by Philip Kerr
“Sometimes I think God is just the devil pretending to be nice.”
TEN
The RCFL building at 13333 Northwest Freeway is a five-story glass box that most resembles a wide-screen TV positioned on a patch of grass that looks like a small concession to nature in an area dominated by anonymous buildings and noisy high-speed trucks and automobiles. It’s just a seven-minute drive northwest from the Houston field office, but it might as well be seven hours. If the atmosphere in the FBI building at North Justice Park Drive is loud, busy, and frequently combative, the atmosphere in the forensics lab is altogether more low-pitched and quiet, like a public library in a town full of illiterates. Most of the geeks employed by the RCFL pay little attention to looking as smart as us feds do. What would be the point? The only people they ever speak to are field agents like me, demanding—the analysts would say—the impossible, and you don’t need to be wearing a tie and a pair of shiny shoes to go messing around inside someone’s Dell.
Through a door beyond a desk that could have fronted any regional field station, things quickly turn very different from the usual FBI office. There’s a room full of wide shelves on which rest a couple of dozen large removal crates, each of them containing a computer or hard drive that was bagged in pink plastic by the investigating LEO, just in case something falls off or out. And beyond this reception area is a long, brightly lit floor given over to very private-looking workstations that are more like monastery cells in a RadioShack, each of them the almost hermetic province of some CART or RCFL geek whose job it is to mirror-image a suspect computer and identify a file document or digital image that can be used as evidence in a court of law. The workstations are wraparound workbenches with high shelves on which stand a variety of operating PCs and Macs, while under these benches are boxes of wires, leads, and flash drives that are the spatulas, scalpels, and tweezers of this less gruesome but no less vital forensic work. In truth, magna brushing f-powder onto a nonabsorbent surface in search of latent prints already looks like last year’s episode of CSI. These days our most commonly left fingerprints are digital ones, whether it’s a cell phone signal in a Speedy Mart during a robbery or a Facebook page with a picture of the perp holding a MAC-10, a newspaper with a story about the robbery, and some stolen bills. I shit you not.
Ken Paris was the prince of the geeks at RCFL. A Bureau man for thirty years, he was KMA: Kiss My Ass, which basically meant that since he was coming up on retirement we needed him a lot more than he needed us. But Ken loved his work. Just the week before, he’d been in court giving evidence against a twenty-three-year-old man from Galveston, Rhys Conroe, Jr., who had been distributing thousands of images of young boys being sodomized by a variety of adults. On Ken’s evidence, Conroe had been convicted and sentenced to 220 months in federal prison without parole. That was what made the job worthwhile for Ken, the idea that creeps like Conroe were out of circulation, and this was also why he was an advisor to Project Safe Childhood, a Department of Justice initiative launched back in 2006. Ken hated jackos and tot bangers the way most of us hate roaches, and he was already on the Internet trail of some of the sick bastards Conroe had been supplying with images.
Ken was from Little Rock, which is why he sounded so very like Bill Clinton. If you closed your eyes, it was almost as if the ex-president was alongside you in the room. Ken even looked a little like him, too. In his late fifties, he was tall, with a huge head, small blue eyes, an easy smile, a tsunami of silver-gray hair, and a nose like a shapely woman’s ass on a barstool. He’d always been interested in computers and, until the mid-1980s, he had worked for Apple; then, disappointed by sales of the Macintosh, he turned down the opportunity to buy shares in the company and joined the FBI. “I’ve always been lucky that way,” he would joke.
I found him at his desk, attaching pictures of startling obscenity to an FD-302—a field document that would eventually be produced in court as evidence.
“Hey, Ken, what’s cooking?”
He closed the lid on the laptop he had been working on and shook his head. “The Conroe case, part two. It seems we have some local elementary school teachers who were involved in this degenerate shit. As soon as a jury sees just one of these JPEGs, they’ll convict. They always do. Just so they won’t have to look at them anymore. Can you believe that? Fucking schoolteachers.”
“In my day you gave them an apple, not your cherry.”
“You’re here about Peter Ekman’s computer, aren’t you?” he said. “Good writer. Nicely argumentative. If a little wordy, for my money.”
“Self-destructing e-mail. How about it, Ken?”
“I hadn’t heard about it before.”
“So they do exist.”
“Oh, sure. There are several companies offering this kind of business e-mail service. Which is really what it is: a service. Primarily, it’s a way for a company to track e-mails it sends out invisibly, and to know if and when documents are opened and forwarded. A tracking report can contain a whole lot more than that, too. Date and time opened, approximate geographic location of the recipient, his IP address, URL clicks, how long the mail was read for, how many times the e-mail was opened, how many computers it was read on. Almost anything except how big the recipient’s dick is. And maybe, a few years down the line, when we get more video e-mail, we’ll know that, too. An SDE doesn’t use spyware, malware, or a virus. It’s not illegal and it doesn’t breach any privacy regulations.”
“Wait, wait. You forgot to put the cherry on my ice cream. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Mr. Phelps.”
