The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2)

by Ron Franscell

  “Sorry,” Morgan said. “It happens.”

  Without a word, Grady Stillwell pedaled off down empty Buford Street. He was high-tech wetware — geek-slang for the human brain and nervous system, and the only real bit of computer lingo Morgan understood — in a low-tech town.

  Morgan’s life had dissolved into vapors, and he was risking the feeble remnants of his career and reputation - hell, his life — on a thirteen-year-old vapor-pirate.

  Rachel Morgan remained a shadow.

  Nearly a full day since she disappeared into thin air, the Perry County Sheriff’s Office still had no news either about her or her abductor. No ransom notes, no tips and no corpse. Law enforcement agencies in three states were watching for her, but it was as if she had crossed the electronic borders of Laurel Gardens and melted into the vast, enigmatic Wyoming landscape.

  Dr. Shawn Cowper was still suspended in the twilight between living and dying. Trey Kerrigan had posted a guard outside his hospital room, not because he worried the professor would escape, but because of the real possibility he was being targeted by killers with unfinished business.

  Claire and Colter were safely concealed far away, in the next county, without an address or a telephone. They had survived a dangerous night and when they awoke, a deputy would deliver Morgan’s only message that morning: I am safe. I love you both.

  But before he hung up, the deputy shared another troubling bit of news, another invisible shadow.

  Nobody had seen Carter McWayne in almost twenty-four hours, since the morning after the fire reduced his mortuary to ashes. A state arson investigator interviewed him at his home shortly after six a.m., but when he returned with some follow-up questions three hours later, the mortician had vanished.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The kid was good.

  Instead of a computer kit that looked like the product of a cybersex affair between Bill Gates and Mrs. Goodwrench, thirteen-year-old Grady Stillwell carried only a Leatherman tool — he called it his “geek toolbox” — and a bootable CD with all his disinfectant software in his backpack. Hackers traveled light.

  He settled into Morgan’s squeaky chair, this slight kid whose feet barely touched the floor, and got to work.

  As Morgan watched the kid navigate The Bullet’s computers, it occurred to him that he had invited a fox into the henhouse. But he had a feeling that if this young ether-ninja wanted to be inside the newspaper’s computers, he didn’t need to be sitting in Morgan’s chair.

  Up to his elbows in DOS prompts, Grady was in his country. He wasn’t big on conversation, but Morgan wasn’t sure if it was the nature of computer geeks, kids in general, or a little boy who’d grown up straining to hear what anybody said to him and just finally drifted away from human sounds altogether.

  “Finding anything?” Morgan asked him.

  “Uh, the usual stuff. A couple little, like, Klez worms, and I fixed a couple back doors you left wide open.”

  “Kill ‘em?”

  “Oh yeah. Dead. You’re virgin again.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “E-mail usually.”

  “Yeah, I got a strange e-mail last night. It supposedly came from somebody I know, but they didn’t really send it. Is that possible? I mean, maybe it had a virus, huh?

  “Yeah. Easy.”

  “Probably not a way to figure out where it really came from though, huh? Somebody like that, well, he’s probably a pretty smart guy.”

  Morgan hoped Grady couldn’t resist the temptation to show how much smarter he was than some moronic e-mail ghost. And he was right: Grady’s eyes brightened at the challenge.

  “Local server?”

  “Yeah, BarbedWire.com.”

  “Not so smart. There’s a back door.”

  “Show me.”

  Grady inserted his CD, punched a few keys and, in a matter of seconds, was inside BarbedWire.com’s main e-mail server. He’d clearly been there before. A few more seconds, and he’d found the only local file to arrive in Morgan’s box in the past twelve hours, the mysterious e-mail from a Shawn Cowper impostor.

  “That’s it,” Morgan said, putting his finger on the screen over Cowper’s name. “How’d you do that?”

  “Magic,” the kid said. “And lazy admins. This guy uses Telnet to log-in as root, so I just set up a sniffer and nabbed his password. Cake. I go there all the time. It’s fun to see what people are talking about. Mail servers are easy.”

