Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  “What do you grow?” Jimmy asks, glancing at Nate and motioning out the window.

  “Lavender.”

  “Really?”

  Nate grins and nods; it’s obviously not the first time he’s gotten that reaction. “The farm belongs to my grandparents. I just maintain the field, help with the harvesting, that sort of thing.”

  “Is there any money in it?”

  “Oh, yeah!” Nate replies enthusiastically. “Most of what we grow gets wholesaled, but there are farms half this size, even smaller, that are grossing a million-plus a year. ’Course, they’re turning their harvest into soap, essential oil, bath salts, tincture, facial cream—stuff like that. Once you start making your own products, your margins go through the roof. I mean, it’s not like pulling gold from the ground, but it’ll give you a comfortable living.”

  Jimmy cocks his head and gives an impressed lift of his eyes. After a few minutes of lavender-flavored small talk, he goes back to his coffee as he flips through his messages.

  My English muffin pops out of the toaster as Jimmy makes a call to Les and Marty and asks them to fly Murphy Cotton’s laptop to the computer forensics lab at the FBI’s Seattle Field Office. He tells them where to pick it up and who to ask for, and then tells them to call if they run into any problems.

  Haiden Webber, one of the Bureau’s most accomplished computer forensics experts, has agreed to give the laptop his immediate attention. Considering that Haiden’s workload is usually scheduled out weeks in advance, we caught a lucky break.

  Then again, he knows that we always have the most interesting cases.

  * * *

  At nine forty-five, Jason arrives in a gray Ford Focus. The detective sergeant walks through the front door without knocking, carrying himself with the ease and air of someone accustomed to the house and those within; someone not required to pause at the sill or rap at the door.

  Holding a sealed plastic evidence bag aloft as if it were a trophy, Jason tosses it gently onto the kitchen counter and pulls a folding knife from his pocket. With one smooth motion, he slices along the upper edge of the bag and upends it, letting a yellow-and-black Garmin GPS drop into his hand. It’s the GPS from Murphy’s backpack.

  “Where’s the on button?” he wonders aloud, but then finds it.

  The GPS screen comes to life a moment later, displaying a zoomed-in view of nothing: no marked roads, no buildings, nothing. Jason hands the unit to Jimmy, sheepishly admitting that his knowledge of the device ended at the power button.

  Zooming out slowly, Jimmy watches as roads begin to appear, first one, and then another, and then a main road running through a small town. On the other side of the road is water. Road names pop out at him, but it’s not until he zooms out a little further that he finds what he’s looking for.

  “Where’s Brinnon?” he asks.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “The Onion King,” I whisper to no one.

  The words seem to fall out of my mouth, clutching at my gut momentarily as they tumble to the ground and break. Vanished forever is the faint hope that the Onion King was just an imaginary bogeyman hatched in the unfathomable darkness of Murphy’s broken mind.

  The GPS shows that we’re three or four miles west of Brinnon, high in the hills and on the cusp of the Olympic National Forest. Winding roads, then logging roads, and finally a rutted simulation of a road brought us close. The last couple hundred feet we hiked, finding ourselves standing around a young fir tree with fresh remnants of duct tape lying about.

  The spot is isolated and remote, yet the ground around us is trounced and trampled by Murphy’s pimpled gray shine. That’s not all. A collection of amethyst footprints glow around the tree, each one strikingly marbled with burnt orange: the Onion King.

  His texture is almost reptilian—somewhere between crocodile and lizard. Combined with the violet hue of amethyst and the probing veins of orange, it’s both hideous and beautiful in the same glance, like the hide of some psychedelic swamp creature.

  * * *

  The Onion King took his own path to the tree, coming in from a slightly different direction than Murphy. Their combined shine cuts a wedge in the forest, like a piece of pie ending at the tree.

  “I’ve got a trail,” I call out, giving Jimmy a subtle cue that I hope he picks up on.

  He does.

  “Can you collect the duct tape and any other evidence?” he asks Nate and Jason as he hands over his kit. “I’ll follow Steps and see if there’s anything else. We can meet back at the car.”

  “Don’t get turned around in these woods,” Jason warns as we start off. “The mountains will swallow you whole and that’s the last anyone will hear of Steps and Jimmy.”

  “No worries,” Jimmy says, flashing him a smile. “I brought my own tracker.”

  I think he’s talking about me, but then he holds up the GPS.

  When we’re out of earshot, I tell Jimmy that Charice may have walked out under her own power, but she didn’t walk in. The Onion King must have carried her. “It’s just his track,” I explain. “One set of prints in, one set out.” Pausing next to the winter remnant of some unidentified deciduous bush, I point out where Charice’s drooping arm or leg must have brushed against the exposed branches, splashing her shine across the twigs.

  Jimmy looks where I point, studies what he cannot see, and then takes a long breath. “She told Angie that before she woke in the woods, tied to the tree, the Onion King injected her with something.” He isn’t speaking to me so much as he’s talking the problem through. “The single track fits,” he continues.

