He was Walking Alone

by P. D. Workman

  “I’ll find out what I can.”

  “Thanks, Zach. Appreciate you keeping me apprised—”

  “Actually, there was something else I wanted to mention.” Zachary raised his voice, trying to grab Campbell’s attention before he could hang up.

  “What?” Campbell questioned from farther away, then held the phone to his mouth again. “I didn’t catch that?”

  “There was one other thing.”

  “Oh, boy. Am I going to like it?”

  Zachary thought of the news that Hope had been dating a younger man, and a minor at that, carefully keeping it a secret from his parents and their friends. But that wasn’t what he had stopped Campbell for.

  “Around the time I took this case… I started getting some nasty emails.”

  “You don’t think they’re from the same guy, do you? Harding’s stalker?”

  “No, I was pretty sure they were from… a family member I’ve been estranged from. But the similarities between them are marked. I don’t know what to think. I can’t see how they could be related.”

  “Can’t you?” Campbell was amused. “If it’s Ashley…”

  Ashley knew when Zachary had taken the case. She knew his email address and phone number and other details of how to contact him. Had she seen him as a replacement target for her boyfriend? Harding was gone and she couldn’t tease and taunt him anymore, so she had needed a new victim?

  “But the things that she—he—has said to me have been very personal, things that someone outside of my family wouldn’t know.”

  “Things that you’ve never told anyone else about? Can you be sure that your estranged family members have never told them to anyone else? Once you put something out there, you lose control of it.”

  Zachary considered. The accusations that had come to him from Tyrrell or the anonymous stalker were not actually that specific. The mentions of what he had done were vague, sometimes focused on the fire and sometimes not. While he had not shared the story of the fire with many people, there were others who knew not only that he had been in a fire when he was young, but that he had been the cause of it, and that his family had broken apart after that. Dozens of doctors, therapists, social workers, foster parents, foster kids, teachers and school administrators. And the few people he had told the details to, like Bridget and Kenzie. Someone running background on him could have found out from many different sources. Despite the fact that his privacy was supposed to be protected by social services, Zachary knew of plenty of cases where confidentiality had been breached. Foster parents gossiped with each other. Professionals discussed difficult cases among themselves. The foster brothers and sisters he had lived with hadn’t been under any legal requirement to keep his story to themselves. They were taught to respect each other’s privacy, but that didn’t mean they did.

  “Zachary?”

  “Just thinking about it. I guess… there were people who knew, alright. But he sent me a photograph. One of my family, right before… that had to come from someone else in my family. No one else could have had it.”

  “Maybe someone in your family posted it online somewhere. Have you done a search to see if you could find it? Asked you family about it?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Someone in your extended family could have shared it. It might have been placed in a public archive for some reason. Hell, you know all this, Zachary. You’re a photographer. You’re a private investigator. You know what happens once a picture is circulated. It never goes away.”

  “Then…” Zachary’s mood lifted a little. “Maybe it wasn’t Tyrrell. But he did send me a letter, to our old address. It ended up being forwarded to Bridget’s.”

  “How do you know it was him? Did you contact him?”

  “Well… no. Not yet. I thought that maybe—” Zachary cut himself off. He didn’t need to share any more details than that. He didn’t need to say where or when he thought he was going to see Tyrrell, or if he was really going to follow through. “No. But it was before I took the case…” Zachary trailed off. “Actually… I don’t think it was. It arrived after our first meeting.”

  “After being forwarded in the mail? Forwarding tends to add a day or two to delivery time.”

  “Wait… I still have the envelope.” Zachary shuffled through the papers on his desk and pulled out the letter and envelope that had come from Tyrrell. He studied the postmark, trying to make out where and when it had been mailed. He was relieved to see that it had been mailed from Vermont, not New Hampshire, and the mailing date was several weeks back, before he’d been hired to investigate Harding’s death. “Yeah. It was mailed before I took the case. So this one is from Tyrrell…”

  “But you’re right, the emails might not be. They follow the same patterns as the ones to Harding?”

  “Same phrasing in a lot of places. Same distribution of times, like the person has an office job or goes to school.”

  “And Ashley Morton, what is her schedule like?”

  “I’m not sure… I think she’s been on leave since Harding died. But the emails I’ve been getting are still in the same distribution pattern. So either she’s very careful to follow the same schedule as before, or it’s not the same person.”

  “Right,” Campbell agreed. “I want you to send them to me anyway. We have someone working on the communications with Harding. They can look at your emails too and see if there is anything comparing them side-by-side can reveal. Maybe if they have two reference points, it will help to triangulate this guy’s location. I don’t know if that’s something they can do with emails.”

  “Uh… I don’t really like the idea of someone else reading these. There’s personal stuff…”

  “You want me to get a warrant for your whole email account or your computer? If there’s a couple you don’t want anyone to see, then hold them back, but we need a stack of them to do a proper analysis. These guys aren’t going to be reading them for their own entertainment or to hold over you. They’re trying to solve a case, that’s all. The point is to learn everything they can about the stalker, not about you.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” If he could hold back the ones with the more personal references, that helped. He didn’t want Campbell’s department having full access to everything in his email or on his computer.

