by L E Fraser
“No worries. I told Lisa we’d be there at seven.” She heard the challenge in her voice.
Reece didn’t say anything, disappearing into the bathroom.
* * *
IT TOOK SAM a full minute to wake up and recognize the ringing was coming from their landline. No one ever called the home phone. They didn’t even have an answering machine on it. Instead of hanging up, the caller stayed on the line. It rang and rang.
“It’s two-thirty in the morning,” Sam croaked, looking over at Reece’s side of the bed.
He was already up, and he followed her down the stairs to the kitchen, where the phone sat unused. Brandy barked from the top of the stairs, unable to negotiate the steep staircase without help and mad at them for abandoning her.
Sam grabbed the phone. “If it’s an international telemarketer, I’m going to lose my shit.”
The number was blocked. She shouted a rude greeting into the receiver.
A drone of traffic hummed in the background. “Get Reece, put me on speaker,” Behoo ordered without preamble.
Reece stood beside her, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
Sam put the phone on speaker and placed it on the kitchen table. “What’s going on?”
“Get your cells and mobile devices.”
“Behoo, what’s—”
“Shut up and listen to me,” he ordered impatiently. “Take out the batteries.”
Brandy continued to bark sharply from upstairs. Between the dog and the traffic noise on Behoo’s end, it was hard to hear.
“Behoo, Reece here—”
“Hurry up! I remote wiped your hard drives, but she can run code to retrieve it. You gotta disable everything.”
Reece ran up the stairs and returned with their cells. He fumbled the backs off and removed the batteries, while Sam flipped over her laptop and snapped out the battery.
“Your iPad,” she reminded Reece.
He searched around and found it on the antique church altar. “Find my laptop,” he told her. “It’s by the desk.”
Brandy was whining and pawing at the ladder. Sam located Reece’s laptop and removed the battery. She raced upstairs, hoisted Brandy under her arm, and carried her down to the main floor.
“Is everything disabled?” Behoo demanded.
“Yes,” Reece said. “Who’s accessing our equipment?”
“Any webcams in your place? Do you have a home monitoring system?”
Sam glanced at the red flashing light by the front door. “Well, there’s the ADT security.”
“Where does it dump data? Is there a dedicated circuit in your apartment? Shit, your router. Unplug it and disable any modems.”
On the other end of the phone, someone was speaking to Behoo, but she couldn’t decipher the words.
Reece was already in the closet that housed the modem and wireless router, tugging plugs from the receptacle. Brandy was running between them barking.
“Behoo, you’re scaring the shit out of me,” Sam yelled over the melee.
“The security system. Tell me what it is.”
“It’s old.” She pawed through the files she kept in the desk drawer and read him the serial number, make, and model. “I put it in years ago. They keep trying to upgrade it.”
“Cameras?”
“No. Motion detectors, door and window alarms, and a panic button. Initiates a silent alarm. It doesn’t digital record.”
“What about the office?” Behoo asked, firing the question at her.
Reece put his arm around her shoulders and answered, “We don’t keep a computer at the office, and there isn’t a dedicated security system. The bakery downstairs has one, but I don’t know the details. It’s old, so I assume it’s basic. What’s going on?”
They heard the blare from a semi’s horn. “Your banking?”
“Behoo, what—”
“Cancel all the cards. Do it now and fast.”
“How, without a computer or phone?” Reece asked. “Can you do it?”
Sam tugged his arm and whispered, “What are you thinking? You’re giving him our banking information?”
Reece patted her hand. “It’s our only option. If we’re at electronic risk, we need someone with the skills to intercept the banks’ firewalls and freeze our accounts fast. Trust me. It’ll be okay. He helped me with credit card fraud in the past.”
Sam hesitated. She’d worked with Behoo for three years, and he’d been nothing but trustworthy. Reece was right: it would take too much time for them to reach the bank and credit card companies. Finally, she nodded and Reece went to the desk to pull the paperwork.
