I sat back in my chair and considered. If he worked in medical billing, then he had access to all kinds of information about patients. Medicare used a patient’s social security number as an identifier, so Wyatt could easily have skimmed those numbers from patient records.
A government investigator could probably determine if all the social security numbers Wyatt had shared were patients of the medical practice where he worked. I might have been able to do the same, but I wasn’t going to break in anywhere to do it.
Maybe I was learning something after all I’d been through. I certainly hoped so.
For now, though, I had a working hypothesis. Wyatt had taken at least one course, if not more, at Liberty Bell University, and somehow he had figured out that he could get money back on a Pell grant. Most likely legally – he was a registered student.
Then he had harvested those numbers and set up a scheme, recruiting other Angels to get extra cash. Did he get a cut for sharing that information? Or was he doing it as part of the brotherhood of the bike?
There was no way to know that without breaking into his bank records, which I wasn’t going to do. Unless their systems were heavily protected and very up to date, I could hack Liberty Bell U’s student records system and cross-reference the list of Levitt’s Angels with their records.
The temptation was so strong and it was hard to resist. Fortunately Rochester must have sensed my dilemma, because he came nosing over to me, pressing his head against my thigh and staring up at me with his big brown eyes.
I shut down the laptop and got on the floor to play with him. We tugged on a rope for a while, and then I tossed a plastic yellow ball for him to retrieve. He did that a couple of times, then settled down with the ball in his mouth, unwilling to return it to me.
That’s when Lili came home. “Some reason why you’re sitting on the floor?” she asked, as she walked in. Rochester immediately gave up on his ball to jump up and greet her.
“I was playing with the dog until he lost interest in me.” I stood up. “How was the talk?”
“He wasn’t a great speaker but he showed some amazing images,” she said. “Have you heard of Eastern State Penitentiary?”
“I’ve heard some of my students refer to at Eastern College as a prison, but otherwise, no.”
“At one time it was the most famous and expensive prison in the world, but now it’s a historic site,” she said. “He took some awesome photographs of the place, really gave you the sense of what it must have been like to be incarcerated there.”
“Forgive me if I’m not that eager to see photos of prisons,” I said.
“I had no idea that’s what he was going to talk about. And I fully understand your lack of interest. But for me, the technical aspects were fascinating and there are things he’s doing that students could incorporate into their own work.”
That was one of the many things I loved about Lili, the way she could get so excited by work in her field, and then be able to learn from it, and translate that learning into something she could use in the classroom.
Wednesday morning I considered driving the motorcycle up to Friar Lake. But my heart wasn’t in it. I’d enjoyed that feeling of freedom, but it wasn’t practical to keep the bike around for the occasional jaunt, and the poker run on Sunday had showed me that long trips were too taxing on my forty-something body.
I was disappointed, too, that I hadn’t gotten more insight into bikers in general and the Levitt’s Angels in particular. It was time to give it up. I called Rick to see if he could meet me that evening at Pennsy Choppers, but my call went to voice mail.
When I got to Friar Lake, my email inbox was filled with resumes and cover letters of applicants for the job of student affairs director. With Rochester sprawled on the floor beside me I began the tedious process of going through each one and making check marks on the grid the committee had come up with.
One of the criteria was a familiarity with the kind of students who attended Eastern. Most of the kids I went to school with, as well as those I taught, were high achievers in high school—valedictorians or the captain of the debate team or editor of the newspaper.
Most of today’s students were unaware of the world at large, cocooned behind our ivied walls, in a way I didn’t think I’d been. They were eager to take advantage of social opportunities and turned out in droves for hip-hop concerts and food truck festivals. But they were less interested in attending speeches by guest lecturers who had been the presidents of war-torn countries or authors of books short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
I kept coming back to Peggy Doyle Landsea as I thought about Eastern and its culture of high achievement. What would have become of Peggy if she’d had the opportunities I had? I was sure there were Eastern alumni in twelve-step programs or scraping by in minimum wage jobs, but they weren’t the ones who wrote in to the notes section of the alumni magazine.
I was out walking Rochester at lunch when Rick texted that he could meet me at Pennsy Choppers that evening at six. I texted him a thanks, and left work at four-thirty so I could drop Rochester at home and then ride the bike over to Levittown. I got there around five-fifteen, and Travis wasn’t surprised that I had brought the bike back.
“At least you’re sharp enough not to buy the bike and then quit,” Travis said. “We get a lot of guys who are all gung ho and then a month later they’re back, whining about how they love the bike but their wife hates it or they have to work too hard and can’t get any time to ride.”
“Not necessarily sharp,” I said. “But I’m never going to be one of those guys who makes fancy moves on the highway.”
“We call them squids,” Travis said. “Then there are the posers, the guys who have to have the latest and shiniest gear, but never actually put any miles on the bike.”
“You have a nickname for guys like Carl Landsea?”
