“That was a long time ago,” Crockett said, simultaneously impressed and disturbed at the access Fish had gained into his life.
“Show me the scar?”
“Um, no.” The shark had taken a chunk out of Crockett’s left calf muscle. “So why do you bring this up? Just showing off? ”
“Yup. Cracked your home computer in under ten minutes. You need to set up a firewall. Really. And set your Web browser so it deletes your history once a day. Got to say, though, you’re one of the few clients I’ve had who doesn’t surf adult sites.”
Tell that to the authorities.
Crockett was ready to cut to the chase. “You left me a voice mail that you found something about Madelyne Mackenzie?”
“Yep. Crazy stuff. She’s running a genome test on your student. As in analyzing her genetic code.” He began clicking away at his keyboard, then turned back to Crockett. “After you asked me to find out what I could earlier today, I did a little bit of spear phishing. The genome thing is one of the strangest bits I discovered about her.”
Fishing by Fish? What? “How did spear fishing help you discover Mackenzie’s genome project?”
“P-h-i-s-h-i-n-g.” Fish spelled it out as if he were talking to a six-year-old. “Basically, spear phishing is a more sophisticated version of regular phishing. That’s when someone creates a junk e-mail that tricks the person into clicking a link and thereby delivering personal information. It’s clumsy. Spear phishing, on the other hand, is much more elegant. Targeted specifically to the victim. In this case, Mackenzie. She clicked the link, and I was then able to access everything in all her e-mail accounts.”
“You’ve already gone through her e-mails?”
“Scanned, read, and transferred. I put them on another server. I’ll give you the URL and a password so you can access them anytime. Mostly boring crap. But this genome thing. It’s specific to Jaimie Piper.”
“Genome. As in DNA.” This guy was as good as Sarah had promised.
“Exactly. Mackenzie sent a blood sample from Jaimie Piper to a geneticist at the University of Tennessee. Asked for a complete analysis.”
“Weird,” Crockett said. How this information was going to help him he didn’t know, but it had to be part of the bigger picture of his arrest. “How long ago did she send the e-mails?”
“Ongoing for the last six months.”
“Did the e-mails give any reason why Dr. Mackenzie is looking into Jaimie’s DNA?”
“Nope. But for whatever reason, Mackenzie was posing as a guy named Greg Biette, a divorce attorney. She set up an alias e-mail account under that name to feed to her real account. Obviously, she’s trying to keep this secret for some reason.”
Crockett let out a breath. He was starting to feel more comfortable with this Catfish guy. His calm and forthcoming demeanor made Crockett want to trust him. “Strange, looking into Jaimie’s DNA. That alone should mean something. Right?”
“It should, yeah. Given that your doctor friend also hired a genealogist to put together a family history on Jaimie, going back three centuries. Maternal side only.”
“Three centuries? Anything in the e-mails that indicates why?”
“Here’s where it gets really weird. Mackenzie specified for the genealogist to look for witches.” Catfish grinned at Crockett. “Turns out it was a dud. No witches in the girl’s past. But you got to wonder why such an odd and specific request. And there’s more.”
“Spill it …”
“I’m not the only person tracking in her cyberspace.”
Crockett felt himself gaping.
Catfish kept his self-impressed grin in place. “Someone else is tracking Mackenzie’s digital activity. A keystroke logger. It’s a new technique, from Europe. Not many standard virus detectors will find it. But it’s not quite good enough to operate without hogging a bunch of her CPU.”
“Let me get this straight,” Crockett said. “Keystroke logging. As in knowing everything she types.”
“Yes. Someone records every keystroke she makes,” Catfish said, his face staying so earnest it contributed well to his manufactured aura of innocence. “E-mails. Passwords. Web surfing. But it wasn’t done to rip her off. I checked her credit rating. There’s no identity theft. No strange withdrawals or transfers from her bank accounts.”
Crockett said, “You went all those places? You can do those things?”