  A minute later we find ourselves back on the rutted semblance of a road. My eyes scan the ground, recognizing patterns I’ve seen too many times before. “Small car,” I say. “Looks like he had her in the trunk. They always stick them in the trunk,” I add in a small voice.

  Jason’s car is clearly visible two hundred feet to our south, so we start ambling in that direction, our movement slowed by contemplation.

  When Jimmy next speaks, he counts out each statement on the fingers of his right hand. I’m not sure why he does this, since they’re not really steps—at least not the type you’d check off a list, like laundry or dishes or homework.

  “The Onion King picks the victims,” he muses, counting the first statement out with his index finger, “he abducts the victims, he holds them for a couple weeks, he leaves them in the woods for Murphy to find … and then he starts all over.”

  He holds the five splayed fingers near his belly, contemplating them.

  “Does that tell us anything?” I ask.

  The answer is slow in coming.

  “He’s meticulous. He doesn’t like loose ends,” Jimmy finally says, though the words come out as if he’s still trying to convince himself. “But he also doesn’t like killing.”

  “Which is why he needs Murphy to take them and do whatever he does.”

  “Exactly,” Jimmy replies. “Murphy’s the perfect henchman: a psychotic who’s malleable. And if he got caught”—Jimmy shrugs—“who’s going to believe him?”

  “You honestly think Murphy’s the fall guy in all this—the scapegoat?”

  “You don’t?”

  The question comes back at me like a ricochet and I have to grudgingly admit that the idea has merit. I don’t like making such an admission, because it’s almost like giving kudos to the Onion King for being clever.

  “The planning that went into this…” Jimmy says, letting the words settle as he shakes his head slowly. “This guy is dangerous.”

  A tense ball suddenly knots in my belly and I can almost hear a voice in my head whispering, Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When Diane calls for an update, Jimmy asks her to dig deeper into Gloria Cotton and her son. “Public records, social media, everything,” he says. “If Murphy does have seven other victims, we need to find out where he’s keeping them, and we need to do that today.”

  Jimmy pauses, so I
add my own request to the list. “When you’re checking social media, Diane, can you keep an eye out for any reference to the Onion King? He’s the other half of this equation. I’m guessing he’s not going to show up as one of Murphy’s Facebook friends, but you never know.”

  “Onion King?”

  “Yeah, welcome to our world,” I reply dryly. “At first I was thinking the Onion King might be a character from an online role-playing game, maybe even another player, but we didn’t see anything in Murphy’s trailer that suggests he’s a serious gamer. Whoever he is, Murphy has an almost worshipful admiration for him, kept going on about how smart he is, and how he’s the king of Onionland, and—”

  “Onionland!” Diane says sharply.

  “Yeah, does that mean something?”

  “It should,” she replies. “Onionland is another name for the dark web.”

  “The part of the web that’s not indexed?” I ask.

  “No, that’s the deep web.”

  “What’s the difference?” Jimmy asks.

  “The deep web is all the stuff that’s accessible online but not directly indexed by search engines, usually because it’s contained within a password-protected database or page. Your bank account information is a good example. It’s available online, but you won’t find your balance by searching Google.”

  “How’s that different from the dark web?”

  “The dark web is about anonymity. It’s about preventing people from tracking your online activity and the sites you visit. It also allows access to sites that are blocked, and no one, not even law enforcement, can identify your physical location. You could be down the street or in New Delhi and they wouldn’t be the wiser.

  “Think of the deep web as the ocean: you can’t see what’s below the surface, but there’s a lot there, including your bank accounts, tax records, email, and everything else that’s locked in a database behind a password or not indexed by the search engines. Now, within that vast ocean is a single submarine filled with pirates: that’s the dark web.”

  I can hear her tapping her pen against the desk. “There’s a whole underworld on the dark web,” she continues in a slower, more contemplative tone. “Some of the stuff that goes on is legit, other activity includes things like pirated music, books, and movies, but then things get darker: drugs, prostitution, pedophilia, even murder for hire. It’s part of the reason that supposedly untraceable digital currencies like bitcoin have become the currency of the realm in Onionland.”

  “There it is again,” I mutter. “Why do they call it that?”

  “Because most people access the dark web through the TOR browser,” Diane explains, “which uses anonymizing software that bounces communications around the world on a network of relays. TOR stands for The Onion Router, named so because it buries your activity under layers of relays. You’ve seen Shrek, right?”

  She knows we have. Jimmy’s six-year-old son, Petey, will sometimes hang out with us at Hangar 7, our office, so we keep a supply of kids’ movies on hand, Shrek being one of them.

  “Uh-huh,” Jimmy replies.

  “Remember when Shrek tells Donkey that ogres are like onions because they both have layers? Well, it’s the same thing with the Onion Router, only these are layers that no one can peel away.”

  Nate turns in his seat and watches as we digest Diane’s words. “I’m guessing there’s no king of Onionland?” Jimmy eventually says.

  “No.”

  “So, who’s the Onion King?”

  “Someone with an overinflated opinion of his computer skills,” Diane proposes, and then adds, “It’s probably just a username. And before you ask, remember what I said about the dark web being untraceable. I’ll do some checking, but unless he posted something using his real name or hometown, I’m probably not going to be able to provide much.”

