J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds Mysteries 3-Book Boxed Set, Volume 1: Web of Evil, Hand of Evil, Cruel Intent

by Jance, J. A.

  In the movies, earth-shattering events happened with the hero stranded on steep, rocky cliffs overlooking roiling seas. Matt had always loved those black-and-white romances from the thirties in which star-crossed lovers would dine together in high-class restaurants where they could say their bittersweet goodbyes, all the while sipping high-toned cocktails or champagne. But Matthew Morrison was no movie-worthy hero. He was just a regular Joe whose downfall had started months earlier in the checkout line at his neighborhood Lowe’s.

  He had gone there after work with Jenny to pick up some gardening supplies and flats of annuals, mostly petunias and snapdragons, for the pots she liked to keep blooming out on the back patio. As they left the store, Matt did what he usually did: He scanned through the receipt. When he spotted the error—an eighty-seven-cent overcharge on the bottle of slug bait—he had turned on his heel and marched back into the store and back to the cash wrap to have the clerk set it right. It was an error; it needed to be fixed.

  As per usual, Jenny was in a hurry. She had been for as long as Matt had known her and for all of the eighteen years they’d been married. She had followed him back into the store, berating him all the way. Despite the long line of strangers at the checkout, she had kept after him the whole time, bitching him out, screeching at him that “only an anal-retentive auditor would waste his precious time and mine for eighty-seven goddamn cents!”

  Matt had prided himself on being a good husband. For the whole time they’d been married, he had been unfailingly faithful to Jenny, even though she’d made it clear from the beginning that no matter what Matt did, he would never measure up to her sainted and mercifully deceased father. Matt liked going to work. Compared to what went on at home, work was peaceful and quiet. He had hired on with the state auditor three years after they married. For fifteen years Matt had kept his nose to the grindstone, doing his important but unheralded work in a quietly efficient manner. It bothered him that when it came time for promotions, he was always pushed aside for someone younger—often someone Matt himself had trained—but he never made a fuss about it. That was something Matthew Morrison didn’t do: make a fuss.

  In all those years and in all situations, he’d kept a mild-mannered smile plastered on his face and done his best to get along. With everyone. Without realizing it, though, he must have been moving ever closer to the edge. And that fateful night, as the clerk counted out Matt’s eighty-seven cents’ worth of change and with the people in line snickering at him behind his back, something had snapped. After emptying the trunk and carrying Jenny’s flats of annuals out to the back patio, he had locked himself in his home office and gone shopping at Singleatheart, a site for “married singles,” which, Matt decided, was what he was.

  A month or so later, he had found Suzie Q, also a married single, separated from her husband, not interested in a divorce, but wanting to put some fun and joy back into her life. That was what Matt wanted, too—some fun in his life, although for him, it wasn’t so much putting it back in as it was having fun for the first time. Ever.

  It hadn’t worked. He had never actually seen Susan Callison, had never, as they say, laid a glove on her. But as of this afternoon, his whole nonaffair with her had blown up in his face. He was convinced that Suzie Q was dead, and he seemed to be the prime suspect. Tomorrow morning the detective would be here at his office. Would that be for questioning, or would it be worse than that? Was Holman planning to place him under arrest? Right there? In the office? With everyone around them looking on? Matt’s insides squirmed at the very idea.

  The janitorial crew swept through the floor. Ignoring Matt completely, they emptied trash cans, vacuumed a little, and then went away. Matt knew what he needed to do, but only when he was left alone once more, only when there was no one left to see, did Matt Morrison reach for his keyboard.

  CHAPTER 10

  In talking to B. Simpson on the phone, Ali had forgotten how tall he was—six feet five, at least. He wasn’t particularly good-looking. His most outstanding feature was a pair of gray-green eyes that seemed to change color depending on the lighting. There was a hint of natural curl in his short brown hair, and the smile he offered was engagingly shy.

  “Can I get you something?” Ali asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I find it’s best not to eat or drink around computers.” Rather than stopping off in the living room, he headed straight for the dining room table, where he deposited the computer bag. “Mind if we set up shop here?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Ali said. “Go ahead.”

  He opened the case and began hauling out two separate laptops as well as a whole series of cables and power cords, which he began connecting.

  “Why so many computers?” Ali asked.

  “Since we have to assume our friend is monitoring your computer at all times, we’ll have to do our own file sharing via cables rather than over the Internet. Oh, and I’ll need your computer.”

  With a nod, Ali went to fetch it. When she came back, she couldn’t help noticing that a subtle hint of aftershave had permeated the room. Good stuff, she thought. I wonder what it is?

  B. took the laptop from her. After removing her air card, he placed it on the table, where he began connecting the computer into what was by then an impressive tangle of computer cables.

  “So here’s the thing,” he continued, talking as he worked. “High Noon has been looking after your system for over three months now. Until today, other than some relatively harmless adware programs and cookies, there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary. The Trojan horse wasn’t there last night during our midnight scan, but it was there today at noon. So I have to ask you the usual clichéd computer troubleshooting question: What were you doing just before that happened? Had you visited any unusual websites, for example, or did you open any attachments this morning, even an attachment from a regular correspondent, from someone you know?”

