Oh, yeah. And Stu’s dead.
That sent her into tears again. “Look, is there anything else? I’m…I just need to go home. I’m sorry, I’ll be happy to answer your questions later, but I just…I can barely think right now.”
“Of course. We’re sorry. Thank you for your time.”
They headed off and it wasn’t until she was out of the parking lot that she realized she hadn’t asked their names, and they hadn’t volunteered them.
Dammit.
She was doubly cursed. Only emphasizing how lonely she felt. No one to really lean on.
She headed home to collapse, letting all thoughts of the two mystery hunks drain from her mind.
Chapter Sixteen
When Shasta awoke Friday morning from a ragged and nightmare-laden sleep, grief and rage burned hot and bright in her soul. Even the dreams about the two hunks who’d asked her questions mixed in with the nightmares gave her no comfort whatsoever.
Whatever had happened to Stu, it had happened because of that damn lab. Overnight, she locked herself in her bedroom with the gun and her laptop and researched how to use it.
Didn’t mean she’d hit anything with it, but at least she knew how to load it and how to make sure she had a round in the chamber.
She waited for her parents to leave that morning. They were going to go talk to an undertaker about arrangements. When they asked if she wanted to go with them, Shasta declined, lying and telling them she had to go to work because—the truth—one of their guys there had died yesterday.
Once she knew they were safely away, Shasta left home and drove over to work to sit and wait for Bailey to get off from his shift. What she’d gleaned from Lou before she’d left last night, Bailey would be off for three days, and she was betting his first stop would be wherever it was he and Waxler and Stu had been going.
Following him, she had the app ready on her phone to control the lights as they drove. Any time he got too far ahead, she simply shut him down with a red light.
It took nearly an hour, but he pulled into a guarded gate at what looked like some sort of secure warehouse facility not too far from the shipyards.
Driving past, she waited until she found a place she could pull in and then she grabbed her laptop.
The latest satellite map view was nearly five weeks old, but it showed a lot of activity in a fairly decrepit looking building. Several nondescript white panel vans parked outside. Zooming in, none of the license plates were visible.
Her cell phone rang, startling her.
Her dad.
“You still at home, sweetie?”
She hated lying to them, but it couldn’t be helped. “I needed to go in to work,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I understand. I don’t blame you. The preliminary autopsy said he died of a heroin-beta overdose.”
“Heroin? He never took that before.” Usually he’d done pills, especially anything that would help his pain.
“That’s what they just told us. They said the syringe tested positive for it. We have to wait two weeks for the final blood work to come back.”
“Oh. Okay.” She felt like the world’s shittiest daughter right now. “How’s Mom?”
“We’re okay. Are you all right?”
She let out a breath. “No. I’m not,” she admitted. “I’m sorry I’m sucking at this, but I’m kind of medicating with work for now.”
He actually sounded…relieved. “Thank you for admitting that. I was afraid you were going to hold it all in.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve been like that all your life, sweetheart. Being the strong one. I know you have to deal with this in your way, but just know your mother and I love you and are waiting if you want to talk.”
“I’m sorry I’m not being very comforting right now.”
“We all lost,” he said. “We all have to deal with this for right now however we have to deal with it. When you’re ready for a hug, just knock on our door.”
“I love you, Dad.”
Now his voice choked up. “Love you, too, sweetheart. Here’s your mom.”
He handed the phone over, and it was almost worse talking to her. “Hey, sweetie. Love you.”
Shasta pulled off her glasses and wiped at her eyes. “Love you, Mom. I told Dad, sorry I—”
“It’s okay. Frankly, all I want to do right now is curl up in a ball. I remember when your grandfather died that I was doing what you’re doing now. Just remember not to hold it in if you don’t need to.”
Growing up, she’d never had any major complaints with her parents, other than Stu sometimes got a lot more leeway than she thought he should have.
“I’ll be home either tonight or in the morning. Lou is trying to get me to go home, but one of our guys died yesterday morning, and I just kind of…don’t want to think yet.”
“Please stay safe. Drive careful.”
“I will.”
“If we’re not home…we’re probably going to drive out to the bay. Maybe even to Galveston. I just…want to sit on the beach for a while.”
“It’s okay, Mom. If you’re not home when I get home, I’ll eat leftovers.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, both, too.” Shasta ended the call and looked up, staring out the windshield. Could she hack? Sure. She’d spent the better part of eight years working for the county. She’d started out in their main IT department, getting transferred into signaling less than a year later when they had a vacancy and rising through the ranks there.
But those months in IT had been well-spent, and she’d made friends of coworkers, friends she still had to this day.
It also meant she had a pretty intricate knowledge of the workings of the county’s IT system and their data center. At the turn of the century, everything had finally been integrated into one massive data center. The different systems themselves were independent of one another…
But if someone knew how to access the main data center they could easily get into other departments through the back end.