  “Is that kind of search safe?” I ask. “I thought the dark web was filled with hackers and identity thieves. If you start snooping around, it seems a bit like walking into a lion’s den with a pork chop dangling from your neck.”

  Diane shrugs off the concern. “Anonymity goes both ways.”

  “Uh-huh. I knew you were a hacker.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Haiden Webber is an anomaly.

  In a world where coding and hacking is dominated by teens and twentysomethings, he remains one of the most competent computer forensics experts the FBI employs despite being several years beyond retirement eligibility. If anyone can hack Murphy’s laptop, he’s the guy.

  Was it extravagant delivering a piece of evidence by jet?

  Perhaps.

  We debated the wisdom of spending both fuel and air time on the delivery, especially since other options were available. We could have overnighted it, or driven the laptop to Seattle, and under most circumstances either choice would have been a reasonable option.

  But we’re still not sure what we’re dealing with.

  What if Murphy is telling the truth? Half his ramblings are nonsensical, but what if the crazy bastard really is holding seven other women? By now they’ve been without food and water, perhaps even air, for at least a day. That gives us maybe two more days to find them before the situation turns dire.

  Jet fuel seemed the least of our concerns at the time.

  * * *

  We’re on our way back from Brinnon when Haiden calls.

  Jimmy puts the phone on speaker and Haiden launches into what sounds like a long string of ancient Aramaic, or maybe just some version of geek-speak with an American accent. We can’t make heads or tails of it, and Nate starts quietly mimicking one of those old Japanese movies where the soundtrack doesn’t match the lip movements.

  “Haiden,” Jimmy says, trying to interrupt. Then, in a louder voice, he again says, “Haiden!” That seems to do the trick.

  “What?”

  “Can you start over,” Jimmy asks in the kindest way imaginable, “and this time pretend you’re speaking to a car filled with a bunch of computer illiterates?”

  The computer forensics guru chuckles at that.

  “Sorry. That’s why they don’t let me out of the office much.” Pausing, as if having difficulty finding the right words, he finally begins.

  “When you erase a file from your computer, two things happen: first, the master reference for that file, which is like an address that tells the operating system where to find it, is removed from the hard drive so the computer can no longer find the file; second, the space occupied by the file is reclassified as open memory, so new files and programs can be written to it. Following me so far?”

  Four voices join together into some semblance of affirmation.

  “Good,” Haiden says, sounding almost relieved. “Now, most people think that by deleting a file and emptying their garbage can, the file is gone, but that’s simply not the case. The data itself hasn’t moved or changed. Sure, the space it occupied has been freed up, but until someone overwrites it with new data, the file info is still there. And that’s where I come in. With the right software, I can pull all the data off a hard drive even after the master reference has been removed. Sometimes the data doesn’t make much sense because it’s been partially overwritten, but a lot of times I can extract the complete file, whether that’s a Word document, an email, or even an image.”

  “And that’s what you did to Murphy’s hard drive?” I ask hopefully.

  “That’s what I tried to do,” Haiden corrects, “but your suspect is smarter than most. It looks like he’s been using some version of file shredder.” Before I can ask the obvious question, he continues. “A shredder program acts just like a paper shredder but for digital files. It removes the reference file, frees up the space on the hard drive, but then overwrites it with gibberish so that every bit of the original data is replaced and unrecoverable.”

  “So we’ve got nothing,” Jimmy surmises.

  “I didn’t say that,” Haiden replies smugly. “I spent some time snooping around and noticed that his Mozilla Thund
erbird email program was set up but never used, which is a bit out of the ordinary.”

  “Because everyone uses email,” Jimmy states in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Exactly! So I tried some of the free online email services: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and a few others, figuring he might have used one of them instead, but still found nothing. Then, on a whim, I tried Yandex Mail. It’s a Russian company, but the mail program is in English. Sure enough, as soon as the page popped up I could see that the log-in data was auto-filled with his username and password.” In a voice dripping with disdain, he says, “All I had to do was click the log-in button and I had full access.”

  “Why would Murphy go to extra lengths to protect the information on his computer,” I wonder aloud, “but leave his email unprotected? That’s a bit like locking all the windows in your house but leaving the front door standing open, isn’t it?”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Haiden replies. “I guess he underestimated us.”

  “Any interesting emails we should know about?” Jimmy asks.

  “Just one,” Haiden says cheerfully. “At first it stumped me, but then I remembered a conference I attended a few years ago on antiterrorism. See, your guy Murphy never sent a single email from this account, nor did he ever receive one.” Haiden lets that hang in the air for a minute until I take the bait.

  “Then why have the account?”

  “They were using the draft file,” he says, as if that explains everything.

  When none of us reply, our silence heralding our confusion, he gives a disappointed huff and continues. “It’s like the dead drops used by Cold War spies: someplace to leave a message where it won’t be found, though these days it’s mostly terrorists and criminals who communicate this way. Suppose you want to get a message to your partner in crime, but you’re paranoid that the government might be monitoring your email activity—”