The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Probably meant her smartphone was connecting automatically to the library network. To be certain, he dialed her number, and then on the camera monitor watched her take out her phone and, not recognizing the incoming number, send him straight to voice mail.

  Sure enough, a pedestrian at the far edge of the Wi-Fi’s range connected to the network for a few seconds before passing out of range. It popped up as a blip on his map and then vanished just as quickly.

  Gibson frowned. Smartphones would make things messy. It was an obvious enough issue that he kicked himself for not anticipating it. Times had changed since his arrest, and he needed to catch up quickly. He was glad neither Jenn nor Hendricks was here to call him out for it.

  He thought through his options, then made adjustments to his program, filtering smartphone traffic into a subdirectory. He wasn’t after a phone, but he’d harvest the data and check it later. If it came to that. His fingers danced lightly over the keyboard. His handwriting might be barely legible, but he could type at nearly eighty words per minute—a child of the times. He hit “Refresh” and watched the cell signature in the park disappear. That ought to clear things up a little.

  But only a little. The citizens of Somerset were clearly eager to embrace the unseasonably cool weather. After weeks of days in the upper eighties, a day in the seventies felt like a gift from God. By lunchtime, downtown Somerset bore little resemblance to the ghost town that had greeted them on Sunday. The park beside the library was packed with mothers and their young children, workers on their lunch break, and people out to enjoy the sunshine. A group of high-school girls had spread out beach blankets and were sunning themselves on the grass, which in turn had brought shirtless boys and their Frisbees. An ice-cream truck set up shop on the corner and was doing brisk trade in cones and Popsicles. As the afternoon wore on, the crowd didn’t dissipate but rather swelled as people decided to play hooky from work and start their weekends early.

  “How are we doing?” Jenn’s voice asked through his earpiece.

  His eyes wandered over to the camera aimed at the park. Jenn was sitting alone on a park bench with a good view of the area. In her employment photo, she’d worn a business suit with her hair was down. Today, she was dressed for a workout—hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail, baseball cap and oversized sunglasses obscuring her face. She sipped a water bottle looking like she was taking it easy after a run. Given the tailored suits that he was accustomed to seeing her wear, he’d taken Jenn for one of those StairMaster-obsessed women whose goal in life was spaghetti arms and a size two. But the tank top and shorts made him realize how mistaken he’d been. She was an athlete and an incredibly fit one at that. But he knew that her extreme fitness was practical; her sculpted shoulders and thighs spoke to a coiled, lethal strength.

  “Looking good,” he said.

  She glanced toward the camera, but he couldn’t read her expression behind her sunglasses and Steelers cap.

  “You better be talking about the weather,” she said.

  “What else?”

  “Uh-huh. Hendricks, status?”

  Hendricks was stationed in the Cherokee a block away from the library, where he had a clear view up and down the street in front of the library.

  “I’ve got some foot traffic into the library and park, but not a lot out. I count five, maybe six, possible matches for our profile that are inside the library. Another seven inside that fall outside our profile’s parameters.”

  “I’ve got six in the park. Gibson, are we missing anyone?”

  “No, that conforms to what I’m seeing too. Computer traffic has been steady, and I’m not seeing anything sneaky from the perimeter.”

  “And all quiet at ACG?” she asked.

  Too quiet, unfortunately. The screen that displayed inbound and outbound traffic on ACG’s network showed nothing out of the ordinary. And no matter how hard he glared, it seemed resolutely determined to keep on doing nothing out of the ordinary. It had led him to worry that maybe they’d tipped their hand and didn’t know it.

  Were they waiting for someone who would never show and was already a thousand miles away, running hard? Or what if this guy were simply taking the week off? Gibson tried to imagine waiting until next Friday to find out. And the Friday after that, and the Friday after that. Suzanne’s memory weighed heavily on him each day, and it was beginning to wear him out. Hendricks had mentioned that his longest stakeout had been seven weeks. Gibson prayed that they wouldn’t be out here that long.

