“You wish.”
“If you really want my help, you’re not being very persuasive. What’s up?”
“My computer just got hacked, and I don’t know how. I was working on a Word file, and someone just started typing into it. They could see everything I was typing.”
“Easy peasy. A kid could do that. There are plenty of free software packages out there that can give anyone remote access to your computer. Tech-support people use them all the time to make adjustments to customers’ settings.”
“But something would still have to be installed on my laptop, right?”
“Again, child’s play. If your computer touches the Internet, all notions of security and privacy go right out the window.”
“Comforting. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t urgent, Sam. This is a killer on one of my cases. I need you to look at my computer and see if there’s anything here that could possibly help me find this sicko. Could you do that?”
“Sure. You want to meet tomorrow?”
“Tonight. I’m driving down right now. This time of night, I can be in L.A. in less than two hours.”
“Whoa. I plan to be totally hammered by then.”
“I’ll take Sam Zackoff hammered over anybody else stone-cold sober any day of the week.”
“Now that’s how you get a guy to help you.”
“Where do we meet?”
He thought for a moment. “There’s an all-night diner just a couple blocks from the convention center. It’s called Riff’s. It’s on Figueroa Street. I’ll be there chugging coffee like a madman.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
“No worries. We go way back. If the only way I can touch base with you these days is to do an occasional favor, I’m here for you. I can never tell when your gratitude might overwhelm you. See you soon.”
* * *
ON THE HOUR-AND-FORTY-FIVE-MINUTE drive down the I-5 freeway, Kendra glanced several times at her laptop on the passenger-side floor. She almost felt it was Colby himself down there, watching her, taunting her, and plotting his next move.
As she fumbled with the car stereo’s volume knob, she realized that her hands had never fully stopped shaking since her dialogue with Colby.
Enough.
She had beaten him once, and she would do it again. As much as he liked to boast that he knew her, she knew him, too. She would use his confidence, his arrogance, against him.
You’re going down, Colby.
* * *
KENDRA PARKED HER CAR AND entered the narrow diner. It was a freestanding building, but was clearly designed to emulate the railroad car diners of the Northeast, with a long counter and a wedged-in row of booths. There were only two people visible at first glance—a medical worker in pink scrubs eating chili at the counter and a homeless man facedown in the last booth.
Wait. Not a homeless man, she realized as she glanced at his tousled brown hair and brown bomber jacket. That leather jacket was lambskin and very expensive.
“Wake up, Sam.”
“I’m already awake.” He didn’t lift his head or make any other move to look at her. “I’m just trying to summon the will. I wish you had called about two hours earlier.”
“Never mind. I shouldn’t have imposed. The FBI has experts who can deal with this sort of thing.”
He snorted and finally sat up with a lopsided grin. “You’re playing me, woman. If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have driven all the way down here in the middle of the freaking night.”
“You’re the best, Sam. And I’m not playing you when I say that.”
“I know you’re not. You’re the one person who has always held all my abilities in appropriate regard.”
He smiled again with that wonderfully cockeyed grin. Sam was thirty, thin, and his thick mane was everywhere no matter how long or short it was at any given time, complementing his brilliance with a distinct mad-scientist vibe.
She and Sam had a brief, stupid fling during her wild days, but they both quickly realized that romance wasn’t in the cards for them. But through all the years, he had always been there for her in a way that no lover ever had. She wouldn’t trade that kind of friend for the world.
Sam picked up the pot of coffee on the table and emptied it into his cup. He waved the empty pot at the waitress who had just emerged from the kitchen. “Keep ’em coming please. Be assured that my friend here tips insanely well.”
Kendra turned back toward the waitress. “I do. Make sure he gets anything and everything he wants.”
She sat across from Sam and put the laptop on the table between them. “Here it is. I’m not sure what you can do, but I’m hoping you can find out something that can give me some kind of trail back to him. Maybe through a software vendor or maybe an IP address … I’m not sure.”
The mere sight of her computer seemed to give him a jolt, making him more alert than the coffee had been able to do. “You never know. Even the most accomplished hackers are often terrible at covering their tracks. Let’s see what we have here.” He lifted her computer, then froze. “I thought you said you turned this off.”
“No, I said I didn’t turn it back on. It turned off by itself at the end of my and Colby’s rap session.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “No, it didn’t.”
“What are you talking about? I saw it happen.”
“No, you saw the screen and indicator lights switch off, and you heard the fan shut down.” He ran his fingers across the laptop’s underside. “It’s still warm. It shouldn’t still feel this way, not after two hours. You were meant to think it was off, but it’s not. For all we know, your laptop’s microphone has been transmitting our entire conversation back to him.”
“Shit. What do we do?”
He quickly popped the laptop’s battery off and placed it on the table. “There. That should take care of it.”
She stared at her computer, once again feeling that eerie sensation she’d had in the car. “Why would he do that?”
