Deep Dark (13 page)

CHAPTER 12

By Monday morning, Bella Marshall's murder was all over the news. By noon, Reed was in the chief's office, and by late afternoon, he was back at Delphi, this time to meet with one of the nation's top experts in cyber-­profiling.

Reed wasn't much on profiling, but he tried to keep an open mind as he rode the elevator up to the Delphi's cybercrime unit alongside the guy who'd spent the night on Laney's couch.

“You ever met Mark?”

Reed glanced over. “No.”

“We poached him from the Bureau a few years ago. He's the best in the world.”

The doors
dinged
open, and Ben Lawson led him down a corridor lined with windows. To Reed's left was a view of rolling green hills bathed in sunlight. To his right was a dimly lit computer lab with rows of glowing workstations. Reed quickly spotted Laney seated at one of them. Several men watched over her shoulders as she pointed at something on her screen.

Reed scanned the lab. Cargo shorts and flip-flops seemed to be the uniform. It was a large work space, and busy, but Reed wondered how much crime fighting actually got done with so many dartboards and basketball hoops around.

“Always interesting to watch Smurfette work.”

Reed looked at Ben. “What's that?”

“Smurfette.” He smiled. “That's her nickname. She ever tell you about it?”

“No.”

Ben propped his shoulder against the window and smiled. “Then I guess she never told you how she landed a job here.”

Reed glanced at Laney again. She was a female island in a sea of men. And most of them looked half Reed's age.

“It goes back to this hack she did in college,” Ben said, determined to tell his story. “Not sure how she got tipped off to this, but there was a teacher at one of the local high schools who frequented this kiddie-porn site.” He glanced through the window. “So Laney hears about it, decides to check into it. She penetrates their system, has a look around. Turns out, it's a major operation based in Phoenix. And this isn't some jerkoff in his garage uploading photos, this is a sizable enterprise, one of the biggest in the country. At least it was back then. Anyway, Laney starts nosing around, getting pissed off, and decides to launch a DoS attack. You know what that is?”

“Denial of service.”

“Exactly. Basically, it crashes the site. So she uses what we call a smurf attack, which means she sends a ping from the spoofed IP address of the target to the network's broadcast network. What happens is all the systems in the subnet respond to the spoof and flood the device.”

Reed didn't really know what he'd just said, but he caught the gist of it. “So she took them down?”

“Man, she
owned
them. It was wizardly. Meanwhile,
she sent an anonymous tip to a detective over at Phoenix PD explaining what they were up to and providing all kinds of details they could use for a bust. Only problem was, the FBI was already on to this shop. They had a sting operation in the works, and she basically beat them to the punch. So, you know, they were pretty pissed. They couldn't figure out whether they wanted to arrest her or hire her.”

Reed looked at Laney again. “I thought she started out at ChatWare?”

“She did.” Ben nodded. “Worked there for almost a year, right after she graduated. That's how long it took the feds to catch up with her.”

“A whole year?”

“Yeah, it was months before anyone could piece together exactly what she'd done.” He looked through the window, and Reed followed his gaze.

Laney was by herself now, leaning back in her chair and resting her feet on the desk as she stared at her screen. Ripped jeans again, black tank top. The streak in her hair was purple today, and Reed couldn't explain why his heart was thrumming just from watching her at her computer.

“She's a master at covering her tracks. That's why the FBI wanted her.” Ben smiled. “Too bad we snagged her first.”

“How'd you do it?”

“Money,” he said. “Although, to tell you the truth, that probably wasn't the real reason. Laney doesn't really care about money. But Delphi's got some other advantages. You can work flex hours, wear anything you want. And they pretty much turn a blind eye to hacktivism, so . . .”

“Hacktivism.”

“Doing it for a cause.” Ben looked at him. “You know, like that thing with that middle-school kid last year. The one who was getting bullied and tormented because he was gay, and so he hanged himself?”

“The boy in Houston?”

“Right. Some crackpot church was planning to picket his funeral with their ‘God Hates Fags' signs. Laney and some other people launched a DDoS attack—that's like a regular DoS but bigger because you use a botnet, which is basically a fleet of zombie computers programmed to ping the site all at once. They crashed their systems and then doxed the congregation, using the church's own website to publish everyone's names and emails so they'd get inundated with spam. It was a sweet op. Signature Laney.”

A man stepped out of an office down the hall. In contrast to everyone else on this floor, he looked over forty and wore a suit and tie instead of a
Warcraft
T-shirt. This would be Mark Wolfe, the former fed.

Ben stood silently by as Reed introduced himself.

“You coming to the meeting?” Mark asked Ben.

“I've got something else.”

“We ready?” Laney asked, appearing in the doorway. She had a file under her arm and didn't make eye contact with Reed.

Laney's boss led the way into a conference room. Reed waited for Laney to sit and took the chair across from her, where he wouldn't be distracted by her closeness.

He looked at Mark Wolfe. “Thanks for meeting on short notice.”

“Aguilar said it was urgent.” He leaned back in his chair. “He sounded pretty rattled, actually.”

Rattled
wasn't a word Reed had ever heard used to describe the chief of police. But the media was all over him, and, as Erika had pointed out, classes were resuming soon at the state's largest university. Both Austin victims had lived near campus, and one had been a student. The last thing the chief wanted was a public panic.

“I went through the reports.” Mark flipped open a file. “I've got some preliminary feedback, but you're not going to like it.”

“Let's hear it.”

