Dark Web (12 page)

It was one of the fastest tear-downs of a crime scene he’d ever heard of. Normally you took your time with a scene. It was all you had. Silas was telling him the road was open because she was nervous. But they’d already gone over this. She wanted his approval, he decided, since he’d been calling the shots.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I think we got everything we’re going to get from there. How you doing?”

“Doing okay,” she said. It sounded like she was in her car, heat blasting away. “Little frozen.”

“Yeah.”

The silence that lasted just long enough to be awkward. “You did a good job.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. Let’s just say I consider you more than just a supplemental party.”

“Shut up,” she said, and he thought he could hear her grinning.

“You’re more than just an evidence tech.”

“Ha ha,” she said. “No one has used the term ‘evidence tech’ since back in your day. Fifty years ago or whenever.”

“Touché.”

She laughed, but it wasn’t a full laugh, it had no real joy in it. He couldn’t blame her. Still, Swift could never resist the opportunity to get someone going, crack a smile, something. His ex-wife said it was because he couldn’t handle unhappiness. “Well I picked the right career, then,” he would tell her. But with Alicia, nothing. Couldn’t get a half-smile out of her. It had been impossible to make her laugh. Maybe, he wondered, the new guy could do it. Maybe he was making her laugh right now while Swift was stuck working out of his tiny State Police sub-station in an office barely bigger than a walk-in closet. He could be in that box with some killer for seventeen hours, looking for somatic indicators, trying to draw a confession out, make a friend, always pitching and selling. When you were an investigator you had to be a salesman. You had to sell someone what they didn’t want — ever — their own stinking, filthy truth.

Swift was making himself depressed.

“How
you
doing?” Brittney asked, perhaps sensing it.

He looked out the window, into the faint light of the day, watching the snow blow down at an angle, and the wind whip it up off the eaves of the house, spiraling it, spreading it like a crop dusting.

“I’m okay.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“You shouldn’t. You’re right. Look, you did fine. You processed your scene, you didn’t touch the body — we bagged it, and we’ve got the bag for trace analysis. There was nothing else anyone could have done at that scene.”

She was quiet, considering. “Thanks, John.”

“Sure.”

“We’ll catch up at the station? Or, what do you want?”

“I want you to stay with your evidence, keep me comfortable that we’ve got case continuity with all this moving around and shucking and jiving. And ask Cohen if he’ll meet me at the diner in town in one hour.”

“Altos?”

“That’s the place. Oh, one last thing. When you talk to Cohen, give him a little assignment from me. Can you?”

“He’ll like that. Sure.”

“Have him just do a search on the name Robert Matthew Darring. He can cross it with Queens, and also just do a general search.”

“Got it.”

She fell silent again, and this time it felt heavy, like she was waiting for something else from Swift. He’d been prepared for that.

“Not asking you because I have other plans in mind for you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Dinner.”

He thought she might just be smiling again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Mike stood in the kitchen, staring off into space. The water was running behind him. He’d never felt anything like this before in his life. He had no idea how to handle it. The detective was talking to him again. Asking him something. Looking at him. He needed to get to his wife. Callie was in the hospital and he was standing here doing the dishes, answering this man’s questions.

“What does your wife teach?”

“She, ah . . . she teaches art.”

“Art?”

“Yeah. Studio Art. The kind where models come in and pose.”

“She’s a painter?”

“Painter, sketcher, illustrator, tattoo designer; she’s done it all.”

“That sounds great.”

The detective, Swift, put on another one of his smiles that made Mike feel as if his blood were seeping into places it shouldn’t. What did they call that when the heart stopped pumping and the blood drained down? It wasn’t rigor mortis . . . livor mortis, that was it. Mike wondered if Braxton had livor mortis. What was happening to Braxton right now? Was he being cut open? Swift had mentioned the autopsy. But Mike hadn’t heard anything much after the detective told him Callie was in the hospital. That she’d basically become unmanageable.

“Hey, Mike?”

“Huh?” Mike looked up at Swift. The detective was looking behind him. It took a second to register before he turned round and saw the faucet running. He hit the lever with the heel of his hand.

Where the hell was Callie’s co-worker, Sarah? She’d sure picked the wrong day to take her time getting to where she needed to be. Of course, it was brutal outside, with the wind picking up into gales, dumping the snow all over the place, creating cowls and ridges like sand dunes. Mike checked the clock on the stove. Had it only been ten minutes since he looked at it last? Time was all over the place. One moment he lost whole chunks of it, and then it slowed to an agonizing crawl.