  Morgan studied the hash of codes and words on the screen. They meant as much to him as Grady’s geek-speak.

  “So if it didn’t really come from Shawn Cowper, can you find out who sent it?”

  Grady pursed his thin lips and rubbed an invisible spot on his jeans. He suddenly seemed nervous.

  “What’s wrong?” Morgan asked.

  Grady shrugged.

  It was all wrong, Morgan knew. Grady now knew it, too. What he might do in the dark seclusion of his own room on his own computer when nobody was watching was one thing. Acting it out for someone else was more daunting. A joy ride through cyberspace was harmless, but even Morgan knew a deliberate backdoor assault was sounding more ominous to the seventh-grader, whose only security so far had been in his obscurity.

  Morgan surrendered his charade. He looked around the mostly empty newsroom and pulled a chair up close.

  “Grady, some bad things have happened. People have been hurt. I need your help. I know about the City Hall computer and the e-mail to the mayor. But I’m not a cop. I’m not gonna bust you or narc on you. I know you’re a good kid, a smart kid, and I’m sure there’s a way we can work it out. Maybe you can volunteer for some computer work down at City Hall. Payback, you know? They don’t have to know. But right now, I need your help. It might save somebody’s life.”

  Grady said nothing. He kept his head down, his magical, skinny fingers tracing uneasy, pointless circles on his trousers. Suddenly, he was just a kid again. A scared kid.

  And Morgan had morphed into a father.

  “Grady,” Morgan said, leaning closer to the boy, “if you can’t do it, it’s okay. I understand. I won’t say anything.”

  Grady tried to hide the tears welling up in his eyes, but couldn’t. They trickled down his smooth cheek.

  “My dad would kill me,” he said softly.

  Morgan knew the fear a son had for his father. And the respect. Especially when little-boy secrets might be exposed. He put his hand on Grady’s trembling shoulder.

  “Look, Grady, I … We don’t need to do this.”

  But Grady wiped his eyes and sat up straight in the chair.

  “It’s okay. I can do it. But not here. I need my stuff.”

  “You sure?” Morgan asked.

  “I don’t want anybody else to die,” the scared little boy not-so-deep inside the hacker said. “I miss my mom … “

  Except for the dirty underwear on the floor, Grady Stillwell’s tiny bedroom was more like a wired prison cell than the place where a little boy slept and dreamed.

  Where Morgan had tacked posters of Farrah Fawcett, Barbarella, Bob Dylan and “Easy Rider” in his room, Grady’s walls were plain and empty. No model airplanes, no anime posters, no Star Wars or Star Trek action figures. The room’s single window, facing the shady north side of the house, was made even darker by an ordinary white pull-down shade.

  It was a cave with four white walls, an unmade bed and a machine.

  In the far corner of the room, on a rudimentary but sturdy table, sat an oversized flat monitor, a scanner, printer, and a few computer modules laced together by a web of power and audio cords. A prodigious stack of home-burned CDs — games, music and software Morgan didn’t recognize — were stacked neatly in a metal stand.

  A red KROK-FM sweatshirt was draped on the arm of an overstuffed leather office chair, plusher than Morgan’s ass had ever known in more than 25 years in newsrooms and probably costing more than almost any other piece of furniture in Speed Stillwell’s frowzy little house. No d
esk lamp, no phone, no photographs — only three empty Mountain Dew cans. More were stashed in a black plastic trash bag on the floor.

  It was as if Grady’s personal tastes in clothing and accessories — and probably religion and social status, too, Morgan figured — held a much maligned priority in his online world. He staked everything on his skills in the cyber world, where he was esteemed for different talents than the jocks or the skaters in his school. Grady’s computer was his great equalizer, and he had built it with his own hands.

  Going online for the first time is not unlike being born: you start naked and alone. But as you mature, so do your experiences and knowledge — and avatars. Grady could fashion himself as a D-Day survivor as easily as he could cloak himself as an Oklahoma City librarian with a slutty streak.

