Worst Date Ever (Scandals #3) (13 page)

CHAPTER TEN

It was after noon by the time I got to the office.  It had been almost four before I got home.  A long, hot shower and a couple of Advil PMs helped me fall asleep.  Of course, the extreme mental and emotional exhaustion from the evening’s events made me wake several times from terrifying nightmares.  I must have finally gone into a deep sleep because I hadn’t heard my phone alarm or the others leaving at their regular weekday time.  But since it was Saturday, if we were working on a case, we usually went in a little late and left early, so I didn’t feel too guilty.  At least not after the night I had had.

The conference room was empty, so I summoned my courage and went to Christopher’s office.  Killeen and Liberty were sitting across from him and they were eating Whataburgers that someone had brought in for lunch. “Hey, I made it...finally.”

“How’re the tires?”  Liberty asked.

“Four brand new ones.  And don’t ask me how much fun it is to ride around with a AAA guy picking them up from a warehouse across town.”

“What made them flat?” Killeen asked. 

I hadn’t talked to anyone since my call to Christopher so no one knew.  “Some psycho with a knife and a sick sense of humor.”

Liberty’s eyes grew even larger than they usually were.  “You mean, someone did it on purpose?”

“But why?” Killeen was shocked. 

I shook my head.  “I would have assumed it was a random act of vandalism…except for the note.”

“Is it still in the car?” Christopher asked.

“Right where it landed after I read it.”

Christopher picked up his phone and dialed his friend at the Austin PD while I filled Killeen and Liberty in on everything that happened last night…
almost
everything.

“Detective Lang will be here in about a half hour,” Christopher told us as he hung up the phone. 

“I need you to do something Christopher,” I told him.

“Shoot.”

“Can you look on our
GPS AlarmTrac
and see if it shows anything?”

“It doesn’t have a camera, so it’s not going to show who flattened your tires.”

“I know…just look, please,” I begged.

Christopher didn’t argue as he swiveled around to his laptop and tapped the keys.  “Okay, now what?”

“Nothing?”

“No.  What did you expect?”

“If the system is armed every time I leave the car and lock the doors, how did he get that note into the glove box without setting it off?”

“Are you’re sure the doors were locked?”

“Absolutely.  I remember hearing them pop open when I reached the car.”

“What time did you go in to Cody’s and when did you come out?”

“Uh…about that.  We may have to go to Plan B.”  I cringed, waiting for their reactions.

“The hunky fireman didn’t take the bait?” Killeen asked.

“Oh, he took it all right.  Things almost got out of hand, and I…chickened out.”

“What?”

All three pairs of eyes were focused on me, and I knew I had to swallow the frog and fess up.  “He wanted me to spend the night…and I couldn’t.”

“Of course you couldn’t!”  Killeen bristled, her motherly instinct already alert.  “The creep!  How dare he!”

“He seemed so nice,” Liberty added. 

“I guess we’ll have to find some other way to prove he’s guilty,” Christopher said.

I blinked as an idea suddenly struck me.  “But he can’t be guilty,” I declared.

“Why not?” Christopher asked.  “He sure moved in on you.”

“Oh, he’s probably guilty of hooking up with every girl he meets,” I agreed, “but he didn’t slash my tires…or kill Tamara.”

“Why the sudden change of heart?” Killeen asked.  “You were so sure he was the one.”

“I was with him constantly from the time I arrived until I left his apartment.  He couldn’t have left the note or messed with my car.”  I felt unreasonably relieved.  “And that means he probably had nothing to do with Tamara’s death either.”

“What about all the harassment of Linked?” Christopher reminded me.

“I think they’re all related…and I’m convinced it wasn’t Cody.”  I didn’t know why, but I was determined to defend him.

“But it all came through his computer,” Liberty reminded me.

“Just like the message appeared to come from Michael’s phone,” I pointed out.

That caused everyone to sit back, their minds whirling with the possibilities this new evidence presented.

“Liberty…see if there are any surveillance cameras in the area that might show something.”

“Got it…first thing.”

“Let’s go into the conference room and talk through this.”  Christopher stood and led the way.

“Hope there’s coffee.”  I had missed breakfast and lunch, plus dinner had been light last night…which seemed like a long time ago.  I was delighted to see there were a few donuts left in the box, so I grabbed a raspberry filled one.  It was a little stale but it made my taste buds and my stomach very happy.

I chose a seat near the white board and coffee pot, anticipating frequent refills, as everyone else joined us. “Full house?”

“This is a murder case.  We all need to think outside the box.” Christopher looked around at our assembled family.  “So, give us the 411 Tulsa.”

I repeated what I had discovered just in case one of them had missed the discussion two nights ago.  “Michael’s cell phone and Tamara’s murder…the pings off the tower show his phone never left his condo, but the messages to Tamara had extensive and complicated routing patterns, indicating they were handled differently.  Bottom line, there's nothing there that proves he did or did not send her that message and he has no location alibi.”

“It’s a non-evidence case for the state against Michael.  Any decent attorney and rational jury will acquit him on the first degree murder charge.”  Dallas added his expertise. “He’ll need some expert witnesses.”

“And the identity theft issue,” I continued, “…Michael’s machine had a very sophisticated BOT that sends every member’s information at a random time each month out of the Linked network to an unknown machine.  The BOT could only be detected if it was being watched at the exact instant it was re-assembling itself and sending the data.”

“How did you find it?” Killeen asked.

“Darius and I changed the internal clock of their servers and slave machines and ramped the clock speed way up…I built a tracer for it and we caught it in action.”

Christopher folded his hands on the table and stared across at me.  “Tell me your honest opinion…do you think Michael stole the identities?”