  “Gibson. All quiet at ACG?” Jenn asked again.

  “Nothing so far,” he said.

  “All right, well, next move is his.”

  Although they were focusing on men who fit the FBI’s profile, their cameras captured stills of everyone, man or woman, who came within a hundred yards of the library. Jenn had explained the approach to him during her briefing that morning. The woman did like a good briefing.

  “In all likelihood the profile is right. A profile isn’t a hunch. It’s statistics, and the numbers say that whoever took Suzanne was probably a white male now in his forties or fifties.”

  “But… ,” he said, feeling one coming.

  “But there are always outliers. Maybe it was a woman trying to replace a lost child, or someone older or younger than we usually see in cases like this. A person of color hunting outside their ethnic group. A terrorist or some other politically motivated abductor. Truth is, the FBI had no way of eliminating any of those possibilities and neither do we.”

  “So play the odds, but cover our bases?”

  “Play the odds. Cover our bases.”

  He passed the afternoon in his motel room, reviewing the surveillance footage for clear face shots, compiling them as stills and matching them, when relevant, with the compiled personal information from the computers logged in to the Wi-Fi. Every hour, he forwarded all-new photos and personal data to ACG—but not directly.

  Out of fear that WR8TH had compromised ACG’s corporate servers, Gibson and Mike Rilling had set up independent servers to receive all case-related communications and data. Rilling was running the faces through facial-recognition software tied into federal and state databases. Putting names with faces, essentially, and hoping to get really lucky with a criminal record. A home run would be a hit on the National Sex Offender Registry.

  Gibson had the TV on mute for company and, once he’d seen the same highlights on SportsCenter three times, he switched over to the news. Benjamin Lombard’s campaign was continuing to battle Governor Fleming’s. Lombard had hired a new campaign manager and had performed surprisingly strongly in California, Fleming’s home state. The pundits discussed the pros and cons of his new, more aggressive strategy. The vice president was in the middle of a swing through New England and was giving a speech in Boston this morning. Turnout was expected to be heavy.

  Gibson wondered what would happen if they actually found Suzanne. What kind of a bump would it give Lombard’s campaign? The American people were suckers for a good narrative, and the sight of a reunited family might be too much for them to resist. Would it put Lombard over the top? He wasn’t sure he’d live through the irony of being Benjamin Lombard’s savior.

  “I need a cup of coffee,” Hendricks muttered grumpily. “Don’t anyone talk to me unless they spot someone wearing an ‘I kidnapped Suzanne Lombard’ T-shirt, all right?”

  Five minutes later the next best thing arrived in the form of a tall, awkwardly thin man with a bowed back and skin that looked to be made of candle drippings. The Wax Man sat down at a worktable, took off a backpack, and laid it on the table. Then he proceeded to stare at the kids playing by the fountain like a tourist picking a lobster from a tank. There was definitely something not okay about him.

  “Are you seeing this guy?” Gibson asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve got eyes on him. He’s giving me the creeps from a distance. Does he have a laptop?�
�� Jenn asked.

  “Negative. He’s just sitting there like he’s posing for a NAMBLA recruitment poster.”

  As if on cue, the Wax Man unzipped his backpack and took out a shiny silver laptop.

  “He appears to be taking requests,” Gibson reported. “One laptop by popular demand. See if he knows any Radiohead.”

  The Wax Man began typing, and Gibson watched a device connect to the Wi-Fi. In moments, his program began pulling pertinent information from the laptop’s system registry.

  “What do you have, Gibson?” Jenn asked.

  “Meet James MacArthur Bradley. I have his home address and cell-phone number.”

  “Good. Forward it and his picture to Washington. Let’s see if Mr. Bradley has a criminal record,” she said.

  They watched Bradley for ten tense minutes, urging him silently to do something. Periodically, the Wax Man would pause typing and look over the top of his laptop toward the kids on the grass and lick his lips wetly.

