Black Ghost Read online

  21

  The morgue was cold. Shiny, mirror-finish cold. Stainless steel everywhere you looked cold. Steel fridge doors, steel sinks, shiny steel surgical instruments, and other shiny equipment. Layers and layers of disinfectant, antiseptic cleaners, and bleach on the walls gave the whole building a ‘just cleaned’ chemical smell.

  On the autopsy table, Gentry Jacobson’s pale naked body lay with his chest split wide open and half his insides on a steel tray a foot from his head. Caroline watched as the medical examiner, a severe-looking man in his fifties, peeled off his gloves and tossed them into the biohazard bin.

  “This was an accidental drug overdose,” he said, “leading to severe heart failure. I would say death was almost immediate.”

  Caroline suppressed her impatience. “Accidental?”

  “It certainly seems that way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure?”

  “Well, it’s just that ‘certainly seems that way’ doesn’t exactly imply surety.”

  “Ok, let’s put it this way. There are no signs of struggle, he was known to use, and his blood had enough cocaine in it to OD a horse.” The examiner handed Caroline the lab report. “So, seeing as how room for doubt decreases with the admission of evidence, I would say that, yes, I’m implying surety here.”

  Caroline handed the report back to him, unconsciously biting at the corner of her lip. “You missed something.”

  The examiner paused, eyes narrowed. “Come here for a second,” he said. He donned a pair of gloves and grabbed a pair of forceps. With these he lifted Gentry’s nose and exposed the inside of the hacker’s nostrils using a flashlight pen. “See this? And this here? That’s all dead tissue. The septum lining is pretty much all dead tissue. Only big-time cocaine users have this much damage. Now, forensics being a science of induction, we start with the specific then expand into the general in order to form a theory—looking for patterns the entire time. As indicated in my report, we have a hypertensive bleed in the basal ganglia of the brain. That’s pretty much the smoking gun in a cocaine overdose. If we were to work backwards, we’d see the bleed first, we’d move on to the lining of the septum to confirm. The conclusion would be the same—cocaine overdose. There’s more. Would you like to hear it?”

  “You have to have missed something,” said Caroline.

  “I welcome any and all scrutiny of my work,” he said, snapping of his gloves and tossing them onto the legs of the corpse. “If you’ll excuse me...”

  The examiner swept out of the room in a huff, crossing paths with Mack as he exited.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Caroline began. “This kid was murdered—”

  Mack held up his hand. “Stop. Just stop.”

  “We’re in the middle of a huge conspiracy. We need to—”

  “What’s this we stuff?”

  “Mack, I—”

  “You lied straight to my face,” Mack yelled. “Just when I start to think we are getting close and have each other’s backs you pull this stunt.”

  “I knew Taylor was hiding something, and I was right.”

  “At what cost? How’d you get this kid’s name?”

  Caroline stared blankly, not wanting to divulge her actions.

  “Tell me now, or we’re done as partners.”

  “I took over Taylor’s Gmail account and found an email to Bryson.”

  “Are you for real you, we, can go to jail for that.”

  “People’s lives are at stake, Mack. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  “You’re acting like this is all about saving innocent people, but there’s something you’re not telling me. Is it your father? Or I’m just missing it? I don’t know.”

  Caroline crossed her arms and looked away. She had nothing to say.

  “We all have our demons, Caroline. But they’re no excuse to do whatever it is we feel like doing.” He gently laid a hand on her shoulder.

  She jerked away. “You just don’t understand. I can’t help it.”

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret, since you won’t tell me yours. My biggest fear is betrayal by women I care for.”

  Caroline fell silent, conflicted. “I hurt you,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. I promise I will never deceive you again.”

  Mack looked into her eyes. The look was different, complicated. “I guess I overreacted a little. It’s just—”

  He struggled to find the words. This was something new. Mack, so cool, so detached—he’d never had a girlfriend for more than a few weeks in all the time she had known him. Caroline thought briefly of his mother, and how he’d more than once described how his mother had left his father.

  But his mother had left Mack, too.

  “I would have never left you out,” Caroline began, trying a new tactic. “Only I knew what I was doing was wrong, and you’re too important to me to jeopardize your career. I made a judgment call, and it was stupid.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “Partners are like family. You’re stuck with me.”

  Whether it was the tilt of her head, the smile she gave him, or her use of the word “family,” Mack perked up, almost instantly.

  “I followed up on your assessment,” he said dryly.

  Caroline motioned to the dead body. “Thank you. But it doesn’t do him or us much good now.”

  “Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a story to tell. I’ve got the locals holding down the hotel room where he died. If he was killed,” Mack added, “there might still be something there for us to find.”

  “I don’t deserve you,” she said, and hugged him excitedly.

  Wrapped in his arms, their friendly hug suddenly felt a little more than friendly. She inhaled him. He smelled like something herbal and spicy.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she muttered.

  22

  An out-of-shape man in his thirties with an unkempt beard and wearing a Yankees baseball cap walked away from the urinal at a large, rough-looking gas station bathroom. He rinsed his hands at the sink, ignoring the soap. Glancing in the mirror, he picked some long-grain snuff off his yellow teeth, exposing the massive dip tucked between his lower lip and gumline.

