“Sure. Something happen?”
“There’s been a possible development. And once more, Ms. Natal is asking for you.”
Chapter 11
I took the elevator back up to the hotel’s elite suite and once again passed muster with the hall bodyguard. This time, Detective Angela Bonelli opened the door. Beyond her, the living/dining room, already designed to double as a meeting area, had taken on a more serious and utilitarian atmosphere. Papers lay spread out on the round, contemporary dining table, and a uniformed cop with a solid build and a flat Marine haircut sat typing on a laptop, as if copying information from some of the documents.
The bar on the other side of the room held remnants of a light lunch buffet, with fruit, cheese, and small sandwiches. Those present appeared to have eaten little of it, though.
Jaki still wore the same shapeless sweater and depressed air as she had that morning, though now at least she appeared dry-eyed. She huddled on the ivory sofa next to her father, who kept his arm loosely around her shoulders. Perry slumped in one of the elegant beige-suede side chairs, his clasped hands dangling between his knees. He still looked natty, in a deep blue open-collared shirt, a checked sports jacket, and gray slacks. Now, though, his eyes had a haunted expression—like those of a proud, free-roaming animal whose spirit had been broken. Was it just because the extravaganza he’d worked hard to promote seemed to be going off the rails so badly? Or, in the past three hours, had something even more dreadful happened?
I asked Bonelli, “What’s going on? You said there was a development.”
Her full lips quirked in grim amusement. “We’ve gotten a couple of what you might call ransom notes. Apparently, word has started to get around that Jaki’s cat is missing.”
In the corner of my eye, I caught an accusatory glance from the young singer. I assured her and the detective, “I only told five trusted people: Mark, Becky, and Chris . . . and just a little while ago, my mother and her friend Harry. They all know better than to tell anyone else. But they’re all watching for any suspicious activity on the cat show floor and the vendor concourse.”
“To be fair,” Perry said, “when Jaki and the rest of us met up in the parking garage, right after the blackout, none of us were keeping our voices down. We all were wondering out loud where the cat had gone. If Cassie and her friends overheard us, other people might have, too.”
“At any rate,” said Bonelli, “we’ve determined that it’s too risky for Jaki to go on tonight. Perry has notified everyone who bought tickets to her performance that it’s tentatively rescheduled for seven p.m. tomorrow.”
“If they can’t make it then, or if that show also has to be canceled, their money will be refunded,” Perry added.
Now I understood at least part of the reason why he looked like he was going to his own funeral. Proceeds from the mini concert would have gone a long way, no doubt, toward putting the whole expo in the black. If it had to be scrapped entirely, they might actually lose money.
“You think she’s in that much danger?” I asked him.
“Like the detective said, we’ve gotten ransom notes. About an hour ago, I got a message via my company e-mail demanding a million dollars for Gordie’s safe return. Shortly after that, Jaki got a text from some aspiring songwriter who wants her to give his songs to her agent. The second note didn’t mention the cat, per se, but promised to trade Jaki ‘something of value’ in return for this favor.”
“Can the first message be traced?”
“Not easily,” Bonelli told me. “It’s from an anonymous account.”
I dropped into another side chair, opposite Perry’s. “Unless they’re working together, doesn’t seem likely that both of those people could have Gordie.”
“No, it doesn’t,” the detective agreed. “That’s why I think the rumor has spread far enough that a few people are trying to exploit the situation to further their own interests. They’ve tried to conceal their identities, but not very expertly—we should track them both down before too long.” With a weary air, the detective sat on the sofa next to the brooding celebrity. “She got another series of texts on her own phone, about fifteen minutes ago, that concern me more. Jaki, you want to explain?”
The younger woman swallowed hard before speaking. “This person claimed to have Gordie and said he, or she, didn’t want to hurt him. Of course, that just planted the idea in my head, like it was a threat. I texted back that Gordie meant a lot to me and I was willing to pay anything to get him back.”