He nodded. “The DIY nutcase. Don’t get me wrong, I work on my own bike, too. But Carl took it to the extreme. He rebuilt his own engine, and he carried this amazing toolkit so he could be ready for anything -- tire blowouts, a gas tank leak, on-the-fly chain tension adjustments.” He shook his head. “Only thing he wasn’t ready for was the issue with his brakes.”
He handed me the paperwork that showed I’d returned the bike, and I walked outside to Rick’s truck.
“I was at the county courthouse for a trial this morning, and while I was there I ran into a guy I know from the Falls Township police,” he said. “I asked him what he thought about the Black Widow case.”
He took a breath. “Here’s the thing. They found Margaret Landsea’s prints on her husband’s bike.”
“That’s not very strong evidence,” I said. “She was his wife. I took Lili out for a ride on the bike on Saturday, so I’m sure her prints are on it. No reason why Peggy couldn’t have gone out for a ride with Carl sometime. Where on the bike were the prints?”
“Don’t know,” Rick said. “But the cops over there in Falls aren’t stupid.”
“Wasn’t the bike messed up in the accident?” I asked.
“You’re determined to prove this woman innocent, aren’t you?” Rick asked.
“It’s more than that. I feel like Rochester when he gets his teeth into a bone. He doesn’t like to let go. I want to know who killed Carl Landsea. I’d hate to find out it was Peggy, but I need to find the answer.”
“You know real police work isn’t like that,” Rick said. “Sometimes you never know the reason behind a crime, or find the person who did it. Sometimes you know who’s guilty but you can’t prove it.”
“That’s the beauty of not being a cop,” I said. “I can push as long as I want.”
16 – Tether to Reality
Rick dropped me at home, and while Lili was upstairs, I opened my hacker laptop and wiggled my fingers. There had to be a way I could make a connection between the social security numbers Wyatt Lisowski had sent Carl, the medical practice where Wyatt worked, and Liberty Bell University.
/> I scanned through every hacker tool I had. Certain ones, like port scanners, which detected vulnerabilities in firewalls, were only useful if I was going to mount an attack, which I most definitely was not going to do. The same was true for Linux rootkits, scanning programs that looked for vulnerabilities in web applications, and intruders, which allowed automated attacks on web applications.
All of those were illegal, and dangerous in the possession of someone who had little self-control. Others were less malicious, like spiders, which automatically crawled and mapped websites; repeaters, which allowed you to test an application yourself; and decoders, which either returned encoded data to its original form, or converted data into coded formats.
None of them, though, suited my purpose, and I was frustrated. Rochester sensed me and tried to get me to pay attention to him, but I pushed him away. “Go see Mama Lili,” I said. “I’m working here.”
He looked at me with mournful eyes. Mama. I remembered MamaHack, one of my friends from the online hacker support group, and how she’d responded to my query about the tingling I felt even when I was looking into legitimate sites. Maybe there’d be something in the group about legitimate ways to find information that might spur something for me.
There wasn’t much in the archive, and the group hadn’t been very active. I guessed some of the members had either gotten over their problems, as I had for the most part, or gotten into more trouble than an online group could handle.
There was one message from a new member, hookmeup18, who had been suspended from his private high school because he had hacked into the school’s database. “I’m sure they’re going to expel me,” he wrote. “And I know I’m being a moron because I need to fucking graduate, and this is the third private school I’ve been to in three years.”
He didn’t have a question, just needed to rant, but I felt obliged to answer him anyway. “Have you considered white hat hacking?” I wrote. “You sound like a smart guy. Study on your own and get your GED and while you’re doing that, sign up for one of the non-degree courses in cyber forensics. See if you can channel your talents into something legit.”
I searched for a couple of programs he could consider, and pasted the links into my message. When I finished, I sat back and thought about what I’d seen. Did I want to sign up for any of those courses myself? Suppose I couldn’t make a success of Friar Lake, and the college president chose to replace me with someone else. What could I do, with my erratic background: technical writing, a bit of college teaching, some fund-raising, and now running a conference center.
And a criminal record, of course. That was going to dog me for the rest of my life.
I envisioned a future with Lili, and I knew that she was growing increasingly worried about her mother, who lived in Miami and was in failing health. We’d talked idly about the possibility of moving down there, if Lili could get a teaching job in the area. I’d never been very enthusiastic, even though I would be happy to leave Pennsylvania winters behind, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to duplicate the job I had at Friar Lake anywhere else.
But IT security? Cyber forensics? That was the kind of thing I could do on my own, and my criminal record for hacking might even be a plus. While I had the time and flexibility, should I sign up for a course or two?
Or would I simply turn what I was learning into a negative, discovering even more ways to snoop around online?
I went back to one of the sites I’d recommended to the kid, and saw a course on how to collect and aggregate data from social media sites. Maybe that would help me learn more about both Wyatt Lisowski and Rita Corcoran.
That sent me into the dark web, where I hunted for a good tool that would collect data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media sites, dump it into a file, and then organize it by relevance to my search terms. I downloaded a couple of them and fiddled with each for a while, finally deciding on one that claimed to scrape data in direct defiance of the terms of service of the different sites.