“I was coming to that. The e-mails are configured to delete themselves at a certain point. You can set the maximum number of times the message can be viewed, the amount of time that the message actually exists, or both. You can compose a message that will delete itself after the first time it’s viewed, after ten seconds, one minute, or ten minutes, or after one view or ten views. It’s really up to the person composing the message to set the destruction criteria. And there’s no sulfuric acid required. Mr. Phelps doesn’t even have to look around to check that no one is looking.”
“But if you’re a legitimate business, Ken, what the fuck?”
“Actually, there are many perfectly good and entirely legal reasons why anyone might use SDEs. How do you know that your personal information is safe on the mail recipient’s PC? You send someone your CV, but you don’t want them making free with your personal details if you don’t get the job, shit like that. SDEs give you an extra level of security. With the ability to create and send self-destructing messages, your most personal correspondences can’t ever end up in the wrong hands. And they can’t remain in someone’s in-box for nine years like some of the e-mails on Ekman’s computer. Nine years from now, two businesses that work well together now might be bitter rivals. And once a message is self-destructed, it’s gone. Not even the person who wrote the message can retrieve the original.”
I shook my head. “But this wouldn’t apply to you.”
“Your faith in me is very touching, but please notice I don’t wear a white coat and a stethoscope. There’s only so much medicine I can do with a flash drive and a USB cable.”
“When a file is deleted, the file system puts a marker in the file management system to let the system know; but that wouldn’t apply to the backup drive. And Ekman had a backup drive. Surely all you have to do is find the digital cavity where the binary data is hiding?”
“What I gather from one of the SDE companies I spoke to is that someone subscribes to the SDE service, and when they want to send a self-destructing e-mail, they send a link that looks like an e-mail. The recipient would access the e-mail via that link, at which point the tracking and destruction criteria set by the sender apply. The e-mail never actually resides on the recipient’s computer, therefore conventional forensics can’t find it.”
I winced. “You’re sure about this?”
&nb
sp; “I looked through Ekman’s Dropbox, his Microsoft Windows Registry, and the Microsoft Outlook files: In-box, Deleted, Unread, Spam, Junk E-mail, AVG Virus Vault, you name it, I looked at it. And while it’s true there are some threats in the mail, these are old threats that go way back to 2005. Islamic stuff. And before that, to 2002, when he had some threats in the UK from animal-rights extremists concerning favorable comments he’d made about people who wear fur. But nothing at all as recent as you suggested. I checked through the hiberfil. I checked Ekman’s temporary application cached files. I checked all of the SDE companies I found on Google, looking for a search string. I checked through the machine’s unallocated space. I even looked in all his digital cavities. Nice phrase, by the way. I must remember that one.”
“How many of these SDE companies did you find on Google?”
“’Bout a dozen. And Gil, those are just the legitimate ones. You can bet there are at least as many illegitimate outfits offering an SDE service, for whatever reason. That’s the thing about the Internet; there’s always more shit than shinola. But you’d need a court order to inspect the database of the legitimate service providers. And even then there’s no guarantee you’d actually find a damn thing. Best you can do is hope that you find yourself a likely suspect, impound his computer, and we get lucky and find that he accessed the self-destructing e-mail website either by viewing the index.dat file—which stores the Internet history—or by webpage remnants left behind in cache.”
I let out a sigh and sprang up off Ken Paris’s chair and went to the grimy window and looked out at the less than inspiring view. If John Ford’s movies were to be believed, Texas was once a place of wide- open plains, red rivers, and relentless big sky. Maybe the sky was still the same, but the rest was now silent speeding cars, half-empty parking lots, and go-fuck-yourself office buildings carrying on all manner of local Houston business: auto sales, pipeline machinery, home construction, real estate. Real estate. Shit. I was going to have to look for somewhere to live, and soon. Somewhere that wasn’t home, where I could practice my heroic solitude; that seemed stereotypically Texan, at least. Like any other brick agent at the Bureau, I’d managed somehow to screw things up at home. Irrevocably, it seemed, if the last agonizing conversation with Ruth was anything to go by. I had been informed that I had thirty days to get out of the house on Driscoll Street before she changed the locks and dumped my stuff on the sidewalk.
“My wife, Ruth. She filed.”
“Well, that’s the Bureau for you. We always get our man. It’s just our women who get away.” Ken waved a finger at me as I left. “Just don’t let your kid get away, all right?”
Dear Danny,
I’m writing this letter to you now to explain myself to you since lately I haven’t been able to speak to you very much. You’re too young to read this right now so I’m going to keep this letter until you are older. By the way, you’ll notice that there’s a postmark on the sealed envelope; that’s just so you know that I really was thinking of you a lot when I wrote this and that I’m not trying to pretend you were more important to me than perhaps you’ve grown up thinking you were. I don’t know how old you are at this present moment, which makes this letter even more difficult to write, so forgive me if I just go ahead and try to speak to the man I think you will become.
I am so proud of you, Danny, and I love you very much and I’ve always wanted the best for you, son. So does your mom. We both want that. Until you have a son of your own, it’s hard to know how wonderful it feels to be someone’s parent and what a sense of human mystery that provokes—by which I mean the question of how any of us are here at all. Frankly, I have no more idea now that I’m a man than I did when I was a boy.