“Don’t know, but maybe we can find out.” Sam reached into the worn leather satchel on the seat beside him and produced a screwdriver. He used it to remove the laptop’s back cover, then the hard drive. He pulled his own laptop from his satchel and connected Kendra’s hard drive to it via an interface cable.
As he flipped up his laptop’s lid, Kendra saw an elaborately etched cartoon version of Sam on it, with the motto BORN TO BE BAD in a fiery font.
“You’re kidding, right?”
He shrugged. “A gift from a grateful client. He’s actually very talented. If I detached the top cover and put it on eBay, I could get thousands for it.” He switched on his computer. “Let’s see what malware your nasty friend put on your computer.”
“Aren’t you afraid of infecting your own system?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Please. This thing is bulletproof. I’ve had foreign governments try to penetrate my systems and totally fall on their asses.”
Kendra had once dismissed Sam’s pronouncements as mere braggadocio, but she now knew better. As proud as Sam was of his accomplishments, she was aware of the fact that there was far more he didn’t talk about, especially where his security-sensitive clients were involved.
Sam glanced at his screen as it booted up. “The thing about firewalls I build for myself, I don’t sell or license them to anyone. That way no one knows how to crack them. Trust me, my computer has nothing to worry about.”
“So what’s happening now?”
“I’m taking an inventory of the applications on your hard drive. I hope you don’t have anything on there you don’t want me to see.”
“Like nude pictures of myself?”
“Pfft. Seen that. Old news.” He shrugged. “Maybe compromising pictures of the new man in your life.”
“There’s no new man in my life.”
“I heard you were living with someone. But if you don’t want to talk about it…”
“There’s nothing to talk about. I was st
aying there for my own safety. Nothing more.”
“Uh-huh. And there was nowhere else you could stay?”
“Not like that. I’m telling you, it’s like a fortress.”
“You’ve butted heads with a lot of sickos in your time. You’ve never squirreled yourself away before, even when it would have been the prudent thing to do. There must have been something about this guy that made you feel safe. Protected.”
“Yes. His house. I’ve already told you. What are you seeing on my hard drive?”
“Still scanning.” Sam regarded her for a moment. “It’s not a sign of weakness to lean on someone occasionally, Kendra. I’m actually proud of you. I wish you’d do it more often. I think you’re so determined to show that you can now stand on your own two feet that you sometimes ignore the lifelines that people throw your way.”
“If you don’t mind, I think we have more pressing things to address right now.”
“Can’t you tell? We’re multitasking. If you’d prefer, we can talk about the weather until your hard drive is finished. Or maybe how I’ve ruined you for all other men.”
“Well, that might be the truth, but it wouldn’t be in the way you’re thinking.”
“All right, the weather it is.” He glanced back at the laptop screen. “Ah. Okay. Here we go. I can see that your system has been infected by some kind of remote desktop software. As long as you had an Internet connection, he was able to see everything you were doing. And that’s how he was able to type his replies.”
“Is this software anything you can trace?”
“Don’t know. A lot of these things are traded freely on Web sites in the hacker community. But I was right about him not trying to cover his tracks. It’s almost like…”
“What?”
Sam shook his head. “It’s almost like he wants us to see what he was doing. Every line of programming code is on display here. As a matter of fact…”
He grabbed a napkin from the table dispenser and pulled a pen from his pocket. He quickly started jotting down letters, transcribing them from the screen. “Damn,” he whispered.
“What is it?”
He turned the napkin around to show her. “This isn’t programming code. It’s a message.”
“To whom?”
He tapped the napkin. “You.”
She looked down.
It read: YOU ARE WASTING TIME, KENDRA. THE ANSWER IS NOT IN LOS ANGELES.
She shivered. “What in the hell…”
“There’s more.” Sam was already writing on another napkin. He turned it around to show her.
WHAT’S A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU DOING AT THIS SEEDY DINER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT?
Kendra quickly turned toward the row of windows facing the street. “Could he be watching us?”
“I doubt it.”
“But how do you know?”
“I don’t know. But it’s far more likely that he could have been listening to your side of our phone conversation. He may have been watching you using your built-in webcam. And even though this thing doesn’t have GPS, he could have used the Wi-Fi radio to get a pretty accurate fix on your location when you brought it here. Remember, your laptop was on and under his control until I yanked the battery.”
She felt sick. “The thought of him watching me…”
“I know.” Sam grabbed another napkin and started writing on it. “There’s one more here. I’m not sure what this one means.” He turned the napkin around.
It read: I TOLD YOU WHERE TO LOOK. THE HOUSEBOAT, KENDRA. YOU’RE WASTING TIME.
She pushed the napkin away.
“This guy knows you, Kendra. He knew you’d have the computer analyzed, so he planned ahead of time to leave these messages for you in the code.”
“Obviously.” She took a moment to stifle the tension that gripped every inch of her body. “Colby is no computer genius. I don’t believe he’s ever even owned one. He had help.”
Sam nodded. “Well, it was definitely someone who knows what he’s doing. That’s where I’d start. Known contacts with fairly sophisticated computer expertise.”
