by Jack Parker
He hung up after that. I hurried over to my computer to confirm that there was indeed an email with video attachments. Weird. I guess I would have to make sure that these videos hadn't been doctored in any way or that there wasn't some kind of virus inside of the files somewhere. And then it might help to try and figure out what play he was trying to make by giving me these.
I remembered before getting his phone call I was about to try and get a hold of my old boss and see if I could get my job back with the gaming company I used to work for. I could easily just let all of this go and make that call and be back in Chicago by the end of the week. I had all but said goodbye to everyone that would care that I was going to leave. I didn't have to play the game that the Vigilante Killer had put in front of me.
But then I remembered all of the unanswered questions that I would be leaving behind if I walked away. I could solve just this last unfinished case, and then I would leave. This was easily the biggest case I had been involved with. I owed it to myself to finish what I started. After that I would hang up my detective consultant hat and go back to programming games for a living. But I couldn't do this alone. I needed help, this case was too big for me to do on my own. Kari would probably be too busy preparing for her new job and Taylor was probably long gone by now.
Fortunately, I knew of one other person that could help me out.
CHAPTER FIVE
Eric Campos was one of the first people I met when I originally visited Houston. He was a private detective in his mid-twenties with his own business that apparently did well enough for him to be independently wealthy. He offered to help me when I had been framed for a murder that I didn't commit. The one thing I remembered about him was that he had a lot of cool gadgets. We used those ear wigs that you see undercover agents use. He had some two way radios that worked for a much longer distance than the commercial ones you could buy. He actually gave me one for the plan we were trying to implement back then and never got a chance to ask for it back. Good thing he didn't too because that radio ended up saving my life. But that's another story.
I had given him a call and explained that I might have work for him. He told me he could talk today but that I would have to meet him at this hotel he was currently at. I thought it was kind of weird because I knew he lived in Houston, but I wasn't too bothered by this since I knew he would explain what was going on as soon as I got there. The hotel was only fifteen minutes away, just off freeway right outside of the downtown area. It was a pretty classy place, with a fancy lobby and an interior that had been elaborately decorated. It had its own gym, indoor pool, Jacuzzi and a restaurant all on the lowest floor.
When I arrived at the hotel I remained in the parking lot to collect my thoughts for a moment. I popped a stick of gum in my mouth, and put the rest of the pack in my pocket for later use. The gum thing used to be a habit I had to relieve the anxiety I felt on a daily basis. It had been a long time since I had needed it though; a few months at the very least. But once again I was putting myself out there. I didn't really know what would happen as soon as I walked through that door, and the uncertainty was a major part of the nervous tension that kept building inside of me.
But I knew I had to do it, so I just took a deep breath and entered the building. Eric said he would be waiting inside of the restaurant. Usually when someone says 'inside' that implies walls enclosing a space of some kind, but this restaurant was open to everything else on the floor. It actually wasn't that bad because you could see the nicely adorned interior of the hotel. The rooms were on the edges of the building facing inward, which wasn't that strange in such a classy hotel because it gave those people a nice view of the decorations as well.
"Mike, I remember you." Eric said as I sat down, he stuck his hand out for me to shake.
"Hello." was the best response I could think of as I shook his hand.
"Did you want me to order you a drink or something?" he asked.
"I'll have a coke, sure." I answered. There was a moment of silence afterwards and I took that time to 'assess the situation'.
He was dressed pretty casually, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap bearing a logo I didn't recognize. This wasn't really that unusual; the guy was probably ten years younger than I was and I was dressed just as informally. But what made it seem a little odd was the fact that it looked like he was trying to blend in. The other thing I noticed was his cell phone propped up on some kind of metal stand with a wire coming out of it like it was being charged. But why bother propping it up? Most people charge their phones just wherever the phone happens to lie. There was only one possible explanation for all of this.
"Sounds like you are in the middle of something." I mentioned. "What's with the phone?"
"It's technically not a phone. It's a camera." he said.
I knew there was something going on. My first clue should have been that we were meeting at the hotel, but combine that with his odd behavior and the phone-camera and now it was obvious that he was in the middle of a stakeout of some kind. He had to blend in so that he wouldn't draw attention, and of course no stakeout was complete without some kind of filming equipment to catch footage of your target doing whatever they weren't supposed to be doing.
"It's a camera?" I examined it a little closer, and I noticed that it was pointed slightly upwards at one of the rooms in the distance. "I didn't know cell phone cameras could film at that distance. Aren't you going to get a blurry image?"
"It's just a cell phone shell, but the inside is different. I took almost everything out, put in a bigger lens and a better display card. Then I rewrote the operating system so that all it did was shoot footage at any range I want and export it to the mini-external in my pocket. I can also clip it to my belt and take it with me if I want to walk and shoot video at the same time." he explained as if it were simple. At least that explained what the cord from the phone-camera was connected to.
