Moving Target, page 23
part #9 of Ali Reynolds Series
The reply from B. Simpson was almost instantaneous. He was obviously far better at texting than she was.
Is there any sign of a break-in?
No.
Do you have any contacts with the San Leandro Police Department—anyone you could turn to without going through the official dispatch line?
LeAnne thought about that. At last she remembered the business card that had been hidden in among her bills. Detective Richard Hernandez.
Maybe. I’ll go check.
Slipping the phone in her pocket, she hurried out to the kitchen. Naturally, her mother had emptied the trash between the time LeAnne had thrown out the business card and the time she had disappeared. LeAnne went out through the back door and opened the garbage bin. She had to dig past the doggy-bomb layer before she found that morning’s trash.
Moments later, she replied:
Got it. Name and phone numbers. Detective Richard Hernandez. But why would he help me? He’s the guy who arrested Lance originally.
Again, B. Simpson responded within seconds.
For the same reason I’m helping. Maybe we both think Lance got hosed. Call him, and send me his numbers. I can’t call him right now, but I’ll be in touch with both of you in an hour or so, once I clear up a few things.
LeAnne sent the detective’s three listed numbers. Then she studied the card again. It was late in the day. It was possible the detective was at work, but it seemed more likely that he’d be at home. Squaring her shoulders, she dialed the cell phone number for the detective Phyllis Rogers had called “a nice man.”
As the phone started ringing, LeAnne crossed her fingers and hoped.
“Detective Hernandez,” he answered.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” she began. “I’m LeAnne Tucker.”
“Lance’s mother,” he said.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Is something wrong?” the detective asked. “He hasn’t taken a turn for the worse, has he?”
“It’s something else,” she said, feeling her throat constrict. “It’s about my mother. She’s missing.”
“The nice woman who’s been bringing Thad to practice?”
Obviously, “nice” was the operant word here.
“Yes,” LeAnne said. “That’s the one.”
“Have you called it in?”
“I tried to, but the person I talked to said no one would take a report because Mom’s only been gone a couple of hours. The thing is, she came here to look after my boys, and she never would have missed picking them up after school. She wouldn’t have gone off and left her dogs behind, either. We believe that a threat to our family was sent to Lance’s room at the hospital in Austin last night. This situation may be related to that.”
“What kind of threat?”
“Someone sent Lance a bouquet of flowers without saying who sent them. In the envelope, there was a photo of my mother and of my younger son, Connor, Lance’s little brother. They were getting into my mom’s car, and the photo was taken on our street here in San Leandro. The message that came with it said, ‘We know where they live.’ ”
“Did you mention any of that to the dispatcher?”
“I tried, but she didn’t exactly listen.”
“I’ll listen,” Richard Hernandez said. “I’ll be right there.”
“Do you need the address?”
“No,” he said. “I remember where you live. I’ve been there before, remember?”
The phone call ended. LeAnne was standing with the phone in one hand and the business card in the other when Connor came into the kitchen. “I’m hungry,” he said. “When’s dinner?”
She rummaged through the fridge, found bread, butter, and cheese, and whipped out a stack of grilled cheese sandwiches. Connor and Thad were hunched over the table eating when the doorbell rang.
LeAnne had a moment of déjà vu. There was that other time she had opened the front door to find Detective Richard Hernandez standing on her front porch, holding up his badge and ID. That had been the worst day of her life. She had stood in stricken silence as Lance had been handcuffed and hustled into the back of a waiting patrol car.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed the memory aside and swung the door open. This time when she saw Detective Hernandez standing there, she was beyond grateful.
“Any sign of your mother?” he asked.
LeAnne shook her head. “Not yet.”
“May I come in?”
“Please,” she said. “And thank you for coming.”
