Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “The government opened the door, yes.” Chad nodded. “But criminals like the ones we’re looking for built the room beyond it. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, spooks might’ve had the best of intentions when concocting these machines, maybe not thinking ahead to what else they might be used for.”

  “Maybe?” I repeated.

  “I’m thinking that was their intention to begin with. The bad guys just beat them to it.”

  I looked toward Harry. “Do you understand any of this?”

  He frowned. “Not a word.”

  “I wish I didn’t either.”

  “There’s more,” Chad said. “It’s called the Gossamer. Super, super expensive and requires a degree of expertise to operate, but, man, can you do some crazy stuff with it. It’s much smaller than the Stingray, but is even more capable of targeting all mobile phones within range and stealing the unique codes that keep their content private.”

  “You said small,” I noted. “Small enough to fit into a man’s jacket or pants pocket?”

  “Jacket, for sure. I’ve heard there’s a version of the Gossamer that’s no bigger than a thumb drive. Think of it like a magnet, drawing all the personal information on your phone to it. The smaller Gossamer works on proximity and may have to actually come into contact, or close to it, with your device in order to be effective.”

  I racked my brain trying to think if there’d ever been an opportunity for something like that to happen while I was with any of my three dates, one of whom was part of the same conspiracy that had cost Hal Wirth his life. But I didn’t recall ever even lifting my phone from my handbag, which had never left my sight. I thought of Max’s odd bracelet, started to wonder if his whole older-woman fetish was nothing but a ruse to make me lower my guard. He’d seemed so sad and milquetoast that I, or some other potential victim, would never have felt threatened by him. Annoyed maybe, but not threatened.

  “Then there’s the Kingfish,” Chad was saying, totally in his element. “A classic mining device.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I chimed in. “Because it mines data from phones.”

  “Which isn’t nearly as difficult as it may seem. Everyone is obsessive about the data stored on their phones, so almost invariably that data is automatically backed up to the cloud. Devices like the Kingfish trick targeted phones into thinking they’re actually the cloud. They don’t have to steal the information because the phone willingly hands it over to them.”

  “A classic mining device, in other words,” I said, repeating the words Chad had just spoken.

  He nodded. “And there are even more elaborate, though larger, devices like the Harpoon that are essentially amplifiers capable of drastically boosting the signal of a Stingray or Kingfish, expanding their range, and giving them the ability to mine a phone’s data in a much faster fashion.”

  “How large?” I wondered aloud.

  “The size of an old-fashioned computer tower, or at least as big as a laptop computer. But you could custom design one to resemble, or be hidden inside, pretty much anything.”

  “Look,” Harry said, finally breaking in, “I come out of an era where we used the Tin Ear, old-fashioned bugs, transmitters planted in the lairs of the bad guys we were trying to catch. That was real surveillance, traditional surveillance. What you’re describing is modifying the latest version of the Tin Ear so it can lift the contents off any cell phone within a certain proximity.”

  “That’s right. And I made sure to load the kind of apps and programs on Eileen Vogel’s phone to make these bad guys think they’d hit the jackpot.”

  “What happens when they realize they’ve hit a dead end?” I asked Chad. “Will they know they’ve been had?”

  “Maybe, but it won’t matter because the only trail they’ve got leads back to Eileen Vogel, not Jessica Fletcher.”

  “Go back to what you said a second ago,” Harry said, “about how you loaded the right apps and stuff on Eileen Vogel’s phone. Wouldn’t Jessica Fletcher’s information be on there as well?”

  “No, because I deactivated it during each of the dates and replaced the real Jessica with a second user identity for Eileen Vogel.”

  “What if you hadn’t set the trap that way? What if these had been real dates and one of them had intended to do to me, Jessica Fletcher, what they’d done to Hal?”