“It could have been someone he corresponded with from prison. He’s had fan letters from all over the world.”
Sam grimaced. “Fan letters?”
“Disgusting, isn’t it? He was a psychopath on death row. Yet he even had marriage proposals.”
“Well, it’s one thing to contemplate marrying a psychopath when he’s about to be put to death. I wonder if any of those women would marry him now?”
“I wouldn’t put it past them. The first order of business is to find out if he was pen pals with any computer experts. His stint on death row put him in contact with a huge network of disturbed loners.”
Sam nodded toward the screen. “It also seems pretty important to him that you visit this houseboat.”
“It was the scene of the crime. He killed a woman there last night.” She looked down at the words on the napkin she had pushed away. “A woman who did her best to make a national joke of me. The police thought it best if I stayed on the sidelines for this one.”
“Well, he really wants you to go there.”
“Which makes me want to run the other way as fast as I can.”
“The hell it does. You’re just dying to get in there.”
She started to deny it, but she stopped herself. Sam was right. Colby had known what he was doing when he dangled that carrot in front of her.
Sam pointed to her hard drive. “I hope there isn’t anything on this you want to keep.”
“Aside from every project I’ve been working on for the past year. Of course not. I back everything up and save it in the cloud.”
“Good girl.” He handed her his pen and slid a napkin over. “Now jot down your cloud storage account info and password.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I’m going to scan every single file you own and make sure there aren’t any nasty viruses lurking there. And you can kiss this hard drive good-bye. I’ll give it a good look, sector by sector. And I’ll see what I can do about tracing any malware I find.”
She wrote down the information and handed it to him.
“Now give me your phone.”
She handed him her phone. “You think he might have done the same thing to my phone as my computer?”
“I’ve no idea, but I’m going to find out.” He plugged her phone into his computer and did a check. “No, it’s clear.” He handed the phone back to her. “But I may ask you to let me check it occasionally just to be sure nothing has changed.”
“Anytime. And with extreme gratitude.” She tucked the phone back in her pocket. “Thanks, Sam. I knew you were the right man for the job.”
“The only man. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to find the computer geek who helped him with this. Check mail and call logs at the prison, visitor information, whatever.”
“Got it. I know he managed to obtain a cell phone in prison, so that may be the place to start.”
“Good. And there’s something even more important.”
“Yes?”
He was gazing at her soberly. “Watch your back. This isn’t just a hacker you’re dealing with here. For this guy, hacking is just a means to an end. He wants nothing more than to get in your head. It’s personal for him. I guess what I’m saying is … Don’t be afraid to grab every lifeline you can.”
* * *
IT WAS ONLY A COUPLE HOURS BEFORE dawn when Kendra pulled into her parking place at the condo.
She didn’t move for a moment. She could feel exhaustion dragging at every limb. She had first experienced a rush of adrenaline, then pure shock. It had been hard to comprehend the scope of Colby’s invasion into her space.
She’d felt violated.
Well, she had to comprehend it. She had known he was clever, even brilliant. She had to meet that dark, malignant brilliance and survive it. She glanced down at the place where she’d set her computer when she’d brought it to Sam.
&n
bsp; Crazy. She felt as if the computer were still there, listening.
Good Lord, that was crazy. She was actually nervous, paranoid, feeling as if that machine might actually attack her.
Get a grip. That was the response Colby wanted from her.
She swung open the driver’s door and got out of her car.
Five minutes later, she was unlocking the door of her condo. Another five minutes, and she was crawling into her bed and turning off the lamp.
Pleasant dreams. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy them.
She went rigid. It was the first time she had even thought of those last words Colby had written. She had been too occupied with the shock of his main message.
And she’d been right to ignore them. It had just been another ploy to terrify her and make her remember a time when he was dominant, and she was weak.
Blood.
That knife shining in the moonlight.
That feeling of helpless terror.
He couldn’t know, he was guessing.
But he knew her well enough to guess that she would never forget that night, that any panicky event would make it storm back to her.
He’d probably even realized that she would not be able to assess that last sentence until she was here alone, in her room.
Block it. She needed to rest, to plan, to sleep, so that she would be able to deal with the next few days. It was only a few hours before Beth would be pounding on her door.
Sleep.
She closed her eyes determinedly.
Pleasant dreams …
I don’t hear you, Colby.
* * *
“YOU LOOK LIKE HELL.” BETH GAZED AT HER appraisingly. “And it took forever for you to answer my buzzer downstairs. You okay?”
“I will be after I have a shower. I had a late night.” She stepped aside and let Beth into the condo. “Twenty minutes. Get yourself coffee and orange juice.”
“Those call logs paid off?”
“You might say that they did. But not in the way you might think.” She turned and headed for the bathroom. “I’ll tell you over coffee.”
She held her face under the warm spray, letting it wash away all the cobwebs.
Not cobwebs. Blood.
Pleasant dreams.
The Naked Eye Page 10
