The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller (10 page)

Morgan walked into the joint workroom holding David Mitchell’s white iPhone. “Sorry it took so long, but I got in. The phone’s unlocked,” he said and handed it over to Jami who started looking at the phone’s contents.

“Did you find anything?” I asked.

“I scraped the contents and copied them over to our shared drive. I have a process running right now to parse any communications he may have made using the device and it looks like he had his email on the phone so I’ll be able to pull that information out, too.” I no longer felt tired after hearing the news. Jami looked wide awake now, too.

“Look at the call log,” Morgan said to Jami who pulled it up.

“He made and received a few calls to the same number tonight,” Jami said and looked at Morgan for any details he may have.

“I didn’t have time to run a reverse lookup, as soon as I got the phone unlocked and the contents scraped, I came right over. But yes, he’s definitely had contact with someone.” I turned to Morgan.

“Let’s do the lookup now.”

“May I?” Morgan asked Jami, implying that he wanted to use her laptop that she had set up. She nodded. He sat down and pulled up one of our internal systems. A moment later and Morgan got a hit. “It’s registered to the Tribune. That’s all I’ve got.” That made sense to me. When numbers are registered to companies, you don’t get a whole lot of information.

“Let’s call and see who answers,” I said.

Jami and I were still standing while Morgan was doing his lookup. I took the phone from Jami and reached to the middle of the large table where we were working and pressed the speaker button on the Polycom phone system and we heard a dial tone. I accessed the call log and dialed the number.

As it rang, Jami, Morgan, and I all looked at each other, not knowing what we could expect. There was a second ring, then a third, then the ringing stopped. For a moment, we thought someone had answered. “You’ve reached John Burnett. Sorry I missed your call, please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” we heard instead and I disconnected the line.

“Who’s John Burnett?” I asked.

“I’ll find out,” Morgan said and stood to walk back to his workstation to get started.

“No, focus on the laptop and then get back to us on what you find. Jami can look into Burnett, right?”

“I got it,” she said. After Morgan left the room, Jami started clacking away at her keyboard and I turned on the TV mounted on the wall in front of us and put it on one of the cable news channels before brewing more coffee for Jami and me. It was five minutes until seven and a banner streamed across the screen.
RNC PRESS CONFERENCE AT 7…PRESIDENT SPEAKS AT 8…

Jami was still digging and trying to find everything she could on John Burnett when the press conference started. RNC Chairwoman Debra Stewart was standing at the podium surrounded by Jim Keller supporters who worked for his campaign. She spoke to the camera and a dozen reporters who were seated in the room that was supposed to have been used to receive Keller after his speech to celebrate with his staff. She explained what had happened, that the senator had been kidnapped and went over the timeline. Stewart was brief and to the point. She had to be – she didn’t have more to share.

“I’ll open it up to questions now,” Stewart said, fielding questions about Jim Keller’s political beliefs and whether or not they had anything to do with the kidnapping. Questions were asked about law enforcement and what was being done to find Keller. Debra Stewart said she’d take one more question and pointed to a reporter off camera who spoke.

“I understand that a local mosque might be involved. The Islamic Civic Center. Is that true and is there any connection to the Jihadi Coalition?” Stewart was caught off guard by the question.

“No, I don’t think so. I haven’t heard about the mosque, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

“Okay Blake, I got Burnett’s home address. It’s not too far from here,” Jami said. I turned off the TV and stood.

“Let’s head out.”

The reporter at Stewart’s press conference must have received a tip or knew someone inside the Bureau because at the very moment that he asked the chairwoman about the downtown mosque, FBI agents had already set up a perimeter and were quickly approaching the building.

Chris Reed stopped Jami and me on our way out and gave us basically the same information. “Agents from the Bureau are at the Islamic Civic Center right now. They’re going to question Aasaal Nazir.”

Always one step ahead of us.

“I didn’t find a lot on the imam,” Jami said. “There was a record of his arrest by CPD when Keller announced that he was running for president which tied Nazir to the senator. The interagency file said that he was suspected of having ties to the JC. That was everything. It’s like he’s been living off the grid.”

Chris walked with Jami and me and as we got close to Morgan’s workstation, I saw him stand up and wave us down. “I’m still running my scraping process on the laptop, but I was able to pull his email from the last twenty-four hours. He sent no emails but received two hundred thirty-six to his Website’s tips email address. I ran a compare on all of them to look for any commonalities. I looked at every message header, trailer, and IP address. Everything looked legit. But then I noticed that the DMARC record on two of the emails had been tampered with between when the messages were sent and downloaded from the server.”