  “What’s he doing?” Hendricks asked.

  “Besides making my skin crawl? Not a lot,” Jenn said.

  “I’ll second that.”

  “Yeah, well, him being creepy is all academic if he doesn’t actually access ACG,” Hendricks said.

  “I wish I had good news, but no joy there,” said Gibson.

  Abruptly, the Wax Man shut his laptop, shoved it into his backpack, and walked briskly toward the street.

  “Where the hell is he going?” Jenn asked.

  “Did we spook him?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Hendricks, he’s rounding the corner toward you in three, two, one…”

  Hendricks grunted an affirmative. “Got him. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. That is not a well guy. He’s getting into a late-model Ford. Started it. Annnnnnnd, he’s out of here.”

  “Damn it,” Jenn said.

  “Well, I got model and plates,” Hendricks said. “But if that was our guy, then yeah, I’d say we just got made.”

  “And if he isn’t?” Gibson asked.

  “Then I guess he had somewhere to be.”

  “Do we go after him?”

  “No,” Jenn cut in. “Nothing we can do about it now. We maintain the stakeout and assume he wasn’t our guy. We have enough data that we can follow up later if we need to.”

  With that, the three of them settled into a state of advanced, professional waiting otherwise known in the trade as excruciating boredom. By four o’clock, the park was still busy but fairly static. No one new using a Wi-Fi-enabled device had come or gone in thirty minutes. Gibson was tracking fourteen users logged in to the library’s Wi-Fi. Nine outside and five inside. Outside, he had four on tablets or e-readers—two white women, a white man in his twenties, and a silver-haired African American man who had to be at least eighty. That left five outside on laptops, also a mix of genders and ethnicities, with three of particular interest.

  The first was a squat, powerfully built white male in his late thirties. His computer’s registry identified him as Kirby Tate. His nondescript face was completely out of proportion with his enormous shoulders and chest, and he looked like someone had Photoshopped a kid’s face onto a man’s body. The result wasn’t pretty, but the man seemed to like the effect, since he was wearing tight khaki shorts and a tank top several sizes too small. Gibson knew the type—had served with the type—guys who would wear a tank top in a blizzard.

  Tate sat at a picnic table near the fountain and divided his time between staring intently at his computer screen and staring intently at the girls on their blankets. The man’s sunglasses couldn’t mask the admiring way his head followed the young girls’ movements.

  The second was a Hispanic male in his forties, Daniel Espinosa. Balding, gray at the temple, and the right age, but pedophiles tended to hunt within their ethnic group. It didn’t eliminate him, but it didn’t move him to the top of the list either. He had a friendly, open face and was chatting with a couple sharing his park table.

  The third man was Lawrence Kenney. He was in his early fifties and looked like he’d purchased his crisp khakis, sweater vest, and unapologetic, sweeping comb-over from the same anal-retentive superstore. The man looked like the proverbial mild-mannered accountant pecking away at his laptop, but he made Gibson uneasy. He couldn’t put his finger on why. Perhaps it was the way the accountant sat among people but felt palpably apart from them. A woman pushing a baby carriage brushed past the accountant, who stiffened. His eyes trailed after her, fixing a simmering glare on her back that made the hair on Gibson’s arms stand up. Did goose bumps qualify as probable cause in Pennsylvania?

  Hopefully, Rilling could match names with faces and run background checks on all of them. Until then, they would have to rely on old-fashioned police work and intuition.

  Jenn and Hendricks set to debating and dissecting their pool of subjects. Listening to them, two things were clear to Gibson. One, they knew what they were talking about. Two, he didn’t, and the conversation quickly eclipsed his ability to follow. His knowledge of serial offenders stemmed largely from The Silence of the Lambs and Patricia Cornwell novels. What he did know was computers and the people who used them. He wondered if the same techniques that were used to profile killers and rapists could be applied to hackers. If he extrapolated backward from the signature of the ACG hack—to whom did it lead?

