Death, Taxes, and Cheap Sunglasses (A Tara Holloway Novel Book 8) (21 page)

“An onion router is a program that sends online communications through multiple, unrelated channels in order to mask its original source.”

Huh?

When the glaze and drool did not cease, Josh worked up an analogy to see if that would make things more clear for me. “It’s like when a money launderer doesn’t want to leave a paper trail and shuffles cash through multiple accounts. Or when someone wants to travel to a foreign country but doesn’t want anyone to track him so he makes stops along the way, changes planes and airlines, maybe transfers to a bus or train or hires a private car service to throw pursuers off track.”

The glaze cleared and the drool dried. “Okay. I get it now. But what does this mean?”

“It means we’re dealing with a tech expert,” Josh said. “And it means we’re going to have to go about this the hard way.”

“Dang.” I much preferred the easy way, when a criminal was an amateur or so dumb or arrogant that he made stupid mistakes, underestimated our ability to catch him, and virtually fell into our laps. “Any idea where we should go from here?”

Josh stared ahead for a moment in thought. Finally, he turned his gaze my way. “I guess we could try to figure out how the thief obtained the victims’ e-mail addresses.”

He spent another moment in apparent thought, this time staring straight up at the ceiling. Hey, whatever works, right?

He lowered his head and looked back to me. “Maybe the person works for some local company that collects e-mail addresses from its customers,” he said. “Stores are always asking for e-mails to send promotions.”

I could attest to that. E-mails informing me of one sale or another constantly crowded my inbox.

“Let’s say the thief works at a store that collects e-mails from its customers,” I said, thinking out loud now. “How would the thief tie the e-mail address to a mailing address? Hardly anybody pays with checks anymore, and there’s no way to glean a customer’s address from a credit or debit card.”

“That’s true,” Josh conceded. “But what about those store loyalty cards?”

I knew all about those, too. My wallet contained approximate 362 of the stupid things.

“When a person fills out the application for the loyalty card,” he continued, “the form asks for both a mailing address and an e-mail address.”

“That’s right.” Hope began to bubble up inside me. “If we can find a common link among the victims, some place that had all of their e-mail and home addresses, maybe we can find our culprit.”

Josh just as quickly burst my bubble. “Maybe. Maybe not. Say we figured out that all of the victims had a particular grocery store card. In order to figure out who might have used the information in the phishing scam, we’d have to figure out who all at the store had access to the card records. There’d probably be dozens of people who’d have access, both at the local store and the corporate headquarters offices. Unless one of them confessed, how could we determine who it might be? Besides, for all we know the stores might even sell their mailing lists. Nobody reads the fine print on those applications. It probably gives the store the right to sell the data to other businesses.”

Ugh.
“And it might have been someone at one of those other businesses who ran the scam.”

“Exactly.”

I looked out Josh’s window as if looking for a solution, a way to move ahead with this case. The only thing I saw was a pigeon dropping a purple load on the windowsill. Someone must have shared a blueberry muffin with the bird this morning. I turned back to Josh. “Got any other ideas?”

He raised his palms. “It’s easy to harvest information online. There’s a good chance the thief found the victims’ e-mail addresses along with their mailing addresses somewhere on the Internet. You can find all kinds of stuff like that on the Web. Businesses give contact information for their staff. Organizations post their membership lists online without implementing proper security protocols to limit access.” He motioned for me to come around his desk.

I stood and stepped around beside him.

He angled his monitor so that both of us could see the screen. “Watch. I bet I can get Nick’s personal e-mail and home address in less than a minute.”

I pulled out my phone and started the stopwatch feature. “Okay. Go.”

Josh typed Nick’s name in quotation marks, along with the words “Dallas,” “e-mail address,” and “home address.” I’d hardly had time to take another glance out the window before Josh proclaimed his work, “Done.”

I stopped the timer. In a mere seventeen seconds, Josh had pulled up a screen listing the members of my neighborhood homeowner’s association, along with contact information for tenants who lived in the rental units. Nick’s home address, along with his e-mail, were right there for the whole world to see. So were mine.

Josh’s expression grew smug. “That’s what happens when people are too cheap to hire professional Webmasters.”