It was snowing when they got to White Plains, not so much that they couldn’t leave after clearing customs and refueling, but enough that the aircraft had to be de-iced before takeoff. In the airport lounge, Ali overheard someone tell the pilot that it was a good thing they were scheduled to fly out soon, because the overnight snow was expected to turn into a blizzard by morning.
For most of the time they were on the ground, B. was on his phone. Ali left her phone turned off and in her purse. Her mother would be provoked by her daughter’s long silence, but with her cloned phone out there somewhere, that seemed to be the best idea.
“Okay,” B. said when they’d reboarded the plane and were waiting for the de-icing. “We’ll be flying directly to San Leandro rather than Austin.”
“Still no word on the missing grandma?” Ali asked.
“Not so far,” B. said. “I’ve been on the phone with Detective Hernandez of the San Leandro Police Department. He’s the guy LeAnne called in to help. He says that since there’s no sign of a struggle at the house, and since Phyllis Rogers isn’t considered an ‘at risk’ adult, his hands are tied. San Leandro PD is sticking to their original forty-eight-hour requirement.”
“In other words,” Ali said, “if it is to be, it’s up to us?”
“That’s right. Without other feet on the ground, ours had better be.”
“What about Sister Anselm?” Ali objected. “If LeAnne isn’t in Austin, and if we’re not going to Austin, shouldn’t we have someone there at the hospital with her?”
“Funny you should ask,” B. said. “I put that very question to Bishop Gillespie. He has a friend in Dallas, Father Michael McLaughlin, a retired priest who also happens to be a former Navy SEAL. He’s already on his way. I called Sister Anselm and let her know that backup is coming.”
Ali laughed. “I guess we can stop worrying about her, but what about Lance? How’s he coping with the idea that his grandmother is missing?”
“He’s in a state, convinced that whatever happened to her is all his fault.”
“No one has contacted him or made any demands for her safe return?”
“Not yet, at least not as far as Sister Anselm knows. She said a boy from San Leandro High who was in Austin today for a conference of some kind came by the hospital and dropped off a gift and a get-well card. The gift was a computer. What makes that interesting is the kid who did it is Andrew Garfield.”
“That’s intriguing,” Ali said, supplying some of the information she’d gleaned from her research. “He’s the co-captain of the science team and, as near as I can tell, he’s the school superintendent’s son.”
“That makes sense,” B. said. “The card was signed by all the kids in the computer club, and that’s who sent the computer.”
“I’m not buying that,” Ali said. “The computer club exists under the aegis of the school system whose server Lance Tucker hacked. I can’t imagine anyone in the district would approve spending that kind of money on someone with Lance’s public track record. No faculty adviser in his right mind would let the kids get away with that, certainly not one who wanted to keep his job.”
“What makes this even more interesting,” B. said, “is that Lance never opened the box. After Andrew left, he had Sister Anselm put the computer in the clothes locker in his room.”
“Is that important?” Ali asked.
“I think so,” B. said. “After all these months of being offline, why wouldn’t Lance jump on the chance to put his fingers on a keyboard? That was one of the terms of his sentence—that he have no computer access. Lance is a kid who grew up living and breathing computers. If it had been me, I’d have torn open that box and been on the hospital Wi-Fi within minutes. Asking Sister Anselm to put it away shows an amazing amount of restraint on his part.”
“Maybe restraint is what he doesn’t have,” Ali suggested. “Maybe that’s why he had her put it far enough out of reach so he can’t lay hands on it. Maybe he’s worried it’ll have some kind of bug hidden in it the way the flowers did.”
“That’s possible,” B. agreed, “or even a keystroke logger. Come to think of it, if I wanted to make off with his GHOST program, that would be the best way to capture it: to log the password keystrokes he uses to access it.”
“I think we need to know a whole lot more about the kids in that computer science club,” Ali said, “all of them. The fact that they cared enough to send him a computer means that, for good or ill, there’s still a connection there.”
“Fair enough,” B. said. “I’ll ask Stu to take a long look at all of them and see if anything pops.”