  Chad nodded, as if ready for the question. “When you pay for an app, the phone’s software charges the credit card it has on file for you. So they’ll have that credit card. Let’s say you use your phone to make purchases on Amazon—they’ll have all the credit info on you, including credit card numbers that Amazon has. Since your e-mail program runs on your phone, they’ll have access to all your e-mails that are still archived. And they’ll be able to figure out your password for that, and since most people actually use only one password, it’s like a golden ticket into the rest of your life.”

  “What about Eileen Vogel’s Social Security number?” I raised. “How could they get that?”

  “Once they have all this other info, they’ll be able to go into the profiles you set up with various vendors or access your original credit card application documents that contain it. Everything they do opens the door into your life another crack, until it’s open all the way.”

  “Back in the day,” Harry started, “I worked some bunco and vice. What you’re describing reminds me of scam artists, con men, and grifters. That’s what this all boils down to, doesn’t it?”

  “With advanced principles of technology applied, absolutely,” Chad acknowledged. “Instead of conning you out of your money, they use proximity technology to steal it. That’s what they did to Eileen Vogel.” He took Alyssa’s hand again. “And Hal Wirth.”

  I weighed that in my mind. “So these three dates I went on . . .”

  “One of them was a plant, just like the woman who dated Hal. Their role is nothing more than to mine your data. The rest is handled in a dark room somewhere by people behind computer consoles rigged to a powerful central server.”

  Harry uttered what sounded like a low growl. “You know what that means? It means there are layers of insulation between the various levels. By its very nature, this operation’s grunts never come into contact with each other. The levels remain separate, like different floors in an office building.”

  “Or different buildings altogether,” Chad corrected, “because they wouldn’t even pass in the elevators.”

  Harry looked toward me. “I feel like Rip van Winkle. I wake up from a nap and it’s a whole new world out there. What am I still doing in this business, Jess? Can you tell me that?”

  “Do you have an alternative?”

  “I don’t even have a pension. Didn’t stick with the department long enough.”

  “So what do we do now?” I said, turning back toward Chad. “What’s our next step?”

  He sighed and let go of Alyssa’s hand, crossing his arms. “That’s where it gets tricky. We may have figured out how they mine for the data, but we still don’t have a notion as to where it goes. So the next step would be to follow the digital trail of the intrusion into Eileen Vogel’s personal data and—”

  The doorbell ringing cut him off. I rose stiffly from my chair and traipsed across the room to answer it, serenaded the whole time by the chime sounding over and over again.

  “All right,” I called out, “I’m coming!”

  I yanked the door open to the sight of a familiar face.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me in?” asked Mort Metzger in greeting.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “You sold me out!” I snapped at Harry McGraw, who’d followed me into the foyer from the kitchen.

  He didn’t bother denying it, nodding in a way that made his jowls look bigger. “I let this go as far as I could, Jess,” he said, his worn expression taking on the contours of a wet dishrag.
r />   Mort stepped inside the apartment and closed the door behind him. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “What I always do.”

  “As in sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong? Even for you, this is a new level. Setting yourself up as a mark? Really, Jessica?”

  I looked toward Chad and Alyssa, who had joined us in the apartment’s combination living and dining room. “I had to.”

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  “What would you have done if I’d just dumped all this onto your desk?”

  “Not put myself, or anyone else, in any danger, I can tell you that much.” His gaze drifted over my shoulder toward the kids. “Does your mother know you’re here, young lady?” he asked Alyssa.

  She shook her head.

  He turned his eyes on Chad. “And who are you again?”

  “Her boyfriend. We go to school together.”

  “You should get back there, both of you.”

  “I can’t, Sheriff,” Alyssa said, with a firmness bordering on obstinacy. “Because whoever killed my father stole all our money first. We can’t afford the tuition anymore.”

  “I’m going to get it back,” I said, immediately wishing I hadn’t.