Her father grimaced. “I wish you’d asked me before you said such a thing. This idiot probably thinks you’re made of money! What if they’d asked for more than we could afford?”
Jaki ignored the rebuke. “Doesn’t matter, because this person said they weren’t interested in money. They just wanted to talk with me. Someplace alone, so we could ‘really get to know each other.’ So we could ‘become friends.’”
Hector threw an agitated look at Bonelli. “We can’t let her do that! This is probably a guy, and he could do anything to her. . . .”
“Of course we can’t,” Perry agreed, his face grave.
“This person said we ‘have a history together,’ that we’ve met before,” Jaki said. “He even said that he’d been very close to me recently and wanted to touch me, but ‘the timing was wrong.’”
“Sick stuff,” said her father. “You’re sure this couldn’t be MacMasters?”
“It wouldn’t make sense, Pop. As soon as this all happened, I called him, and he swears he had nothing to do with it. He even sounded upset at me that I’d neglected Gordie and let some stranger make off with him.”
“Nice,” I muttered.
Bonelli was still trying to interpret the text message. “It could just be a fan you said hello to once. Somebody who asked you for an autograph.”
“I know.” Jaki shut her eyes and massaged her forehead with one hand, as if trying to activate her memory. “But I meet so many people, especially on the road. I can’t think who. . . .”
“Of course not.” Hector patted her shoulder. “You wouldn’t remember, it’s not your fault. This is a crazy person!”
“Trouble is, he described Gordie’s carrier in detail,” Jaki recalled miserably. “So he’s the one who’s really got my cat.”
I ached with sympathy, knowing the young woman was frightened for both her pet and herself. “Was the last message signed in any way?”
She nodded. “ ‘LBH,’ which I guess is an abbreviation for ‘Last, best hope.’ It’s got to be the same creep who left all of those notes in the mailbox at my family’s house.”
Hector scowled, mustache drooping. “We should leave right now, forget the damned cat.”
The mere suggestion started Jaki sniffling again.
“That might not solve the problem, anyway,” said Bonelli. “Her cat is just the bait . . . this time. If this person knows where her family lives, her brother or sister or mother could be taken hostage next. I think we should try to find this guy and stop him, here and now.”
The young star dried her eyes and nodded emphatically. “I do, too.”
“The other troubling thing,” Bonelli went on, “is that this person somehow got Jaki’s unlisted cell phone number and is texting her from a fake number, possibly also using burner phones. So these texts will be even harder to trace than the e-mails—maybe impossible.”
“Which suggests this person really knows what he’s doing,” I guessed.
The detective nodded grimly. “We figured that stealing the cat might be linked somehow to the conference room blackout. We also were thinking that the guard might have been killed because he blocked access to an electrical panel that operated those features.”
“Right, that makes sense,” I said.
The cop at the table had finished his typing and now listened to his boss intently, like the rest of us.
“But the Bradburne is state-of-the-art, so the lighting, the smoke alarm, and other security features a
re all computerized,” Bonelli explained. “Lights can be preprogrammed to go on and off at certain times without anyone having to manually operate them. About half an hour ago, I talked to the hotel’s IT manager. He thinks someone hacked into the computer yesterday to black out the room and trigger the alarm remotely.”
Hector gaped. “Sounds like something out of a damned James Bond movie.”
“Not so outlandish, though,” said Perry thoughtfully. “Systems get hacked all the time by people just trying to cause mischief. But the guy would need serious computer skills.”
“So we know at least one thing about this person,” I concluded. “He or she is very tech-savvy.”
Bonelli turned her gaze out the room’s picture window, where the sun had set beyond the highway and spread molten gold over the distant mountains. Facing west from Chadwick, we could see a range of the Appalachians that formed a dramatic backdrop at this time of day; you just needed to look past all of the man-made clutter below.
The view seemed to help the detective organize her thoughts.