With the de-icing process complete, the plane taxied to the end of the runway and took off. For a while, the world outside Ali’s window was a sea of swirling snow. Eventually, they popped out above the cloud cover into a frigid, star-spangled night. Across the aisle from where she and B. were seated, Leland sat with a blanket draped over him and with a paperback book resting forgotten on his lap. He was already asleep.
“Take my advice,” B. told Ali. “If we want to have anything on the ball tomorrow, we should make like Leland and grab some sleep.”
Leaning back in his seat and unfolding his own blanket, B. was out like a light in under a minute. Ali knew that was part of B.’s ability to deal with jet lag: He could fall asleep on command. She couldn’t. She sat there for a long time, staring out into the nighttime sky and wondering how Lance Tucker, a troubled jailbird kid, could be worth this amount of money and effort. And what about GHOST? Everything she had learned about Lance’s program bothered her. She wasn’t concerned about what B. would do with GHOST if he managed to lay hands on it; he would use it to create defenses against it. But what about those other people, like the ones from UTI who had run her off the road? And what about the people who had taken Lance’s grandmother? Had she been kidnapped by someone hoping to gain control of GHOST? What would such people do with that kind of technology?
Ali understood that B.’s whole focus was to keep Lance’s program from falling into the wrong hands. Ali’s problem right then was that she didn’t know if she wanted it in the right hands, either.
It was almost three hours later when the plane bumped onto the tarmac in San Leandro and taxied to a stop. A running Cadillac Escalade was parked beside them. Ali and Leland staggered off the plane and into the waiting rental car while B., disgustingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, wrangled luggage and keys.
“Okay,” B. said as he sat in the driver’s seat keying an address into the GPS. “We’ve got rooms at the San Leandro Inn. Detective Hernandez and LeAnne Tucker are going to meet us there.”
They were leaving the airport and waiting for the security gate to close when B.’s cell rang. “Yeah, Stu, we just landed in San Leandro,” he said, switching the phone onto speaker. “What have you got?”
“I’ve taken a long look at the two dead guys, Lowell Dunn and Everett Jackson. I managed to get the autopsy report on Jackson. Definitely suicide. Try twenty-two Oxycodones and about that many over-the-counter sleep aids, all washed down with a fifth of Jägermeister. That’s not an accident, so as far as we’re concerned, his death is off the table. I got lucky with the other case, though: Lowell Dunn’s daughter made enough of a stink about the missing batteries from the smoke alarm that the cops went back out and took another look. I hate it when crooks are stupid. It takes all the fun out of it.”
“Why?”
“He removed the batteries and dropped them in a neighbor’s trash can. Unluckily for him, the garbage on that street won’t be picked up again until Monday. The cops found them and got a partial print that led back to a guy who works at the detention facility.”
“Let me guess,” B. said. “That would be Marvin Cotton?”
“That’s the one. How did you know?”
“Like I told Ali earlier: Once a firebug, always a firebug. But who is this guy, really? Is he some kind of computer whiz, masquerading as a prison guard?”
“Hardly,” Stu said. “He doesn’t even have a computer at home. He uses one at work. The cops haven’t found the smoking gun yet, because they’re probably waiting to get a warrant. Once they do, they’ll find the same thing I did, and that’s when the official story about Lance’s injuries being self-inflicted will be blown out of the water.”
“What kind of smoking gun are you talking about?”
“I found a weird message from Cotton to a guy who works for the security monitoring company at the detention center. All that was on it was a list of numbers. At first I thought he was writing in some kind of code, but it’s not code at all. A search led me back to the camera-repair work order we found at the very beginning of our investigation. That e-mail went out the day before the attack on Lance, and it gave the accomplice the exact locations of the cameras that needed to be taken offline. Since both Cotton and the camera technician were working from the same set of schematics, the two lists were exactly the same. That’s how I was able to make the match.”
“What about the technician?”
