by Lee Perry
“Well, slow down!” She chuckled, “We need you home tonight.”
“Okay,” she heard the smile again, “I’ll see you two then.”
“Okay.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” She hung up, still smiling and stared back out the window; This is the life I wanted. Sitting up straight, she rolled her chair back to her desk and stared at the screen, Okay, so where was I?
If Nancy Ward kept a personal journal… In unconscious imitation of Jordan, she rotated her neck and stopped, she would’ve kept it online… She closed the open files on her screen and opened a browser. Her fingers hesitated just over the keys; She would have kept one where and under what user name? Her eyes narrowed as she stared at, into and through the screen, I could make a program that scans for likely user names… A single eyebrow rose, Of course that means I’d have to hack into the website to do it. She sighed heavily and sat back in her seat, And Jordan would need a warrant of some kind, I’m sure… dammit.
She stared at her screen, at an impasse, But I’m a contractor and Jordan isn’t here today… and what do I know? Maybe I wouldn’t need a warrant. Sitting up, her fingers flew over the keyboard, It’s not like I’m looking to commit some kind of fraud or read anyone else’s private stuff online, I’m just looking for a journal of a murdered woman…
It took her less than an hour to construct a program that allowed her to enter online journaling sites and surreptitiously scan the listed user names and passwords, comparing them to a list of likely words Nancy might have employed in the creation her journal’s account.
Of the nine sites she found, it wasn’t until she ran her program on the seventh, CloudJournal.com that her program had a hit. She had been ordering Christmas lights and decorations online when the alert window filled the screen. “Okay…” she muttered, closing the browser she had been shopping with and studied the results. Her program found a user name Ich Bin Ostara, written in scarlet red Rockwell Extra Bold font, the same font used by the Silver Legion of America. Tamping down her growing excitement, she clicked open the account and grinned at the user photo Nancy Ward had uploaded of herself, her blond hair flowing over bare shoulders.
“Well, finally…”
Millburn, NJ
“And throughout all possible universes…”
Jordan grinned, watching them from the doorway of Cameron’s bedroom; I wonder if he wonders what pottible newnipurses are…
“’Night Jordan…” he called to her from the bed and she joined them, bending to encircle Cameron and his mother in her arms and smothered them with kisses, making them giggle.
“Good night, Cam.”
Catherine rose from the bed and together they exited the bedroom, Jordan closing the bedroom door behind her. She waited until they got to the kitchen before Catherine spoke, “Did you have dinner, or are you starving?”
“Starving, as soon as I personally handed off my evidence to the tech who took official custody I jumped back in the car and drove home.” She opened the fridge, “I’m more than happy to have a sandwich.”
“I’ll have one with you; I just heated up spaghetti-o’s for Cam… He does love that stuff.”
She snickered as they pulled items from the fridge, “And how did the rest of your day go?”
Catherine pulled a spatula from the drawer and turned to her, “Does that mean I can talk about work at home?”
She shrugged, “Well, I guess it’s going to get harder not to… but if you have bad dreams or it keeps you up at night then we don’t. We have plenty of other things to talk about…”
“Ooo!” Catherine’s eyes lit up, “Like how I bought lights and Christmas decorations online today… was that okay?”
Jordan grinned, “Of course it is.”
“I wanted to make sure; cuz’ I think we should at least buy our tree ornaments together as a family…”
“Sounds like we need to schedule a trip to the mall...”
Catherine pulled her in for a quick kiss, “Thank you…”
Jordan pulled her back for another, “You’re welcome.”
“Okay, so I found Nancy’s personal journal online…”
She looked surprised, “You’re kidding.”
“I am not, considering what she and Schmidt were into I figured if she had one she would have kept it remotely on one of those online journaling sites. Although…” She pressed her lips together anxiously, “to find it I had to create a program to search for certain key words that she would have been used as a user name and or password…”
Jordan held the knife she wielded midair until the dollop of mustard dropped from the blade and onto her bread, “And the only way you could use that program was to hack into the site first.”
“Um…” Catherine concentrated on cutting thin slices from the block of cheddar cheese; “yeah…” she dragged the word out, not looking at her.
“How many sites did you hack into?”
“Not many.”
“How many?”
“Seven.”
Jordan’s brows arched high on her forehead and she erupted in laughter, making Catherine cast a worried glance over her shoulder towards Cameron’s bedroom,
“Shhh!” She hissed, “For heaven’s sake, Jordan!”
She was still holding the knife so she covered her mouth with her arm and giggled helplessly.
“I only hacked in so I could run my program under their software like a common anti-spam program; I promise you, I was very careful, none of their IT people will ever know or trace it back.”
Jordan finally sniffed and shook her head in silent admiration, “Of course they won’t...” she snickered, wiping her eyes. “Did she indentify Schmidt by his real name?”
“Not from what I’ve read so far…”
She shrugged, “That’s okay, I’m hopeful the condom I found was his and not the victim’s from some previous encounter… It turns out this young guy was another one of these hedge fund managers who cashed in five years ago…”
“Another one?”