Braxton, somewhere in a room where they were digging into him and separating him with stainless steel tools that glinted beneath the fluorescent lights.

The kid had been standing there in the kitchen. Right where the detective was now. Last night. Eating his final snack before bed. He’d had a few handfuls of
Combos
and some milk. He only drank milk at Mike’s insistence. All he really liked was grape juice, the kid. It used to aggravate Mike. They’d gotten in little heated battles over it. Mike had raised his voice about it once. It all seemed so stupid and petty now. Mike felt waves of guilt churning up, choking him.

He leaned into the sink and an explosive, unexpected regurgitation of his previous night’s dinner splattered into the steel basin.

His body was shaking as he reached up and turned the tap on. He was beginning to lose his grip.

“Mike. Maybe you should be looked at, too. Let me take you, when your friend gets here to watch the girls.”

Mike leaned down and put his mouth to the water frothing from the tap. As he let it pour over his lips and tongue he was reminded of the week-long crusade Braxton had undertaken not long ago, to conserve water. He’d seen a documentary or read an article online, and suddenly he’d been afraid that they were all going to run out of water — not today, but when the girls had grown up and were about to start families of their own.

“We waste water like it’s nothing,” he’d said, his eyes animated beneath the mop of highlighted hair. The only time Braxton ever really came out of his shell was when he was on some crusade. “People think the Third World is the only place to have water shortages, but we have it right here in the United States. Lake Mead is running out. Vegas is going to pipeline all the way up into northern Nevada and steal the water from there. Then
that’s
gonna run out, too.”

Over the years, Mike and Callie had held several private discussions about Braxton’s bouts of anxiety over environmental and economic issues. They admired the kid for his knowledge, but worried that his concern, sometimes amounting to panic, was not healthy. He was easily agitated, and he blew the issues out of proportion, obsessing over it for days, sometimes weeks, like the water issue. Or he would champion something like The Venus Project for hours on end. Callie’s biggest fear was that this behavior showed traces of his biological father’s symptoms. The mood swings and the obsessive-compulsiveness. Braxton didn’t have the signature peculiarities that were supposed to accompany OCD, like turning a light switch on and off, having shoes that didn’t touch together in the closet, but he worried about things that were not yet happening, he perseverated endlessly over some eventuality that might just come to pass, and Callie described his father that way, too.

The detective was still behind him, standing just next to the woodblock, no doubt looking at him with that frown of empathy and concern that was making Mike sick. He was getting annoyed with the detective now. Standing there, asking questions about Callie, about Mike, about who they were; assessing what kind of parents they were.

He spun around, half-aware of the water running from the corners of his mouth.

“Why don’t you stop, huh? Give us a little space. I already told you what I think. I think you need to look at the kid’s biological father. Alright?”

The detective was nodding, still with that
I understand
expression on his face that Mike hated, wanted to smash, wanted to run away and hide from. He wanted to get away from this entire day, this whole nightmare. He wanted to wake up and have his wife next to him and the kids — all three— snoozing contentedly, soft sounds of sleep drifting through the air, as the house, satisfied with their warmth and presence, creaked and sighed around them.

Without another word, the detective named Swift suddenly walked out of the kitchen. Mike heard him leave by the front door.

Mike felt his heart turn cold, and his hands form into fists. He found himself thinking back to earlier times, back to the days when he’d been young and free in the city and pain like this couldn’t touch him. Running around with guys like Denny Ford, guys like Bull Camoine, owning the night, taking what they wanted.

Back then, there had been nothing to lose.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Can you tell me where this email came from?” Swift asked.

It had been two hours since he had left the Simpkins place, and it was now going on ten in the morning. The clock was ticking on the three young men from the Hyundai. They were being kept on ice in the back rooms of the sub-station, given meals, kept sequestered from one another, but time was running out. Like Mathis had said, they needed to be formally charged, booked, and dropped at the county jail to await arraignment. Janine Poehler was still performing the internal autopsy on the body, Brittney Silas had dusted for latent prints and turned over the laptop to the police officer now sitting in front of Swift. Kim Yom.