  “I logged on to something called Singleatheart,” Ali said.

  “What’s that?” B. asked.

  “An Internet dating site,” she replied.

  B. stopped what he was doing long enough to give her an appraising look. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it doesn’t seem to me that you’d have any reason to go looking at one of those.”

  To her consternation, Ali found herself blushing at his unexpected compliment. “Thank you,” she said. “But it wasn’t for me. I was doing it for a friend of mine.”

  That sounded lame, she thought. Totally and completely lame.

  “Right,” he said, then returned to his cables.

  Bob and Edie had left Ali with the impression that B. Simpson was something of a recluse. She wondered if that was true or if it was simply what he wanted people to believe.

  “How much do you know about what goes on in town?” Ali asked.

  “Not very much,” he admitted with a shrug. “I’m more in tune with what’s out there on the Web than I am with what’s going on down the street. Why?”

  “I have a contractor who’s working on my house,” Ali said. “My new house. His wife, Morgan, was murdered earlier this week, and now Bryan’s fallen under suspicion. I learned that his wife had been involved with this Singleatheart website. That made me curious. I logged on because I was trying to find out why a happily married woman would have signed up on a dating service to begin with. The problem is, you can’t go there and look around for free. You have to sign up and log on.”

  To judge from the puzzled look on B.’s face, Ali wasn’t sure he was listening to her. “Did you say Bryan and Morgan?” he asked as though the words had just penetrated his consciousness. “Are you by any chance talking about Bryan Forester and Morgan Deming?”

  Ali didn’t remember hearing Morgan’s maiden name, but clearly, B. Simpson had. “Yes,” Ali said. “Do you know them?”

  “I knew them both,” B. replied after a slight pause. “It was a long time ago, when we were all still in school. I didn’t know they’d gotten married, but that’s ju
st as well. As far as I’m concerned, they deserved each other.”

  So you weren’t exactly friends, Ali thought. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  Again B. didn’t answer right away. “Morgan Deming and Bryan Forester were part of the in crowd,” he said finally. “For all I know, you were, too, so maybe you don’t have any idea how it feels to be ‘out.’ The people who are ‘in’ go through school in a kind of Teflon-coated world. Nothing touches them. They get away with all kinds of outrageous stunts while teachers, parents, and coaches turn a blind eye. Bryan and his best pal, Billy, were the ringleaders of a particularly vicious little gang of thugs. I was still called Bart Simpson when I met them. Once The Simpsons showed up on TV, I turned into one of their favorite targets. Bryan and the other creeps made my life so miserable that as soon as I could, I took the only option available to me at the time. I quit school, went to Seattle, and never looked back. The day I left Sedona was the happiest day of my life. I couldn’t wait to get out of town.”

  “You said Billy,” Ali pointed out. “Which one? Would that happen to be Billy Barnes?”

  B. nodded grimly. “One and the same.”

  “But you’re back here now,” Ali observed. “Are your folks still here?”

  B. shook his head. “My dad died of a heart attack about ten years ago, and my mother went back to Michigan, where she came from originally. She still has family there. So what brought me back to Sedona? For one thing, it’s a beautiful place. I came back because I loved the red rocks, and I missed them. I loved the blue skies, and I missed those, too. I decided that I wasn’t going to let a bunch of school bullies keep me from living wherever I wanted. When I did come back, I did it with a whole pile of cash in my pocket and with the ability to be here on my own terms. By choice, I don’t have much to do with local yokels. I probably have more day-to-day dealings with your parents than with anyone else in town, and that’s pretty much how I like it.”

  “What about Bryan Forester?” Ali asked.

  “What about him?” B. said with a shrug. “I’m sorry to hear his wife is dead. That’s too bad, especially if they had kids. But just because I wouldn’t walk across the street to say hello to Bryan Forester doesn’t mean I wish him ill.”

  Ali hadn’t anticipated that Bryan Forester and B. Simpson would have such a complicated history, but that was what happened in small towns. Inevitably, everyone knew everyone else, for good or ill. Ali would have liked to tell B. about Bryan Forester’s difficulties so she could enlist his help and advice on the two thumb drives. Realizing she had inadvertently poked a stick at a hornet’s nest, though, she quickly backed away from that idea. She’d have to deal with the thumb drives on her own.

  “Unlike you,” she said, “I didn’t know Bryan Forester in high school. From what you said, it sounds like he was a complete jerk back then. But he’s not a jerk now—at least he doesn’t seem like one to me. And he doesn’t seem like a possible killer, either. As for Morgan? Maybe she never grew up. Apparently, she liked living on the wild side, otherwise she wouldn’t have been messing around in places like Singleatheart. But that’s why I went there, to try to find out more about it and see if her being involved in the website might have had something to do with her death.”

  That comment seemed to get B. back to the problem at hand. “So you went to the site and logged on,” he said.

  Ali nodded. “And paid money—a hundred bucks—to do it.”

  “You paid with a credit card?”

  Ali nodded again.

  “That makes sense.” B nodded thoughtfully. “My guess is that someone who works at Singleatheart is capturing the information that comes in to the website and planting the Trojan horse on the computers of people who sign up. That gives him an unending source of information that he can subsequently use in identity theft scams. He may lift money out of an account here or there, or he may use pieces of real names to create what’s called a synthetic identity.”

