Red Paint

by Valerie Van Clieaf

  “No joy,” said Kennedy, looking up as Alex entered. Nothing in the system from the perp’s ID. HE refuses to talk. Wants a lawyer. Something tells me he was involved with the hit on Batlan. Twelve hours later, the attack on you and Gwen.”

  “Whoever is orchestrating this has definite revenge fantasies which seem to involve surprising his victims at home. We’re about 450 kilometres from Vancouver, only a five or six-hour drive and the weather’s been good for the last 24 hours. The perp had lots of time to be in town for both hits.”

  “Brandeis has set up a room at E Division in Surrey.”

  Alex nodded. “I want to be at my house when forensics do the sweep.”

  “They’re flying up at 8:00 AM. You should probably try to get some sleep.”

  “I could use a few hours.”

  Morgan O’Meara and Lucas Arenas were cozy under a blanket on their living room couch, away from the front window.

  “I’ll imagine it’s common to have trouble sleeping when you’re under 24-hour surveillance,” said Morgan.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Lucas with a smile.

  “Do you think it was the blond guy that killed Batlan?”

  Everyone was at the Clarendon in Vancouver the night their friend, Michael Bolton, had taken surreptitious pictures of the trafficking ring having dinner. They’d all had a good look at them. He was hard to miss.

  “Crazies tend to stand out, don’t they,” said Morgan. “And he was the only one who got away.”

  “He did have that look,” said Lucas.

  “That ‘mess with me and you’ll pay’ look.”

  “Exactly,” said Lucas. “That look.”

  “On a brighter note, we have a shooting schedule for the film,” said Morgan.

  “You must be excited.”

  “I’ve gotta confess, I don’t feel quite ready.”

  “You’ve been ready for a long time, Morgan. You’ll see. Once you start, everything will fall into place.”

  “My blue-eyed handsome man. Always so positive.” Impulsively, she put her arms around him and gave him an exceptionally long kiss.

  Lucas chuckled and pulled her closer.

  They were interrupted by a knock at the door.

  “Really?” Lucas groaned. Reluctantly, he got up and peeked through the side of the curtain. “It’s one of the officers.” He moved to the front door and let him in.

  “Sorry sir, ma’am. We just got word there was an attempt on Sergeant Desocarras and his wife up in 100 Mile House.”

  “No!” Morgan sprang to her feet.

  “Are they okay?” asked Lucas.

  “They’re fine. I’m going to have a look around. Just a precaution.”

  They watched him make his way to the back of their cottage, heard the back door open and shut.

  “It’s not over, Lucas. I knew it wasn’t over.” Morgan moved to the couch and sat in one corner, pulling the blanket around herself protectively.

  Just when they were finally getting back to something approaching normal, thought Lucas. He was angry at the interruption, but he was angrier that Morgan was scared and that the lowlifes were still in their lives when they so desperately wanted them out. With an effort he got himself under control and joined her on the couch.

  Chapter 2

  The dish pit was Levon Starr’s domain. He always had a transistor radio on low, so low that during busy times even he couldn’t hear it. But then things would ease off later in the evening and he’d become aware of it; a quiet friend that sang songs and gossiped about the world. It helped to ground him and kept him focused.

  It was Wednesday night. There’d been a game at the arena earlier, but the restaurant hadn’t been busy, even after the game ended. They’d probably close early. They did sometimes in the winter, and he was hoping for that. Ange Batlan had been murdered. It was news in Prince George because of Seth Boyce, a local boy who’d been abducted by one of Batlan’s gang and held for years. Maybe Batlan had turned on the other men who hurt the children. Seth wanted to find out what was going on.

  Like he was reading his thoughts, Scott said, “I say we close early. I don’t think we’re going to get anyone else.”

  “Okay, Scott.” Levon quickly shed his dirty apron and dropped it in the laundry hamper. He went into the back room, exchanged his sneakers for boots and pulled on his hat and coat. He retrieved his cell phone from his locker and quickly made his way to the front of the restaurant.