“Objectively speaking…I think he’s a victim.  And here’s why.  He’s a marketing guy…not a techie like me and Darius.  All he had to do was look in the files to get everyone’s socials, credit and debit card numbers and personal information.  He didn’t need to hack in, and if he did, I don’t think he’s savvy enough to know how to hide it that well. Why go to all that trouble?  He could have taken the info directly to the deep internet through an onion router or some other site that can’t trace your IP or location and sold the data where Russians and Chinese hang.  No, I believe someone got his machine to swallow the BOT a long time ago, and now it’s triggering.”

“What about Cody?  It all went to his machine. Tulsa…did you sleep with the enemy?” Reno turned the spotlight on the gorilla in the room.

“I can’t tell if Cody even knows this is going on inside his little network.  Why would someone with his money, career and everything else he’s got going for him screw around with a few hundred thousand dollars and risk bringing the NSA, FBI or worse busting through his door?  And, oh, by the way, I didn’t sleep with him.”

Everyone sat there, drinking their coffee and iced drinks but no one offered a comment to either of my answers.

Dallas broke the silence with an interesting question.  “Let me ask you this…could Michael be doing the identity thefts just to throw suspicion onto someone else?”

“Possibly…not sure why he would bother…but yes,” I answered, a little reluctantly because I truly didn’t believe he was guilty.

“Remember, we’re trying to prove Michael is innocent.  Right now…legally, he’s responsible for shipping the identity files off to Cody…whether he knew it or not.  And we have to find out where they go from there.”

“But I don’t think Cody is guilty either,” I added.

“Well, someone is.  We’ve got to find out who has access to Michael’s
and
Cody’s computers.  And we can start by figuring out who is benefiting from the sale of this data.” Christopher sat back in his chair and began strumming his fingers on the table. Killeen reached over and covered his hand, silencing the annoying noise.               
Thank you Killeen.
  I didn’t say it out loud, but I’m sure we were all thinking it.

“Okay, and you’re saying there’s no way to hack Cody’s network?” Reno asked.

“He has an amazing security system.  I played around with it a little yesterday before going to the mixer, and I wasn’t able to get in.” I licked the sugar off my lips, unintentionally reminding myself of the sexy mouth that had set me on fire last night.

“If the info is being routed through his computer, then we have to use it to get inside the ring,” Christopher stated thoughtfully.

“To do that I would have to actually watch a packet of data go into the deep net from his computer.  Then, if we’re lucky, we can see who bought it and where the money went.”

“Follow the money.” Dallas nodded wisely.  “It never lies.”

“How do we do that...isn’t the deep internet really secretive?”  Liberty asked, innocently enough.

“The way the internet you and I use every day works is everything is sent from computer to computer, cloud to cloud, server to server in packets.”  I saw the glazed look wash over everyone’s eyes, so I hopped up to the white board and drew three circles in red around the edges.  “These red circles are packets and they have commands, pictures…you name it in them.  Every packet you send zips back and forth and, what most people don’t realize, it has your IP address inside.”  I connected the circles with black lines.  “It has to have your IP address, or the remote server won’t know where to route the requests when they’re bouncing back…make sense?”

“Like a return address?” Liberty offered.

“Exactly. So why the onion router?”

“It makes you cry,” Killeen kidded.

“Only the amateurs,” I answered seriously.  “Onions have to be peeled…layer by layer. As I said before, the Onion Router…known as TOR…can find information not available through surface browsers such as pages not linked to other pages, sites that require registration and limited access content.  If you intercept the data transmission at any point TOR doesn’t let you continue to peel the onion.  You can’t see where it came from or where it’s going.”

“So there’s no hope?  Get to the point, for God’s sake,” Dallas pleaded.

“Well there’s good news…TOR is great at providing anonymity, but it doesn’t protect against end-to-end timing attacks.  If we can watch the traffic coming out of Cody’s computer, and also the traffic arriving at the chosen destination, which I suspect is another BOT in his machine, I can use statistical analysis to discover that they are part of the same circuit, locate them and, eventually, find out where the money is going and to whom.”

“NSA lite?”  Christopher smiled.

“They’re restricted by rules and regulations.”  I grinned. “I’m not.”

Reno sat down and Christopher stood up and leaned against the table supported by both arms.  “Back it up a minute, Tulsa… you said you would need to watch the traffic coming out of Cody’s computer, and also the traffic arriving at the chosen destination?”

“Yes…that’s the best and quickest way.”

“So, now that our date-the-suspect plan has crashed and burned, how do we get you in front of Cody’s computer?” Christopher asked.

Reno suggested.  “You could just knock on Cody’s door with your sleeping bag and cooler in tow and ask him if you can crash on his living room floor for a few days and have your way with his computer.”

I shook my head doubtfully.  “Once he looked out the peephole and saw it was me, he wouldn’t open the door.”

“Jeez, Tulsa.  You should have slept with the dude.  Taken one for the team,” Reno teased.

I didn’t admit how close I had come to doing just that. If I hadn’t been reminded that I was but one of an endless number of females in his bed, I think my common sense could have taken a nap while my body got its rocks off.  “Well, too late for that.  What’s our next plan?”

“We could always go straight to the source and lay all our cards on the table,” Reno suggested.  “If he agrees to let us…and by that I mean Tulsa and Liberty…probe inside his computer, then that says a lot for his innocence.”

“And if he doesn’t play along, then maybe he’s got something to hide,” Killeen concluded.

I almost hyper-ventilated at the thought of being forced to spend hours or even days with Cody, considering how our last meeting had ended.  But I knew I had to put my big girl panties on and muscle through this since I was the only one at Scandals who knew what to do.  Damn!  Why hadn’t I chosen a degree in animation instead of cyber security?