Doubt (Caroline Auden Book 1) (23 page)

Caroline froze the image. Eddie was right. The flash didn’t look like a car’s headlights. It was too high in the frame.

“There’s a sound in the background. Right at the end there,” Eddie said.

Caroline turned up the volume and hit “Play” again, advancing the visual and audio feeds together, frame by frame, split second by split second. And this time, when she reached the end of the message, she heard it. A low sound, right when the flash occurred. A horn. A flash.

The conjunction of light and sound, linked in a memory of seashores.

“It’s a lighthouse!” Caroline said.

She searched online for lighthouses with operational lenses and horns.

She found three in California. One in Mendocino. One near San Diego. One near Eureka.

“Guess it makes sense,” Caroline said.

“Huh?” Eddie asked.

“Nolan has asthma. The coastal air is good for him.” She pivoted around to meet Eddie’s black eyes again. “Okay, so assuming Annie didn’t keep moving after she recorded the message, we know she’s near the coast.”

“Yeah, but which coast? We’ve got three different lighthouses at three different locations.” Eddie shook his head. “I don’t know how we’re gonna figure out this one. I’m a lawyer, not a private investigator . . .”

Caroline leaned back in her chair and ran her hand through her unruly hair.

Suddenly, she sat straight up.

“I know how to figure it out. There’s someone I need to talk to,” she said.

CHAPTER 12

Caroline spotted the artist talking to a group of patrons in the center of the cavernous warehouse art gallery. Henrik’s shaggy mane of blond hair stood out above the group of men in suits interrogating him about one of his canvases. The artist had dressed up for the occasion. Instead of the paint-splattered jeans and loose tank top he’d worn the last time Caroline saw him, he wore khaki pants and a collared shirt. Only his wild hair hinted at the temperamental passion simmering beneath his now affable demeanor.

Upon seeing Caroline, Henrik’s light-blue eyes ignited with interest.

He excused himself and strode over to her.

“Did you find Annie?” he asked, his voice pitched low so no one around could hear.

“No. Not yet, but I’ve got some ideas where she might have gone,” Caroline answered.

Henrik exhaled, his disappointment written across his face.

“I’m getting close,” Caroline said. “I’m pretty sure she’s either in Mendocino, Eureka, or San Diego. Do you know if she had any connection to any of those places?”

“I have no idea why she’d be in any of those places.” His eyes narrowed. “Are you fucking with me?”

“No, I am not fucking with you. But I do need some more information.”

“What do you want to know?”

“What’s the name of the pharmacy where Nolan got his asthma medicine—his Telexo?”

“Nelson’s Pharmacy in Santa Monica,” Henrik answered. “Those guys are awesome. The big pharmacies were all a bunch of assholes.”

“Why?” Caroline asked.

“The big pharmacies wouldn’t stock Telexo. They told Annie they couldn’t get a drug for a single customer. Too much hassle. But Nelson’s rocked. Independently owned and totally legit.” Henrik cocked his head. “Why does it matter?”

“Nolan needs his Telexo, right?”

When Henrik nodded, Caroline continued, “So, if Annie’s living in a new place for any length of time, she’s going to need somewhere to fill Nolan’s prescriptions. Wherever that pharmacy is, Annie is.”

“Smart,” Henrik said, nodding to himself.

“I figure it would be easier for Annie to arrange for her old pharmacy to just forward the prescription to a new pharmacy rather than for her to try to get the drug company to coordinate with a doctor to write that prescription and send it to the new place. So, I just need to figure out where Nelson’s forwarded the prescription.”

Across the gallery space, a new group of patrons entered. A woman in a well-cut suit, escorting a young couple. Perhaps an art dealer or consultant bringing her clients to consider new acquisitions.

“Looks like you have more customers,” Caroline said, withdrawing. She didn’t want to explain to Henrik how she planned to find out from Nelson’s Pharmacy where it had sent Nolan’s prescription. To discover that information, she knew she might need to visit a place she hadn’t visited in years. A place that both terrified and exhilarated her.

She’d almost made it out the door when Henrik called out, his deep voice booming across the gallery.

“Hey, Caroline.”

Caroline froze. She turned to meet the artist’s sky-blue gaze.

“I never cared what the deal was with that kid’s dad.” He held her eyes. “I would have adopted him. In fact, I still would, if they came back.”

