Dark Web (20 page)

Swift took the cord coil in his hand. He reached over with his pliers and lifted the cord up off the hook.

It was slender, strong, about a half-inch gauge. A good, tensile cord, stronger than a typical electrical cord. Judging from the coil, it was about twenty, twenty-five feet long.

Swift looked at the ends. He grabbed one end with the pliers, as if taking a snake just behind its jaw, and lifted it up to eye level to get a better look. It was a guitar cord. The end was called a quarter inch end, or a tip-ring-sleeve. Probably was used with the mangled instrument he’d seen in the bedroom.

The CSI was watching him.

“I’m going to take this,” he said.

The tech responded with that same muffled voice. “You’re going to need to sign for it.”

“Whose clipboard?”

The tech looked around. In the other room, there was a loud crack, a splintering that could only mean a floor giving way, and Swift heard men’s voices cry out. The firemen and cops in the kitchen had just fallen through.

“Shit,” said the tech, and turned and leapt toward the kitchen. He gripped the doorway and leaned in. “Everyone okay?”

An embarrassed-sounding voice floated back. “Yeah . . .”

Swift slipped out the back door.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“If he left the house,” said six-year-old Reno Simpkins, “it was because he was trying to protect us.”

Mike and Callie sat together on the couch while Reno stood in the middle of the living room floor. Hannah was nearby, absorbed in playing with her toy doctor kit. The sun was going down outside — daylight saving was getting nearer, but for now darkness fell at 6 pm. Callie realized that neither she nor Mike had even thought about putting together a dinner.

“I bet you’re right, honey,” said Mike. Callie glanced at her husband sitting beside her. Each of them held a cup of coffee in their hands. So far, broaching the terrible subject to their daughters had gone much better than they had feared. Of course, who knew what a lasting impact this would have on Reno. She seemed to be taking it in her stride. She was a smart girl, and her parents already knew her to be capable of managing her emotions to some degree.

Callie leaned forward a little, sitting cross-legged with her coffee resting near her abdomen. “Why do you think that, honey? Why would Brax be trying to protect you?”

Reno stuck out her lower lip and lifted and dropped her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Because he always protected us. That time when Hannah was at the top of the stairs and he caught her before she fell? And he came into my room sometimes.”

“He came into your room?” Mike now leaned in a bit, too.

“He plays on his ’puter sometimes and I see the light when I wake up and one time I came into his room and then he walked me back into bed and I had a bad dream.”

“You had a bad dream that woke you up?”

“Yeah and Braxton was on his ’puter and he came into my room and he told me that bad dreams were just atoms and couldn’t hurt me.”

“Atoms?” asked Callie.

“Yeah, atoms, and he told me that he could protect me from the atoms by a magic trick.”

“Maybe you mean ‘Phantoms,’” said Mike.

“Yeah, bantams.”

Callie frowned. Mike could see she was attempting to hold back her tears. “What did he do, honey?” she asked. “How did he protect you from the phantoms?”

Reno held her hands out in front of her and then clasped them together and drew the coupled fists towards her heart. “He took them and he put them in his chest, like this.”

Mike fully expected Callie to break down at this, and could feel his own tears rising against the backs of his eyes, threatening to spill over. But Callie slowly sat back and then took a sip of her coffee with both of her hands and then smiled at her daughter. “That was very nice of him.”

“Yeah, very nice of him so I think that when he left the house it was maybe to release the bantams outside. So that they wouldn’t stay here in the house with us but be outside and then they could fly away. He was probably doing that and then he got hit by the car.”

Mike felt the stone in his chest that had settled there the moment they’d told Reno the white lie — that Braxton had died because he’d been outside in the dark and a car hadn’t seen him. And as if his daughter was able to read his thoughts, she now crumpled up her face as she asked a question. “I don’t understand how he would get hit by a car.”

“Why not?”

“Because he had his headlight,” she said, pointing to the middle of her forehead.

The police hadn’t said anything to them about a headlamp being found.
What headlamp?
Mike wondered for a moment. Then he remembered his father gifting one to Braxton as they’d traveled north two months ago. “How do you know he had his headlamp, honey?”

“Because when he went outside he had it on.”

“You saw Braxton go outside the other night?”

“Mmhmm, I was awake.”