Yom was with computer forensics, a cyber-crime specialist. She was Filipino, with a Korean surname. Or, was it the other way around? Swift couldn’t remember. She’d made the drive up from Albany through the severe weather in record time. Added to which, she’d attended the latest National Cybercrime Training Partnership a year before, so she was alright in his book.

“Here’s what I’ve done,” Kim said. She had two laptops in front of her. She referred to the one on her left. “After I fished this email out of the trash, I began at the bottom and worked my way up in the headers. First we’ve got original arrival time, a couple of months ago, you can see that here. Content type is plain text. But then already, in this next line, we have a problem. Most everyday emails are MIME. That means Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. That’s a formatting protocol to encode any attachments and alternative representations in a single email. But this email is more dynamic than that. Okay, we can see here the ‘To’ field, it’s to you, and the ‘From’ field, it’s from this address. There is no X-sender, or X-originator or X-originating IP. Ah, but in the Received; here is where we would find the gold.”

“Please tell me about the gold. Before my head explodes.”

“The series of ‘Received’ headers are the trail we follow. This trail tells us where the message was sent from, and along what path or series of servers it traveled across the internet. And this is why we started at the bottom, as each mail server adds a received header to the top. So, you see all these? On and on and on?”

Swift bent forward and squinted at what to him looked like hieroglyphics. “Uh-huh?”

“That tells me that this email was bounced all over the world. There is no discernible return path. It’s completely covered up. This email came through the deep web.”

Swift looked blankly at the screen.
The deep web
. He’d heard the term, but couldn’t remember where. Part of him felt foolish for asking, but he asked anyway. “The deep web?”

Kim pushed back from the desk and turned in her chair to better face him. “In a nutshell, everything you and I see and do on the web is just superficial. What the everyday user accesses — Amazon, email, even porn — that’s just surface material. Like, cutaneous. The deep web, also called the dark web, is ninety-percent of the internet. Subcutaneous. Beyond that, really; the guts. It’s where you’ll find the black markets for prostitution, gambling, murder for hire; all that good stuff. It’s where hackers go to rob bitcoin and Target and create massive viruses. Or, I’ll give you another analogy. Think of it like the water beneath the ground. You’re standing on dry land, but there’s an enormous aquifer beneath your feet.”

Swift considered this. It described how he felt to a tee.

“Great,” he said laconically. “So the email is useless to us.”

“I’m sorry detective. It could take months to track down the source.”

“Well . . .” He looked at her and his eyes conveyed
If months is what it takes . . .

She looked back at him like he was crazy. It was a look he’d become familiar with over the years. He smiled. “Okay, let me ask you this: this is pretty big league stuff, right? Hacker stuff. You think some guy who might have an anger management problem, maybe a drug problem, a deadbeat, is going to know how to do all this stuff? Hide his . . . whatever you said?”

“I really can’t make that assessment, Detective.”

He looked at her, hoping for more, but she was a stone. “Okay,” he said. “Then please tell me more about the victim’s activities on his computer.”

Kim seemed happy to change track. She turned to face the second laptop, her own.

“Okay. Here I’ve cloned the hard drive to my computer and gone through the registry. I’ve been able to recover almost every deleted file from when the computer was first purchased and activated, which was only three months ago. Pretty normal stuff.”

“Like what? What normal stuff?”

“Like there are a handful of school assignments. Just Word Docs. One Power Point presentation for an oral report, and one spreadsheet for a math class. Other than that, there’s nothing. But the internet cache is loaded. It looks like he spent most of his time online. I’d say ninety percent of the time the victim was actively using the web.”

“Doing what, mostly?”

Kim Yom’s slim, delicate fingers fluttered over the keyboard for a moment and Swift watched as the internet browser opened and brought them to a website. The front page of the site depicted a bloody, Mafioso scene, a man in a classic mobster hat and trench coat, holding a tommy gun, stood over a fallen body.

“What’s this?”

“This is ‘The Don.’ Very popular game.”

“What’s it about?”

“Oh, building and managing a criminal empire, killing off your competition, that sort of thing.”

Swift grunted. He leaned in and squinted at the image. “Can we play it?”

“We need to create a username and password.”

“Yeah, but, doesn’t he have one? Stored in memory? Just click that button there, ‘play.’”

Kim glanced back over her shoulder at Swift. “Passwords are stored in log-in cookies. I’d need to use his computer.” She was asking permission.

“Don’t sweat it. Let’s just take a peek.”

