the police confiscated Adam’s computer and other files, and I want to access them, but I don’t know the rules here around all that and I also don’t really know what I’m doing with technical stuff.”

  Flora chuckled. “It’s just a computer, Zoe. Surely you know how to use one by now.”

  “Well, that’s not what I meant. His lawyer mentioned Adam dabbled in some dark web stuff and that you need special knowledge to get to those kinds of sites.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, as far as it concerns the law, you’re the Head of Moon Grove’s government, so you’re entitled to any evidence the police might’ve gathered. Adam’s computer is probably a different story for privacy reasons, but now that he’s dead…”

  “That’s what I thought. The thing is, there’s someone in particular I’m trying to track down. Do you know anyone at the Bureau who could get me on the dark web and into Adam’s account on one of those sites? Or maybe help me figure out who the person is he’s been talking to?”

  “I can’t make any promises, but I know the perfect agent. His name is Leif Meadows, and he’s my go-to guy for tech stuff. I’ll call him and have him meet you at the MGPD.”

  “You’re the best, Flora.”

  “It’s the least I can do. If the Court convicts Heath, all of Moon Grove is in serious trouble.”

  “Yeah, you’re telling me. I’m the one who’ll have to manage the fallout, remember? Anyway, thanks again. I’ll head over to the police station now.”

  “Anytime. Let me know if there’s anything else you need, and don’t forget to take care of yourself, Zoe. Too much stress is bad for the babies.”

  “I know, I will. Talk to you later, Flora.”

  “Good luck,” she said and clicked off the line.

  “Where are we dashing off to this time?” Umrea asked as I pocketed my phone.

  “Either you know me too well or you were eavesdropping.”

  Umrea shrugged. “Perhaps both.”

  I chuckled. “Anyway, we’re going to the MGPD. I’m meeting an FBI agent there.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “Could be, we’ll see. You mind giving me another lift?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Nope,” I said and held my arms out expectantly for her to pick me up. She sighed and did exactly what I wanted her to, and we blasted off back toward the center of town.

  “You know, I kind of like having a chauffeur,” I said when my feet met the ground again on the sidewalk outside the MGPD.

  Umrea scowled at me as she folded her wings behind her back. “Don’t get used to it. As soon as you can get back on your broom, you will.”

  “You’re no fun. Anyway, you know the drill. Wait for me.”

  “That is my job,” she said, and though it was almost impossible to tell with gargoyles, I could’ve sworn she’d attempted a joke. I kept wondering about it until I walked into the station and came face-to-houndlike-face with Mueller.

  “We meet again,” he grunted.

  “You don’t look pleased about it.”

  “That’s because I’m not. I’d prefer to keep you out of this investigation, but I know that will never happen.”

  “Darn right. Is Leif here yet?”

  “Sure is. He’s already in the evidence room. Follow me,” Mueller said, and walked me toward the back of the station and the locked door that led to the underground cells. Across from it on the other side of the hall was another cracked door. Mueller shoved it the rest of the way open and waved me into a room full of shelves overflowing with random objects the police had collected over the years.

  Officer Ewan Barrett stood with his back to us, peering over the shoulder of a slender, four-winged fairy who sat hunched at a small desk and intensely focused on a large, outdated looking laptop.

  The FBI agent’s silver-blond hair streamed down his shoulders and over his Bureau-issued black jacket like running water. He looked younger than me — though I had no way of knowing how old he was. Fairies didn’t age like the rest of us. Heck, Flora was over seven hundred years old and even she didn’t look a day over twenty.

  “Howdy, boys. How’s it going?” I asked, and both turned.

  “Ah, Zoe. I’m not the best with this kinda stuff, but I think Leif here’s a real pro. He’s already gotten into Adam’s computer and found what we think are passwords for some of his favorite sites,” Ewan said.

  Leif smiled and pushed a lock of his hair behind one of his delicate ears. “He’s making it sound more impressive than it is,” he said, his voice as light and airy as a gentle spring breeze. “His password for the computer was just ‘password,’ so you can probably guess the level of technical sophistication we’re dealing with here.”

  I stifled a laugh and joined Ewan in standing over Leif’s shoulder. “What else have you found? Anything noteworthy?”