Mike’s body had grown rigid. He spoke deliberately, with clear enunciation. “Reno, did you see what happened to Braxton? Did you watch him outside and see?

She shook her head, her feathery hair flopping. “No, I just watched the light go away.”

“You watched the light go away? You mean it just went out?”

“It went into the snow. It just got darker and darker and then gone.”

It sounded like she was describing him head up the road, but Mike still had to press. “But you didn’t see anyone out there with him? Maybe a man, like me?”

No
, she shook her head again.

Callie broke in. “Honey, did Braxton say anything to you before he went outside?”

This time, Reno nodded her head.

Mike felt his pulse start to race. He could feel Callie beside him, literally feel the heat emanating from her body.

“What did he say?”

“He told me goodbye.”

“He said goodbye? What, exactly, honey, if you can remember — what exactly were his words?”

She shrugged. For a moment she seemed much older. “Just goodbye. He said, ‘Goodbye, Reeny.’”

Mike and Callie exchanged a look. She was holding on now, but it couldn’t last. Her flesh-and-blood son had been taking on the nighttime dreams of their eldest daughter. Unknown to Mike and Callie, he’d been getting her back to sleep. And he had put on his headlamp and said goodbye to her the night of his death, walking off into the snow, his light, literally, fading.

He’d known what was going to happen. Yet he had still left in his pajamas. It meant he wasn’t going to run away. It meant that he had planned to walk outside into the snow and cold to meet his death.

Mike got off the couch and went to call Detective Swift.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Swift called Brittney Silas on the way back to New Brighton. The Simpkins daughter had reported that the victim had left the house with a headlamp on. Swift advised Silas to redouble the search of the woods along 9N. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and a lot of manpower had been drawn off by the manhunt for McAfferty, but it was paramount. Silas was on it.

He also informed her that he’d found something which matched Janine Poehler’s description of the ligature used to strangle the victim. He realized that guitar cables, extension cords, and all the rest could be found everywhere. Probably one in four households had a resident musician, someone with an electric guitar. And Swift was no audio technician — for all he knew the cable could be used to hook up stereo speakers, too. Which put it at just about every household. But it was something.

“I need you to cover my ass here, Brit,” he said to her.

“What? What did you do now, Swift?”

“The McAfferty house was a mess. They were up to their eyes in it.”

He heard Brittney sigh. “You just took it?”

“I didn’t want to wait until hell froze over to pull it from their chain. Listen, all you have to do is call Remy LaCroix. We’ve got interlinking investigations. He’ll sign off on it. He’s a good guy.”

“Did you pack it up already?”

“I did. Sent it to the lab.” The quarter-inch cable would be tested for DNA in Albany. It took time to be couriered there and run through the examination. Swift wanted to keep things moving.

“Alright,” Silas said, sounding resigned.

“Hey,” Swift was nearing the substation. The setting sun was blinking through the hardwood trees beyond the shoulder. Silas would be out there all night looking for a headlamp, in the cold, under the glaring area lights. “Thanks, Brit.”

She paused for a moment. “I’m beginning to think you’re a smooth talker,” she said.

“No. Too many eyes spoil the pie, is all.”

“That’s another one of your lines?”

He smiled. “Thanks, Brit.”

* * *

Time to shift attention to Kim Yom, the computer forensic specialist. Kim had overnighted at a local fleabag motel, but looked as prim and fresh as if she’d spent the previous evening at the Waldorf. She was immaculately dressed in a linen pantsuit and smelled faintly of perfume and shampoo. They sat side by side at Swift’s desk.

“Tell me more about the deep web,” Swift asked.

“I’ll tell you what I can. What do you want to know?”

“How does it work?”

Kim sat back in her chair and gathered her thoughts. She was an articulate woman, and chose her words carefully. “Like I said before, ninety-nine percent of the internet is deep web territory. And by that I mean, the accepted definition is sites that aren’t indexed by standard search engines. We’re talking about dynamically generated sites, very hard to reach unless you know exactly what you’re looking for — and how to find it. We used to work with Turbo10, which was a sort of deep-mining type of search engine. But that’s defunct. If you think of the deep web as a pie chart, the largest slice is databases. NASA, the Securities and Exchange Commission, others. Then there’s fee-charging sites like LexisNexis and Westlaw which host government documents. About twelve percent is Intranet stuff for companies and universities. Then you get to the darkest wedge of the pie. That’s Tor. Here’s where you can buy LSD, AK-47s, human body parts, you name it.”