With much on her mind, Caroline ducked out into the alley.

Caroline stood at the threshold of the dark study. Nothing had changed since her father’s departure. The same pictures still hung on the walls, the faces frozen in time. Younger. Faded. Long ago. The same plaid blanket draped over the armchair, still smelling faintly of mildew. The same books still stood neatly arranged on the long shelves.

The only thing missing was the computer. Three LCD monitors and a state-of-the-art IBM had once sat upon the metal desk that stretched below the bookshelves on one end of the room. Confiscated by the FBI, neither the monitors nor the computer had ever been replaced. Not by her father, while he’d still lived there. Not by her mother in the years since he’d gone.

In fact, Joanne had not touched the room. It was a memorial to a relationship.

But Caroline hadn’t come to the study to pay homage to her parents’ defunct marriage. She’d come to invoke her father’s presence.

William Auden had always been so distant. So preoccupied and distracted.

Except in the study.

Here, father and daughter had found common ground, thrilling when they cracked another security code. Giggling like schoolchildren playing a prank when they erased the event logs and hid their tracks. Together, they’d found information no one was supposed to see. They’d gone places no one was supposed to go.

Just like Caroline needed to do now.

She wished her father were with her. But he lived far away. With his new family. In his new life. And she needed to deal. Now.

Placing her laptop on the desk, Caroline rubbed her hands to bring blood to her fingertips. If all went as she hoped, she wouldn’t need to do any real hacking. She’d avoid crossing the line she’d drawn for herself . . . though she might get a little chalk on her toes.

Like all hackers, Caroline adhered to a basic rule: always try the most vulnerable avenue of attack first. And like all hackers, she knew that the weakest part of any security system wasn’t a firewall or a password. It was the human inclination to trust. The desire to be helpful was a bug in the human machine that allowed people to be manipulated into giving out information they knew better than to share.

Caroline found the phone number for Nelson’s Pharmacy, and as soon as a technician answered, she set her trap: “I’m calling from Dr. Thompson’s office. We have a new patient. Nolan Wong. We’re writing him for Telexo, and I just wanted to check the dosage to make sure we’ve got it right. Do you mind letting me know what he takes?”

Caroline paused to let the innocuous question do its work. Once she got the pharmacy technician to give up this first useless piece of information, she knew she could get him to reveal the location of Nolan’s new pharmacy. It was a trick, to be sure, but not a terrible one. A necessary manipulation, she assured herself. For a good cause.

“Sure,” the technician said. “Nolan Wong, you said?”

“Yes,” Caroline confirmed.

“Excuse me a second,” the technician said.

In the background, Caroline heard the muffled murmuring of a conversation between the technician and someone else.

“The pharmacist is here,” the technician said to Caroline when he returned. “She wants to know which doctor’s office you’re calling from.”

“Dr. Thompson’s office,” Caroline repeated the false name.

In the silence that followed, her heart began hammering against the inside of her chest.

Something wasn’t right. It was taking too long.

A woman’s voice came onto the line. “This is Gerry Nelson, the pharmacist. I apologize, but like I said earlier, we just can’t give any information about patients.”

“I didn’t call earlier,” Caroline said.

Suddenly, she realized what must have happened: Henrik had called the pharmacy. Tantalized by the prospect of finding Annie, he’d tried to get Nelson’s Pharmacy to tell him where it had sent Nolan’s prescription.

“Oh, I see here that we’ve just received an e-mail confirmation of the dosage from the patient’s mother,” Caroline said, quickly hanging up. Social engineering depended on bringing down the target’s defenses by garnering trust. Henrik’s misstep had made Nelson’s Pharmacy too suspicious. They’d never help her now.

She turned to the screen of her laptop.

In the darkened study, the glow of the web page obliterated her awareness of anything else in the room.

Caroline’s stomach sank.

She hadn’t hacked since the police had come to the door. She’d promised never to do it again. If the gods of justice were merciful and her dad didn’t go to jail, she had vowed to turn away from the fun but dangerous world of hacking. Burned once, she’d avoid the stove.

Now she was going to have to break that promise. If she wanted to find out where Annie Wong had gone, she had to. She needed to take a step across the line. Not a giant one, but a step nonetheless. The thought gave her pause. Her father had almost gone to jail because of hacking. Because of her. Shame constricted her throat.