  “You’re going to get it back?” Mort shot at me, shaking his head. “From what I’d already figured out for myself, and what Harry here told me, we’re dealing with a national, or international, ring of high-tech thieves who effectively steal everything their victims have and then murder them. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know where they are. We don’t know how many of them there are, or how long they’ve been at this, or how many victims they’ve claimed. Tell me, does that sound right so far?”

  I nodded and left it there.

  “And you were going to get Hal Wirth’s money back from them. Why not just walk right up to their offices, knock on the door, and ask them to write you a check?”

  “Because I don’t know where their offices are. That’s what I was doing. Trying to flush them out.”

  “And how’s that going for you?”

  I glared at Harry. “I guess we’ll never know now.”

  “All those mystery books you’ve written,” Mort sneered, claiming my attention again, “got any ideas what I should charge you with?”

  “Not off the top of my head, and it’s out of your jurisdiction anyway.”

  “You want me to bring in the NYPD on this, just say the word,” Mort said, in a tone like none I’d heard him use before. “Anything to get you off the street. Jeez, I might just arrest you for reckless endangerment. Yup, that should work.”

  “Who am I endangering?”

  “Yourself, Jessica.” He stopped, scratched his head, and gazed about as if still in disbelief over the circumstances that had brought him there. “And, hold on, I’ve saved the best for last. Harry also tells me that Sean Booker, a prisoner in federal custody—”

  “Larry Dax, Mort. His real name is Larry Dax.”

  “—Larry Dax, a prisoner in federal custody, slipped you some message you neglected to turn over to the proper authorities. So I guess we can add obstruction of justice to that reckless endangerment charge. Imagine the field day Evelyn Phillips at the Gazette is going to have with this. . . .”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Relax, Jessica—maybe she’ll go easy on you for keeping her so busy all these years by turning Cabot Cove into the murder capital of the country.”

  “You’re blaming me for that, too?”

  “I can’t even go to conventions anymore because of all the questions about statistical anomalies and the like.”

  “You never went to conventions, Mort.”

  “But now I couldn’t even if I wanted to.” He stopped and held his stare on me, as if waiting for me to respond, then resuming when I didn’t. “This message Larry Dax slipped you, can I have a look at it?”

  “It’s probably nothing. I think he wrote it on toilet paper, maybe never got to finish it.”

  “Do you have it or not?”

  I fetched the photocopy from my bag and handed it to Mort and watched him mouth the sequence of letters and numbers I’d been unable to make any sense of:

  ME2006Y

  “The best I’ve been able to come up with is Dax was talking about himself because he wrote ME. Two thousand six must refer to the year, something that happened back then that he’s trying to draw my attention to. Or maybe ME stands for medical examiner and there’s some case somewhere I’m supposed to find to bring me closer to who’s responsible for Hal Wirth’s death. It’s the Y that’s got me baffled. That’s why I don’t think he got to finish the message. Or maybe there was another piece of doubled-over toilet paper he thought he’d passed me, too, containing the rest of the message.”

  Mort was staring at me, his expression utterly flat. “Figured all that out by yourself, did you?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  He shook his head, a bemused look settling over his features, as he flapped the piece of paper in the air. “You should’ve showed this to me earlier, Jessica. I could’ve saved you the trouble.”

  I felt my eyes widen, my breath catching briefly in my throat. “Wait, you know what it means?”

  Mort nodded, looking no less bemused. “It’s not ‘me,’ Jessica. It’s ‘M-E,’ which is short for ‘Maine.’ You know, the state in which you currently reside.”

  “Maine,” I repeated, utterly dumbfounded over how I’d missed that.

  “And the two-zero-zero-six-Y that follows the M-E? You don’t spend a big chunk of your life as sheriff of a coastal town like Cabot Cove without knowing a boat registration when you see one.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “Stay in the squad car, Jessica,” Mort ordered me, as a blanket of fog swept in over Cabot Cove. “I see you out of it and I might just shoot you.”