“I have a basic profile, which you've probably already come up with on your own. The UNSUB is a white male, twenty-five to fifty, living in or near the Austin area, and probably working in a technical or computer-related field.”

His rundown came as no surprise. Sexual predators tended to operate within their ethnic group, and the tech connection was obvious.

“That's a pretty big age range,” Reed said. “I'd expected younger.”

“I did, too, at first, especially with the online-­targeting angle. But when you look at the murders themselves . . .” He shook his head. “His MO is revealing. He exercises tremendous patience and impulse control, which indicates we might be dealing with an older perpetrator. These crimes demonstrate a good deal of premeditation. To approach a door with a specialized tool and pick a lock without being seen—it's probable he scoped the place out ahead of time.” Mark
tapped his pencil on the table. “Another important factor is the webcams. In the April Abrams case, the report suggests he might have hijacked the webcam as early as last October.”

“He did,” Laney confirmed.

“That's a long time to watch and wait to select your moment. A long time to construct the fantasy.”

“But that's part of the thrill, isn't it? I'm no psychologist,” Reed said, “but seems to me he likes the buildup.”

“That's correct,” Mark said. “He's driven by deep-rooted fantasies about controlling women and causing pain. It's likely he was abused by a parent—no surprise there—and I also think he's probably been treated for depression at some point.”

“That narrows it down.”

“Look, I realize it's not a lot of specifics,” Mark said, picking up on the sarcasm. “Most online predators I see have some of that in their background. Many of them also have difficulty fitting into normal social situations, so the Internet is something of a haven. But let's talk about what sets this guy apart.” He leaned forward on his elbows and looked Reed in the eye. “Studies indicate that at any given time, there are as many as eight hundred thousand child sexual predators online. And that's only
child
predators. Add adults, and we're dealing with an enormous number. It's bad enough that these people are out there spying, surfing kid-porn sites, and harassing people. I'm not saying those aren't real crimes, because they absolutely are, and they cause harm and pain. But this UNSUB took it all a step further.”

“He went after them in real life.”

“Exactly.” Mark nodded. “So you have to ask yourself, what kind of person would do that?”

“Someone who thinks he can get away with it,” Laney said.

“That's right. He believes he's beyond the reach of law enforcement, immune to punishment. This is someone who has spent years online shrouded in a cloak of anonymity, frequenting the Internet's dark side, sometimes called the darknet.”

“He likes the anonymity,” Reed stated.

“Thrives on it,” Mark said. “Many people online construct these alter egos. They feel free to say and do things they would never say and do in a face-to-face encounter, and they feel immune to consequences.”

Reed watched him, digesting it all. He glanced at Laney, who was being unusually quiet.

“This UNSUB made a leap that many online predators do not,” Mark continued. “He went from spying and stalking online to actually tracking down his victim in the real world, entering her private home, and carrying out a remarkably violent attack. All without leaving much of anything in the way of physical evidence. All this tells us he's adept at operating and concealing himself in two entirely different environments, not just one. And that definitely sets him apart.”

“Did you see the note in the report about the shoe print?” Reed asked. “Our lab tested the fiber found with that print, and it looks like he wore shoe coverings.”

“He's very meticulous. And he knows about police procedures, or else he's watched a lot of CSI shows. You shouldn't discount that possibility.” Mark glanced at the file in front of him. “Another thing I notice, he's got a keen sense of his targets. He finds a victim he wants and hones in on her digital vulnerabilities.”

“You mean portals into her life.” Reed glanced at Laney.

“Right,” Mark said. “Where has she left herself open to attack? Internet-enabled devices are so ubiquitous now, there are more and more places for predators to get in. Everything from your fitness tracker to your smart refrigerator can provide a doorway into your life. We let ourselves be tracked and monitored, then we have no control over how that info is later used. Laney here can tell you better than anyone. She's our top cyber-intrusion expert.”

“Take the webcams,” she said, finally chiming in. “Many devices come with built-in cameras. And a lot of people don't bother setting up passwords. They leave the default passwords that were set at the factory, which means if someone knows what they're doing, it's not that hard to remotely take over a device.”

“The key word here is
remote
,” Mark said. “So much of the planning, the fantasizing, the stalking can be done from a distance, and it adds to the UNSUB's sense that he's anonymous and out of the reach of law enforcement.”

“It's part of his game,” Laney said. “He's screwing with you.”

“Me?”

“Investigators. Take the phone, for example.” She looked at Mark. “The most recent victim's cell phone was found in her refrigerator.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “I hadn't read that.”

“It wasn't in the preliminary report. You'll have to go through the crime-scene photos.”

“Wait.” Reed looked at Mark. “Explain the phone.”

“It could be a reference to certain low-tech tactics
used to hamper surveillance by spy agencies,” he said. “If you put your cell phone in the refrigerator, it's harder for the NSA or whoever to use it as a listening device.”

Reed stared at him. “So you're saying—”

“He killed her and stashed her phone in the fridge for investigators to find,” Laney said. “He's being sarcastic. It's a taunt.”

“In other words, he knows that
we
know he's monitoring his victims,” Mark added. “He's escalating the game.”

The room went quiet as Reed digested that. “I take it you think he's not done,” he said.

Mark shook his head. “All evidence points to the contrary. He's been doing this a while, and he's very patient. He has long-term commitments to these women, and he targets multiple people at once. What we're seeing now is a shrinking interval between murders. It's getting harder for him to control the urge, to make himself wait. Which might be good for us because he might slip up.”