I expelled a long, frustrated sigh. I’d hoped this case would be a slam dunk. Instead, it looked like we’d be chasing down rabbit trails.

Wait a second …

What if instead of chasing after rabbits, we could dangle a carrot and get the rabbit to come to us?

“What if we send a response to his e-mail?” I asked. “We know this guy’s MO. We could provide some fake information and nail him when he goes to the bank to withdraw the funds.”

“That could work.” Josh’s eyes gleamed. He had a box full of high-tech spy gadgets and fancied himself some type of secret agent.
James Treasury Bond.

I could probably handle the stakeout of the bank by myself, but it was clear Josh wanted to be included. What fun is it to work on a case if you can’t be part of the final bust?

We pulled some documentation from the file. Several people who had received the suspicious e-mail had realized it was a scam, contacted the IRS, and provided copies of the communication.

Josh put his hands to his keyboard. “I’ll create a fake e-mail address that looks like one of the ones the thief contacted. Give me one from the file, either a Yahoo or Gmail account.”

I looked over the documentation. One of those who’d recognized the e-mail for the con it was had been Thelma Puckett, a ninety-two-year-old great-grandmother whose e-mail address was [email protected].

“Here’s one,” I said, handing him the printout.

“Shouldn’t we use a man’s information?” Josh asked. “You said the bad guy is a
guy,
right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but where’s the fun in that? Let’s make him dress up like an old lady to make the withdrawal. It’ll be fun to drag his ass off to jail in a gray wig, reading glasses, and a flowered housedress.”

“All right.” Josh simply added an
s
to the end of Granny Puckett’s e-mail address, making it [email protected]. Chances were the thief wouldn’t pay that much attention. Josh copied the text of the e-mail the culprit had sent, and pasted it into an e-mail addressed to our target so that our response would look legit. “What bank should we use?”

I performed some quick research on my phone and determined that Farmers Bank and Trust had a single location in Dallas, and that it was less than three miles from the Daniel Cemetery.

“Use this bank,” I said, holding up my phone so Josh could read the information from the screen.

While I called Farmers Bank and Trust to determine their routing number, Josh typed in the name of the bank and made up a fake account number. As I repeated the routing number to the clerk on the phone, Josh typed that in, too.

“Thanks.” I ended the call and turned back to Josh.

“What do you want to use for her social security number?” he asked.

“April fifteenth is tax day, so how about 415 for the first three numbers.” I glanced down at my phone. “Eight for
t,
as in Tara. Five for
j,
as in Josh. Then end with 1040, like the tax form.”

Josh typed in the fake number, 415-85-1040, and hit send. “When are you going to stake out the bank?”

Per the information in the file, the thief normally made the phony withdrawals only two to three days after receiving information from a victim. He must have realized that he needed to work fast, before the victims could realize they’d been duped and close their bank accounts.

“Wednesday morning.” I glanced again at my phone. “Their drive-thru opens at seven-thirty. Meet me there. I’ll bring coffee.”

“Make mine hot chocolate.”

Some James Bond, huh?

chapter twenty-one

L
unch with the Lobo

Lu peeked into my office around noon, catching me fingering a limp petal on one of the roses Nick had sent me. “You’re a pitiful sight.” She motioned with her hand. “Come on, lonely girl. I’m taking you to lunch. My treat.”

“Okay.” Maybe I should look pitiful more often.

I grabbed my purse and followed Lu down the hall. After she rounded up her handbag, we headed downstairs in the elevator and traversed the crowded lobby.

“What’s your pleasure?” Lu asked as we stepped out onto the sidewalk.

“How about the Zodiac at Neiman Marcus?” I suggested.

“Good idea,” Lu said. “I’m almost out of eye shadow. I can pick some up at the cosmetic counter after we eat.”

Neiman’s probably hadn’t carried Lu’s shade of bright blue eye shadow since the 1970s, but no sense pointing that out to her.

After we’d been seated and placed our food orders, I took a sip of my tea. “How are things with Carl?”

Lu had met her boyfriend several months ago via an online dating service. While Carl’s odd comb-over hairstyle, polyester leisure suits, and white bucks left something to be desired, the guy was as nice as they come. And he was clearly crazy about Lu, doting on her nonstop.