  “Scott says we can close early,” he told Judy. She worked the evening shift on weeknights.

  “Great. I’ll be able to catch some of Dancing with the Stars.” She grabbed the restaurant keys from the drawer under the till and followed Levon to the front door.

  “Night, Judy,” said Levon over his shoulder as he hurried out the door and into the cold night air.

  “See you tomorrow, Levon. Don’t be on your computer all night,” she called out to his disappearing back, then quickly shut the door and locked it.

  Levon pulled his thick wool hat over his ears and pulled up his collar. He’d forgotten his gloves at home, so he buried his hands in his jacket pockets. His apartment was only a few blocks from the restaurant, and he made it home in minutes. Once inside, he kicked off his boots, shed his outerwear and stopped at the fridge for a Coke. He turned the radio on low, then headed to his computer by the street-side window. He brought it to life and got out his notebook.

  A search for Ange Batlan’s murder brought up a few links. He clicked on these but there wasn’t any new information. He would have to hack the RCMP servers in Prince George; maybe 100 Mile House too. He’d hacked them both three months ago, after they found the children in North Vancouver; he wanted to know if they were okay and he needed to know if Seth Boyce—the young man who had been put in a coma—was going to be okay because the media didn’t know very much. Seth was young when he was abducted, and for all these years his mom never had any idea where he was. Mrs. Boyce came into the restaurant sometimes for supper. She was nice. They were all happy for her when the police flew her down to Vancouver to be with her son. Her picture was in the paper. Levon had cut it out and taped it to the side of his fridge to remind himself that sometimes the bad guys didn’t win.

  When he paid his first visit to the 100 Mile House server, Levon had set up a backdoor, in case he needed to make a return visit. Once he was in, he pulled up Detective Desocarras’ email account and quickly read through the emails relating to Batlan’s murder. Detective Fernice in Vancouver thought that GK murdered Batlan. GK probably referred to Gregori Kirigin, the guy who got away from the police last fall. Levon was relieved to see that all the witnesses had protective details assigned to them. He was about to close the server when a new email appeared at the top of the inbox from someone named razum. He opened it.

  You saved your lovely wife. This time.

  “Shit,” Levon whispered. He marked the email as unread and quickly closed it. His mind raced. Saved her from what? Razum might be GK. He must have tried to kill Alex’s wife, maybe Alex too. Maybe he planned on killing everyone that could testify against the traffickers. He remembered reading in Ange Batlan’s interview report that Kirigin had advanced computer skills. He decided to look for other traces of Kirigin on the server.

  First, he checked the admin account. There were two administrators now. Levon had a photographic memory, and he was sure that George Killam’s name hadn’t been there the last time he’d paid a visit. Same initials as GK too, so it might be a pseudonym. He exited the desktop, pulled up system processes and started to search. It didn’t take long to find it, a small keystroke program that was monitoring email messages. Programs like this copied the emails and sent the text to another computer. He checked and sure enough, one of the computer’s high ports was in use. Levon knew how easy it was to program the transfer of information from one computer to another—meanwhile deleting the program that had initialized the process—as many t
imes as you wanted.

  Levon followed the trail of the stolen information to Amanet, an international US cloud platform in Seattle, Washington, with direct links to big internet hubs in three other countries. The trail ended there.

  He erased his presence from the systems log and all traces of his login. To be on the safe side, he deleted his backdoor in case Kirigin went looking, then exited the 100 Mile House server. He stood and stretched and glanced out the front window. The street was deserted and cold, in that curious way you can feel the cold in the winter, even when you’re inside, safe, and warm.

  He went into the kitchen, plugged in his coffee pot, and started to munch on the last of a bag of chips. He returned to his computer and did another search, this time for any news on the attack on Alex Desocarras and his wife, but there was nothing. Levon had previously hacked the RCMP Prince George server and left a backdoor for himself there as well. He made use of it now.