“Joe Pollard, the guard, was found in a stairwell at a distance from his post, which suggests he might have been pursuing someone,” she said. “And the ME said he had a strange bruise on the front of his neck, near his Adam’s apple.”
“Strangled?” Perry asked.
“Not exactly. He could have done it when he fell, but he also could have been punched in the trachea. That’s known in martial arts as a throat strike. We learned it in the academy, and it’s sometimes taught as a last-ditch move in self-defense classes. It’s never used in competitions, though, because it’s too deadly.”
Hector jerked to his feet and paced to the coffee bar. “Isn’t that a little far-fetched?”
“A little,” the detective admitted, “and I really hope that’s not the case. I hope he was just chasing someone down the stairs when the lights went out and lost his footing in the dark. Because otherwise . . .”
I sank back in my chair. “Otherwise, this stalker isn’t messing around.”
“And again, it shows that this person is smart. Hit somebody with your knuckles, you don’t leave fingerprints.”
“Were there any suspicious prints around the stairwell where the body was found?” I asked.
Bonelli shook her head. “Not many. I suppose the guests don’t use the stairs often, and even the handrails get cleaned regularly. We found a few prints that belonged to the dead guy. Also to a couple of other guards and a maintenance man, who all have good reputations and alibis for the time of the blackout.”
The young cop seated at the table finally spoke up. “I did ask the IT manager who might be able to hack into a sophisticated computer system like that. He said it would have to be a coder.”
“Good point, Gardiner,” the detective said, though I suspected she was bluffing and had only a vague idea of what he was talking about.
As if for the benefit of the rest of us, Officer Gardiner added, “That would mean a software guy—someone who writes computer code for a living. But there could be a lot of them around.”
Bonelli’s lips tightened. “I think we need to call in the county prosecutor on this one. Maybe even the feds.”
I saw a chance to help her save face. “Detective, you and I already know a coder.”
“We do?” Being a clever woman, she took only a minute to scan her memory bank for this information. “You’re right—Janos! What’s his first name again, Dion?”
“Chadwick’s very own IT genius.” When the others looked skeptical, I added, “The FBI now uses an encryption method that he invented.”
“Any chance that he’s the one stalking Jaki?” quipped Perry.
“I strongly doubt it, but he might be able to help us find whoever is.” I asked Bonelli, “Want me to call him?”
She encouraged me with a head bob.
I searched through my phone’s contacts. Fiftyish Nick Janos was my go-to handyman, but I hadn’t had any reason to call his son in many months. Luckily, I did still have Dion’s number. I dialed it and got a recording. But I knew he rarely left his office in the basement of his father’s house, where he worked the bugs out of sophisticated computer games for a living.
“Dion, pick up,” I chided him. “It’s Cassie McGlone, and I’m here with Detective Bonelli.”
She and I waited patiently until we finally heard Janos’s live, snarky voice on the line. “Whatever happened, I didn’t do it.”
Dion always had a bit of attitude, and it had only gotten worse after he’d sold that encryption system to the federal government for serious money. “I’m sure you didn’t,” I told him. “I’ll bet you never even heard of Jaki Natal.”
“Who?”
I had my phone turned up loud enough that, when he said this, the singer could overhear. For the first time all day, she giggled—probably finding his ignorance refreshing.
I briefed him on what had taken place the day before at the hotel, leaving out the theft of the cat, because Dion wouldn’t care about that one way or the other. “We’re figuring it took a coder to hack into the hotel computer.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Easy peasy.”
I recalled then that his cocky style could wear on one’s nerves. “If I put Detective Bonelli on, would you explain to her how that could’ve been done?”
“Yeah, sure.”
As I started to hand over my phone, she suggested, “Put it on speaker, so Officer Gardiner can listen in.”
I smiled to myself—Bonelli wasn’t too proud to acknowledge that she might not be able to follow Dion’s explanation without help. Soon, we all could hear his monotone tenor voice lecturing us on subversive technology.