  To Grady, worrying about how anyone looked on the outside was something only the uninformed did. It was a game he’d always lose, so he elected not to play. Online, he was more. Better. Smarter.

  Free.

  To Grady, it was more important to have a good chair than a good bed. Better to be a mountain in an artificial world of electrons than a shadow in the messier one he inhabited outside this room.

  And this assembly of silicon and sparks on the table before them was the equalizing gateway through which Grady Stillwell passed.

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” Morgan asked.

  “Here and there. My dad gave me the money,” he said. “I help him when he’s, like, gone and stuff.”

  “With your brother and sisters?”

  “I guess. Whatever.”

  “I’m sure he is grateful.”

  Grady smiled nervously and turned away.

  “You’re not gonna tell him, are you? About the mayor guy?”

  Morgan shook his head.

  “And the radio station?”

  Morgan was startled.

  “What about the radio station?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Too late,” Morgan scolded him gently. “What did you do to the radio station?”

  “Well, uh, I phreaked.”

  “Got scared? Why”

  “No, dude. Phreaking is like breaking into the phone system. I just busted into the Wyoming Power & Light PBX and, when the radio guys have a contest and stuff, I just flood the switchboard with calls, see? Right before the contest, the deejay usually puts a hold on all the lines into the station so my computer goes to active wait. And so when he takes off the hold, I send about forty calls to his phone. They’re all me. Cool, huh?”

  “So you win every time.”

  Grady just smiled, his face as bright as his braces.

  “And the other thing I didn’t tell you about before. Where I scrambled up their programming computer and stuff. That was a kick.”

  “You did that?”

  Grady smiled even bigger.

  “Okay, I promised I wasn’t gonna bust you, but it really wouldn’t be a good idea for you to do it again,” Morgan said sternly. “It’s just not right.”

  “So you won’t tell my dad?”

  “No, Grady. I won’t tell. But maybe you and I can make it right. He doesn’t have to know. Nobody does.”

  “Thanks.”

  Grady sat down in his extraordinary chair and began to tap his keyboard. In a few moments, he was back inside BarbedWire.com’s e-mail server. Morgan watched closely, but he couldn’t follow the alternating screens and rapid-fire commands that flew from Grady’s fingers.

  In less than four minutes, he had an answer: Cowper’s putative e-mail had been sent, in fact, from another server.

  “What was it?” Morgan asked, a little impatient.

  Grady punched a few more keys.

  “Oh dude!”

  “What?”

  Grady giggled, partly out of a sense of accomplishment, partly out of a teen-age boy’s scatological sense of humor. He couldn’t say it out loud, so he just pointed.

  Morgan squinted.

  “TittiesofDeath.com? What the …”

  Grady started to type the web address, but the father in Morgan leapt out again. “Hold on. Better let me do this, just in case …”

  “I’ve seen ‘em before.”

  “This site?”

  “No,” Grady said, rolling his eyes. “You know. Them.”

  Morgan was mildly embarrassed. About discussing breasts with a teen-age boy. About his technical inferiority. About contributing to the delinquency of a minor. About not being able to speak English to a kid, for God’s sake.

  “Yeah, well, maybe. This is … you’re just a … your dad would kill me.”

  “I’ve seen lots worse, dude,” Grady smirked.

  In fact, he probably hadn’t.

  The home page for TittiesofDeath.com promised the best necrophilia and slab photos on the Web — for $39.95 a month. For about the same cost as cable TV, perverts on the farthest edge of sanity could get their still-living rocks off on pictures of dead women, and worse.

  “Dead end,” Morgan said. “Literally.”

  “Maybe not,” said Grady. “There’s always a back door to, like, get inside without paying. Easy. Watch.”

  Morgan and Grady traded places again. The kid found an open proxy server and ran an exploit. Within seconds, he was inside an electronic chamber of horrors. On the Chicago cop beat, Morgan had watched autopsies, seen faces peeled back from skulls, observed medical examiners probing knife and bullet wounds with their fingers, even and witnessed the reconstruction of dismembered children as each piece of meat and bone was laid in its approximate living position. He’d come to be able to laugh at the gallows humor in morgues, and hold a conversation about a Cubs double-header over a corpse. He had eaten dinner after visiting a triple murder scene, had never cried about a stranger’s death, and had only puked once.