But inevitably, when I look at you, I see myself, and I often imagine my own dad looking at me in turn. It’s only now that I’m your dad that I can really understand him the way I tried to do when I was his son. He was a good father, and while I’ve tried to be a better one, I’m not altogether sure that I’ve succeeded. I think that’s true for a lot of guys. The fact is that it’s both an honor and a great responsibility to be a father and there are times when perhaps the responsibility weighs a lot more heavily than you might imagine. You want to pass on some hard-won wisdom and a wealth of good experience to your son, but sometimes you feel that all you’re doing is giving orders and advice and not much in the way of love. You have to learn a lot of stuff when you’re a kid, but what no one ever tells you is how much more you have to learn when you’re a parent. I guess you could say I’ve had to learn more being your dad than I ever had to learn being someone’s son. Who’d have thought it? Frankly, being my dad’s son was easy in comparison with how much more difficult it must have been to be my dad. I thought he had all the right answers—not all of which I agreed with. It’s only now I realize that he didn’t have all the answers and how—in a good way—he was making it all up as we went along. I think all fathers do that. Life presents so many temptations and problems that there’s just not enough time to always get things right. And the fact is I don’t have the answers, Danny—none of us has as many answers as perhaps we need—but I do recognize the questions. They’re the same questions that I asked when I was a boy. They’re probably the same questions that all sons ask their fathers. I guess what I’m saying here is that you’re a lot more like me than perhaps you realize.
Don’t mistake what I’m telling you, Danny. I don’t want to make you like me. You’re not me just as I wasn’t my dad. Look how different we are. We’re different, but he’s always the one guy I know who’s most like me. The one guy who loves me just as much as I love you.
As I write this, your mom and I haven’t been getting on too well lately and we’re living apart. None of that is your fault. It’s my fault and, to a lesser extent, your mom’s. I sincerely hope that we can patch things up between us and live together as a family again, but with each passing day I fear the worst—that something has broken between us that can never be repaired. I won’t go into the details right now except to say that no matter how much they might love each other sometimes people find their beliefs and principles forcing them apart. I think I believe one thing and your mother believes something else, but the one thing we can agree on is you: we both want what’s best for you.
I promise to write again when I have time. But for now, that’s all. I love you.
Your loving father
ELEVEN
The following morning, checking through my voice mail, I found an urgent message from Andrew Newman, the medical director at UTHCPC, asking me to call him at his office.
“Uh, thanks for calling us back, Agent Martins. I appreciate it. I’m sorry to tell you that Philip Osborne died at 4:31 this morning. I have to say it came as a real surprise to us here at Harris County Psychiatric. We were pretty sure we had him stabilized. At least physically. It’s too bad. I was a major fan of his writing.”
“What was the cause of death?”
“Cardiac infarction. Followed by a massive pulmonary edema. It looks like his heart just stopped.”
“I see. So, did you try to revive him?”
“No. There are certain occasions when it’s clear there would be little point in trying. I don’t want to go into too many details, but I’m afraid this was one of those occasions.”
“All right, sir. Can I ask you this: Would you say that his death was caused by the same mental trauma that put him in an acute state of catatonia?”
“From the amount of adrenaline we found in his system, sure, that would be my guess. But it is just a guess, you understand, Agent Martins. There will, of course, have to be an autopsy.”
“When will that be?”
“First thing tomorrow a.m., I would imagine.”
I was about to hang up the telephone when I realized that Newman was still on the line.
“It’s probably nothing important,” he continued, “and in a way it’s nothi
ng unusual, but for a brief moment, just before he died, Mr. Osborne regained consciousness. According to the computer monitoring him, and the nurse who was summoned by his patient alarm, he was conscious for almost four whole minutes.”
“Did Osborne activate that alarm himself?”
“No, it’s automatic. His conscious state would have activated an alert on the duty night nurse’s computer, which summoned her to his room. Not that she really needed it under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances were they?”
“Er, he screamed. And kept on screaming, like he was taking a dive off a tall building. That’s what I’ve been told. The nurse was pretty spooked by it. Then again, it’s not that unusual for people to scream in a psychiatric hospital. But perhaps it’s a little unusual to scream for so damn long. According to the nurse, perhaps as long as four minutes.”
“You mean he screamed for the entire time he was conscious again?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to speak to the nurse if I may, Dr. Newman. What’s her name?”
“Nurse Kendall. But she’ll have to call you. Her shift was supposed to end at midday, but she was sent home early.”
“Oh? Why is that, sir?”
“The screaming was followed by a massive pulmonary edema. I guess it shook her up a bit.”
“What exactly is a pulmonary edema?”
“Usually, it’s caused by heart failure. As the heart fails, pressure in the veins going through the lungs starts to rise. And as the pressure in these blood vessels increases, fluid is pushed into the air spaces in the lungs, which interrupts the normal intake of oxygen in the lungs. He coughed up some blood. Onto Nurse Kendall, who happened to be bent over his bed at the time.”
“So she got some blood on her uniform. Isn’t that what you might call an occupational hazard?”