Fish waved it away like it was nothing. “Easy. Even better, I can remove those pesky anonymous complaints about you from the school-system computers. Oh wait, already did that. Do you think that will mess with the cops? And the people who put them there in the first place? No trace of those complaints. Anywhere.”
Crockett’s mouth was still hanging open as Catfish continued. “On Mackenzie’s computer, I went ahead and set up a backdoor Trojan, which will help me find out who is the other guy tracking her. But in the meantime, you should find this interesting. She’s got a reservation at a hotel in Rome in the next few days. But I can’t find anything showing how she’s going to get there. No airline tickets. Nothing either to show what she plans to do there, or if she’s meeting someone.”
Crockett leaned back in the couch, processing all of this. Italy. Genealogy. DNA. It seemed disconnected, but he knew it wasn’t. A thought cropped up. “What about the results of the genome testing? Has Mackenzie gotten them back?”
“Yup.”
“And?”
“There was an e-mail, but I couldn’t find the attachment; she must have printed it and deleted it. But there’s a way to work around that. A little thing I like to call social engineering. You’re going to have to do it yourself, so let me explain.”
Twenty-Eight
arly Tuesday morning, the sun just up, Crockett swung in his hammock in the backyard of his bungalow, alone except for a ruby-throated hummingbird hovering in front of his feeder. Seconds later, he had true solitude. Hummingbirds didn’t stick around too long. He wondered if that was a metaphor for something.
Normally, he treasured his solitude. The acreage of his backyard was tiny, but there was a palm tree. A charcoal barbecue. The hummingbird feeder. His hammock.
Until the events since Friday night, Crockett had made himself as content as possible, considering the circumstances. He had a decent job that made him feel good about himself. He had an amiable enough relationship with his ex-wife and a continuing hope they might reconcile, and he had a son he loved as much as life. And a neighbor he enjoyed visiting with on occasion.
Now solitude was troubling. First, it reminded him that the neighbor, Nanna, was missing. And that reminder led to a domino effect. He couldn’t escape the thought that all the rest of what he had structured his life upon had collapsed. With little likelihood of resurrection.
Deliberately, he rubbed the scar at the back of his left calf. He was wearing a workout shirt and sweatpants, cut off at the thighs. Normal early morning clothes. He was ready for a run once he put on some shoes.
Crockett didn’t think often about that morning, out in the swells, when some guy, maybe twenty yards away, had gone down, flailing and screaming. Everyone else bailed out of the water; Crockett too. Except bailing felt wrong. Not that he’d analyzed it in the moment, but later he’d realized that what turned him back to save the guy was knowing that, no matter how much he rationalized it, not turning back would have been an act of cowardice so grave it would have haunted him always.
There’d been the brief flurry of news reports, but then it was gone. He never talked about it because there was nothing really to talk about. You live and die. Not too exciting. It wasn’t that Crockett minded simplicity. He really just wanted to be a good dad and a good husband and a good teacher.
Still, he rubbed his leg to remind himself of his moment of bravery. That bright, piercing moment of timelessness, pulling this guy out of the water, the shark bearing down on his board, Crockett striking out with his fist to punch the rough skin of the shark’s nose. The pain that wasn’t pain tha
nks to adrenaline, realizing the shark and the gaping mouth had veered and the teeth had come down on Crockett’s leg. Then nothing to think about except for the hard, hard swim back into safer waters, wondering if the shark would return. Crockett recalled thinking the strangest thing: that the guy he’d rescued had horrible halitosis.
There’d been other occasions when Crockett drew on his survival from the shark attack, reasoning that if he could take on a shark, he could take on anything.
Then Ashley had died.
He’d finally run into something that he was powerless to fight, something worse than a shark attack, something that had weakened and drained him to the point he could barely get out of bed for months.
He rubbed his scar one last time, fighting the urge to get back into bed and lose himself in the enveloping depression that threatened.