“First, you’d have to buy malware on the Dark Web, using Bitcoin. And you’d get yourself an anonymous address with a false identity, probably from an offshore site. That way, nothing you do can be traced. You use that address to phish for the IT manager’s password. Sorry to rat him out, but somewhere along the line, the hotel’s guy had to have slipped up. He responded to some kind of message that he shouldn’t have.”
Bonelli leaned nearer to the phone with an intent look I’d seen once or twice before—like a tiger on the hunt.
“Following so far?” Dion asked us.
“Got it,” said Gardiner, taking notes on his laptop.
The voice on speaker continued. “Once you’ve got the password, that gives you administrative privileges, and you’re into the hotel’s main computer. Then you just search around until you find a menu that controls the lighting and other systems for the various rooms. If the lights are already programmed to go on and off at a certain time, you can change the programming.”
“Could that be done in advance?” Bonelli asked him.
“You bet. For instance, if an event was scheduled at five o’clock and you wanted to disrupt it halfway through, you’d program the lights to go off then. The fire alarm, you might have to trigger on the fly. But that could be done pretty easily, too, from just an iPad.”
“Holy crap,” breathed Perry.
Gardiner typed rapidly on his laptop.
“Thanks for your help, Dion,” said Bonelli. “One more question: Where should we go looking for this type of person? Where would he have gotten his training, and what kind of company could he be working for?”
A laugh on the phone. “Sorry, I know this is a serious issue, but . . . Hardware guys might go that route—get a degree in engineering or computer science, then go to work for a firm. They’re usually perfectionistic, methodical types.” His tone carried a note of pity for such conventional souls.
“And coders?” Bonelli prompted him.
“They might get some basic knowledge in school, but after that they usually teach themselves. And they usually work for themselves, too. So basically, you’re looking for someone like me—independent, hates the idea of working in an office and taking orders from a boss.” Dion paused. “I guess that’s not real helpful.”
No,
I thought. Especially not if the stalker works out of his dad’s basement, like you do.
“Well, it doesn’t make the search easy, but in the long run it might at least help us recognize the guy,” Bonelli told him.
Meanwhile, I tried to picture Jaki’s high-tech tormentor. Dion always looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, dressed in sloppy jeans and dirty sneakers with an assortment of tech-themed or sarcastic T-shirts.
My mind instantly went to the tall, bearded character in the Marry me! shirt who’d been roaming the concourse.
“If you don’t need anything else from me, I gotta get back to work now,” Dion told them. “Good luck, guys. Oh, and tell Janie that I’m sorry I didn’t know who she was.”
After he’d hung up, Bonelli passed the phone back to me. “That young man knows way too much about how to hack a security system.”
“Thank God he’s on our side, right?” I smiled. “Listen, I’ve noticed two people hanging around the expo that you might want to check out.”
First I told her about the four Jak-ettes. “This one girl, Lexi, said she was planning to get a Scottish Fold cat soon, the day before Gordie disappeared. Could be a complete coincidence, but you never know. She might have a nasty boyfriend who offered to steal Jaki’s cat for her.”
“Have to be pretty nasty to take down the security guard,” said Bonelli, but she noted the information in her vinyl-covered pad. She’d once explained to me that she didn’t take notes electronically because they could be lost or hacked too easily, and besides, she was probably the only person alive who could read her own handwriting.
Then I described the Marry me! guy who’d been in the crowd Friday and wandering the concourse since then, always by himself.
Jaki’s dark eyes widened. “I know him! I mean, I don’t know him, but I’ve seen him before. At a couple of my concerts and appearances, here in the general New York area. He was close to the front at one show, wearing that shirt, so I could see him by the stage lights. He caught my eye because he did not look like one of my usual fans. Like you said, Cassie, he was older and had long, hippie hair. Another time, when I was passing through a crowd, he called my name and pushed through people to get near me. He made such a fuss that one of my bodyguards got worried and made him back off.”
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