Kim once again turned to the laptop on her left. With latex gloves on her hands, she brought up the same web page and clicked the start button. They waited a few seconds while the game loaded, a blood-red progress bar inching across the lower portion of the screen. Once it had fully loaded, they were looking at a rendering of a New York City neighborhood. The volume was faint, but Swift could hear the sound of traffic, cars honking, even birds in the trees.

Trooper Bronze and Trooper Day were in the office, both of them opting to pull double-shifts in order to stay with the case. They drifted over towards the machine to have a look.

“I’m familiar with this game,” said Kim. “You don’t need to download anything; it’s all on the company’s servers. Which means that whatever actions the victim took on here, we’ll have no record of them from his laptop.”

“Can we search for the names of the three suspects in the box?”

Kim shook her head. “Each user comes up with a code name for themselves. See?” She pointed a pink-nailed finger at the screen. Swift saw the name “Fresco.”

“That was his nickname,” Kim said. “We’re in his game.”

“What’s that?” Opposite the name and other stats was a smaller window.

“That’s chat.”

“Chat?” Swift knew what online chat was, he just hadn’t realized that it had integrated with computer games. He supposed it made sense. “So, he’s playing with other people from around the world, and he’s able to chat with any of them?”

“If they’re online, yeah. More than chat, they can interface with each other wearing headsets, talk to each other. There’s also this inner game email here, too.” She made a few quick movements on the mouse pad and a new window within a window opened, showing a chain of emails.

“Let’s look for emails with other players.”

“No problem.” Kim selected one of the four tabs on top of the email window; Reports, Messages, Tributes, All. She clicked on Messages, and a list of names appeared. Swift read a few of them. Mickey 2 Nines. Lefty Guns. Dixie Normous. They ranged from tough, mafia-sounding names to the silly, lewd, and sometimes completely obscure. One name was all alphanumeric symbols. The other was a nonsense syllable half a dozen characters long — HYLPMR.

“Can we print all of these out?”

“Absolutely.”

Swift leaned back from the laptop, stretching, feeling the knots that had settled in his upper back throughout the morning. Driving, hunching over tables, standing around in the cold, it all took its toll, and he wasn’t getting any younger. The two troopers stepped back and gave him space, as he rolled his neck and his shoulders for a moment. He brought his attention back to Kim and the laptop.

“Okay,” he said. “So, what else can we do? How can we find who he was talking to? I need to place those kids in this game and find something they said to him.”

But she was shaking her head. “That’s not possible. Unless he took a screen shot of something, but I’ve found absolutely none. It’s possible he uses his phone for this game, too, so I’ll have to go through that next. Otherwise, we’d have to get a federal warrant, fly to San Francisco and lift the data from their thousands of servers.”

Swift sucked his teeth for a moment. Then he dropped his palm onto the desk next to Kim and looked into the computer screen at the tiny objects moving around behind the open email window. The miniature buildings in the neighborhood, the tinny, faraway sounds of the streets, as if he was looking through a portal to some other world. Which of course, he was.

He turned to look at Kim. “You think he would’ve given out his physical address?”

“It’s possible. A player can be friends with another player one minute, have an alliance with them, and then be enemies the next. In the game, and in their own minds, their reality. These games are becoming more real to kids than their everyday life. On the other hand, kids are always told not to give out information over the web. And, in my experience, they’re pretty smart about it. It’s possible he offered his information, but I think, if anyone found out where he lived, they did it another way.”

“How? Why? What makes you say that?”

“Because this computer has been hacked. The basic operating system firewall, a network filter, was breached two days ago.”

Kim turned her face from the screen and her dark brown eyes looked up at Swift.

He gazed back, unflinching. “This laptop was hacked?”

She nodded.

He instantly thought of Mike Simpkins. “By someone who came into his room and . . .”

Now she shook her head, “No. By someone remote. Through the internet connection. The Simpkins have broadband and a decent router. There’s plenty of signal pumping through their home.”

“How, though? I mean, I don’t know the first thing. They just zero in on an email address and then, what? They connect to the computer and take it over?”

“Yes and no. That’s what an IT person might do if you call them up and give them your passcodes because you’re having a problem and you let them control your computer remotely. This is different. They came at this computer from a different route. From the deep web.”

That phrase again. “Jesus,” Swift muttered.

Kim looked at him straight-faced. “Personally, I think Jesus would be impressed. I consider Him a libertarian.”