“How do you access that?”

“Well, you don’t. It’s not like that. Tor browsing is what keeps a user’s internet activity hidden, bouncing them all around the world.”

“How?”

“It’s communication relays.”

“It’s all automatic?”

“No. Well, yes and no. But the relay network is run by volunteers.”

“Volunteers?”

She nodded. “People who believe in anonymity, and stand against Big Data. See, we’re really in Federal territory here. Personally, I work a lot with the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Child pornography is a federal offense. Eighty-five percent of the perps are doing it both locally and on the internet. Agents pretend to be kids and get into chats, careful not to solicit a rendezvous, but to lead a perp into it, and then they nab him. But the deep web is tricky — you’ve got to catch criminals in the act, because these websites are shifting constantly. And because a lot of times, you have more than one person acting in collusion. Acting as one entity, bouncing things around, making their moves to hack or whatever they’re doing.”

Swift pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and shut his eyes. He hated the sense that he was completely out of his depth. Jumping off the horse to chase the fugitive down on foot? He was the guy. Pursuing a criminal through a labyrinth of shifting websites designed to keep all footprints concealed? It was worse than a foot of snow on the crime scene.

He opened his eyes again, and saw Kim watching him carefully. “Alright,” he said. “So we know — or, we’re fairly certain — that someone out there used these . . . methods to learn Braxton Simpkins’ location?”

“No.”

Swift was stumped. “No?”

“Okay,” she said, and turned to her own laptop, a shiny new Mac, slim as a magazine. Her fingernails clicked against the keys. Swift watched the screen, his head starting to pound. When they’d been together the previous afternoon, Kim had claimed that the victim’s computer had been hacked — he was sure of it. He thought she’d said that the hacker had accessed it through the deep web, a term Swift knew he’d heard before; now he remembered how. Kim had mentioned NASA. Swift recalled that, before rising to more global fame, Julian Assange had been a hacker who’d broken into NASA over a decade ago.

Then it made sense. You hacked in
to a deep web site, not necessarily a laptop’s hard drive itself. Did that mean Braxton Simpkins had a website? Swift was still confused, and hoped Kim would clear it up.

“I’ve cloned the victim’s hard drive like I showed you yesterday,” Kim said, “and I have a Tor browser bundle on my computer.”

“So you can hack NASA?”

Kim remained unsmiling. “There have been major hacks into other companies besides NASA over the years. Google, AOL, Verisign, Heartland Payments, Monster, Fidelity Nation, Stuxnet; they’ve all been hacked. So has, I believe, Kapow.”

Swift perked up. Now they were on some familiar territory. He remembered the name Kapow.

“That’s the company that administers the game, ‘The Don.’”

“Correct. All of the user data — the player data — is stored in the Kapow servers in San Francisco, maybe other places, too. They have a lot of users. Over six million. What I’m doing with my own Tor is searching the deep web hacker sites — there’s a few — where hackers might brag about their victories, or swap information, in some cases.”

“Excellent,” said Swift. He thought he was beginning to get some of the bigger picture. At least, he could grasp that Kim Yom was actively searching for the hacker who had gotten a hold of Braxton Simpkins information. There was still one piece left missing.

“But what about the firewall breach? Is that part of the same thing?”

“Once the hacker had the data from the Kapow theft, they targeted the victim’s laptop directly.”

“Why? They already had all of his info, right?”

Kim lifted her shoulders awkwardly and let them drop. It was almost as if this self-possessed woman didn’t take naturally to a shrug. “They were looking for something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

Swift blinked at the screen. Pages were opening and closing rapidly. Nothing looked like anything he’d seen before; the usual website was a blitz of advertising and buzzwords and branding. These sites were stripped bare, filled with cryptic information. In some cases, as Kim’s fingers flew, the pages onscreen didn’t even appear to be in English, but code. Swift thought it was called
html
.

“Pinpointing just where the hack came from is basically trying to find a needle in a haystack. The digital tracks have been very well covered. The best I’ve been able to determine so far is that it originated in the U.S.”

