Crack-Up (42 page)

Pitt nodded.
 
“Happened nearly five months ago, back when our unsub was still searching for the names of paranoid schizophrenics living in the DC area.
 
Your name popped up during that session, by the way.
 
Yours and about two dozen others.”

“I’ll be damned.
 
Why didn’t the network administrator notify somebody about it?”

“Web logs don’t get scrutinized until and unless there’s a problem, and Financial Datacorp doesn’t really consider hackers a problem.
 
More like an unavoidable irritation.”

“So what about our unsub?
 
The puppet master.
 
Our high tech Satan.
 
The motherfucker who destroyed my life.
 
Were you able to track him down?
 
His computer, at least?”

“Not yet.
 
He used some anonymizing trick to disguise his computer’s identity and location.
 
The techies haven’t given up yet on tracing his digital footprints, but they tell us our best chance of catching him is online, so we’ve got the FBI monitoring Financial Datacorp round the clock now.”

“Return to the scene of the crime, huh?”

“Unsub hasn’t been back since the day you got arrested for the Helms murder—or so the techies think—but we just have to be patient.
 
The vile mind we’re dealing with—Or is it minds?—will find the power of that data too tempting to pass up for long.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“
Quantico
thinks it’s one guy,” he said, referring to the FBI’s behavioral analysts by their location just across the
Potomac
in
Virginia
.
 
“One puppet master, as you say.
 
And that he isn’t done manipulating.
 
Or killing.”

“Can I see the profile?”

He shook his pompadour from side to side.
 
“They’re still working it up.”
 
After a brief, repelled glance at some other patients sitting at nearby tables, he finally got around to asking me the only question he’d really come to ask.
 
“Could we keep the local constabulary out of this, Argus?”

In other words, he was asking me to keep secret everything I knew about Financial Datacorp’s data mining link to US intelligence, to say not a word about what we both knew to be the modus operandi in the assassination of John Helms.
 
I refused.

He tried changing my mind.
 
“The conspiracy is out there now, Argus.
 
Known.
 
Verifiable.
 
It’ll come out at your trial without you tracing things back to Financial Datacorp.”

“I’m not concerned about any leniency from the courts.”

“What is it, then?
 
Revenge?
 
Whoever did this, we’ll get them for you—I promise!—just give us some time.
 
But you’ve got to do what’s right here.
 
For the country.
 
For national security.
 
For the Service.”

He didn’t understand my motives at all.
 
“You know, Pitt, I may have been psychotic when you first told me about the data mining project, but I was right to be appalled by it.”

“Argus—”

“Never before, in world history, has a government known or recorded so much about the smallest, most intimate details of its citizens’ lives.
 
Not in Mao’s
China
, Stalin's
Soviet Union
, or Hitler’s
Germany
. . .”

So we had ourselves a heated, spittle-swapping disagreement.
 
We wrapped it up by calling each other un-American, and we both meant it, and Pitt left mad.
 
That is to say, angry.

I phoned Homicide detective Mona Strecker and spilled my guts about the data mining.
 
Strecker believed me right away this time, even though Doctor Woods still hadn’t signed the papers declaring me mentally fit enough to be shipped back to jail.

Five days later, though, Doctor Woods signed.
 
Yipee!
 
The night before my transfer, Strecker and her partner, Gary Fellows, came to my seclusion room.
 
They thanked me—stiffly, formally, but sincerely enough—for my contributions to their murder case.

“Any closer to finding the asshole—or multiple assholes—who did this to me?” I asked them.

But they weren’t.
 
Their spadework—or traditional detective work—had reached a dead end.

The telephone calls placed by the unsub to Bernard Simpson and to one of the corporate jet passengers had been made on throw-away cell phones purchased anonymously.
 
Based on records from cell phone towers, the calls had been made from locations scattered throughout the
Washington
,
DC
area.

The detectives hadn’t had any better luck with the email contacts.
 
In theory, a sender can be tracked through the email header, which shows the route the message takes from the sender’s computer to the receiver’s.
 
But a trace revealed that unsub had used a
chainer
in Belgium, a service that strips out a real email return address, inserts a fake one, and then sends the message on its way.
 
Chainers only stay in business because they never share a sender’s true address, not even with the police, and they shred their data too fast to make a search warrant useful.

The detectives carried bad news from the Feds too.
 
After an exhaustive, massive search made by the best computer forensics specialists in the government, unsub’s digital footprints leading out of the Wall Street consortium’s database had also dead-ended.

“What do you think of the widow?” Strecker said to me.

“Rebecca Helms?
 
Why?”

“We like her.”

“As the unsub, you mean?”