“What does that mean?” I asked Morgan, trying not to get frustrated.

“It means that the emails were spoofed. They weren’t real. They looked legitimate from the surface and even if you looked at the SPF records from the postmaster report everything would look fine. But it’s impossible that the DMARC record would be exactly the same from two email messages from two different senders. That just doesn’t happen.”

“What were the contents of the two emails?” Jami asked.

“Both were tips about the senator’s kidnapping. The first one came from Jake Massey at the Tribune.” That was the first time I had heard that name.

“Who is Jake Massey?” I asked Morgan.

“I looked him up. He’s the managing editor at the newspaper.” I turned to Reed.

“We didn’t find out if the Bureau arrested anyone when they went to the Tribune earlier, did we?” He shook his head.

“No. They were there based on a tip but that’s all they shared, there haven’t been any more updates to the bulletin.”

“That’s not a hundred percent accurate,” Morgan said with reservation, trying not to speak out-of-turn. “They issued an update earlier. I checked the bulletin a few minutes ago, right after I realized that these two emails had been spoofed. The FBI took Massey into custody.” I was beside myself.

“Damn it Reed, you have to stay on top of these things. I can’t do everything, I need help.” Chris Reed folded his arms.

“Blake, we—” Morgan interrupted him.

“Guys please, there’s more,” he said and called us over to his workstation. “The second email that I found from the scan was spoofed to look like it had been sent from the mosque.” Reed and I looked at each other.

“So, you’re telling me that David Mitchell sent himself two emails, one from the Tribune’s managing editor—” Jami interrupted me.

“He was probably Mitchell’s old boss. Most likely the guy who fired him.”

“And he sent himself a second email,” I continued, “made to look like it was a tip coming from the downtown mosque. The Bureau would naturally think it came from Nazir.”

Then Morgan pointed to the article, the same one Jami had been looking at. “Guys, the byline says that Mitchell was a contributing writer on the story. He was there when Nazir got escorted out by the CPD.”

“Mitchell knew what happened to Keller. He spoofed the emails to buy some time. And maybe as payback against his old boss for firing him. The mosque is just a red herring. You ready to head out?” I asked Jami.

“Ready.”

John Burnett woke up tired after tossing and turning all night. He didn’t sleep well after talking with his friend and former coworker the night before. David Mitchell had called and told Burnett everything – the kidnapper, the black van, the address of the warehouse on the south side. He learned about the FBI making a stop at Mitchell’s apartment and taking his electronics, including an old phone and spare laptop.

Burnett worried when he learned the whole truth and thought his friend should come forward and tell the authorities everything that he knew. But that wasn’t how David Mitchell operated. He had to be the center of attention. He had to control the story and tell it his way, embellishments and all. Burnett hated that about David, but he had been a good friend who had helped Burnett out a number of times over the years.

David promised that he would release all of the information he had by today and John was okay with that. He still had concerns that Mitchell would be discovered for not just knowing more of the story that he wasn’t telling but for being a part of the story and not doing anything about it. And since David called and told him everything,
he
was now involved. And that meant being linked directly to David Mitchell.

He had received another phone call last night after speaking with Mitchell. Burnett’s department manager at the Tribune called to let him know that they were scheduling an all hands on deck meeting for eight o’clock the next morning. That meant that Burnett and his fellow staff writers would be briefed on everything that the paper knew about the kidnapping and tasked with spending the day writing article after article on Senator Keller. That’s what the media does, doubling down whenever they have a hot story.

Burnett turned the radio on and splashed water on his face to wake up. “…Has been found dead in his apartment, we’ll be right back after these words,” the voice said and the station took a commercial break. He had already changed his clothes and was getting ready to go into the kitchen and make breakfast when the radio station returned from commercial break. “Breaking news to get you up to speed, David Mitchell, the former Tribune journalist who was fired last year and started his own news Website was found dead in his apartment late last night, stabbed to death in an apparent robbery. David Mitchell was thirty-two years old. Still no sign of Senator Jim Keller, the manhunt is still…” Burnett turned the radio off.

David was dead? Murdered in his apartment?
His mind started to race.