"They didn't teach that when I got my computer science degree." I said, trying to hide how impressed I was. This guy was an even bigger computer geek than I was it sounded like.
"They didn't when I was there either, but I've been messing with stuff like this since the beginning of high school. You fiddle around long enough and you sort of become an expert at it."
"Damn." was the only response I could muster. He seemed satisfied with that. He was probably used to people being impressed with his skills and he seemed to not let it affect him, pretending like it was nothing.
"I've heard you aren't too bad yourself. You've been working with the police, right?" he wondered.
"Actually, that's what I wanted to talk with you about…" I started to say.
"Well, hold on. I don't want to be distracted from the task at hand. I think I might be moments away from finishing this thing up. We'll get to your issue afterward."
"Are we on some kind of stakeout?" I wondered. He paused before answering as if he was debating whether or not to share some kind of secret.
"Eh… I guess I can tell you. Maybe you can even help." he finally said as he dug into his bag and pulled out a bunch of papers from inside of a folder and slapped them down on the table in between us.
"What's this?" I wondered. He seemed to ignore my specific question and launched into some kind of explanation.
"I was approached by a married woman in her thirties." he began. "Her name was Maria Edelman. She told me that she has been happily married to her husband Hank for over 10 years and they already had two kids. The relationship was good. They got into a few fights but no more than the average couple. But recently he had started calling from work once a week saying that he would have to work late… always on the same day, always around the same time every week. That's what got her suspicious that something might be going on in the beginning. So she asked me to see if I could find proof that he was having an affair. She didn't want him to think she didn't trust him if it turned out he really was working late every week."
"And I assume this folder is what yo
u found?" I asked.
"Yes, I started by looking into his email accounts and cell phone records. The phone records are first." he said.
"How did you find this stuff anyway?" I wondered. Email and phone records couldn't be easy to come by. I knew that the police usually required a warrant to obtain stuff like that.
"For legal reasons I can't confirm or deny that I did anything at all, but there might have been a firewall or two that a nameless individual penetrated to get this valuable information." he said with a sly smile.
"I can keep a secret." I responded, returning the smile. I turned to look at the phone records.
There were maybe three pages filled with at least 50 numbers each, front and back. The records were identified by the number of the caller and also tracked when the call started and ended, and what day the call was placed. It looked like Eric had gone back and highlighted some of the entries, using multiple colors of highlighter. He used the same color highlighter if it was the same number that had called multiple times. There were notes in the margin that provided specific names and maybe a note of 'friend' or 'family' or 'business' next to some of the entries.
"Interesting." I muttered.
"Yeah. Maria was able to identify a lot of the numbers as friends or family that called often. And the few we couldn't identify were businesses or telemarketers. No personal numbers. So that was a dead end." he said with a disappointed shake of his head. "The emails were interesting. Sure, we found the usual junk mail that everyone gets but the same person emailed him dozens of times over the course of weeks, starting around the time Hank started staying late at work. And there was something else that convinced me that this was the person he had been seeing one night a week for the past couple of weeks…"
I flipped over to the emails as he said that. It was about ten pages worth of emails between him and a person he never referred to by name. It was organized chronologically so that I could read it as if it were a conversation in real time. And I would have been able to read the conversation if I understood what they were talking about. None of the emails made sense. It was like they were speaking in a different language… a coded language of some kind.
"Is this some sort of code?"
"It has to be. These entire paragraphs of text don't make any sense. It's almost as if he knew that someone might be looking in on these emails at some point, so he invented a system so that they could talk about whatever they wanted and no one would know what they were saying. Which got me thinking: what kind of person goes out of his way to make sure you don't know what they are talking about?" he asked semi-rhetorically.
"Someone with something to hide?" I guessed.
"Correctamundo!" he shot back. "So the emails are useless other than to confirm that there is something going on. I even tracked them both to this hotel. They book the same room every week. And every week I watch the two of them go into that room separately and leave separately. But I still don't have evidence of anything specific. I haven't even gotten a look at this mystery woman because she always shows up dressed in a hoodie wearing sunglasses. Hank does something similar too but I know it's him since I followed him from work. One of these days they are going to slip and maybe we'll get a picture of them kissing outside of their room. That would be all the proof I need."
Something bothered me about those emails but I couldn't quite put my finger on it, so I looked back through them. It seemed like the code was relatively simple. The sentences always made sense grammatically, but just didn't have complete contextual meaning. One of the sentences might say 'Default the brief on next appearance.' or 'Be there writ venue if you can't make it'. There was something about the words that were being used.
"Wait a second, these are all law terms." I pointed out.
"He works at a law firm. That probably had something to do with it." he explained. "Wait a second, how do you know?"