Fortunately for her, she was usually the one racking new equipment in the data center when their department needed to install it. One of the data center guys helped or supervised to make sure nothing else was messed with and their operation standards were implemented, but she was the hands-on one who did it. Next to Lou, who had a bad back, she was the only one who knew how to do it in their department.
I think it’s time I went to work.
* * * *
Shasta’s luck held. After driving a more direct route back that only took twenty-five minutes, she walked into the data center and found her friend, Pete, in charge on the floor that day. She hoped no one had told him about Stu.
He gave her a hug. “Hey, girl. What’s up? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah, I needed to check a couple of things out. I think I have a workstation upstairs with a fluky connection. Intermittent problem we can’t trace. Wanted to look at the data logs, if you could get me in? Want to make sure it’s not an error originating down here, just in case.”
“Sure.” He glanced around. “I log you in and walk away to go get my other stuff done that I’m behind on, you’ll behave, right?” He grinned. From the way he was acting, it was obvious he didn’t know about Stu. Maybe not even about Paul, either. If he’d just come on shift that morning, no one might have told him yet.
She grinned back. “You know me. Of course I will.”
Hell, he’d just made it really easy for her.
After he logged her in, she pulled some error and data logs for their server and e-mailed them to herself on her work account. Didn’t want there to be a missing trail of evidence. She was supposed to be pulling data.
Once she finished, that, she pulled out her phone and looked up the address for the warehouse.
Inside the system on the back end now, she found county water bill records, property taxes, a permit for medical waste disposal and other lab-related issues from the h
ealth department, and even a construction permit pulled less than a year ago. The owner of the property was apparently some Saudi company, which she thought a little odd, especially since a mailing address she’d found that was used only for the construction permitting process was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, despite everything else relating to that property listing a PO Box in Houston.
She grabbed pictures of all the information with her phone, including a floor plan filed with the fire inspector’s office, as required.
Sure as hell looked like a lab set-up to her, especially when she looked at natural gas connections running into the building. And then there were the health department permits.
Their county DMV offices were tied into the state’s system. She ran the van’s license plates and—shocker—they came up with the same Saudi corporation and the same PO Box as an address.
That was good enough proof for her.
Logging off and getting out of there, she returned to her car. She wanted to research the company in-depth.
Funny thing was, when she plugged in the one address, she also pulled up information for the Church of the Rising Sunset, which made zero sense.
Until she realized it was the same address.
Why does that ring a bell?
Two more seconds of searching brought up the massive scandal. A missing wife and sex tapes being posted by a blogger.
Holy farking shitballs.
The church also had some sort of stronghold they’d built there in the Houston area as well, which listed a PO Box mailing address only one digit off from the one being used for this warehouse address.
Well, what do you know about that coinkydink?
It couldn’t be a coincidence.
No. Fucking. Way.
And there was also disputed audio evidence posted, supposedly showing the head preacher and some assistant discussing plans.
Dammit. Now she wanted to go back in there, log into the system again, and see what she could pull up about the church in the county records.
She really didn’t have a plan, per se. She knew she’d need to find out as much as possible about the building before charging in there and asking what the fuck they did to her brother, but that there seemed to be a remote connection to the damn church was just…weird.
I wonder if they have Wi-Fi.
Some networks were ridiculously easy to hack into. All it took was someone not bothering to change the default admin password on the router, and boom.
After a quick search, she downloaded a couple of tools and then drove back to the warehouse building, parking one property before it, where it wasn’t gated and guarded.
Surveying, she found two wireless networks nearby that were likely candidates, called sunsetetik and NetFi90. Both of them password protected.
Neither of them strongly protected, just using a simple password.
After running one of her tools, she easily hacked into both networks.
The first one, NetFi90, was apparently owned by the cabinet shop in the complex she was currently parked in.
Based on the signal strength, she guessed the other, sunsetetik, was the one she wanted.
And she walked right into it with her little electronic friend.
The computers on the router seemed to be a little more complex, but as she’d expected, there was no place like home, or an out-of-the-box router with a lazy IT guy setting things up for the building.
The first thing she did when she got in was to change the admin username and password from the defaults. If anyone wanted to change the router access password, they’d have to reset the router first, and they might not think of or know how to do that.
She also found security cameras hooked into the router, so she started there.
Lazy bastards.
But in this case it worked in her favor. The feeds were scrambled and undetectable from outside sources, but there was nothing locking them down once she was inside the system, no secondary password, just the system defaults.
Yes, it looked like a lab, and likely the building she wanted. Then when she spotted Bailey and two others lying on cots or gurneys of some sort with their eyes closed and wearing identically blissful smiles, she knew she’d hit pay dirt.
