Black Beast: A Hard Boiled Murder Mystery (A Detective Bobby Mac Thriller Book 1)

by R. S. Guthrie

  “I do,” I told him.

  Burke was forever buying me drinks. I would leave to use the head, or to say hello to someone familiar, and return to a fresh glass—sometimes residing beside another fresh glass I had yet to dive into.

  “What are you thinking about the case?” he said, nursing a Budweiser—the worst beer ever brewed.

  “No shop talk,” I said. “That’s Rule One.”

  “Screw Rule One,” he said. “I can’t think of anything more interesting to talk about.”

  “What I think is that those two dope dealers skimmed from the wrong supplier.”

  “And you know as well as I do who that supplier would be,” he said.

  “No great leap, I suppose.”

  “And that doesn’t intrigue you. After your conversation with the dearly departed?”

  “Not really,” I said. It was a lie, and Burke knew it.

  “Have you thought any more about Dan Wells?”

  “I’ve thought of practically nothing else,” I said.

  “And?”

  “I remember he was trying to get his kid into some private school.”

  “Private school equals private tuition,” Burke said.

  “It still doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Besides, this was twelve years ago.”

  “So you figure Durning called you up to the prison for nothing? He was just winterizing the pipes before the long trip?”

  “So he had a theory,” I said. “Big deal.”

  “One he thought important enough to share with you the day of his execution.”

  “Yeah.”

  I finished my bourbon and signaled the bartender.

  “Arliss Jackson was a gangbanger,” I said. “He was high on coke, had just murdered a shopkeeper—why wouldn’t he fire at the police?”

  “Didn’t have to be a conspiracy, is what you’re saying.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Not one to kill your partner anyway,” Burke said.

  “What?”

  “There was the owner of the store,” he said.

  “They checked her out. Went through the business with a microscope. Talked with her husband. They didn’t even know who Arliss Jackson was. Doubtful he was shaking them down.”

  “Maybe she knew him from somewhere else.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Eb Durning seemed to think so.”

  “Not the most reliable source of information,” I said.

  “True,” Burke said, and excused himself. While he was up I bought him another Budweiser.

  “So how’re things with the missus?” he said when he got back. “And thanks for the beer.”

  “You’re welcome. And the missus wants nothing to do with being a missus. You’re well aware.”

  “I am,” he said. “But there’s always hope.”

  “I had this thought,” I said.

  “About marriage?”

  “No, about the case.”

  “I still want to talk about the missus,” Burke said. “She’s prettier than me.”

  “Everyone’s prettier than you.”

  “Then back to the case.”

  “Who was the guy—couple years ago—the IA guy who tried to nail a whole bunch of cops on the take.”

  “Valero,” Burke said. “I have a knack for recollecting rats.”

  “So maybe this guy’s still around.”

  “He’s around. IA rat squad, they’re like vampires. Only those fuckers love the sunlight.”

  “Limelight,” I said.

  “Give me a break; I was making a vampire analogy. You aren’t seriously considering having a sit down with IA are you?”

  “Why not?”

  “For the ante, you aren’t careful, you’ll get yourself ostracized. And me with you.”

  “A risk I’m willing to take,” I said.

  “Thank you for the consideration,” Burke said, and took a long pull on his beer.

  “Next objection?”

  “You really want to try and dig up dirt on your old partner? You know, the dead one.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said.

  “Wow. Not much respect for the dead. Remind me to write you out of my own particulars.”

  I thought about it for a moment. Burke was right. If Danny Wells was on the take, there wasn’t much I could do about it now. Assuming the worst, IA didn’t have enough on him in the day. His wife was getting all the benefits she deserved.

  If Danny was on the take and IA never knew about it, I could be fueling a locomotive that wouldn’t stop until Laurel Wells had to pay back every cent of the money she’d received, including funeral expenses.

  Probability said he was completely clean. This is what I believed.

  Or did I? There was still something that eluded me.

  “Danny was either clean or he wasn’t, right?” I said.

  “A solid observation,” said Burke.

  “If he was dirty, IA would’ve known about it. In all likelihood.”

  “Probably.”

  “So if they didn’t go for his badge and pension then, it means they didn’t have enough. It’s not like I’m going to give them anything new,” I said.

  “You’re rationalizing,” Burke said. “Those bastards down there in the rodent pen got nothing better to do than harass a widow and you know it.”

  “Maybe there’s another way to get the information,” I said.

  “Another way?”

  “The indirect route,” I said with a smile.

  “Shit,” said Burke.

  Duncan Rand is twenty-something now, but I’ve worked with him on a contingency basis since he was a child. I met him on the first case I caught in Vice, as a fresh, wet-behind-the-ears detective.

  Back in the late nineties, there was no Computer Crime Division; Al Gore had just unleashed the Internet on us ordinary folk and for many years, we were the sheep being led to the hackers’ slaughterhouses.