Through a crack in the drapes, Caroline saw a hint of late-afternoon sunshine. But she didn’t open the blinds. This next task was best suited for the darkness.

She told herself she was hacking for the greater good. But her conscience wouldn’t be caged. Letting the ends justify the means was the Machiavellian deal that devils of all stripes had used to justify their dark deeds through time immemorial.

But if she didn’t find Annie, she’d be consigning people to death. To lifetimes of disability. Dialysis. Especially after reading Dr. Heller’s article, she had no doubt that SuperSoy killed. So surely, this situation was different. Surely, this hacking was justified. It wasn’t like she was hurting anyone . . .

Closing her eyes to the moral quandary, she brought her attention to the screen.

She knew the pharmacy’s patient files would be encrypted. Another layer of protection for the most personal information. But she didn’t need to access the patient files to find out where Annie had gone. All she needed was a communication between Nelson’s Pharmacy and whatever new pharmacy Annie had asked Nelson’s to forward the Telexo prescription to.

An e-mail would do.

The website provided her with the domain name for Nelson’s Pharmacy. Now she just needed an e-mail address. She didn’t see any e-mail addresses on the website, but she knew how to find one.

At the bottom of Nelson’s Pharmacy’s website, a list of hypertext links blinked.

I
MMUNIZATIONS

H
ORMONE
R
EPLACEMENT
T
HERAPY

V
ITAMINS

S
END A
M
ESSAGE TO A
P
HARMACIST

Caroline chose the last option.

“I’ve got a question for the pharmacist,” Caroline typed into the “What’s Your Question” field on the website. “I’ve got terrible psoriasis,” she wrote, slightly concerned that the lie would cause her to actually develop psoriasis. “Can it be treated with over-the-counter medication?” She filled out her own e-mail address in the “About Me” field, then waited.

Moments later, she received an e-mail response from [email protected]: “Over-the-counter medication can treat psoriasis,” answered Gerry Nelson. “Specifically, fish oil and vitamin D will help. I just checked and both items are in stock now. Please let us know if you’d like to order some.”

“Not now, but thanks for the info. I appreciate it,” Caroline responded. She really had appreciated it. In far more ways than the unwitting pharmacy would ever know.

Now that she had an e-mail address and domain name, she just needed to hack into the e-mail account. Because the suffix on the e-mail address wasn’t Gmail, Caroline figured Nelson’s Pharmacy probably used the next most popular e-mail service: Exchange. That meant she could trigger Outlook’s autoconfiguration protocol. All she needed was the password and username.

A brute force attack—systematically trying all possible username-password combinations—on the pharmacy’s password and username might work. The problem was that Outlook’s timeout interval would limit her number of tries. Caroline knew if she didn’t get the right password-username combination in five or six attempts, the program would bar further tries for at least an hour. An hour she didn’t have.

No, what she needed was a more sophisticated way to guess Gerry Nelson’s username and password. She knew what to do.

She called on a trick she sometimes played at parties, where she’d guess her friends’ usernames and passwords based on just a few pieces of information. A pet’s name. A home address. If she knew just those things, she could usually guess both password and username in seven or eight tries.

Recognizing that she didn’t have time to guess every combination, Caroline wrote a simple algorithm. She typed in Gerry Nelson’s name, the pharmacy’s name, the pharmacy’s physical address, and several pharmacy-related terms. Dosage. Medication. Compounding. Pharmaceutical. Then she set the algorithm loose to do its work.

Moments later, she had her answers.

Username: Gerry

Password: Nelsonspharm

Caroline was in.

Now the final step.

She ran searches of Gerry Nelson’s e-mails, hunting for any that contained the name
Nolan Wong
. She retrieved several dozen hits.

Opening the most recent e-mails containing Nolan’s name, Caroline found what she sought: Nelson’s Pharmacy had forwarded Nolan’s Telexo prescription to the Arborville Pharmacy one month earlier.

Caroline considered the information. The first thing Anne had done after fleeing Los Angeles had been to arrange for the prescription to be forwarded to her new location. A careful, good mother. Even as she’d been running for her life, perhaps.

Caroline searched for “Arborville Pharmacy.” Her first hit for the name appeared on a list of pharmacies in Northern California: Arborville Compounding Pharmacy, 2385 Linden Street, Mendocino, California.