  There were two administrators on that server as well. One of the accounts, almost two years old, was the same administrator he had noted on the 100 Mile House server earlier. On a hunch, he accessed the staff database. There was a George Killam, but he wasn’t an officer. He was listed as an internet security consultant, under contract from Palindrome Security. Now it made sense that he would have administrator privileges on two different police servers since he was employed by the police. Maybe it wasn’t Killam who had planted the keystroke program on the 100 Mile House server. But if not him, who?

  Levon left the staff window open, gained access to the email server and scrolled down the list, looking for the name McCormick. He remembered him as the officer who was handling the paedophile ring case notes for Prince George. The names George Killam and Penelope Lawson sat just above McCormick’s. Levon opened Killam’s account first. Row after row of code stared back at him.

  “Code?” he muttered. Heart racing, he quickly copied the message, opened a new message window, pasted the code into it and sent it to his protonmail account. He erased his sent message, exited Killam’s account, and erased all traces of his visit from the system log. He was going to delete his backdoor program, but hesitated. He thought about the code and thought better of that. The coded message might contain information that would necessitate him visiting again in a hurry. Playing it safe, he deleted his backdoor, exited the server, pulled up his protonmail account and downloaded the coded message. The coffee was ready. He got up to fetch a cup and returned to his computer.

  The file from the PG server sat on his screen. The cursor blinked beside the last character: no space, no return. Levon noted that automatically because he never failed to notice any detail, no matter how insignificant. He sent the file to his printer and once printed, arranged, and numbered the pages and carried them to his kitchen table.

  Before settling down to work, he cleaned the table with a damp cloth and dried it thoroughly, arranged the three pages of code in a row the length of the table, and only then, pulled out his spiral notebook and a pen. He noted the date and time at the top of the next blank page: Thursday, January 6th. He noted Killam’s name and that the code text came from an email draft, eight days old, that had not yet been sent. He guessed that it didn’t need to be sent; it was meant for someone else with access to the same server, probably an employee.

  The scrambled letters were in groups of seven, two groups of seven per line. He wrote the first two lines of code into his notebook. It looked like a simple column cipher, although the use of seven letters was unusual. If it wasn’t a column cipher, he’d know soon enough.

  ONDGHEL RTEAASV

  Then he did what he always did when he was solving a column cipher, pretended he was playing Scrabble and wrote out the words he found in the first seven letters alphabetically: dog, done, dong, dongle, eh, el, en, end, gel, geld, glad, goat, god, gold, golden, grade, great, held, heart, hag, hog, hold, log, long, nod, oh, old, on, rag, rat, rate, real, vale, vat, veal.

  That gave him 35 words. He decided to work with golden first. If he was wrong, he’d know soon enough. He wrote out each letter, and the position of each in the scrambled text and included the leftover ‘H’ in the only slot that wasn’t yet taken, number 5.

  G – 4

  O – 1

  L – 7

  D – 3

  E – 6

  N – 2

  H – 5

  Keeping ‘H’ as the starting letter for the next word and using the number cipher for golden—4173625—he got the word harvest, with an ‘A’ left over. The first two words were: golden harvest. He spent the next few hours carefully writing the deciphered text above each line of code on his printed sheets. Any elation he felt at what he considered a minor success was soon gone.

  Golden Harvest was a ship and people were one of the cargoes she carried. The ship was going to dock in Prince Rupert early Sunday morning. Everyone was to be taken elsewhere. The message didn’t say where.

  Levon got up and moved to the window. He looked out on the street. It was still several hours yet before first light. The wind was blowing harder now and tossed flurries of light powdery snow in its path. He dismissed the idea of giving this information to the detachment office in town—even anonymously—as way too risky. George Killam worked there, and he was a member of the paedophile ring that the police didn’t know about. Killam had created the coded message but didn’t send it. Levon guessed that it was meant for someone who worked for the RCMP; someone with an email address on the server; someone who had Killam’s email password and had the code cipher; someone who only had to log in to his account and download the file, just as Levon had done.