  As the man turned to exit, Bic lunged from one of the stalls and grabbed him from behind, covering his mouth with a rag. The man struggled for just a moment and then went limp.

  Bic pulled the man into the handicapped stall and settled him into a waiting wheelchair. Bic then grabbed sunglasses and a travel pillow from his duffel bag and placed these items on the man. He threw a blanket over his legs.

  Bic pushed the man out of the stall. As he did so, an elderly, white-haired man entered the restroom. The man glanced warily at Bic, and then the man in the wheelchair. He nodded and made his way to the stall, whistling something semi-atonal.

  Bic hummed along with the tune unconsciously as he wheeled his target out of the bathroom.

  23

  Mack and Caroline walked up to the hotel door and broke the crime scene seal. Mack pulled out a pen flashlight and started checking behind furniture while Caroline went down on all fours to get a look under the bed. She rocked back up, took a band off her wrist, and tied her hair in a ponytail.

  Mack paused his search and plopped down in the desk chair, then suddenly found himself reliving the worst day of his life. He was seven and he had wandered into his parents’ bedroom one afternoon, despite his mother telling him not to. His first recollection was of his mother’s ponytail, bouncing frantically. Then he remembered his mother naked on top of his dad’s best friend from college, a man Mack thought of as an uncle.

  Caroline, heedless of Mack’s distress, continued to examine. “They had to have left something.”

  Mack looked on, motionless, just like he had when he was seven. Frozen, just staring, unable to walk away. If I would have just walked away, maybe what had happened next wouldn’t have happened, he thoug
ht wistfully.

  “You going to help or just sit there and look pretty?” said Caroline. She held out her hand expectantly. “It’s dark. Give me the light?”

  Mack stood, shaking off the memory-burned look of disgusted shame in his mother’s eyes, and tossed Caroline the penlight. “Reports said the amount of blow on this table was nearly 100 grams.”

  “Yeah?” she said, scrutinizing the mattress lining. “You told me that already.”

  “Thought it bore repeating.”

  She looked up at him incredulously. “And why’s that?”

  “The OD could have been legit.”

  “Too convenient.”

  Mack looked at the TV. “Hey, did we find a remote for this thing?”

  Again, her look of incredulity. “Catching up on your Gilligan’s Island reruns?”

  Mack ignored the comment and turned on the TV manually. The screen stayed black, except for INPUT2 showing in the upper right-hand corner. He inspected the back of the TV.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “There’s a lock on the cable cord into Input 1. Our hacker could have plugged an HDMI cable into the Input 2 slot for some reason. See that?” He pointed to the message on the screen

  “Huh, can we do anything with that?”

  “Maybe,” Mack went to his computer bag and pulled out his laptop. “If there were any IP addresses that sent packets of streaming data out on the hotel’s Wi-Fi, I might be able to recover it.”

  For twenty minutes, Mack pounded away on his laptop, going through all the files from the last twenty-four hours. “Found one with video!” he said at last.

  Looking over his shoulder, they both watched as a video played on the laptop. It was the hacker, setting the GoPro camera up in the corner of the room. As he set it up, the camera swiveled over the entire room, and then settled on the desk. After ten seconds, the video was over.

  “That’s it?” Caroline asked in disappointment.

  “Wait. There’s also a data file hidden inside with this video.”

  “Open it,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am. Uh… It looks heavily encrypted. Let the lab geeks figure this one out. Considering this type of encryption though, this could be juicy.” He looked up at her. “And you saw it, right?”

  “Saw what?”

  He replayed the video. Caroline stared for a second and shook her head.

  “I’m not seeing it.”

  “Look again. He replayed the video, savoring the coming ‘gotcha’ moment.”

  “Mack, come on, it’s getting late.”

  “Look,” he said, pointing at the pile of coke in the corner of the screen. “You saw the stuff in the evidence bag. Does that there look like a hundred grams?”

  Caroline’s eyes opened wide as she said, “Uh, no.”

  “It’s twice as big, now” Mack said. “At least.”

  “So … it was planted after the fact?”

  He held up his hand for a high-five that never came.

  “We’re taking this to Bender.”

  “Hang on. I don’t know if it counts as definitive proof of anything, but it’s suspicious. The big deal is that encrypted file.”

  24

  A man sat low inside his car, watching Mack and Caroline leave the hotel, both clearly happy about something. As he observed them getting into their rental car and driving off, he took out his phone and accessed his speed dial contacts.

  “Yes?” said Congressman Tidwell.

  “We have a problem.”

  A pause. “Is that so?”

  “FBI,” was all the man needed to say by way of response.

  Another pause, then, “Fix it.”

  The congressman disconnected the call, and Phil Utah sat low in his car, taking slow, measured breaths.

  Mack drove towards the airport as the buildings of San Francisco fell into the distance behind them. Caroline sat in the passenger seat, a pencil stuck through the base of her ponytail and pad of paper tossed on the dashboard, working on Mack’s computer.