  “Not really, other than his use of the dark web,” Leif said. He navigated to and clicked on a pentagram-shaped app icon on the desktop called ORB, and what appeared to be a web browser popped on the screen. It took several seconds to load the homepage, a s
ite called Abra Kadabra that seemed to be a search engine of some sort.

  “What is this app you’re using?”

  “The Occult Relay Browser, or ORB for short. It uses a secure connection to mask the user’s traffic, and it’s what most people use to access the dark web, which is pretty much all you need to know about it from a technical point of view.”

  “And anyone can install and use this?”

  “Sure. Like I said, we aren’t dealing with a digital genius here. On top of using one of the worst passwords on the planet for his login, it seems Adam Highmore was also fond of saving all his passwords in an unprotected document.”

  “Bad news for him, but fantastic news for us, right?”

  Leif nodded. “Absolutely. The only problem is the document doesn’t specify which passwords belong to which site, so we’re guessing. The upside, however, is that like most people, Adam seems to have used the same passwords for multiple sites.”

  “Any idea which sites those are?”

  Leif frowned. “Well, that’s where we’ve run into trouble. Thanks to Adam’s usage of ORB and his failure to list the sites, we don’t really know where he’s been surfing.”

  “I do.”

  Both Leif and Ewan locked eyes with me. “You do?” they asked in unison.

  I nodded. “I talked to Adam’s ex-wife, Morgan, earlier today. She told me she caught him using a site called The Underworld.”

  Leif’s eyes widened. “You’re sure that was the site?”

  “Positive. Adam’s lawyer also more or less confirmed he was on it when we spoke just a few minutes ago.”

  Leif turned back to the computer and typed out the address into the URL bar. A plain-looking site loaded several seconds later, just text laid out in a traditional forum style, sorted into different categories — but the titles were disturbing. I saw things like “Banned Magic,” “Dark Arts,” and “Blood Rituals.” Before I could take any more of it in, Leif clicked on a login link at the top of the page and the browser refreshed to a screen asking for a username and password.

  Leif typed “theforsaken1” for the username. “So far, that’s worked for everything we’ve tried, or some variation of that spelling. Adam was definitely consistent,” he said, and navigated over to the document listing all Adam’s passwords. “Now the question is: which of these is the winner? We probably only get two to three guesses before the site locks us out.”

  “Adam might’ve been simple with tech, but I’m willing to bet he was smart enough not to pick the most obvious password for something like this. Which one have you used most often?”

  “The first one,” Leif said and pointed to the top line on the list. It read, “lightinthedarkness.”

  I rolled my eyes. “How original. Okay, try the one there at the bottom. The random string of numbers, letters, and symbols.”

  Leif copied and pasted the password into the box and clicked “Login.” I held my breath while the loading bar crawled across the top of the browser and didn’t let it out until the screen switched over to a page that said, “Welcome back, theforsaken1. Here are the latest posts since your last login,” and displayed a list of thread titles. I didn’t bother to read any of them — I didn’t want to know, anyway.

  “Bingo,” I said and patted Leif on the shoulder.

  “Judging from this list of new posts, it’s been a long time since Adam logged in. Might mean nothing, but it’s worth keeping in mind,” he said, but a red badge with the number three inside it at the top right of the screen underneath Adam’s username had already caught my attention.

  I pointed to it. “What’s that? Adam’s chat messages?”

  “That or private messages between him and another user. Let’s see,” he said and clicked the badge. The browser loaded another list, this one of a long and ongoing correspondence between Adam — and a user by the name of Erebus. My heart dropped into my stomach and I gasped.

  “What? What’s wrong?” Leif asked and gave me a concerned look.

  “This is exactly what I wanted. Morgan said Adam had been talking with someone named Erebus on this site, and I’m almost positive they have something to do with Adam’s death, whoever they are.”

  Leif turned back to the screen. “Looks like these three new messages came in several weeks ago. They’re in reverse chronological order.”

  “How many weeks ago?”

  Leif squinted to read the date stamp. “About ten.”

  My heart sank further into the pit of my stomach, and the twins swirled to make room. I worried I might fall over. That meant that whoever Erebus was, they’d been in contact with Adam right before he’d gotten into a tussle with me underneath Derwin Moriarty’s Divination shop. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

  “Click the first new one. Let’s start at the beginning.”

  “Are you sure? I’m not positive, but this site probably has a way to tell the other person we’ve read their message. Once we click it, there’s no going back, and this Erebus character surely must know what happened to Adam by now. It might tip them off.”