  Duncan had been building computers in his basement since he could read, which was likely around the age most of us learn to speak. He tested out for a GED when he was nine, achieving a perfect score on the test. He then completed his undergraduate degree in computer science at MIT, taking just two years to accomplish it.

  The Rands had money, however, and Duncan’s social skills were, to put it mildly, inept. It was actually a miracle the boy attended college for six semesters (although as I understood it, he rarely left his one-bunk dorm room except for lab time—and even then, many professors excused him from the more rudimentary ones).

  In 1998, Duncan first came on the DPD radar when he hacked our public facing website. He changed the front page to one with a “Girls Gone Wild” flavor. Naked female cops. Most of the officers and detectives I knew thought the stunt was pretty hilarious, but the brass would never tolerate anything that made the department look like a bunch of spider monkeys descending on a pile of bug droppings.

  So Vice got the case.

  It only took us two days to find Duncan, but it wasn’t because of the department’s technical prowess. It was because the kid couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

  We banked on that fact.

  Literally.

  DPD put out a $1000 reward for anyone who could lead us to the cyber-vandal. It took exactly 36 hours for us to get the golden call. When we arrested Duncan, he was in his locked bedroom, buried in a bag of Doritos, and completely nonplussed.

  His parents, however, were understandably shaken. The District Attorney worked out a slap on the wrist which included Duncan restoring the original web page and doing a few upgrades, free of charge.

  It was a win-win.

  A month later I had a laptop from a money laundering case and approached Duncan, asking for his help cracking the disk encryption on the machine. I never did sign him up officially—the few times the department used him, the cases were low profile, mostly-white collar crime.

  Besides, the kid only wanted junk food in return.


  I knocked on the door to the Rand guesthouse where Duncan now lived. He opened the door and a cloud of white cannabis smoke blew forth, as if an Indian were sending war signals.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me, Duncan.”

  “Detective Mac!” he said. “Sorry, it’s my latest vice.”

  “I’m a cop, young man.”

  “Call next time,” he said, cramming half a candy bar in his mouth.

  “Fair enough. You mind having a walk with me? I can’t return to the station smelling like Willie Nelson.”

  “Sure,” he said. “You have something for me?”

  “Not something easy,” I said.

  “Au contraire,” Duncan said, crushing nougat, nuts, and chocolate in his molars, mouth open for the world to see. “There is not hard and easy, there is only DO.”

  “I think you got that one a little mixed up.”

  “My own interpretation. Tell me more.”

  “You know anything about the internal DPD computer system?”

  “I choose not to answer that question on the basis it might really get me in trouble,” he said, looking about my person for a microphone.

  “I’m not wired, Duncan. I thought you knew me better than that.”

  “It’s been a few years,” he said.

  “Do you?” I said.

  “Let’s just say, hypothetically, that a lot of times when a hacker defaces a website, it may also be a kind of diversion.”

  “Diversion?”

  “You know, while he interrogates the perimeter of the system.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Looking for entry points,” he said.

  “I get it.”

  “It’s called reconnaissance,” he said.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Allegedly.”

  “Would that reconnaissance have included—hypothetically speaking—the computers of the Internal Affairs Division?” I said.

  “Shit, Detective.”

  “Yeah, I know. I hesitate to bring this to you.”

  “I hesitate to have it brought.”

  “Duncan, you haven’t even heard my request.”

  “IA is like the League of Justice for cops,” he said. “Sorry, Detective. I love a hack as much as the next guy—but I can’t believe you are even considering this.”

  “Is it really that difficult? Because I don’t want to give you stress.”

  “Difficult?”

  “Yeah, you know. IA, well, they’re some smart sons a bitches. If you think the risk is that their system is too sophisticated, I get it. Of course I wouldn’t want to risk…”

  “Sophisticated. Did you just say sophisticated to me concerning a police department computer system? It’s not like you guys are NSA.”

  “I’m just thinking of your best interest, Duncan.”

  “Internal Affairs, huh?”

  “I just need information,” I said.

  “No kidding,” said Duncan Rand. “I thought you might actually want me to walk out with the hard drives and everything.”

  “Just the bits and bytes,” I said.

  “Actually, the DPD firewall is pretty well-kept,” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Up to date. No visible holes, last time I checked.”

  “The last time…”

  “Yep.”

  “Which would have been when?” I said.

  “You don’t want to know. Let’s just say I was anticipating your need.”

  “We haven’t spoken in over a year,” I said.

  “I need internal access,” Duncan said. “You need to get me inside the building.”

  “How far inside?”

  “IA is downtown, right? Eleventh floor? The whole department went wireless a couple years back. If you can get me somewhere on the eleventh, that’s best. Up or down one flight probably works, too,” said Duncan. “It’s all going to depend on the concrete thickness, shielding, etcetera.”

  “How much time do you need?” I said.

  “You haven’t identified the prize yet.”

  “Records,” I told him.

  “What kind of records,” he asked.

  “I need you to tell me if there are any investigations on a particular officer.”