This jolted Swift out of his brief hypnosis. “That’s great.” He nodded at the hieroglyphics in front of him. “You’re able to prove that the victim’s computer was hacked, and from the U.S.”

“Yes. And I have a date, too, in the registry.”

A couple of flicks of her fingers and a window popped up, with more icons and graphics. Something Swift could finally recognize. She opened a folder and started to scroll through about a zillion file addresses. Then she stopped. “So, we’ve got this Kapow data theft happening December 28. The firewall was breached a day later.”

Swift reached into his inner pocket, pulled out his small notebook. He licked his thumb and flipped back a few pages. “That was the day the Simpkins were moving. They weren’t even here yet. Two months before the crime.”

“Looks that way, detective.”

Swift sat back in the swivel chair beside Kim, thinking. Then he leaned forward again and put on a winning smile. “Any chance we can narrow the trace? Three hundred million people in the United States.”

Again, Kim was stone-faced. “That’s a real long shot. Next to impossible.”

He sat back. Stumped again.

“What about the messages? The email messages from within the game.”

Kim turned and pulled a stack of paper from a very chic valise at her feet. She flopped the papers on the desk beside the computer. “I read them all.”

“And?”

“You’ve got your basic stuff. Definitely a lot of rivalry going on. These gamers are vicious. Lots of wummers.”

“Wummers?”

“Wum. W-U-M. Means ‘Wind-up Merchants.’ Internet slang for someone who intends to cause as much disruption as possible by goading others online.”

“Like a troll.” Swift had heard the term somewhere.

“Sort of. Trolls tend to be characterized by spewing negativity everywhere. Wummers are really looking to stir things up, to get a reaction.”

“And you’ve found ‘wumming’ going on in there?” Swift glanced at the stack of papers.

“I certainly did.” Kim began to leaf through the printouts. “There are messages between players, and there are also battle reports. From what I could gather — and this is going back about three months, before the messages were last cleaned out of the inbox — a player named Billy Sweet Tea had attacked Fresco — that’s the victim — and wiped out a good portion of his defenses, and stolen vast resources. So, Fresco then goes what they call in gaming circles, ‘berserk.’”

“How so?”

“He retaliated by hitting Billy Sweet Tea every single day for the next three months.”

“Wow. Berserk.”

“What I found in other messages though was that Billy Sweet Tea had been terrorizing other gamers, too. Sweet Tea is a big player. Though it’s free to play, you can spend real money in the game for ‘bullion,’ and use that as currency to buy troops and speed up building and training processes. Sweet Tea was a giant compared to other players.”

“But he didn’t appreciate it when Fresco started hitting him day after day,” Swift said, trying to follow along.

“No. He most certainly did not.”

“Are there direct threats?”

“There’s one.”

She handed Swift a sheet she had already pulled out and set aside. Swift snatched it and read it eagerly.

fresco i see you got your try-hard pants on today, good 4 you. now listen here you stupid fvck, u keep this shit up go right ahead private tryhard, i’mma find u, not in the game, i know all your hideouts in here dumbshit but I’m gonna find you in real life and I’m going to kill you. you and everyone in your fucked family. you failed to even help your little butt-buddy too. You probably fail a lot in life don’t u? you hear me u stupid little fck? U must be a little kid LMAO. But you’re playing a big boy game now little kid. I’ll be seeing you. keep yer light on for me. – billy

“Jesus,” Swift said, leaning back, holding the sheet up in front of his eyes with one hand, pawing at his jaw with the other. “This is it, right here. Sweet Tea says he’s going to kill Fresco. Find him and kill him and kill his whole family.”

Kim Yom looked at Swift, expressionless. She was capable of divorcing herself from any emotion during a case, which was partly why she was so efficient, Swift knew. But he couldn’t help get excited himself.

“This could be the threat that gives us intent.”

“Or it could be two kids talking tough. You build that into your prosecution — worse, hinge it on that — and the defense shoots it right down, saying that the language only refers to in-game strategy. Rile your opponent. Get them to make a mistake.”

“Yeah but this is the kind of stuff that causes kids to jump off bridges.” He thought of Mathis, who’d been looking to carve out a possible case of cyber-bullying, maybe a hate crime.

She blinked at him. He knew just by looking in her eyes and hearing the words come out of his mouth that what they had was still circumstantial, no matter how scathing and brutal it read.