“He quit his job a week ago and left town. No one knows where he went, and so far, we’re the only ones who are interested.”
“What are we saying here?” Ali asked from her side of the car. “Does this mean the attack on Lance was some kind of beef between him and the guard?”
“I’d say not,” Stuart said. “Last week Marvin Cotton paid off a car loan for thirty-eight hundred bucks. He also cleared up an almost-two-thousand-dollar credit card bill. The guy got a windfall, and I’m guessing it was a payday for attacking Lance. That missing technician probably picked up a fistful of cash for that as well.”
“Sounds like attacking Lance was worth about the same amount of money as cloning my phone,” Ali observed. “The only question is, who paid the freight: the people who attacked me or someone else?”
“My money’s on UTI,” B. muttered.
“What if it’s someone else completely?” Ali asked. “What if the people we’re looking for aren’t the ones who want to defend against GHOST? What if they want to use it? Who all knew about GHOST?”
“Most of the kids in the computer science club knew something about it,” B. said. “At least that’s the impression I’m under.”
“Have you been able to take a closer look at any of those kids, Stu?” Ali asked.
“Not yet,” he answered, “but I found a roster online. I’ll get on it right away.”
“Any idea when’s their next meeting?” Ali persisted.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Stuart answered. “Actually, later today—two o’clock at the school. Why?”
“Lance may have been out of the picture for the school year, but they remember him fondly enough that they chipped in to give him a computer. I think we need to talk to them. One of them might know something without being aware of it.”
As B. turned in to the hotel entrance, they ended the call. Ali and Leland clambered out to check in, again leaving B. to deal with the luggage and the car. While Ali stood waiting for room keys, a couple who looked to be in their forties came through the sliding door. Ali pegged the guy for a cop the moment she saw him. The woman, a brunette with gray roots showing, was thin to the point of being scrawny. Her face, which might have been pretty once, was marred by the dark circles under her eyes and the downward turn of her mouth. Ali recognized the look all too well: Days of standing vigil at a hospital bed will do that.
Ali handed Leland his room key and stepped forward to greet the new arrivals. “You must be LeAnne Tucker,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Ali Reynolds, with High Noon. Nice to meet you.”
“I’m LeAnne,” the woman confirmed with a notable lack of enthusiasm. She ignored Ali’s proffered handshake.
Undeterred, Ali turned to the man. “You must be Detective Hernandez.”
“We were looking for Mr. Simpson,” Hernandez said.
“He’ll be right here.”
As B. finished with the bellman, his phone rang again. While he was answering it, the ring of someone else’s cell phone echoed through the granite-lined lobby. LeAnne immediately dove for her purse. When she extracted the phone and looked at the caller readout, her already pale face went another shade lighter. “Hello?” she asked anxiously. “Thad? What’s going on?” There was a momentary pause, but then her face brightened. “Oh my God. She is? Really? Is she okay?”
LeAnne held the phone away from her face. “It’s my son,” she explained to Ali and the detective. “It’s about my mother. She just turned up at the house on foot.” Into the phone, she said, “Did she say where’s she’d been? What do you mean she doesn’t know? How can that be? Okay, tell her we’re coming right now. I’ll have Detective Hernandez bring me right back to the house.”
LeAnne ended the call and turned to the detective. “We’ve got to go,” she said. “Now.”
They were out the door before B. had time to finish his conversation. When he did, his face was grim. “Crap,” he said. “We’re too late.”
“What do you mean, too late?” Ali asked. “Lance’s brother just called. His grandmother is home. She’s safe.”
“She’s safe because Lance gave up GHOST. That was Sister Anselm on the phone. She said the ransom call came in on the phone in Lance’s room a few minutes ago. After he answered, he listened for a few moments, then he reeled off a long list of letters and numbers.”
“A password, do you think?”
“No doubt, and Sister Anselm wasn’t quick enough to catch it.”
“What do we do now?”