Fuckers.
Getting into the computers themselves might be a little more difficult. Going back to the router’s admin interface allowed her to see all the machines currently hooked up to their system.
Including an on-site server.
I shouldn’t do it.
She considered it.
Stu was dead. Whatever had happened to him, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that it had to do with what they did to him there.
Fuck that, I should totally do it.
It wasn’t nearly as hard hacking into the server as she thought it might be. An eight-digit password—password.
Fuckers make it too damn easy. They deserve to get hacked.
Whoever had set up this place had done it fast, and sloppy. And included in the server was a password list for all the workstations she saw connected to the network.
The goldmine, however, was inside the server. She pulled a data dump from them, files that were encrypted but only took her a few minutes to find a recently uploaded decryption tool from a hacker site to decode them—names, dates, chemical formulas. Stuff she didn’t understand, but her Google-Fu skills were damn sure well above average. She would figure out what it meant and use it against them if it was the last thing she did.
They’d killed her brother. What they’d given to him had killed him. He’d thought he’d had a chance to turn his life around, and he’d died. And probably, also, Waxler.
Bailey likely wasn’t much better off.
Something struck her then. The ME told her parents Stu died of a heroin-beta overdose.
While the files were downloading to her laptop, she used her phone to pull up news reports from the day before Stu had revealed his new “job.” She’d been so damned exhausted, she hadn’t thought too much of it at the time.
Sure enough, several other people in the Houston area had died of heroin-beta overdoses.
Another quick web search scared the hell out of her.
Some of the conspiracy theory sites were insisting that was the government’s code name for Kite the drug. Including a few wackjobs insisting that Silo’s church was involved in spreading Kite in both forms in the US, and something about Drunk Monkeys, whatever those were.
But Stu hadn’t tested positive for Kite the drug. They would have told her parents.
Right?
What the fucking hell?
Once she’d pulled the files from the server, she logged out of the network, closed her laptop, and detoured by work again. Pete was still on duty and got her into the server again.
Once again, she pulled more logs down to make it look legit before getting into the sheriff office’s system.
“Heroin-beta” overdoses were listed in nine other cases since the beginning of October. Stu and Waxler brought the number to eleven.
In one of the reports, the roommate had reported the victim had recently started a new job, but they didn’t have details about it. All but four of them were former veterans who’d used the same VA office.
If it smelled like bullshit…
There was a pattern here. She could feel it.
Now all she had to do was find it. Maybe it made her an obsessed big sister. If so, she’d own that. But she didn’t want her little brother’s death to be written off just because he was a junkie.
He hadn’t deserved to die.
She wished like hell she’d paid more attention, pushed Stu harder to get better answers from him. Unfortunately, she’d just been so damned tired from working when that had all hit that she hadn’t had any time or energy to really fight him about it and try to get those answers.
It was a failure on her part and now her parents, especially, were paying an emotional toll for that. Maybe she was trying to shove her feelings into a
deep, dark hole.
She’d own that, too.
Stu deserved the truth. Her parents deserved the truth. Shasta would bring Stu’s murderers to justice if she had to do it with her own two hands.
She headed home. Her parents weren’t home yet and she wanted to try to go through all the data, alone, before they did.
She stared at Stu’s car sitting in the driveway for a moment before she walked into the house. She couldn’t bring Stu back, but she could bring his killers to justice. Whatever was going on in that lab wasn’t kosher, it wasn’t legal, and it damn sure wasn’t going to go unchallenged if she had something to say about it. Stu wasn’t the best brother she could have asked for, but he had a good heart.
Whoever was responsible for him dying was going to pay, and pay hard, even if all she could do was go in and ruin them from the inside out with some black-hat hacking. Might be the only justice her junkie brother would get. She damn sure couldn’t count on any from the cops, even though she understood the realities of life.
They had better things to do, more serious crimes and issues to worry about.
So it was up to her to make sure these fuckers paid.
Even if it meant going against everything she’d ever stood for to do it.
Chapter Seventeen
When Shasta heard her parents arrive home early Friday evening, she emerged from her room to hug them.
Her mom and dad both looked haggard, drawn.
“It’s okay, honey,” her mom said. “I just want to go lie down and go to sleep. Are you all right?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Shasta said.
“None of us do,” her father said.
Her mom headed to their bedroom, her father hanging back, waiting until the door closed behind her to speak again, his voice low. “I’ve been scared about something like this happening ever since we learned he was using. Frankly, it’s a relief. And I’m sorry that makes me sound like a horrible father, but at least the other shoe has finally dropped.”
She hugged him. “No, Daddy. It doesn’t make you sound horrible. I get what you mean. I sort of feel that way, too.”
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