“Yep, it looks like Joseph Schmidt’s current raison d’être is stealing tons of these guy’s money after he kills and rapes them.”
“How much this time?”
“I ran his financials and one hundred million dollars was transferred from ten offshore accounts…”
“Transferred to Grace Goodale?”
“Yep…” Jordan slapped the top slice of bread onto her sandwich, “And we can’t touch ‘em.”
“Lord.” Catherine finished making hers, “Only decaf tea for me.” She said when Jordan opened the refrigerator.
She got them each a bottle of decaffeinated tea and they made their way to the dining table, “Victim Number Three was only twenty-three years old when he made a killing on the subprime market.”
“I hope he enjoyed himself the last five years.”
“Yeah, me too…”
They ate in silence for several minutes and when they were nearly finished Jordan asked, “So you found Nancy’s online diary?”
“Yes, I downloaded the entire contents…” She paused to wipe her lips with a napkin, “I read as much of it as I could till it was time to get Cam, it’s quite extensive.” Her tablet lay on the table and she pulled it to her, powering it on, “There’s her daily musings and files of articles Schmidt must have sent her on the Nazi’s and their many views on creating a new world order…” She opened a file and dragged her finger pad down the screen, “She kept this journal for nearly two years, and from what I can tell, she started it soon after meeting Schmidt.”
“When was her last entry?”
“The night she was killed.” Catherine knew that would be Jordan’s first question and she tapped open the final page and read, “I’m meeting with him tonight, this ridiculous bullshit has got to stop. I’m going to record the conversation. I have to be very careful not to implicate myself, and when he admits what he did I’ll have enough to make sure he never drags me do
wn with him if he refuses to stop living in his fantasy world.”
“What he did…” Jordan repeated, shaking her head, “I don’t suppose she was more specific?”
“Not in this entry.”
“But we were right,” Jordan rose from the table and collected their plates, “she was hoping to get him to confess or admit to something she could use as blackmail against him.”
“Well,” Catherine took a sip of tea, “you were right.” Her brow furrowed and she shook her head, “I don’t get her; here,” she pointed at her tablet, “she says she’s going to use her recording of that conversation to blackmail him, but in the transcript of that conversation she tells him she wants out of his scheme but she still wanted to see him, how? Socially? Sexually?”
Jordan left the dishes in the sink and returned to the table, “Maybe Nancy didn’t have a lot going on in her life outside of work,” she lifted a shoulder in a shrug, “maybe she really liked his sick Nazi stuff in the bedroom,” she snorted, adding, “and cemeteries.”
“Agreed, but still…” Catherine shuddered, “yuck.” She tapped her finger on a bookmark she created, “I sent you a copy of this, obviously, and I didn’t have time for a thorough read… But I think she really just wrote about Schmidt in here, how she thought he was so brilliant… in the beginning anyway. She liked his ideas… I take it she was a bigot too.” Jordan gave her a look. “Oh yes, when she talks about Schmidt making Nazi references about the master race and all that stuff I did read at least one entry where she said she avoids the black and Asian guys at work.”
“Great.” Jordan muttered sardonically and tilted the bottle of tea to her lips.
“I know, anyway, she wrote about recognizing almost immediately in their relationship that he was steadily drawing her deeper into his world. He started sending her articles… She wrote how excited she felt reading them at work when she should have been working and then wiping all traces of her online Nazi reading jaunts from her hard drives in case her supervisor checked up on her activities…”
Jordan looked puzzled, “She was pretty high up in the food chain, why would she have to worry about her boss spying on her?”
“It’s not uncommon for employers to check surreptitiously on their staff, especially if they’re really smart and might be entertaining offers from a competing company.”
“Before you and Alex left that company…” she thought for a minute, “Symteck. Did your employer ever spy on you?”
“No…” Catherine scoffed, “When Alex and I started… well,” Her voice was edged with momentary exasperation, “Alex mostly wanted us to start our own company, and she wasn’t very discreet about it. When corporate got wind of it…”
Jordan nodded, “They threatened to sue you both if you took any of the programs you wrote for the company with you.”
“That is standard business practice.” She shrugged, “The digital business world is full of people who will work for one company, quite loyally for a period of time, then get a job working for a competitor who wants them to lay their previous employer in the dust… so to speak.”
“So Nancy felt wicked and naughty reading Schmidt’s Nazi crap when she should have been working…”
“And she played along quite happily, thinking it was all great fun, especially when they started LARPing.”
Jordan looked mystified, “When they started what?”
“LARPing,” Catherine chuckled, “it means, Live Action Role-Playing.”
“Oh god,” Jordan rolled her eyes, “I think I know where this is going.”
Her brows disappeared beneath blond bangs, “Oh yes. He called her his Ostara and he was her Thor…”
“Thor…” Jordan groaned. “Oh my… lofty.”
“I’m sure it felt that way.” Her smile faded, “She wrote about his fantasy of destroying America, as William Dudley Pelley had envisioned, but digitally, and then bringing it back online and becoming its ruler. She said he told her how all the other countries would fall in line or be destroyed. She said he spoke avidly about racial purity and how they would both begin The New Master Race,” she waved a hand dismissively, “and so on...”