  “That’s more like it. We’re on the same side here. We both want to find out who the stalker is. Or who they are.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate your help.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  Zachary thought about Jonathan Roper. “N-no.”

  Campbell heard his hesitation. “On the case or personally. It sounds like there’s something else.”

  “I don’t know whether it’s relevant or not yet. I have to process my New Hampshire interview notes.”

  “Is it time sensitive? Are we going to miss something if we put it off?”

  “No. I don’t see him going anywhere.”

  “Alright. We both have plenty to look at, then. Let me know if you find anything in Ashley’s records and I’ll tell you if we can get anything from the email comparison.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I

  n spite of being back in his own bed for the night, Zachary found he couldn’t sleep. He tried lying down a few times, but each time his brain started chattering, processing all of the disparate clues, and he’d think of something he had to get up and check, or to write down so he wouldn’t forget it in the morning. Eventually, he gave up and went back to his computer, carefully sorting through everything he knew and trying to make sense of it. He ran deeper background on the suspects in New Hampshire, looking for any clues in their past and trying to tie them to Rusty Donaldson or Ashley Morton.

  It struck him that while he had tried to find a connection between the stalker and Rusty Donaldson, he hadn’t spent much time trying to find a connection between Donaldson and Ashley. Maybe Ashley was the stalker and maybe she wasn’t, but what if she knew Donaldson? What if she put him
up to killing Harding?

  The trouble with that was that he couldn’t think of a motive. They hadn’t found any evidence that Harding was abusive or that Ashley would benefit from killing him. He was a blue collar working stiff without any money, without even a life insurance policy. She wouldn’t get anything material from his death. There wasn’t any sign that he’d been cheating on her. Despite having changed his email address and phone number, there was nothing on the old accounts to incriminate him. Zachary was an expert at spotting signs of infidelity.

  By the time it was what could be considered a decent hour to call Ashley to see if he could meet with her, his eyes burned from staring at the computer screen for too long. He rubbed them and showered and put in eyedrops, then made himself a cup of coffee and sat down. Ashley still sounded like he had dragged her out of bed. Zachary explained that he wanted to get together to talk, to follow up with her on what he had learned in New Hampshire.

  Ashley yawned unenthusiastically. “Couldn’t you just make a report to me over the phone? I really didn’t want to have to deal with anyone today.”

  “There are things I don’t like to discuss over the phone. I’d like to come see you at your house. Would that be okay?”

  “At Richard’s, you mean?”

  “No, no. There’s no need to drive out there. I’ll just come to your house. Why don’t you give me the address, and I’ll be there as soon as I can? Then you’re free to do what you want the rest of the day.”

  She gave a noisy sigh. “Did you find something?”

  “I need to talk face to face,” he insisted. “I’d like it to be today, if possible… do you have work or another commitment?”

  “Fine.” She gave him the address that he already had for her and advised that she would need to shower and dress before he arrived. “So don’t get here too fast.”

  “An hour?”

  “I suppose.”

  Zachary did his best to soften her up, stopping at the donut shop to pick up some pastries and some good coffee before swinging by her house. Her hair was still wet from her shower, but she did manage a smile when she saw that he had brought her breakfast.

  “Well, at least I get something out of this,” she grumbled. As if Zachary weren’t doing anything else for her.

  They went into the kitchen to put the pastries and coffee on the table. Zachary had thought through his approach with Ashley, so he had his story all prepared. “I’m sorry I couldn’t really say anything to you over the phone, but I’m concerned that someone might be monitoring your communications.”

  “Monitoring… you mean someone has my phone tapped?”

  “I don’t know whether it’s your phone or your computer, but I’d like to look at both of them. And what about in here or your car? Have you had anyone out of the ordinary in your house lately?”

  Ashley looked around her eyes wide. “You think the house is bugged?”

  “It’s a possibility, but probably not. It’s easy to tap a phone or computer remotely. Not so easy to arrange to have a bug physically planted in a house or car that’s in a different state.”

  “You think one of these people you saw in New Hampshire might have bugged me?”

  “I can’t say they did without looking at your equipment. And if you could get me a printout from your phone company of all of your call and text logs that they give you access to, that might be helpful.”

  “Why?”

  “Chances are, if someone bugged you remotely, they sent you a trojan. I’ll look at what I can find on the phone and computer, but if it was attached to a text that was since deleted, or if the stalker called you first to make sure that your phone was turned on…”

  Wide-eyed, Ashley unlocked her phone and handed it to him without a word. She grabbed one of the pastries from the box and ate it as she walked into the living room to retrieve her laptop, scattering crumbs along the way.

  “I’ll print out what I can while you look at the phone,” she said. “Then you can look at it. Unless… should I not be doing that?”