  “And if there are?” he said, anticipating my next need.

  “Then I need the information. Everything they’ve got.”

  “An hour. Maybe two,” Duncan said.

  “You’ll have one,” I said.

  I drove Duncan downtown, to the DPD Headquarters building. It wasn’t possible for me to get him on the eleventh floor because Internal Affairs Division occupied all of that. I wouldn’t have known how to explain my own presence there, much less a chubby hacker, laptop in tow.

  The twelfth floor was all brass. However, the tenth floor was a solid possibility. There were several interview rooms on the tenth that were there for miscellaneous needs—in particular, wayward cops that needed a room close to downtown.

  IAD never used them that I knew of. That’s why they occupied the one entire floor.

  No outsiders, no observers.

  Duncan and I rode the elevator to the tenth floor. All the interview rooms were empty, as I’d hoped. Payroll is on the tenth floor, and I’ve been down there on several occasions—I’ve rarely seen an interview room in use.

  I entered my information on the electronic pad outside the room. As far as I knew, the pad was not connected to anything and would not permanently store any of the info—it was strictly so that arriving personnel would know which interview room contained whom.

  I used a false name for Duncan, identifying him as an informant. If anyone asked, I planned to tell them I picked him up downtown and did not have time to run him to my station.

  Once in the room, I turned off external observation, throwing a switch that clouded the one-way glass. I also made sure the camera and recorder were off.

  Duncan booted his laptop and checked the Wi-Fi networks.

  “It’s not advertised,” Duncan said, and opened a program called NetStumbler. “Give me a sec.”

  I waited.

  “Got you,” he said.

  “You’re in?”

  “Not yet, but I found the IA network. Good solid signal.”

  “Great,” I said nervously. This seemed less and less like a good idea as each minute passed.

  “Weak encryption,” he said. “Probably not too worried, being on the eleventh floor of the Headquarters building.”

  “I could do without the narrative,” I said.

  “I’m connected,” Duncan said a few minutes later. “I’m going after the default administrator login. If they haven’t changed the account name, I can get to work cracking the password.”

  “Silently. Do it silently,” I said.

  A few minutes later, Duncan was all over the IA servers. He had just found a shared drive that contained all investigations, active and expired, when there was a loud knock on the interview room door.

  My heart redlined.

  I was a shitty liar.

  I got up, composed myself, and opened the door—expecting to see an IAD detective flashing his or her badge in my face, cuffs in the other hand.

  Imagine my delight to see a perky administrative assistant, smiling like she’d won the lottery.

  “We’re making a run for sandwiches, sweets. Y’all hungry in here?”

  I was preparing to thank her anyway when Duncan beat me to it:

  “A large meatball,” he said, raising his hand as if he was in class and had a question. “Hold everything but all the peppers they’ve got in the house, darlin’!”

  “Extra peppers,” the petite southern belle exclaimed, writing down the hacker’s order. Duncan never stopped mousing or typing.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Aw, c’mon, Detective…” she looked at the electronic pad. “…Macaulay. You know when the food shows up, y’all are gonna be sorry.”

  “Turkey on rye,” I
told her. I decided to go the easy route.

  “You got it,” she said and spun around, moving to the next room down the hallway. She called back over her shoulder:

  “Thirty minutes.”

  I smacked Duncan on the back of the head as I sat back down.

  “Shit!” he said.

  “Tell me you’ve got something,” I said, perturbed.

  “Go easy, Sheriff,” he said. “We’re just blending in, right?”

  “Talk to me.”

  “They’ve got everything listed by name. Can you believe that shit? Not badge numbers, not socials—names.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  “Daniel Wells,” I told him.

  “Hey, that was…”

  “I need to know what they have on him. What I really want to know is if they were even looking at him,” I said.

  “There’re an awful lot of names here,” he said. “Hey—Macaulay!”

  “Good God, Duncan,” I said.

  “Kidding. I’m only kidding. I’m just getting started—you’ll be way down in the M’s.”

  “Skip straight to the W’s, Duncan. I mean it.”

  “He’s not in here,” Duncan said a few moments later.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Yep. No Wells anywhere. I even did a text search of the drive. Nothing.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

  I left a twenty on the table and cleared the reservation pad.

  “Man, I was freaking hungry,” Duncan said.

  “You’re certain Wells wasn’t there?” I had to know for sure.

  “If you wanted, I’d have printed you out a list. They keep detailed files under the officer’s name. I told you.”

  “That’s good news,” I said.

  “I’m happy I could assist,” said Duncan.

  “Thanks again,” I said, stopping at the gate in front of the Rand residence. Duncan was staring at me with accusatory eyes.

  “What?” I said.

  “C’mon,” Duncan said. “You’re not even the slightest bit curious?”

  “You looked,” I said.

  “It’s kind of like finding out the sex of the baby. But I feel like I can only tell you if you really want to know.”

  “I don’t,” I said, and reached over to open his door.

  Duncan got out.