“Give me the details and make it fast,” Behoo said in a clipped tone. “Bloody Widow’s chasing Hybrid, but she’ll figure out it’s a red herring.”
Sam had no idea what he was talking about. Hybrid must be a friend of Behoo’s, probably the person he kept speaking to in the background. Was Bloody Widow the online handle of the person threatening her and Reece? Behoo must have moved from where he’d been when he’d first called. There was no traffic interference now. Sam strained to hear his conversation with this “Hybrid.” All she heard was the thumping of her own heart, and, from the other end of the speakerphone, the fast clicking of computer keys.
Reece pulled a folder from the file drawer, opened it, and handed her a piece of paper. It listed all their banking details in a table, along with passwords and online account details for every site they accessed.
She recited the information and heard Behoo’s fingers flying across the keys. He grunted twice, swore, and typed manically.
Through the phone, someone said loudly, “T-minus three, dude. There’s the Widow.”
“Got it!” Behoo shouted. “Shut it down, Hybrid. Get that bitch off your ass.”
“Behoo, what’s going on?” Reece asked.
The nonsensical technical gibberish that followed was incomprehensible to Sam.
“English!” she yelled over Behoo’s explanation.
“She caught me up in her shit.”
“Who caught you up in her what now?” Reece asked.
“Lanteka is safe,” he said. “I set the IP address up in a maze of proxy servers but double checked that she didn’t link it to me. But you guys? I dunno. Covered your gov docs. She’s dope, and I don’t know how long she shadowed. Get it?”
“No,” Sam retorted.
“Need me to draw you a picture?” he shouted. “This Caitlyn Franklyn bitch you sent me after is protected by Bloody Widow, one of the most nefarious black-hatters on the deep web.”
“Caitlyn is a technological genius,” Reece stated with a sigh. “My guess is that she’s not protected by Bloody Widow, she is Bloody Widow.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Behoo’s voice rose. “You sent me after the Widow blind?”
Dumb, dumb, dumb, Sam thought and her stomach dropped. It hadn’t occurred to her to mention the technology aspect. She’d asked Behoo to find her an address on a woman who had served time at Grand Valley.
Behoo spoke away from the phone, rapidly shouting orders to whoever Hybrid was. Sam had never heard the laid-back hacker anything but serene and confident. He was brilliant, he was careful, and he was an outstanding hacker. As he scrambled to protect them from Bloody Widow, his uncharacteristic frenzy frightened her.
Reece sat at the table, crossed his legs, and casually linked his hands behind his head. “How at risk are we?” he inquired. Sam couldn’t believe that he didn’t seem at all upset or stressed.
“I think you’re okay,” Behoo said slowly. “But I warn you, I’ve never seen the mad skills I caught tonight.” He paused before adding, “Look, we know Bloody Widow’s handle and her rep. She’s into bad shit. Scary people would love to shut her down permanently. Reece, you guys need to watch your backs. If the people who want Bloody Widow stopped find out that she was after you, they’ll assume you have a connection to her real-world identity.”
“And come looking for us,” Reece said with a
nother sigh. “Let’s focus on the immediate problem. Will this Bloody Widow launch a cyber-attack?”
“No clue. I don’t know why you were looking for her in the first place.” Before Reece responded, Behoo rushed to add, “And I don’t want to know. Look, I did what I could to make you ghosts. She can’t touch what doesn’t exist.”
“Okay,” Reece replied passively. “So we have no government identity, email, or social media accounts. No bank accounts or credit cards, and you purged all our documents, passwords, and contacts, yes?”
Sam’s stomach flipped and sour bile rose to her throat. She tried to do a mental inventory of everything she kept on her computer and felt sicker.
Behoo’s voice was hard when he said, “How you deal with the government and banks is up to you, but I got nothin’ to do with it, nada. You don’t know shit about me, get it?”
Reece stood and stretched out his back with a yawn. “You have my promise.” Unruffled demeanour, pleasant tone of voice. “Thanks, Behoo.”