  Early on, he learned not to look into the eyes. It was as if the eyes tripped the shutter of his mind’s camera, and the image would be burned in his memory forever, a grotesque snapshot he didn’t want to see again, ever.

  He wasn’t callous or pitiless about the dead. Nor was he comfortable with them. He’d simply believed that although it was among the most personal, intimate acts in a human’s life, death initiated certain protocols among the living, such as continuing with life.

  But this web site took it too far. Various pages featured sex scenes with cadavers, nude and lewdly posed corpses of young women on stainless steel mortuary tables, extraordinarily grisly crime-and accident-scene pictures, and the fleshy, contorted mess found at dozens of suicides.

  Although Internet necrophilia salon featured necro-porn, cannibalism, a tribute to Jeffrey Dahmer, torture, snuff videos and mock-murder, TittiesofDeath.com carried its own uniquely pleasant disclaimer:

  “This site promotes healthy illustrations of sexual intimacy in a loving relationship by exploring fetishes and fantasies that can keep intimacy alive through understanding and accepting private sexual feelings for the dead as being part of who you are, dead or alive.”

  “Who’d pay for this shit?” Morgan blurted.

  A few more key strokes, a couple administrative screens, and Grady pulled up a list of 2,587 paying customers. Morgan did the math in his head: If each one paid $39.95, that was more than $100,000. In one month. In the anonymous world of online fetishes, death had become a profitable commodity.

  The exploitation sickened Morgan more than the stink or the decay of any human carcass.

  “Where does this originate, Grady?” he asked.

  Grady’s little fingers flew. Using Traceroute, he found the IP address, which he ran through something called arin.net, which cheerily revealed that the server was in Winchester, Wyoming.

  Morgan was startled.

  “So can we tell who runs it or who wrote the e-mail I got last night?” he asked, trying to control his breathing.

  Grady smirked again, clicked his mouse a couple times, then set loose his password sniffer. Within a few minutes, he had the code name of the server’s
administrator: Horus.

  “Isn’t he the Egyptian god of death?” Morgan asked.

  “Uh, actually, no,” Grady responded smugly. “Horus was the son of Isis. She got like pregnant with, uh you know, the spunkum from a dead guy. That’s like, whoa.”

  How quaint, Morgan thought, an erudite pornographer.

  “How on earth do you know that? Surely they don’t talk about spunkum in school.”

  “Pffft. Nope. He’s a good guy in this cool online game I play, called Pharaoh. God of the sky and stuff.”

  “Okay, so this Horus” — Morgan tapped the screen — “he runs a porn site. What do we know about that e-mail?”

  Grady flipped to a new screen, typed some codes, and a ledger of Horus’s e-mail transmissions appeared. Many were from customers, but a few were not.

  “Does he know we’re snooping in here?” Morgan wondered.

  “No. I daisy-chained like three different servers. If this guy had any magic, he’d think somebody from the University of Perth was hitting him up.”

  “Australia?”

  “Yeah. Cool, huh? I’d like to go to college there and stuff. But this guy’s like a poseur. He knows some stuff, but not as much as me.”

  “So if a hacker can use different servers anywhere in the world, how do we know if this guy sent that e-mail to me last might?”

  Grady plunged into his hard drive for something new and then turned back to the screen and ran through a complicated sequence of codes Morgan couldn’t follow. He was completely lost.

  Finally, he ran his finger down a screen full of encrypted data. It was incomprehensible … but not for long.

  Suddenly, the characters on the screen transmuted into plain text and made sense.

  “Horus logged onto the barbed wire.com server at one-forty-nine a.m.,” Grady read. “He created a new screen name for shawn-dot-cowper at one-fifty-eight. He composed an e-mail and sent it at two-oh-four. He deleted the screen name at two-oh-six and slipped out the back door.”