  “It’s a risk we have to take. We don’t have any other leads.”

  “Okay, but hold on a second. I have a feeling we might need this,” Leif said and picked up a briefcase from the floor beside him. He pulled a tiny thumb drive out and plugged it into a port on Adam’s laptop, then clicked a button to download all the messages between Adam and Erebus from the site. When it finished, he navigated to the drive on the computer and double clicked to run a program called “Parrot.exe.” A grey dialog box with a green loading bar popped up on top of the browser window. Above the progress bar it said, “Analyzing, please wait…”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Parrot is a piece of AI that can learn the written speech and vocabulary patterns of a user, then use those patterns to converse automatically with others as if they were that user in real time. The person on the other end can rarely tell the difference, but to get it up to speed, it has to have enough content to analyze. This huge chain between Adam and Erebus is perfect fodder.”

  “Right, I’m gonna pretend like I understood any of that.”

  Leif shrugged. “You don’t have to. It’s just a precaution.”

  “Good. Open the message, please.”

  Leif nodded and clicked the most recent text, and we read over it together:

  “I understand your concerns about getting caught, but you can’t let them stop you. If it’s true that the Seer had the artifact and that witch stole it from her, we need to convince her to turn it over to us, no matter the price. We might not get another chance.”

  My head spun as I tried to make sense of what I’d read. Erebus could only have been referring to Merlin’s Mind, one of the three ancient and powerful magical artifacts created by Merlin himself — the same artifact I’d almost gotten killed trying to get back from Derwin, Adam, and the other mystery member of the Brotherhood who’d died in the skirmish.

  And if Erebus knew all this, that could only mean it involved them. They could’ve been the one pulling the strings behind the scenes all along. From the way Erebus talked about paying any price to get the artifact from Holly, who’d stolen it from a traveling Seer out of sheer economic desperation, it didn’t seem like money was an issue for them — so could Erebus also have been the one who arranged for Virgil to represent Adam? And who in Lilith’s name were they?

  “Does any of this make sense to you? Because I’m not getting anything,” Leif said, pulling me off the rollercoaster of thoughts and connections running wild in my mind just before it plummeted.

  The message made perfect sense to me, but I didn’t know how much, if anything, Heath had shared with the police and the FBI about Merlin’s artifacts, so I kept quiet and hoped my reaction hadn’t already given me away.

  “Not really, no,” I lied, and realized my critical error as soon as I’d made it — because it was physically impossible to lie to a fairy; they were like walking, fluttering lie det
ectors. The slightest crease in Leif’s eyebrows formed and disappeared as quickly as it’d come, but thankfully, he didn’t press me.

  A ding from Adam’s computer saved me from having to cover for myself, and Leif turned back to check it. “A new chat message just came in. It’s from Erebus,” he said and pointed to a window that’d popped up in the bottom left corner of the screen.

  My throat tightened so much I could barely breathe. “What does it say?” I wheezed.

  Leif read it silently and turned to give me a concerned look. “It says, ‘You’re supposed to be dead.’ They’re on to us. Not even Parrot can get us out of this one.”

  My knees wobbled, so I lowered myself down onto the corner of the desk. “Log out before it gets any worse. We’ve got everything we need,” I ordered. Leif nodded and closed out of everything, but I just sat there staring at the computer’s desktop as I tried to catch my breath.

  The message didn’t prove Erebus killed Adam, but it proved they knew something about it, which meant they were someone living in Moon Grove or they had a connection to someone who did. Worse, if the attempted theft of Merlin’s Mind involved them, then it seemed even more likely that the killer designed Adam’s murder to frame Heath because they knew Heath had the artifact — and there was nothing they wouldn’t do to get it, including but not limited to making it look like Heath killed his own son.

  “Can Leif and I have a moment?” I asked Ewan and Mueller.

  Mueller narrowed his eyes at me. “We don’t leave anyone in the evidence room alone.”

  “Fine, then can Leif and I have a room to ourselves somewhere?”

  Mueller hesitated, but eventually realized he had no choice. “This way,” he barked and led us back into the hall. We walked further down it and stopped outside a small room with nothing but a card table and two folding chairs inside. “We usually use this as an interrogation room, but it should work.”

  “There aren’t any hidden cameras or microphones in here, are there? This is sensitive information.”