  “Synthetic identity?” Ali repeated. “How does that work?”

  “The bad guy applies for a credit card under a fictitious name, or else he uses the real name and social security number along with a fake address. That generates a file name and address, as far as the various credit-reporting companies are concerned. Once enough action happens on that name, the guy ends up having a real credit report, which makes him real as far as financial transactions are concerned. It makes him good to go, even though he doesn’t exist. The synthetic identity can then be used to empty people’s bank accounts or run up thousands of dollars in fraudulent credit-card charges.”

  Ali was stunned. “That’s all it takes?”

  “That’s all,” B. said. “People like that are generally cowards. They don’t have guts enough to pick up a gun and go out robbing people face-to-face or holding up banks in person. They’d rather do their stealing second-and thirdhand, hiding behind various virtual camouflages. This is your basic white-collar crime. No blood or guts. That’s why the cops generally aren’t interested.”

  Finished with his cable connections, B. punched a series of commands into one of the keyboards. The computer screens came to life with pictures of files floating first in one direction and then another.

  “Okay,” he explained. “What I’m doing here is making a mirror image of your hard drive on this computer so you’ll have access to all your files. If you don’t want our bad guy seeing everything you’re doing, that one will need to stay off the Internet at all times. We’ll leave his Trojan intact on your old computer. I’m loading what I call my stalking horse into your online banking folder and into your e-mail folder as well. Use that one selectively, enough that it looks like business as usual. That way, if he tries to access any of your recent e-mail activity or your banking or credit-card information with his computer, we’ll be able to infect him. What goes around comes around.”

  “In other words, we’re turning my computer into a mousetrap, and I’m the bait.”

  “Exactly,” B. said.

  “But won’t these extra programs slow down my computer—and his, too?” Ali asked. “Won’t he notice?”

  “Have you noticed any difference?” B. asked.

  “Not so far.”

  “Right. With any luck, he may not notice right away, either. I’m hoping we’ll be able to hack in to his system long enough to get a fix on some of his other connections. Even if he wises up and deletes our program, I’ll have enough details that I’ll be able to track back to him through some of the other people he’s targeted. He’s most likely hiding behind multiple servers and layers of identities that are strung out all over the globe. This isn’t going to happen all at once. It’s going to take time to find him. Unfortunately, finding him will be just the beginning.”

  Ali nodded. “Until we find compelling evidence of some illegal activity, there’s no sense in turning him over to the cops. Which means we have to wait until he rips me off before we can do anything about it.”

  “Not entirely,” B. returned after a moment.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are really two ways of doing this. The one you’ve just mentioned—using your computer as bait and waiting for him to do something illegal—is the long way around. First we have to catch him; then we have to bring the cops in on it in hopes that eventually, the justice system will dish out some kind of punishment.”

  “But we both know that with all the jurisdictional considerations, that’s not likely to happen,” Ali said. “And even if he is convicted, punishment will be minimal. So what’s the other way, a shortcut of some kind?”

  “You could call it that,” B. said. “It comes under the heading of an eye for an eye, and it bypasses the justice system completely.”

  “You’re talking about some kind of vigilante action?”

  B. nodded. “These bad-boy geeks think they’re so smart that no one will ever wise up to them, so instead of hitting him with my Trojan, I’ll nail him with my other secret weapon. Did you ever
watch Voyager or Enterprise or any of those Trekkie series on TV?”

  “I suppose so,” Ali answered. “Why?”

  “Do you remember tractor beams, the things the bad guys used to grab something and drag it back to their mother ship?”

  “I guess.”

  “My pet worm works the same way. I deploy it by putting it on your computer, the one he’s targeted. It sits there until he tries logging on to your system. That carries it into his system, where it’s programmed to do two things—retrieve all his files and shoot them back to us while it’s trashing them on his end.”

  “We end up with his files?” Ali asked. “Is that legal?”

  “Would whatever we retrieved from there be admissible in a court of law?” B. asked. “Probably not. That’s what I meant when I said we’d be bypassing the justice system. But I guarantee you, this is some jerk who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, and when we outwit him, he’s going to be annoyed as hell. It’ll drive him up a wall.”

  “Driving him up a wall sounds about right,” Ali said. “What’s the turnaround time?”

  “Once I install the worm program on your computer, all it takes is for him to try opening one of your infected files. As soon as he does, it’s kerblammo, and his computer system is toast. So it’s up to you. I’m happy to do it either way—fast or slow, through legal channels or not. And until we know we’ve nailed him—I’ll know as soon as the worm is deployed—then you should probably operate on an outside computer.”

  Remembering her father’s gunslinger comment, Ali was glad to have B. and High Noon Enterprises on her side. It didn’t take long for her to make up her mind. “I’m all for instant gratification,” she told him.

  B. grinned at her. “So am I,” he said.

  Once the file transfers were completed, B. began disconnecting his cables and stowing his gear.

  “You’ll let me know as soon as anything happens?” Ali asked.

  “You bet,” he said. “Night or day.”