Mickey deserved more than that, though. So did Nanna.
So it was time for more bravery, in the form of Catfish’s social engineering.
Crockett had his cell phone in hand. It was a three-hour time difference, but he still wasn’t in a hurry to dial the number. He mentally rehearsed the way the conversation might go, based on advice from Catfish. Finally, he punched the numbers. Only took two rings for an answer.
“Dr. McFarlane here.”
Crockett tried to imagine the man on the other end, in Knoxville, at the University of Tennessee. Lab coat? Round spectacles? What exactly did a genetic scientist look like?
“Dr. McFarlane,” Crockett said with an air of total confidence. “It’s Greg Biette calling. I hope this isn’t too much of an intrusion on your time.”
“Not at all. What can I do for you, Mr. Biette?”
“I trust you recall the DNA analysis project I sent you?”
“Yes. I was hoping to hear back from you.”
“Right. The thing is, I was clickjacked,” Crockett said.
“Clickjacked?”
“Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Essentially, someone stole control of my computer. It could happen to anyone. And trust me, you don’t want it to happen to you. Lost all my data.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Indeed.” Crockett hoped he wasn’t overplaying the academic-guy shtick. “I’m not a computer geek, so I might have some wrong terms here. But what happens is that Web pages will have a concealed link. There will be a set of dummy buttons, and when you click on the visible buttons, you are really clicking on buttons on a hidden page. The short of it is, some malicious hacker installed a bunch of viruses and caused my computer to wipe itself clean.”
“Shocking,” Dr. McFarlane said, clearly buying it. “What do they say? The Internet is the Wild, Wild West all over again.”
Crockett forced a chuckle into his voice. “Good one. Wild, Wild West. WWW. Never heard that before.”
The guy chuckled too.
It was working just as Fish had promised. Social engineering. Access the computer through a person, not a firewall. Get a conversation going, unite the person on the other end against a common foe, make a good emotional connection, and then ask for what you want.
“As you can imagine,” Crockett said, “I’m in the process of rebuilding my computer and files. And I’m a little gun-shy about work e-mails right now. If I give you a brand-new e-mail address, would you mind resending the report to me?”
Crockett expected some difficult questions now, expected he’d have to prove he was Greg Biette. He was armed with all the background info that Catfish had scoured from Madelyne’s e-mails.
“No problem,” Dr. McFarlane said. “Happy to e-mail it again.”
Crockett gave him the Hotmail address that Catfish had set up.
“Mr. Biette,” Dr. McFarlane said when Crockett was finished, “I know you mentioned in an e-mail that you weren’t interested in sharing where you got Ms. Piper’s DNA sample, but now that we’re on the phone, I feel it’s important to try again to learn more. The genetic aberration might seem minor, but it doesn’t take much to make a difference. Nothing about the gene sequence gives any hint of what actions the code dictates. Can you at least let me know if it’s disease related? I’d really, really like to know how the DNA change is manifested.”
“Manifested?”
“Yes. In other words, which actions and physical changes result from the code difference. I mean, something like this could be huge from a research point of view.”
Huge? Crockett wanted to ask how huge, but didn’t know whether the fictional Greg Biette should already know.
“Here’s my promise,” Crockett said, choosing the cryptic route. “When it’s all right to share the information, you’ll be the first to know.”
McFarlane seemed satisfied, and after they said their good-byes, Crockett hung up the phone, feeling he knew less than before he’d called.
Huge? What in Jaimie’s genetic makeup had marked her in such a way that a genetic scientist would declare it huge? She’d always seemed like an average messed-up girl to Crockett.
Maybe he’d learn something from Agnes Murdoch, the foster parent Brad told him about, the woman who’d had Jaimie the longest. But first things first. Now that he’d done all he could at the moment to learn more about Dr. Mackenzie and Jaimie’s mystery genes, he had to do what he could to take care of Nanna.