  It turned out that the boat with Maine registration 2006Y was currently berthed in a Cabot Cove Marina slip and had been under watch since a few minutes after Mort had deciphered Larry Dax’s message. So Larry Dax had clearly known plenty more than he’d let on to me or the federal authorities, obviously a participant in the plot instead of just an accidental accomplice. He might not have known the identity of whoever was behind all this, but whatever he knew was somehow connected to this boat: a thirty-five-foot cabin cruiser registered to some shell company that Mort could find absolutely nothing about, almost as if it didn’t exist.

  I felt like an idiot. Not so much for being confined to the passenger seat of the squad car, not even for recklessly endangering myself, as Mort had put it. He’d given me time to shower and dress hours before shepherding me out of New York City, insisting on driving me back himself to make sure I didn’t stray again. It was a quiet drive, made worse by the awful traffic, accident after accident on Route 95, which turned a difficult five-hour trek into an interminable seven-hour one.

  And people ask me why I never bothered getting my license.

  Night had already fallen by the time we’d made it back to Cabot Cove, trailed by the Wirths’ SUV, which Alyssa had borrowed for the occasion. Mort insisted she and Chad follow us every inch of the way, promising to put out an APB on the kids if they ever lapsed from his rearview mirror. Toward that purpose, he actually deputized Harry McGraw to ride with them to make sure no further hijinks ensued. Upon arrival in Cabot Cove, Harry’s revised orders were to see them home and “sit on them,” to make sure they stayed right where they were, while we proceeded to the marina.

  Cabot Cove Marina was undergoing a substantial renovation, adding a sea (no pun intended!) of new docks and slips, along with that five-thousand-seat amphitheater, the Westhausen Garden, where concerts and other performances would be held. As a result, the smell of fresh lumber mixed with the salt air blowing in from the sea. The large area of new construction was barely
visible through the fog carried by a thick swath of humidity that had settled over the region, and it was all I could do to catch a glimpse of the cabin cruiser docked in Slip 41 under the boating registration ME 2006Y.

  Before we’d left my New York apartment for the long ride home, Mort had put the young man I referred to as Deputy Andy in charge of surveillance of the vessel. The sheriff’s orders were explicit: Watch the boat, but don’t be seen doing so. I gnashed my teeth at that a bit, but held my tongue, refraining from commenting on the Cabot Cove police department’s lack of experience surveilling anything other than the streets for a missing dog or cat. Especially since the harbormaster and several dockworkers said they recognized Porcelain Man meandering about the marina, from that picture lifted off Eve Simpson’s Labor Day video assemblage. None, though, could say they saw him anywhere near the cabin cruiser docked in Slip 41.

  Meanwhile, I sat in the passenger seat of Mort’s squad car, stewing. The windows on both sides had been rolled down, doing little to relieve the increasingly fetid conditions inside the cab. I was roasting, starting to perspire through my clothes, and wondering why I hadn’t asked Mort to just drop me at home. I was exhausted. My first three dates in twenty years had worn me out. The last few days had left me with a clearer picture of the circumstances surrounding Hal Wirth’s death, but no real resolution or comfort. That wouldn’t come until the true perpetrators were caught. This was no longer about solving a puzzle, as involving myself in real-life crimes normally was. It was about making sure whoever was behind this could claim no more victims and destroy no more lives.

  I gazed out the open passenger-side window toward the docks. The fog and the night sky conspired to strip away my sense of perspective, stealing the blue and white cabin cruiser docked in Slip 41 from my sight. I had no idea where Mort and his deputies were posted for their vigils—a good thing, since the fact that I couldn’t see them suggested the boat’s owner wouldn’t either, should he return.

  I thought I caught a dark shape moving through the fog, outlined briefly by the LED lights shining down from a series of telephone poles. I thought it might be a trick of the eye, an illusion, until the movement, black against the grayness of the night and fog, flashed again. I wished I knew how to operate the police radio in order to inform Mort, warn him of the figure skulking about.