"Because my dad is a lawyer also, I've heard him use some of these words in his phone conversations with colleagues or clients back when I was growing up." I explained, and then suddenly I had an idea. "You know, maybe the code is just substituting words for a somewhat related law term. We have enough emails to crack this code, all we need is time."
"It's not going to matter." Eric said. "His wife wants absolute proof. We can't give her a decoded bunch of emails because she'll just say we didn't decode it correctly. She'll only believe us if we give her a picture of the two of them together in some kind of compromising position."
"Why did she hire you to look into her husband if she was going to doubt your findings?" I wondered. The wife was going out of her way to make us look
"Because there are two types of people that hire me." he began to explain, "There's the type that wants me to find evidence that someone is doing something wrong, and then there's the type that doesn't. They want piece of mind. They are suspicious of someone close to them but want someone to tell them they have nothing to worry about even when the evidence is staring at them in the face. She claims that Hank's not the type of person that would do this sort of thing to her. So she'll never accept the reality of the situation unless we find something definitive."
He had a really cynical way of looking at this situation. Not that I could fault him. There were certainly enough things I was that cynical about, but this wasn't one of them. I had a feeling there was something else going on we weren't thinking about. I didn't yet want to share my uncertainty with Eric because he seemed certain he was just a compromising photo away from closing this thing. So while he focused on that, I decided to look back at the phone records and emails.
The coded emails were at the forefront of what was troubling me. Using code to get a message across suggested he had something to hide. But why go to such lengths to hide a secret? His wife sounded like she was the very trusting type. He shouldn't have to go out of his way to hide something from her. Maybe it was the woman on the other end of the relationship. Maybe she had to go out of her way to hide this affair from another person that we were unaware of.
I could tell he wasn't using his normal email account. The only emails in his mailbox were junk mail and the mails between him and this mystery woman. If junk mail was being sent to this account it must've been old. It was probably an email account he opened years ago so that he could sign up for things that wanted an email address without worrying about getting junk mail from them. I had my own trash account for that purpose as well.
"Did you check to see if he had any other accounts?" I wondered.
"He has a work account and another personal account. And at some point in time he accessed them all from either his computer at his work office or the one at his house, don't ask me how I found that out. None of the other accounts had anything interesting but the information on them is in the back of that folder." he said.
So he had a work account and probably his regular personal email that he wasn't using for this. What did that mean? It meant an outside observer would have no way to know way of knowing it was him. After all, Eric had no clue who this mystery woman was that Hank was with. The only reason we knew one of them was Hank was because Eric used his hacking skills to find out which email accounts he accessed. As I thought about all of this, I realized what had been bothering me. There was one thing when it came to the emails that made no sense.
"Did you find out if he has any hobbies?" I asked.
"How does that help?" he wondered.
"I don't know yet. But did his wife mention a bowling league or shooting hoops at the nearest Rec-center maybe?" I asked again.
"Actually, no. From what she describes, he's either working or at the house. They go out as a couple every so often I'm sure."
"What about the gym? Does he go somewhere to work out?" I wondered.
"He works out at home. No gym membership." he said mindlessly, making sure his camera was pointed at the room in the distance.
"Does he have any weekly errands he runs? Maybe the grocery store or the bank?"
"
His wife takes care of that while he's at work. I put a tracker on his car that first week and he's only gone to work, his house or this hotel since then. No where else." Eric stated.
"And you are sure that you have all of his email accounts? You haven't missed any suspicious emails in the accounts that you have found either?"
"I'm thorough, I didn't miss anything." he assured me. "Why are you suddenly asking so many questions anyway?"
"Because you just proved that he couldn't be having an affair." I revealed, a smile slowly creeping over my face. Relief filled my body, as it usually does when I'm sure I have solved a mystery. I kept trudging through the information and suddenly everything clicked. All of the questions had been answered. All of the gaps in logic had been filled and that last piece of the puzzle fell into place.
"That's impossible." he said in disbelief.
"It was those emails... and the code that the two of them wrote back and forth. They couldn't have just made that up on the spot. At some point they would've had to have met beforehand to come up with that system." I explained. "And you said yourself that he had no hobbies… didn't run any errands. He basically just went to work and came home every day. How did they meet each other?"
"They corresponded by email." he said.
"But you ruled that out too. The first email sent between those two accounts was in the same code. There was no prior email contact between the two where they could have worked out the code, you said so yourself. That leaves only one possibility: they work together. "
"Exactly… they worked the code out at work and then they were able to email each other afterwards." he stated.
"That would explain everything. But don't you find it a little odd that they chose to use two personal accounts to contact each other rather than using their work accounts or just talking in person at the office?" I inquired.
"It's a little odd, but it probably doesn't mean anything. There could be any number of reasons for why they chose to communicate this way. You can't just ignore secrecy of their emails and the fact that they both meet at this hotel on a weekly basis though."