Strecker nodded.
 
“It wasn’t a perfect marriage, was it?”

“You should talk to Keisha Fallon.”

“We did.
 
She told us the two of them spent lots of time apart.
 
More and more toward the end.
 
And did you know Rebecca had signed a brutal prenup?”

“How brutal?”

“Enough to give her motive.
 
Now consider the murder itself.
 
If things had gone just a little better for the true killer, for the unsub, I mean—if Sally Anne Bilchik hadn’t failed, or if you hadn’t been so quick to catch on to things after your escape from jail—then the murder would’ve been hung on one poor, paranoid schizophrenic patsy or another—you or Sally—and there would be no suspicions surrounding Rebecca Helms at all.”

“Or anyone else,” I added.

“Whereas,” she said, “if John Helms had been bumped off in the usual way, then—”

“Rebecca’s a suspect,” I agreed.

“Right,” she said.
 
“Especially if the hit had the markings of a professional hire.
 
And even if Rebecca beats the rap, there would always be talk.
 
Whispers in high society about her possible role in the killing.
 
And who wants to live with a reputation like that?
 
Certainly not this woman, don’t you think?
 
‘No black marks, but upon the royal ermine, I say.’ ”

“Pretty good British accent,” I said.
 
“Pretty good thinking too.
 
I hadn’t considered the reputation angle.”

“It does explain the elaborate modus operandi,” she said, “the subversion of three paranoid schizophrenics.”

I thought back to that slap I’d received from Rebecca Helms by the helicopter the day after the Sally Anne Bilchik attack.
 
Distraught wife or disappointed murderess?

“But if she’s good for this,” Strecker said, “then how’d she pull it off?
 
She’s no computer geek herself.
 
We’re thinking she hired someone.
 
Someone she knew at Helms Technology.
 
Because it would take someone with a computer science background, and some computer hacking skills—”

“As well as someone who knew about Financial Datacorp’s data mining capacities,” I said, excited.
 
“And, as we all know by now, Helms Technology custom-developed their software for that.”

Detective Fellows stared at me intently.
 
“Who might she have hired, Mister Ward?
 
Any ideas?”

“Not off the top of my head.
 
What did Keisha Fallon say?
 
She’d know better than me.”

“She gave us a couple possibilities, but I don’t want to prejudice your thinking.”

After some serious consideration, I said, “I’m not coming up with any names.
 
Rebecca Helms never seemed all that involved with her husband’s business or employees.”

“Ms. Fallon shared the same general impression,” Strecker said.
 
“In fact, she insists Rebecca wasn’t involved in her husband’s murder.
 
Says the woman may come off as a stone cold bitch, but she’s not.”

I pondered that slap again.
 
“But nevertheless, you still like her for this?”
 
My eyes shifted between detectives.

Fellows shrugged.
 
“She’s all we got to like, so far, and we’re looking at her.
 
That’s it.”

I promised the detectives, as they left me, that I’d ruminate on who Rebecca Helms might know inside Helms Technology.
 
That’s what I was still doing the following night, my first back in jail, when I came up with a name.

Only it wasn’t the name of any co-conspirator.
 
I saw in a flash that Rebecca Helms was entirely innocent of any involvement in her husband’s death.

I had the name of the unsub.
 
And I knew his motive.
 
The puppet master was mine.

Chapter 43

At the first opportunity, I used my daily allotted phone time to contact the District police department.
 
In a meeting room at the jail, I gave Homicide detectives Strecker and Fellows the unsub’s identity.
 
The name took them by surprise, to say the least.

Questions cascaded out of both of them, answers out of me.
 
An hour later, the pair rushed off to dig, like detectives do.
 
When we met again, seven or eight days later, in the same meeting room, they greeted me with fat grins and exuberant handshakes and kudos of all kinds.
 
I even got an apology.

“We’re very sorry, Mister Ward,” Fellows said, “for not listening to you from the start.
 
Problem is, Sir, we deal with lunatics all the time, and we’d go loony ourselves if, in every case, we took all the wild bullshit we hear seriously.”

“Understandable,” I think I managed to say.
 
Mostly, I remember triumph and relief trembling my body.
 
We sat down.

“Now for the bad news,” Strecker said and proceeded to steady my trembling with amazing swiftness.
 
“We believe you fingered the right guy not so much because of what we found, but what we found destroyed.
 
We’ve got no direct evidence—it’s all gone, or wiped clean—and the circumstantial is spotty at best, with little hope of further discovery.
 
Bottom line—we don’t have enough to make an arrest, much less convict.
 
We’re going to need a confession, Mister Ward.”