  “Probably should leave it for the pros,” Mack said.

  “I’m being careful,” she replied. “Just taking a peek to see if there was anything else.”

  He smiled. “I guess I have no choice but to trust you.” It was a shared joke. At the academy, she had finished ahead of him in the cybercrime modules.

  “You weren’t kidding about the encryption,” she said after a minute. “This kid knew what he was doing.”

  He heard her clicking the keyboard ferociously, and then, “No, no, no!”

  The severity with which she exclaimed this forced him to pull over.

  “This isn’t happening!” she said. “It was here! It was right here! Did you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “It must have been five pages of data. It just scrolled by real fast.”

  “Did you catch any of it?”

  “Hang on.” She typed again, and the data scrolled again. “Hang on...” She hit the spacebar and the list froze. “I found the list! It’s names and numbers—”

  Suddenly, the screen froze, and right before her eyes, everything began to break down, the data vanished line by line.

  “What?” she said. “No.”

  “What the hell’s happening?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she screamed in frustration. “It’s a virus.”

  Mack’s phone pinged.

  “We got another problem,” he said, showing her the text from Bender ordering them to get their asses into his office immediately.

  25

  Caroline and Mack had been waiting outside of Bender’s office for about twenty minutes. At 10:15 PM, Bender, dressed in shorts and a Tommy Bahama shirt, stormed around the corner, not even acknowledging them as he threw open his office door and entered.

  “Get in here,” he yelled from his office.

  Caroline and Mack looked at each other.

  “After you,” said Caroline.

  Mack took a deep breath. “Out of the stewpot and into the fire.”

  “Guess who my boss’s boss got a call from?” Bender didn’t wait for a reply. “The Chief of Staff! Who just so happens to go hunting regularly with Bubba Taylor.”

  “Oh boy,” Caroline mumbled.

  “Oh boy is right. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Sir, Taylor knows who’s involved in the Bryson investigation. The man got a call moments before Bryson was murdered, and then there’s a dead hacker—Jacobson—”

  Bender cut her off. “Oh, I was getting to him. You put out a lookout on the hacker kid. Why?”

  Caroline was resolute. “Merely part of a thirty-day assessment, sir.”

  “Why?” he demanded.

  “Taylor has a connection with him.”

  “How do you know this? Did Taylor volunteer this information?”

  All she could say was the truth, but that would just get her fired—maybe even arrested.

  Bender slammed his fist on his desk. “God help you if you did anything illegal.”

  “Sir,” Mack interrupted. “I made the connection from the prior surveillance we had done on Senator Bryson, and I found an email that led us to him.”

  “Did you, Agent always-seems-to-have-the-right-answer Maddox?” Bender turned back to Caroline. “Is that what happened, Agent Foxx?”

  “Sir,” said Caroline, “we think the hacker was killed because he created the list of the targeted people Bryson was going to divulge to his attorney.”

  “I saw the medical examiner’s report,” said Bender. “He was very insistent that this was an OD. Where’s your proof?”

  “We had it on Mack’s laptop, sir, but I bricked the machine.”

  “Bricked…?” His eyes went from one to the other. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “A virus,” said Mack.

  “Sir,” said Caroline, “the same person who killed Senator Bryso
n also killed Jacobson. We have to stop them before innocent people are killed.”

  “Then get some real proof. And fast.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to Mack. “Don’t let your partner brick your evidence next time.”

  Mack nodded.

  “You two just do your jobs and support Moretto and TJ. And if you piss off another person in the President’s cabinet, your asses are gone.”

  Ten minutes later, Caroline and Mack walked silently through the parking garage to their car.

  “Can that man have a bigger stick up his ass?” Even though she was pissed, Caroline kept her voice low. Sounds had a tendency to carry in the cavernous parking structure.

  “You got him in pretty deep water,” Mack said gently. “Did you see how he was dressed? He probably was at some couple’s game night drinking red wine and playing charades or something, and he gets a call from the Chief of Staff chewing his ass out.”

  “Please. I did my job and the boys’ club got their shorts in a bunch.” She clasped her arms around her midsections. “I almost got us fired, didn’t I?”

  “I’m with you on this one,” Mack said. “We both saw that video.”

  “Yeah, and there were names on that list… and numbers. I can remember at least one of the names. It was W-something, White or Wicks… for mercy’s sake. Let me think.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you think, memories aren’t evidence.”

  Caroline looked up. “After I betrayed your trust, you didn’t blink an eye at risking your career for me. That’s special in my book.”

  Mack smiled, eating up the compliment. “You know I got your back.” Then he slapped Caroline on the butt in an atta-boy type of way—but as soon as he did it, he regretted it. His cheeks went red. “I’m sorry. It’s habit. It’s a baseball-buddy kind of thing.”

  Caroline looked at him dumbfounded for a moment.

  Mack was sure she would chew him a new one, but Caroline just walked away, saying. “You better start working on your swing there, hotshot.”

  “What?” Mack replied, baffled.

  Then she turned and smiled. “Oh, there’s a lot you don’t know about me, Maxwell.”