“I’m thinking about getting back on that dating site, seeing if there’s some fresh pickings.”

“Why?” I asked. “You and Carl seem so happy together.”

“We are,” she said, her orange lips puckering. “But it’s getting too serious, moving too fast.”

“Too serious? Too fast?” How could that be? It’s not like they were high school kids. Heck, they were both in their sixties.

She plucked the lemon wedge from her glass and squeezed a few drops of juice into her tea. “He’s starting to make noises about making our relationship permanent.”

“Permanent? You mean
marriage
?”

She nodded, her towering pink beehive quivering atop her head. “I’m not interested in washing a man’s dirty drawers and cooking him dinner. I did that for my husband for more than three decades, God rest his soul.” She looked up and raised a hand as if bidding her deceased hubby hello in the hereafter.

“Many men do their own laundry these days,” I said. “Some of them even cook.”

“Even so,” she said, shrugging, “I just want to have fun. Sow some wild oats.”

The only thing most women Lu’s age would be doing with oats was baking oatmeal cookies for their grandchildren. But I supposed I couldn’t fault the Lobo for wanting to maintain her freedom. I’d hate to see
her
end up the lonely girl, though.

She eyed me intently, her eyes narrowing, her upper and lower false eyelashes gathering to form a thick black fringe. “What about you and Nick? Any talk about tying the knot?”

Heat rushed up my neck to my cheeks. “Nick and I aren’t ready to talk about that yet.”

Lu harrumphed. “You might not be ready to talk about it, but that blush on your face tells me you’ve
thought
about it.”

I have. More than I want to admit.
“Of course I have.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “It’s only natural for a woman my age to think about it. But just because I don’t want to waste my time playing around anymore doesn’t mean I’m ready to settle down just yet.”

I wasn’t, was I? I mean, I couldn’t visualize myself ending up with anyone but Nick. He’d been the only guy I’d ever dated who truly understood me and accepted me as I was, tolerating my many annoying habits and hopeless imperfections with little complaint. But could I visualize the two of us sharing housekeeping duties? A bathroom? A closet? Maybe. But the visualization was still a faint pastel, a light watercolor, a paint-by-numbers that had yet to be fully completed.

“I understand where you’re coming from.” Lu tossed her head one way then the other. “’Course Nick may be a little gun-shy, too, after what happened with his first engagement.”

Nick had been engaged years ago to a schoolteacher named Natalie. It hadn’t ended well. But surely he wouldn’t let their history affect our relationship, would he? After all, Natalie had been rigid and controlling and high-maintenance, like a Mercedes-Benz. I was the exact opposite, the Volkswagen Bug of girlfriends. But just because I didn’t have a ring on my finger didn’t mean our relationship wasn’t solid, did it?

My concerns must have been written on my face because Lu said, “You might have your doubts, Tara, but none of the rest of us do. Hell, we’ve got a pool going.”

My mouth fell open. “You do?”

“Mm-hm. If you’ve got a ring on your finger by the end of summer, I’ll win five hundred bucks.”

“Does Nick know about this?”

She offered a sly smile. “He put fifty bucks on September.”

Whoa.
September was only five months away. While that might seem like a long time from now, Nick and I had only begun dating late last fall and would have yet to complete a full year together by then. Still, like Lu and Carl, Nick and I were hardly children. Besides, as coworkers in addition to romantic partners, our time together had been much more intensive than the typical relationship. We’d been through so much together in such a short time. I’d helped him escape his forced exile in Mexico and together we’d taken down a man running a fraudulent cross-border financial enterprise. We’d gone on to bust a minister who’d fleeced his church and its congregants, a gun nut running a taxidermy and tax-processing outfit, a scumbag running a drug and prostitution ring, and an international criminal ring importing counterfeit electronics, pharmaceuticals, and weapons. We’d survived multiple physical attacks by our targets, emerging battered and broken yet stronger and wiser. And we’d done all of it together, watching each other’s backs, sharing the load. It seemed only right that we’d watch each other’s backs and share the load on a personal level, too. Right?