It wasn’t quite hacking, but it wasn’t a hundred percent legal, either. If I found anything that Hunter ought to see, I’d have to massage the way I acquired it. After all, viewing the information directly through Facebook, for example, wasn’t illegal. It was my shortcut that was questionable.
I set it up to run and went upstairs to hang out with Lili for a while. I recalled my earlier thoughts, and asked, “How’s your mother doing?”
“Same old complaints. It hurts when she stands up. It hurts when she sits down. The lady in the condo below her plays her music too loud. There’s a lot of seaweed on the beach and the management office won’t do anything about it because they say it’s the city’s problem.”
She looked at me. “What brought that up?”
“Just thinking about the future.” I told her about the online courses in cyber forensics I’d recommended to the kid. “If I got myself certified in something like that I’d be a lot more portable. We could move to Florida if you wanted, if you could get a job there that you’d like. And then you’d be close to your mother.”
“That’s awfully sweet of you,” she said. “For right now, she’s doing okay, and Fedi and Sara are close enough in case of emergency.” Lili’s younger brother and his wife and kids lived a few miles inland from Senora Weinstock’s oceanfront condo. “But it’s always good to have flexibility.”
We snuggled together until Rochester came nosing at us, ready for his bedtime walk. I forgot all about the program I’d set up on the hacking laptop to look for information on Wyatt Lisowski, and only noticed the computer was still on when I went to feed Rochester his breakfast the next morning.
The program had saved a huge text file of data, and I copied it to my flash drive. Then I reset the parameters to “Rita Corcoran,” and let it loose. I took the drive with me to Friar Lake, and after spending another morning reviewing cover letters and resumes for the search committee, I was able to take a look at it after lunch.
The data was organized by relevance, starting with references that included both “Wyatt” and “Lisowski.” There weren’t that many of them, and at least half of them came from Facebook posts where Wyatt had been added to a list, usually of those attending a biker event.
Wyatt was either shy or reluctant to have his picture taken, because he only appeared in one of those posts, a group shot of eight Levitt’s Angels with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Wyatt was at one end, with Carl Landsea next to him. Big Diehl was at the far end.
The other guys in the photo matched several of the names I had gleaned from reviewing Carl’s emails. Then I opened up a spreadsheet and started making notes. When were Wyatt and Carl together? Which posts connected to Wyatt’s job, which to the Angels, and which to Liberty Bell University?
I was so caught up in that work that I was surprised when Joey stuck his head in my office door and said, “I’m closing up soon. You sticking around?”
I looked at the clock and realized it was nearly five. “No, I’ll shut down on my end.”
That was the kind of thing that often happened when I delved into analyzing data. An old boss of mine had called it getting into the zone, and he’d even forbidden the receptionist from using the public address system to page any of us, because he was afraid that would disrupt our work.
It was scary to recognize I could get so involved in something that I shut the rest of the world out, but I knew I always had Rochester as my tether to reality.
17 – Passion and Change
That evening Lili and I sat together over a dinner of fettucine alfredo with grilled chicken strips (a couple of which went to Rochester), garlic bread and a nice Pinot Grigio.
“I’m looking forward to taking a lot of pictures at the beach,” she said.
She was wearing another of her strapless sundresses, this one in bright yellow with white polka dots and a swirly skirt. She had teased her hair up into a big bun but a few curls had escaped.
“We say ‘down the shore,�
� you know,” I said. “That’s the real Jersey way.”
“I keep forgetting you were actually born in New Jersey,” she said. “Did you go ‘down the shore’ a lot when you were a kid?”
I nodded. “Almost every summer. We stayed in motels by the beach and I was always either in the pool or the ocean. It’s weird—I would make these great friends of kids who were at the same motel, and it was like having the brothers and sisters I didn’t have, and then the week would be over and I’d never see them again. Today, kids probably immediately friend each other and Instagram everything they do.”
“I might do that myself. It will be great to take pictures for fun. This new Panasonic camera is pretty good, with lots of features I’m still exploring. I’ve been looking at images on line and there’s a boardwalk with all kinds of funky signs, and colorful beach umbrellas and wacky 1950s architecture.”
“You really do love taking pictures, don’t you?”
She looked at me like I had two heads. “Well, duh.”
“I mean, I know photojournalism was your career for years, but now you’re a professor and a department chair. I forget sometimes how much photography means to you.”
“I can’t imagine what I’d be doing if I hadn’t discovered the power of images,” she said. She tucked one of those stray curls back into her bun, and I imagined what fun I could have taking that complicated hairdo down in bed, seeing the curls come wantonly loose.
“Taking pictures carried me through the bad times,” she continued. “When I was unhappy in my marriages or after my divorces, when I didn’t know what else I could do. I feel terrible for your friend Peggy because I know what she’s gone through, and how hard it is to keep starting your life over again.”
“Maybe that’s why she fell into drugs again,” I said. “Because she didn’t have anything left that she felt passionate enough about to use as a life raft.”
Lili cocked her head. “Do you feel that way about hacking?”
Another Three Dogs in a Row Page 51
