“You miss him.”
“Desperately,” I said, surprising myself with my candor.
“I wish I missed my wife.” He took a sip from a mug overflowing with some foamy concoction. “The truth is, I was glad when she left; it freed me from having to please her, from trying to be the man I was before Iraq. Anyway,” he said, lifting his mug in the semblance of a toast, “here’s to happiness.”
I felt myself smile, hoping Richard Fass had nothing to do with whoever was behind Hal Wirth’s death, because I was already considering a second date with him.
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, toasting him in return.
Chapter Thirty-three
Harry McGraw pretended to be sleeping when I got back to the car, not popping an eye open until I slammed the door to rouse him.
“Sorry, listening to the banter between the two of you must’ve knocked me out. You know, Jess, for an author who writes page-turners, you’re pretty dull.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Harry.”
“How about this could be the most boring case we’ve ever worked on together? How many more dates are you expecting to go on?”
“As many as it takes to get targeted.” I waited for Harry to pull out into traffic before I resumed, not wanting to distract him. “What do you suppose it’s like to wake up to the realization you’re flat broke?”
“I wake up that way every morning. You get used to it.”
“Not if you were rich the night before.”
“Yup, the good ole World Wide Web has created a whole new cast of criminal characters.”
“Who are a lot harder to catch than the old-fashioned ones.”
I checked my phone to see if there was anything from Chad while I’d been having coffee with Richard Fass.
“Oh, jeez,” I said.
Harry looked at me across the seat. “Something wrong?”
“Yes, you not keeping your eyes on the road.”
“Besides that,” he said, and let the scowl return to his face.
“A text from Chad telling me I’ve got a third date set for tomorrow.”
* * *
• • •
Lunch this time, as it turned out, with a man named Max Gladding. I arrived at the restaurant first and didn’t recognize him when he got there, because he looked quite different from his picture.
Younger, much younger. By as much as twenty-five years maybe.
“I hope you’re not offended,” he said, after we exchanged the usual greetings and pleasantries.
“Well,” I said, still at a loss for words over having been matched with a man closer in age to Chad and Alyssa than me.
“My shrink tells me I’m trying to date my mother.”
“I’m sure she’s a fine woman.”
“Was. She died when I was a kid.”
You still are a kid, I almost said, but didn’t.
“I’ve never been happy with women my own age.”
I swallowed hard, noticed Max Gladding was wearing something on his wrist in addition to his watch. A dull glow seemed to be emanating from it, but that could have been a trick of the restaurant’s lighting. I almost asked him about it but stopped short, not wanting to appear overly suspicious.
He must’ve caught me looking, though, and maneuvered his arm to hide that wrist from my sight.
“Have you ever dated a younger man?” Max asked me.
“You mean, someone young enough to be my son?”
He nodded.
“I haven’t dated anyone in a long time.”
“Your profile lists you as a widow.”
“And I haven’t dated since my husband died. I’m thinking around the time you were born.”
I was expecting any number of responses from Max Gladding, but not the laughter he broke into. “Age is in the eye of the beholder.”
“I think you mean ‘beauty.’”
“Everything’s relative, Eileen.”
I suddenly found myself comfortable in his presence, due to the fact that he was unabashedly open about whatever frailty led him to seek out the company of older women.
“What was your mother’s name?” I asked him.
“Paula.”
“What do you remember most about her, Max?”
“The way she smelled after taking a bath. I’ve tried to find whatever it was she used on her skin, but I haven’t been able to.”
I pictured him scouring the women’s perfume section of department stores in search of the right scent.
“Thank you for not turning around and walking out when you saw me.”
“Actually, I’m feeling rather flattered.”
“It’s not like that,” Max said, suddenly sounding shy, shifting his shoulders the way a boy might.
“Like what?”
“You know.”
“Okay,” I managed.
“I’m looking for what I lost as a young boy. I know I can’t keep it, but moments like this, spending time with women like you, make me feel whole again. As if I’ve never lost anything.”
“I’m not sure that’s healthy, Max.”
“That’s what my latest therapist keeps telling me, just like the other ones did. I try their prescriptions for happiness, but always end up back in the same place. Is that wrong?”
“The only thing wrong is the deception. Pretending to be much older than you really are. Have you ever tried telling the truth?”
“That’s what I’m doing now.”
“I meant in your profile, Max.”
“Young man looking for his mother?”
“Young man looking for an older woman.”
“Because he misses his mother.”
“I think you need to get past it,” I told him. “I think you need to grow up.”
Tears welled in his eyes and then began to pour out. “That sounds just like what my mother would have said.”
Then he buried his face in his hands.
“Oh, boy,” I muttered.
* * *
• • •
This time, Harry McGraw was laughing hysterically when I got back to his car, unable to contain himself.
“Enjoying yourself, Harry?” I asked, settling into the passenger seat and feeling the duct-taped vinyl squish beneath me.