Jordan’s brow furrowed “But it was more than a fantasy for him…”
“Toward the end she wrote about how it felt like scandalous scary fun, being with him, and it’s interesting in all her writings she was careful not to implicate herself over the Wall Street thing in writing…”
“But she blew it and slipped when she confronted Schmidt in her car.”
“And he killed her.”
“Yes.”
“When he began talking about bringing his plans online and how he was finally ready to begin the final destruction of America that she thought he was starting to lose it and decided to withdraw her involvement.”
“So,” she drew a deep breath in through her nose, “he could be targeting these hedge fund guys who made it big back in the economic crash five years ago so he can build a financial war chest… but he did steal from her the exact amount of money she made in the Wall Street glitch.” Jordan quirked a brow, “There wasn’t that much more in that account, he could have cleaned it out. Why didn’t he?”
“Trying to make a point?”
“Between that and all his Nazi aliases, it does seem like he’s working hard to craft symbolic meaning into everything he does.”
New York City, NY
When they got Cameron from daycare, she suggested they go out for lunch and surprised them afterwards by taking them to an enormous toy store that had a special section for Christmas decorations. She hadn’t stopped smiling for thirty minutes, watching Catherine and Cameron eagerly shop for tree ornaments; noticing that while Cameron picked out mostly ornaments that represented his favorite things like fire trucks and dogs, Catherine’s choices were more symbolic of their new life together. The shopping basket Jordan carried was full of ornaments shaped like animals and popular cartoon characters and her eyes brimmed when Catherine placed a lighthouse ornament in the basket,
“We have to hang this one in the middle of the tree.”
Jordan nodded and cleared the lump from her throat, “Absolutely.” She dipped her head for a quick kiss on soft lips. “Along with the polar bear family of three and the Teddy bear angel…” She felt an insistent tug on her jacket and she looked down into earnest brown eyes,
“Jordan,” Cameron spoke and signed simultaneously, “When do we get the Christmas tree?”
She grinned at his perfect execution of the sign for Christmas tree she taught him, “In a couple more weeks, can you wait that long?”
He stared off, out the large picture windows, considering her words, “I’m not sure…”
Her phone chimed in her jacket pocket “Fair enough...” she chuckled and pulling it from her pocket answered, “Hawkins.”
Catherine motioned to take the basket from her and murmured to Cameron, “Time to get back, let’s check out, okay?”
Jordan followed them, saying only, “That’s great, I’ll be about twenty minutes…” before hanging up. When they got in line, Jordan stuffed her phone back on her pocket, “CODIS got a hit on the DNA…” she whispered in Catherine’s ear. “We should have his real identity by the time we get back.”
She hurried down the long corridor to the bureau’s medical examiner’s office and knocked on Dr. Samantha Lucas’s office door,
“Come in…”
She entered and closed the door behind her.
“Why, Agent Hawkins, how nice to see you.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” she begged, “just tell me you found him.”
Dr. Lucas was an attractive woman, Jordan guessed she was in her forties and she chuckled, “Warren Neville Jeffers… I sent you digital copies of everything but, here…” she handed Jordan a thick sheaf of papers and stood, motioning for her to follow, “The old school part of me prefers seeing this stuff printed out.” Her office was spacious and a large conference room table sat at
the far end, “Once we got the DNA profile from the condom we ran it through the database and got a match for an offender profile down in Florida.”
“Florida?” Jordan’s brows rose in surprise, “So he knows Florida.”
“He was a low level IT programmer.” She took the stack of documents from Jordan’s hands and began spreading them on the table, “He got into sextortion on a rather grand scale and is in their system as a convicted sex offender.”
Jordan’s eyebrows rose as her eyes fell on the image taken from Jeffers’s driver license, printed large on the page; “That’s him…” she said in a quiet voice, “that’s Schmidt.” She stared in silence at the picture of a man approaching middle age; the loosening skin at the jaw line and the crow’s feet, like parentheses around his eyes. Straight, collar length mousey brown hair matched the brown eyes, Not exactly the picture of Aryan perfection, are you?
“Schmidt’s his alias?” Dr. Lucas asked.
She nodded. “One of many, probably...”
“Well then, you have that tiny sample of ejaculate caught between the latex folds and CODIS to thank for the match.”
“And…” she tapped her finger on his picture, “Warren Jeffers, for being too lazy to either flush his used condom or take it with him.” CODIS, the generic term for the bureau’s Combined DNA Index System, maintained databases of criminal DNA profiles on a national level and Jordan breathed a sigh of relief, “I was beginning to worry I’d never get a break in these murders.”
“That could have easily been the case,” Lucas agreed, “in every one of the autopsies performed on these victims so far, no trace evidence had been recovered. The epithelial cells recovered from the vehicle left at LAX were identified as having come from the victim.” She shook her head, “The only thing he leaves for us to find is evidence of a bleach cleanser, the chemical composition perfectly matches a popular bleach product that comes in disposable wipes.”
Jordan muttered, “And no fiber evidence has been found yet either.”