“Gotta peace. Grab a pen.” He gave them an address. “That’s all I got for you.”
“Appreciate it,” Reece said. “I’ll send you a grand for the trouble. Any chance she has your real-world identity?”
“No way. Bitcoin for the payment, some as usual. I suggest we all be extra diligent for the next little while. I’ll contact you in the morning with a new cell number and email address you can use to reach me.” Behoo hung up.
Sam flopped into a kitchen chair. “This is terrible! We have no money and no credit cards. We lost all our contacts, all our files. Behoo’s pissed.” Tears burned her eyes, which infuriated her.
Reece went into the kitchen and made coffee.
She’d had enough of his composed attitude. “What’s the matter with you? This is a disaster!”
“Well,” he said, extracting a T-Disc from the Tassimo and putting in another. “It’s unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate?” she screamed. “It’s a nightmare!”
“Not really. We don’t use social media anyway. Lanteka is safe, which is good since it skirts legalities.” He passed her a mug of coffee and sat on a kitchen chair at the table.
“We’re at risk of identity theft,” Sam yelled. “Our reputa—shit!” She covered her mouth with both hands. “All my PhD notes for my dissertation. Eight months of work! Can she hack into the university database? Can she trash my record?” Panic washed over her, and she couldn’t decide whether to cry or to punch something.
“Well, based on Behoo’s impression of her skill, she can do whatever she likes. The question is whether she’ll bother. But, no, you didn’t lose anything.” He thought for a minute. “Well, whatever you did today. Did you do anything significant today?”
She shook her head.
“You’re fine. We’re not broke, either. The accounts are frozen but the money’s not gone.” He chewed on his lip. “Explaining to the authorities how we managed to secure everything without speaking to the financial institutions will be tricky.”
She didn’t feel the least bit reassured. “And what do you suggest we do now?”
“The Financial Crimes Unit is the best starting point. We’ll ask Bryce Mansfield for help,” Reece said. “Not that this has anything to do with the homicide squad, but having a staff inspector in our court might grease the wheels with the police.” He sighed and ran his hand across the stubble on his chin. “Since Behoo isn’t one hundred percent sure how much Bloody Widow got before he shut her down, we better contact Trans Union Canada and Equifax Canada to put a fraud alert on our credit reports. I suggest we speak with the office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, too.” He sipped his coffee. “Tomorrow, we’ll replace our government documents.”
“What about what Eric and Sally said about pornographic emails being sent to all their contacts?”
Her mother’s critical face rose in her mind. That relationship was already hideous. She and her stepfather were close, but he disapproved of the strife between her and Grace, feeling strongly that Sam should make more of an effort. Sam shuddered to imagine what her stepfather would do if Grace received a disgusting email from her estranged daughter.
Uttering a small groan, her mind skipped to all of her professional contacts. If narcissistic, paranoid CEOs received an offensive email from her, how was she going to explain a massive electronic attack? It had taken years to develop those relationships and to convince them of her confidentiality. If Bloody Widow publicized confidential client material, the civil suits alone would cripple her business. She felt violated and homicidal toward the potential threat.
“Stop freaking out. I can see it in your face,” Reece said, sipping his coffee. “Behoo cancelled our email accounts. It’s doubtful she had time to send anything malicious. But we’ll open new accounts and warn our contacts. Identity theft happens. People understand.”
His passiveness just enraged her more. People who hire private investigators and entrust them with their darkest secrets did not understand horrendous security breaches.
“How are we going to warn anyone?” Sam retorted. “We lost all our contacts. Don’t you understand the magnitude of what has happened? There was highly confidential material on my computer. What if she posts it online?”
“Behoo purged our files before she downloaded anything, Sam,” he said, sounding a little impatient now. “He was online, along with whoever Hybrid is, and prevented Bloody Widow from getting the data. He deleted everything. I don’t know much about the technology, but I know it’s damn near impossible for a hacker to compromise someone of Behoo’s talent when he’s immediately aware of the threat. He took defensive manoeuvres.” Reece took her hand.