  He supposed his money was on the accountant. The coding on the virus was clean, precise, and required attention to detail. At least going by wardrobe, the accountant was the best match. It was thin, though. He knew plenty of programmers who were slobs. He figured he was out of his league, discarded the theory, and went back to work sorting through the batch of driver’s license photographs that Mike Rilling had sent him from DC. Over the next hour, he mapped out their locations as best he could.

  By a quarter to five, Gibson wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t entirely alert either. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he was resting his chin on his knuckles and staring at the monitor displaying ACG’s server data. He felt like a guy waiting for a plane that was perpetually delayed. So he was slow to react when his phone vibrated on the floor between his knees. On the third buzz, he looked down at his phone, saw the text message, and immediately snapped back up to the monitor. Adrenaline slammed through him. A red bar had popped up with an alert message. The virus on ACG’s servers was receiving new instructions.

  “Did either of you just get a text message?” Hendricks asked.

  “Yeah, I got it. Gibson, what’s happening?” There was an edge to Jenn’s voice—excitement fused with a predator’s hunger.

  “The virus is active. WR8TH is talking to it.”

  “From the library?” Jenn asked.

  “Hold one,” he said, scanning the list of outbound library Internet traffic. Come on, baby. Come on. He ran his finger down the screen. And there it was. Big, beautiful, and guilty. Someone on the library Wi-Fi was communicating with the corrupt ad server that was the virus’s anonymous relay station. It was an impossible coincidence and could mean only one thing.

  “Son of a bitch is here,” he said. Mostly to himself, but he’d left comms open and the response came back with urgency.

  “Where?” Jenn demanded.

  “He’s outside. He’s in the park,” Gibson said.

  He looked at the video feed from the park. Their guy was down there. Suzanne Lombard’s kidnapper, and likely murderer, was sitting in plain sight, catching some rays.

  “Which one?” Jenn demanded.

  He matched the IP address to a machine and read through his notes until he found the driver’s license photo. He looked from the name back to the monitor until he spotted their man.

  “Got you,” Gibson said with a smile.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Tinsley sat on the wooden crate he was using as a makeshift stool. He’d been there since
before dawn and had watched the sun come up over the library. He was waiting for it to happen… or not. He was indifferent.

  Earlier in the week, he had scoped out a small, unoccupied office to hole up in. From the second-story window where he sat, Tinsley had an unobstructed view of the library and adjacent park. At that hour, the library and park were deserted, but Tinsley wanted time for the emptiness to saturate his retinas and burn the landscape into his mind’s eye. Later, as it filled with bodies, each object would stand out clearly to his brain like a blemish on a pristine original.

  The leasing agent who showed him the property had complained that Tinsley was the first nibble in more than a month. Tinsley took that as a good omen and broke in later that night. He’d been using it as a base of operations, but there was no trace or sign that anyone had been there. He wanted to leave this town without causing so much as a ripple in its surface. Tinsley had no intention at this time of killing the leasing agent, but he’d taken the man’s card in case things took a turn.

  Tinsley blinked and the noonday sun greeted him.

  Tinsley blinked and the sun dipped toward the far horizon.

  His expensive watch told him he had been sitting at the window for twelve hours. His eyes continued to track the hazy movements of the shapes in the park. Nothing of importance had changed. The woman was still on the park bench. The thin, irritable man was still in his car. The third was nowhere to be seen, but Tinsley was confident that Vaughn was back at the motel. Probably typing away on one of his little computers. Type, type, type.

  It was ironic in its way—the hunters unaware that they themselves were hunted. And that if they found their quarry it would mean their deaths. It did not impress him, but he did pause to wonder: Would he know if he was being hunted? Was he not arrogant to assume he alone had the edge? The thought made him grin. That would be an intricate play indeed. Set a killer on a killer; tie up all the loose ends. Doubtful but not beyond the realm of possibility. He would recalibrate his senses to be alert to such a betrayal.