He laughed some more. “I wish I’d taken a picture,” he managed finally.
“For posterity?”
“To sell to the tabloids. I can see the headline now . . . ‘Bestselling Author Caught Dating Her Son.’”
“You’re a barrel of laughs, Harry.”
He slammed the steering wheel with both palms and laughed even harder, stopping only when the horn engaged and wouldn’t shut off, no matter what Harry did.
And now it was me laughing.
“Very funny, Jess. Yuk it up at my expense.”
I laughed some more.
* * *
• • •
I slept through the night peacefully for the first time since Hal Wirth’s death, and felt freed, as if the whole afternoon had unbridled me from the burden I’d been bearing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed as hard as I had in Harry’s car, which also made me realize how much I enjoyed his company. His gruff briskness was camouflage for his warm heart and compassion for people, especially crime victims who had no one else in their corner. Harry was like a knight-errant coming to their rescue when the system had abandoned them, caring nothing about his fee and willing to sacrifice his own lifestyle if it meant others could live better.
So maybe we’d both needed a laugh.
The upshot of my so-called date with Max Gladding was to make me realize all at once the folly of this pursuit. The fact that I had actually entertained the thought that I could infiltrate an elaborate criminal network by si
mply posting a fake profile online was so absurd on its face, I wondered how I’d let myself be so deluded. I guess this whole case had confronted me with the evils of technology to the point where I thought those same evils could be used to turn the tables.
Like snapping my fingers to make magic happen. Make a killer appear instead of a rabbit disappear. I had become my own fictional character, believing real life could be manipulated as easily as fiction, where the world moved at the pace of my choosing, and life unfolded in neat, convenient chapters kept short to please the digital audience. I was so glad neither Mort Metzger nor Seth Hazlitt was around to witness the extent of my silliness, and imagined they would’ve gotten a laugh at least as big as Harry McGraw’s at my expense. Maybe someday I’d have the courage to share this story with them, but I doubted it.
I emerged from my bedroom in my bathrobe and headed straight for the kitchen to enjoy breakfast and the newspaper before plotting my route back to Cabot Cove, where I could put this entire experience behind me.
Alyssa and Chad were both seated at the kitchen table, studying his laptop screen. And there was Harry McGraw, gulping down a huge polystyrene cup of coffee while standing at the counter.
“If you came here to laugh at me again, Harry, go right ahead.”
“Not this morning, Jess. I’m not in a laughing mood.”
I followed his gaze toward Chad, who tilted his laptop toward me as if I could see it from so far away.
“Your bank accounts were accessed last night,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-four
“Not the real ones,” he added. “The ones I set up for you.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re telling me somebody tried to steal Eileen Vogel’s fake money.”
“No, this was a data mining operation. They accessed your accounts, and your financial records, to determine how much you were worth, pulling passwords and any other info needed to prove that they were you.”
“Prove to whom exactly?”
“No one in the flesh, that’s for sure. Less-than-scrupulous Web-based loan outfits that masquerade as official, pretending to offer small business loans, that sort of thing.”
I moved to the table and sat down without making myself tea or pouring a cup of coffee from the old drip percolator Chad and Alyssa had somehow figured out how to work.
I couldn’t believe what Chad had just said and could tell neither could Alyssa nor Harry.
“And once they have all this information,” I started, my thoughts forming as I spoke.
“They’d be able to use it to do pretty much what they did to Alyssa’s father,” Chad picked up before I could continue. I noticed he took Alyssa’s hand in his when he got to the part about her father. “Open lines of credit on these unscrupulous lending sites that are the very definition of fly-by-night—literally, since they change their Internet identities on a weekly or even daily basis. And once those lines of credit are opened, secured by your assets, they could immediately draw the lines down to nothing, essentially bankrupting their targets. Because by then the unscrupulous sites have placed the deals with foreign lenders who’ve placed liens on the target’s real accounts by the time that target realizes he’s been taken to the cleaners.”
“Or she,” I added, needing to remind myself again this was happening to Eileen Vogel and not Jessica Fletcher.
“Wait a minute,” Harry said, in what sounded more like a growl than a voice, “are you telling me that’s all it takes? No signatures, no handshakes in person, to borrow millions of dollars?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Chad told him. “A lot of business these days accept e-signatures and e-verification. And if you had the kind of information whoever’s behind this was able to accumulate on Alyssa’s father, and now the fictional Eileen Vogel, you’d have everything you need.”
“Banks have lost their minds,” Harry groused, shaking his head.
“Not the legitimate ones, Mr. McGraw.”
“Ha-ha!”
“What’s so funny, Harry?” I asked him.
“Nobody ever calls me ‘Mr. McGraw.’”
“What do they call you?”