She jerked away from him. “My PhD work is gone! I don’t have any cash. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you understand how devastating this is?”
He went to the closet and returned with a sachet, unzipped it, and handed it to her.
She peered inside and took out a block of paper-wrapped bills. “How much is here?” she asked in awe.
“A grand, give or take,” he replied. “Three in the safe deposit box.”
She pulled out a red My Passport portable hard drive.
“Most nights, when I remember,” Reece said, “I back everything up. I forgot tonight, but I did it last night.”
“My stuff, too?”
His smile was reassuring. “Of course. People rely on technology too much.” He shrugged. “Hope for the best, but plan for the worse. I tried to talk to you about it last year, remember?”
She nodded. “I said you were paranoid.”
“Who’s paranoid now?” He arched his eyebrow and grinned.
“We’re safe?”
“As safe as we can be.” He gestured at the bag. “There are phones in there, too, and new SIM cards. The issue is how we explain to the cops what happened while protecting Behoo’s identity. I need to sleep on that one.”
“If it is Caitlyn Franklyn, her only motivation to hurt us would have to do with her ex-husband’s murder,” Sam said slowly, trying to assess the risk based on fact rather than emotion. “Even if she managed to grab data before Behoo wiped the drives, I didn’t write up anything about this case. How about you?” she asked.
“Not a thing.”
“If she reads the papers, she knows we’re investigating her ex-husband’s death.” Rational thought was returning and Sam tried to think through Caitlyn’s perspective. “She allegedly attacked the Alistair family after Sally accused Jordan of rape. Without those case notes, she won’t know we suspect the twins in conjunction with your poisoning. Still, she could hack us for the hell of it.” She checked her watch. It was nearly four in the morning and she was wide awake, riding an adrenalin rush. Reece, on the other hand, looked exhausted.
“From what Behoo said, she has bigger problems.” He took their coffee mugs to the sink, speaking over his shoulder. “If Caitlyn Franklyn is Bloody Widow, protecting her anonymity is crucial. If she’s cavorting with k
nown cyber predators, guarding her identity is vital. She didn’t know who Behoo was or why he was snooping into Caitlyn Franklyn. She attacked the threat. Now she knows it was just us, I doubt she’ll care. She must have anticipated that we’d want to question her about her ex-husband’s murder. Clearly, she doesn’t want to talk to us, but I think she’ll just ignore us.”
Reece put the SIM cards in the phones, turned them on, and handed her one. “We need to call those emergency numbers. Grab that piece of paper.”
On the back were the numbers for the agencies he’d recommended they call. While Reece called the police, filed an incident report, and obtained the number, Sam started notifying agencies and reporting the possible identity theft.
After half an hour, Reece hung up and ran his fingers through his hair. “We have to go to the pink palace and answer questions tomorrow.” He sighed and closed his eyes. “That’s not a conversation I’m excited about, but we’re meeting at Bryce’s office. That should offer some protection.”
Having finished her own calls, Sam put down the cell she’d been using. “So, tomorrow, after we talk to the police, how about we check out Caitlyn’s address?”
He nodded. “I’d like to talk with Bloody Widow.”
Sam scowled. “You talk. I’m just going to beat the shit out of her.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sam
BRYCE MANSFIELD SAT rigid behind his desk, with his hands folded on top of a file folder. He was clenching his hands together so hard that his knuckles were turning white. It looked to Sam as if he was also grinding his teeth. The man was furious and trying to hide it under a professional mask.
Sam had met the staff inspector once or twice when she was a police constable and wished that this reunion were under better circumstances. She felt terrible for Reece. The clusterfuck they were in could sully Reece’s opportunity to join Bryce’s homicide squad. Maybe it was for the best. Sometimes it was easier when circumstances made a tough decision for you, and Sam had felt for a little while that Reece’s reluctance to accept the offer was because he didn’t want to return to police work.