It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Mitchell had discovered where the kidnapper was keeping the senator and being murdered that same night. The media didn’t know what he knew. Burnett thought about the reality that his friend may have been murdered by the kidnapper himself. The kidnapper may have tracked Mitchell down and shut him up for interfering.

A chill ran down Burnett’s spine.
What if the kidnapper, now turned killer, was after him, too?

A few minutes after it sunk in that the friend he had spoken with just a few hours ago was dead, John Burnett made another realization – that he was now the only person in the world that knew where the kidnapper was keeping Jim Keller. Now he had the burden of deciding what to do with this information.

As Burnett stood at the sink and all of these thoughts swirled in his head, he saw a shadow pass slowly across the blinds from a window in his bathroom. He ran to the window and looked outside but saw nothing.

He hurried into the kitchen and looked into the backyard and again saw nothing. When he walked up to the front of the house, he again saw a shadow pass, this time by the long vertical window with its own set of smaller blinds next to the front door. Burnett went into the living room and slowly pulled up on one of the blinds and was horrified at what he saw. There was a man standing at his front door trying to look in.

And the man was holding something – it was a gun.
It’s the killer! Here’s here!

I stood outside of John Burnett’s house on Holly Court in Oak Park, just west of the city. It was an older, two story brick home, shaded by a large oak tree out front. A red Honda Civic was parked in the driveway, so I knew he was still home and probably getting ready to head into the office on Michigan Avenue.

There wasn’t enough time to look into Burnett, so we didn’t know if he was single or a family man. When we parked a few houses down and walked toward his home, I noticed that it was on the smaller side, so my first thought was that Burnett most likely lived alone. Jami and I decided to play it by ear and roll with it. We walked to the back of the house where Jami stayed waiting for me while I walked back to the front.

After walking the perimeter of the house and being unable to see inside, I knew I’d have to try and take him by surprise. But seconds before I was about to make a move, I heard Jami.

“Federal agent! Stop!” she yelled.
He must have seen me and ran out the back
, I thought. And Jami was right there to keep him from getting away. When I heard Jami yell, I ran down the small set of stairs leading to the front door and turned to my right, guessing that I might be able to stop Burnett. But instead, he ran down the other side of the house toward the front yard, chased by Jami. He stopped when he got to the street and saw me with my gun pointed right at him.

“Don’t move!” I yelled and Burnett stopped and put both hands behind his head, looking at Jami and me.

Jami was still chasing him from the backyard and I was approaching from the front. But when he saw me holster my weapon and reach for the handcuffs, Burnett ran again, heading east.

We ran down the shady suburban street, early enough in the morning that there wasn’t much traffic yet. I chased Burnett for two blocks before he ran into a park off of Bonnie Brae. He ran south and I tackled him in the park’s baseball field. Jami came up from behind me, gun still pointed at the man, as I cuffed him.

“Please don’t kill me,” Burnett said and I shot a confused look at Jami before pulling him up and walking back to his house.

“As long as you tell me everything I want to know, you’ll be okay,” I said as I saw Jami try not to smile.

“We’re DDC federal agents,” she said as she walked behind us on the sidewalk back to the house. “Do you want to tell us why you were running?” Burnett didn’t answer.

“This will be a lot easier if you cooperate,” I said as we got to his house and the three of us walked down the side and into the backyard.

We walked through the backdoor and into the kitchen and stopped at the family room. It looked like a classic bachelor pad and was decked out with an eighty-five inch TV mounted to the wall and surround sound speakers all over the room.

I forced Burnett into one of the chairs. Jami and I stood next to each other and started the questioning. “Why would you think that we were going to kill you? Who did you think we were?” I asked. But Burnett wouldn’t budge. He pressed his lips together, as if he were trying to force himself not to say anything. He looked away, visibly shaken but unable to decide what he should or should not say to me.

“We know you spoke with David Mitchell a few times last night. He’s dead. Stabbed to death in his apartment,” Jami said. We had decided on the way over that Mitchell and Burnett must have developed a friendship at the Tribune and were likely helping each other with leads and tips for stories. The fact that Burnett wasn’t shocked to hear the news made me realize that he already knew his friend had been killed.

“I heard about his murder on the radio. I don’t know anything about the kidnapping,” he finally said.

“Then why run? What are you so scared of?” I asked, but no response. I leaned in.

“You’re lying to me.”