  “If there’s a key-logger installed, you’ll need to go through your various online accounts and change the passwords after I clean it off anyway. I don’t think it will hurt to print out those logs.”

  They sat down. Zachary went to Ashley’s texts, and started flicking through them. “You don’t recall getting any strange texts lately? From someone you didn’t know or who normally wouldn’t be sending you something? A video or gif or song?”

  “Uh… maybe, I don’t know.”

  Zachary went through each sender, scrolling back to when Richard Harding had died. If she had any brains, she would have deleted any incriminating texts she had sent; but criminals made mistakes all the time. That was how they got caught.

  He stopped when he got to a sender that had sent only one text, apparently a video of a cat. Zachary turned the phone around to show her the screen.

  “Who sent this?”

  “Uh… I don’t know. I thought maybe it was a school friend of mine. I ran into her at the store, and she said she would connect with me. But I don’t know,” Ashley shook her head, looking at that one lonely message. “She never sent anything else or responded to my texts…”

  Zachary turned the phone back around to investigate further.

  “Do you think that’s it?” Ashley asked in a low, nervous voice. She looked around. “Do you think that’s some kind of virus that bugs my phone?”

  One of the problems with phones was that they were always on. Even when she turned off the screen, that didn’t turn off the phone or its broadcasting abilities. A clever hacker could use it like a baby monitor, to listen to anything that was going on, even when she wasn’t making a phone call. Zachary held his finger to his lips to silence Ashley. He turned the phone to airplane mode and removed the SIM card. He put the tiny black chip on the table.

  “I’ll need to spend some more time with it, but for now, no one can monitor you through the phone. If that was a trojan, I would suggest getting a new phone. I can’t be sure he hasn’t done something that will give him permanent access whenever it is online. Even with a system wipe… I can’t give you any guarantees. You might have backed up the trojan. It may have attached itself to some other app or file that you’ve saved to the cloud. You should probably do like Richard did, get a new phone and a new email address. Don’t try to retrieve anything from this account.”

  Her eyes were wide. “But my whole life is on that little thing! All of my contacts, my plans…”

  “I can convert contacts and calendars to CSV files and reimport them on a clean phone. That should be safe.”

  She just continued to shake her head. “How could this happen? I thought phones couldn’t get viruses?”

  “People can hijack them. This wasn’t just a random virus.”

  Ashley stared at her computer for a long time, then logged in. “Do you still want this log, or do you not need it anymore because you already found it?”

  “Uh…” Zachary thought it through. The reason he had asked for the logs had not been to track down spyware, but to see if Ashley had any connections with anyone else on his list. He hadn’t actually expected to find spyware. “Yes, to be safe, if you could still print them out. We want to be thorough.”

  Ashley nodded and went to work. Zachary focused his attention on the phone, seeing if he could track down a suspicious program in the app list. It was probably lurking in the operating system, not visible to the user, but sometimes they still left traces in the visible interface.

  As Ashley printed off pages of phone and text logs, he found a calculator app that seemed to be more than it appeared to be on the surface. It wasn’t the built-in calculator app, though it was certainly intended to mimic it. But Zachary’s keen eye picked out a few discrepancies. He pulled out his own computer and, being sure to tether it to his phone rather than to Ashley’s potentially insecure network, he searched up the app and confirmed that it was spyware.

  “It
is infected,” he confirmed to Ashley.

  She looked at him with wide eyes and said nothing. She left the room, and came back a few minutes later with a thick stack of print outs.

  “Can you do anything with it?”

  “I’ll do my best, but like I say, if it’s sophisticated… that might not be enough.”

  “And my computer?”

  Zachary reached across the table and turned her computer around. “That may take longer.”

  But it didn’t. The malware seemed to be fairly unsophisticated. Checking for open ports, it was quickly obvious that Ashley’s computer had been infected as well. He blocked each of the spyware programs and downloaded his preferred app to clean it. While he was working on it, his mind was churning through all of the possibilities and implications. He had told Campbell that the stalker was quite possibly Ashley or someone she had told that Harding was missing. That was no longer the case. Whoever had had access to her phone and computer via the spyware knew about all of her phone calls and messages. They had read and listened in on her increasingly worried messages to Harding, and then to the police. They knew everything that she knew in real time. It was back to square one, unless they could figure out who had been monitoring her.

  The chances that Ashley was the stalker had gone down considerably. But they hadn’t been eliminated. She still might have infected herself as a cover, or someone else might have infected her for some other reason. Maybe a friend of Harding’s had been suspicious of her and had investigated her. For that matter, maybe Harding himself had suspected her.

  “How long had you and Richard been dating?”

  Ashley looked at him, eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “I don’t even know how long you had been together. You met him when he got out of prison. I assume you had been dating for a while. But you were not living together, so maybe that was a wrong assumption.”

  She considered him for a minute before answering. “Two years,” she said finally. “But I don’t see what living together has to do with it. Plenty of people know each other for years and years and never move in together. You have different kinds of relationships. Some people don’t want to give up their own independence.”