“Jackass a lot. Harry sometimes. These days, there aren’t many calling me anything. Not like my phone is ringing off the hook with PI work.” He looked back toward Chad. “You were saying, kid?”
“I was about to say there are plenty of—let’s call them less-than-reputable lenders that are mostly shells for offshore holding companies that charge exorbitant fees for borrowing and take them all up front.” Chad focused his attention back on me. “Here’s how it might work in the case of our dear Eileen Vogel. They secure her account numbers, passwords, personal information—pretty much everything. And with that information, they go to these less-than-reputable lenders and open a line of credit for, say, a million dollars secured against Ms. Vogel’s assets. All the institution knows is that the loan or line of credit is adequately collateralized with assets she either can’t touch or doesn’t want anyone to know about. The institution takes maybe a ten percent fee off the top and whoever’s behind the crime pockets nine hundred thousand dollars. By the time Ms. Vogel learns she’s effectively broke, it’s too late. That is, if she’s still alive to notice.”
“You’re saying all this can be done online?” Harry said, shaking his head in disbelief.
“Pretty much all of it, with willing partners,” Chad explained, clearly on comfortable turf here. “Sometimes online means the Dark Web, the identities of the online lending partners changing by the day, even hour. But the bottom line is that by the time someone like Eileen Vogel, or Hal Wirth, realizes they’ve been taken, the money’s gone and there’s no way to get it back. No trace back to who took it, and the actual lender might already be in the wind, still operating but under an entirely different alias.”
“Will somebody pinch me?” Harry sighed. “I thought I’d seen everything. Gotta love progress, right, Jess? I was a beat cop back in the days when people were still robbing banks with guns. Now all you need is a finger.”
“And a keyboard,” Chad added.
“Okay,” I started, “I think I’m getting a handle on this part of the crime. But how exactly did one of the three men I dated in the past couple days steal all this data from me? It wasn’t like I handed over any information, and none of them even had a phone number—well, a phone number for Eileen Vogel.”
“Glad you asked,” Chad said, sounding like he was getting to the best part. “Your phone,” he followed.
“What about it?”
“That’s how they got your information. I synced your fake profile to your phone, just in case.”
“None of them even touched it. It was in my bag the whole time, that new surveillance app Harry loaded open so he could listen in.”
Chad seemed to think of something. “You have your phone on you right now?”
I felt about the bulky pockets of my bathrobe. “Must’ve left it in the bedroom. Just give me a sec.”
I retrieved the phone from my night table and handed it to Chad back in the kitchen. He jogged through a few screens, looking for something.
“You keep track of your apps?”
“Pretty much. I don’t have too many of them.”
He tilted the screen toward me, pointing at the icon for an application I’d never seen before. “Recognize that one?”
“No.”
“Of course, you don’t. Because you didn’t load it onto your phone; one of Eileen Vogel’s three dates did.”
I was beyond confused. “Chad, I told you none of them even touched my phone.”
“They wouldn’t have to. Reasonable proximity is plenty close enough for them to clone a program from their phone onto yours. Do you remember if the restaurants you met these dates at had Wi-Fi?”
“No.”
“Becaus
e that’s all you’d need. Both phones pull signals from the same cell towers, transmitted over the same Wi-Fi network. In the past couple years, there’s been a twentyfold explosion in the theft of financial details from mobile devices. Not many people realize just how open and vulnerable to hacking their cell phones are. It’s not so much hacking as hijacking,” Chad continued. “Smartphones are like minicomputers, full of data, e-mails, and other personal information users like to keep private. That app they managed to put on your phone was like a sponge that sucked up every bit of the fake financial data I loaded onto your phone and then sent it to the cloud to be retrieved later.”
I gazed again at the flaming red icon for the app I didn’t recognize on my screen, trying to remember again why I traded in my flip. “What about the encrypted data, passwords, and the like?”
“I was getting to that. An application, like this one here, is software. To get everything they’d need, these guys would’ve also needed to employ hardware, like an advanced offshoot of the Stingray.”
“Stingray?” I said as Harry rose to refill his polystyrene coffee cup from the percolator.
“Like a whole bunch of these devices, it sprang from devices built for intelligence agencies. On the surface it’s a listening device—but a listening device that functions like an electronic vacuum cleaner, sucking up thousands of phone ID codes. The next step is to use those codes to track the users of all those phones. Where they go at what time of the day.”
“That sounds like a long way from stealing data and private information.”
“Like I said, the latest versions are offshoots capable of doing just that. Going from tracking, monitoring, and listening in isn’t as far as it sounds from stealing a phone’s data. Once somebody’s in your phone, they’re in your phone, free to roam around for as long as they want to take what they came for.”
“Kid,” Harry started, swirling his cup about in his hands, “you’re saying we have good old Uncle Sam to blame for all this, that the government invented this technology these space-age thieves have now corrupted.”
Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder Page 21