  He went to his bedroom and changed into a flannel nightshirt, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and climbed into bed. He reached for his alarm and set it for six thirty am. He was working noon to eight pm tomorrow. On his way to work, he would FedEx a copy of the decoded message, and any details that would help take these bastards down, to Alex Desocarras.

  Levon was exhausted, but his mind raced, and he was unable to sleep. Working with the police was a major break with AERIE protocol. AERIE was a hacktivist group that Levon had belonged to for a few years. After what happened to the brother in Dawson City, the group would be thoroughly pissed if they found out Levon had helped the police in any way. Levon knew he was alone in his admiration for Detective Desocarras, and so sending this information to him was risking a major backlash, but he couldn’t see another way. He made the difficult decision not to tell the group. There was no danger he would be identified; he would send the info anonymously. Decision made, he settled in for a few hours rest. He was almost asleep when he realized Desocarras might need to communicate with him further. He decided to set up a separate protonmail address for that.

  Chapter 3

  Alex awoke to the insistent ring of his cell. He rolled over and grabbed his phone. It was his dispatcher, letting him know that the forensics team from Vancouver were due in town any minute. Gwen slept right through the call. Not wanting to wake her, he dressed quickly and left the room. He checked in with the officer on duty outside their door. He told Alex another uniform was stationed in the parking lot, with a clear view of the side entrance to that wing of the motel door and the only window to the suite. They generally worked out of Williams Lake. Alex drove to Barney’s for a breakfast sandwich and coffee to go, then headed over to his house.

  100 Mile House is a small town. He arrived home quickly and pulled into the driveway just as he finished the sandwich. He grabbed his coffee and cell phone, exited the car, and stared at the front of his house. He and Gwen had bought the place when they first moved to town eight years ago. An older couple had owned it before them, and it was well cared for. While the neighbours hadn’t lined up to invite them over for barbecue, neither had they been unfriendly. The Storeys were one couple they now counted as friends. Alex looked over at their back to front split across the street, just a couple doors down. Christmas lights twinkled merrily day and ni
ght and had for three months now. Zeke loved Christmas. Their driveway was empty. Babs and Zeke both worked during the day.

  It was then that Alex noticed Corporal Linda McLelland stepping off the porch of one of his neighbours a few houses down. She must be doing the house to house. She saw him and waved. He raised a hand in greeting, then got back into his car to finish his coffee and wait for the Vancouver team. In his car rear-view mirror, he watched McLelland cross the street and approach his car. She came up to the driver side and he opened the window.

  “Good morning, sir. I just wanted to tell you how glad we all are that you and your wife are okay.”

  “Thanks, Linda. Any luck?”

  “I’ve only done the one side, but no one remembers a stranger entering your house while you were away. Are any of these houses vacant?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’re all occupied.”

  “Okay. I’ll get back to it.” She left him and made her way to his neighbour on the other side.

  A few minutes later, a van pulled in behind him and two men got out. They waved and quickly unloaded their equipment. Alex hopped out of his car and got his forensic gear from the trunk. They joined him.

  “You’d be Sergeant Alex Desocarras.”

  Alex nodded.

  “Helluva thing,” said one guy. “Glad you’re okay. I’m Joe by the way.”

  “I’m Joe too, except younger and better looking,” said the other guy with a cheeky grin. “I hear we’re doing a full sweep. Then we’ll dust for prints.”

  “Let’s get started,” said Alex. They followed him to the front door, and he let them in. Alex filled them in as they all suited up.

  The older guy was ready to go. “I need you to power off your computer, your router, anything connected to the internet.

  “Everything’s in here,” said Alex, standing in the doorway to the first room on the right off the front door, which served as an office for both him and Gwen. He gave them a sheepish smile. “The computer died just before we went on holiday. We’re shopping for a new one. The tv died a few months back. We’re not much for tv. We like to read and we’re outdoors a lot.”