Twenty-Nine
rockett had been to plenty of police stations before. Aside from his recent adventure with the Santa Monica police force, he’d spent time at police stations because of his ABC kids. Typically, he was meeting parents there because the kid had done something wrong. Or worse, and tragically more often, he was meeting kids there because their parents had done something wrong.
He especially recognized the smell. To Crockett, it was like old cheese. Too many hormones and pheromones and the rest of the catalog of “mones” emitted through sweat of predators and prey, hookers and johns, victims and victimizers, emitted through the sweat of the cops themselves, who were sometimes predators and johns and victimizers themselves, decades of a stew of sweat in confined quarters with not enough ventilation.
He also knew to expect the tired cynicism on the other side of the counter.
“Let me get this straight,” said the irritated receptionist. She was young, black, in uniform, and probably felt like she was twenty hours into an eight-hour shift. She was doing her best not to stare at the mess of Crockett’s face. “You want to check if a missing person report is on file, but you need a homicide detective to help you.”
“Not any homicide detective. Pamela Li.” He was tired enough not to hide his crankiness. “And tell her it’s Crockett Grey.”
“Your face,” she said, blatantly ignoring Crockett’s request. “I got even money you deserved it.”
Crockett couldn’t help a snort of laughter. “Deserve is a complicated word. Look, sorry if it sounded like I was trying to push you around. The lady missing is my neighbor. She’s old. She makes me cookies. I cut her lawn. I’m afraid for her. And I want the best for her.”
“I liked pushy better. Easier to say no to.” She gave a theatrical sigh and picked up the phone. “You’re going to want to hope Li likes you. ’Cause when she gets it into her head she doesn’t like you, it’s no fun. Trust me.”
“I’m not impressed with this little game you’re playing,” Pamela said, refusing to come around the counter as she faced Crockett. “And no, I’m not discussing this with you.”
“Just tell me you’re looking for Nanna,” Crockett said, trying to keep his cool.
Young and Black and Tired leaned on her elbows on the counter. “Detective, the missing lady is his neighbor. Old lady. Makes him cookies. He cuts her lawn. Can’t we … you … help him out?”
“The guy in front of you is also an accused pedophile,” Pamela snapped. “He’s out on bail. With an order not to get within a hundred yards of a playground. His little game is that he’s here to pretend he wants his neighbor found.”
Young and Black and Tired lost her smile. “Sorry
I called you down. How about I deal with this?”
“No,” Pamela told her subordinate. “You made the right decision calling me. Gives me an insight into this creep.”
Pamela turned to Crockett.
“Is this some kind of bluff?” Pamela said.
“Nanna’s gone, Detective. I’ve been feeding her cats. She never leaves unless she’s arranged that, either with me or a pet service.”
Pamela let out a sardonic laugh. “I know what you’re trying to do, Grey. Set up some sort of conspiracy thing. You’re innocent. Somebody is doing all this to you.”
“I was set up. Look a little farther than the dish someone served up on a tray for you.”
“I don’t do missing persons anyway. What I do is try to find out why people died in a fire. And your face is dead center on the whodunit dartboard.”
“See?” Crockett said. “That’s why you’re the person to find Nanna. You’re a bulldog.”
“You’re right about that,” Pamela said. She turned on her heel to leave.
“Please,” Crockett begged, turning his tone soft. “I get it. You think I’m scum, but please don’t punish Nanna for it. Tell me at least. Is there anyone out there looking for her?”
“She’s a person of interest.”
“That’s it? No missing person search? She’s in her eighties.”
“And, from what her son in St. Louis said, she’s very spry and independent and prone to going on short trips without telling him. And if she was as close a friend to you as you say, and if she really was as helpful with Ms. Piper as you claim, seems she’d have saved one of her random jaunts for another time. When there wasn’t the possibility of a scandal at your door.”
That was one way to look at it. He had to keep trying. “Can you at least check to see if her credit card has been used?”
The Canary List: A Novel Page 11
