“I feel like we’re rolling, but I can’t tell if it’s uphill or downhill,” Bob said when Lucas told them about Armstrong’s lab results.
* * *
—
THE FBI TEAM showed up, the manager let them into Ritter’s apartment, while the marshals and Clark stood around in the hall as the team took a preliminary look. An hour later, the team leader, Jake Ricardo, came out, and said, “We can’t find any sign of a shooting in here. I don’t believe he was killed in this apartment.”
No murder scene. The first time the marshals searched the place, they’d been restricted by the warrant—they’d had to specifically list what they were looking for, and they’d been strictly held to that list because their justification for the search was fairly thin. With Ritter murdered, the FBI team could tear the place apart.
They did that.
The first significant find was two passports, hidden under a carpet edge held down with a strip of double-sided tape. One passport was British, issued to one Richard Carnes, with Ritter’s photo. The other was American, issued to a David Havelock, also with Ritter’s photo.
The second and final good thing was Ritter’s laptop, which was sitting on a coffee table. They couldn’t get into it because it was password-protected. Lucas asked them if they could get the laptop to their computer lab to break the password.
“That’s in a different place, down in Quantico,” Ricardo said. “I’ll call them and see if they can pick it up. What about his cell phone?”
“Haven’t found it,” Lucas said. “We know he had one, because we got the number, and we know some places that it wasn’t.”
“When did he get killed?”
“Probably last night,” Lucas said.
“What service?”
“Verizon.”
“Okay. Verizon will have tracking data for him going back quite a while, and texts going back at least a few days. You gotta get some guys on them.”
“Could you do that?”
“Our people can. Let me call another guy.”
* * *
—
HE DID THAT, and then called the computer specialist at Quantico, whose name was Roger Smith. “I live up near where you are,” Smith said. “I could stop by on the way home, take a look. If I can’t do anything, I could bag it and bring it to the lab first thing in the morning.”
“That’d be great,” Lucas said.
“In the meantime, look for the password. Could be written anywhere, if he actually wrote it down. Which he probably didn’t. Probably his mom’s middle name.”
“We’ll look,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
CLARK, the Frederick County detective, gave up first. “If there’s anything else here, I’ll be damned if I know what it would be. I don’t think he left a note that says ‘I’m going to Joe’s house, and he might shoot me.’”
“No, but he might have left a trail to the house,” Lucas said. “The FBI is looking at his phone records. Hang on a while longer, we ought to be hearing back from them.”
They did, but not for an hour. An FBI tech called Lucas, and asked, “Do you have a cell phone or an iPad?”
“An iPad, in my car,” Lucas said.
“Give me your email, and I’ll send you a link. We’ve mapped his track for the twenty-four hours before his phone quit.”
“When did it quit?”
“About eleven o’clock last night, over in Virginia.”
“Where in Virginia?”
“There’s a place called Applejack’s . . .”
“That’s where his body was dumped,” Lucas said. “How long before I get the track?”
“About thirty seconds after you give me your email address.”
* * *
—
LUCAS WALKED DOWN to his car, got the iPad, and walked back to Ritter’s apartment, bringing up the email as he walked. The FBI file was simply a pdf of a Google map, with the track played across it in a red line, with ant-sized numbers attached to the track. A legend with the map showed the time for each number.
The track started at Ritter’s apartment for eight hours—he was asleep—then touched at the Heracles office, where it stayed for a few hours, followed by a wandering line at noon—lunch, Lucas thought. The phone went back to the office in the afternoon, went out to a location in Arlington, touched at the office, went over to Georgetown in the evening, and looped back toward Virginia, where the signal disappeared.
Lucas got back to the apartment, and Bob, Rae, and Clark all looked at him. “Ritter was at home last night, and he drove over to a restaurant that’s about a block from Parrish’s house,” he said. “There are some squiggles on the map, where he maybe walked over to Parrish’s place. The phone goes back across the river to that restaurant, where the body was probably dumped. Parrish killed Ritter and drove him back across the river and dumped him.”
“Good to know,” Clark said. “That’s better than Ritter driving himself back home, stopping to get a bite to eat, where he gets shot behind the restaurant by muggers and thrown in the dumpster.”
“That’s unbecoming skepticism,” Rae said.
“Only because the Washington area has the best defense attorneys in the country, because it needs them,” Clark said.
Rae was looking over Lucas’s shoulder, and said, “Call the FBI phone guy, get Parrish’s track.”
“Of course,” Lucas said.
He did that, and the phone guy said it would be another hour.
While Lucas was talking about the phone, Smith, the computer expert, showed up. He was a balding black man, who first took a long look at Rae, then used some electronic boxes to mess with Ritter’s laptop. After a few minutes, it opened up. Lucas, looking over his shoulder, said, “Thank you.”
“You’re premature,” Smith said. “Everything in here seems to be encrypted. Everything. All his email and a dozen or so documents. It’s standard heavy business encryption . . .” He tapped the screen showing an icon for an app called SanderCrypt. “That means there’s no possibility of reading this stuff without the key.”
“Well, hell, what would the key look like?” Bob asked.
“Could be anything. Might not even exist anymore, if he memorized it, and of course now he’s dead.”
“What if he wrote it down?” Rae asked. “How many numbers would it be . . . or letters . . . or whatever?”
Smith shook his head. “Can’t tell. It could be anything, but probably quite a few letters, or numbers, or symbols . . .”
“And you guys can’t break it?”
“Nope. The NSA can’t. Nobody can.”
“So let’s say he wrote it down? What should we be looking for?”
“Well, anything that’s sort of out of place,” Smith said. “Most people don’t write ‘Hey, diddle, diddle, the frog and the fiddle and the moon jumped over the plutocrat’ on the typing tray of their computer desk. If you find something like that, it’s probably a key.”
“We’ve been all over this place, inch by inch, and haven’t found anything like that,” Lucas said. “Would it just be a regular sentence, though, instead of random stuff?”
“Oh, depends on how much he knows about computers. If it was that ‘Hey, diddle, diddle’ thing, and, say, thirty letters long, it’d be impossible for any computer to break through with brute force. At the same time, it’d be easy to remember,” Smith said. “Most non-techies don’t know that, so they create a long random sequence. But random sequences are a lot harder to remember, and they get written down. That’s what you’d look for—random numbers and letters that are out of place, that don’t connect to anything else.”
“Haven’t seen anything like that, either,” Lucas said.
“Then you’re SOL,” Smith said. “I’ll take the computer—let me know if you find a
nything. Maybe he’s got the key in a safe-deposit box or something and you’ll find it later.”
“That seems unlikely if he has to use it,” Bob said.
Smith shrugged: “You’re right. With all the encrypted emails, it looks like he used it quite a bit.” He paused, then added, “We had one guy who used the serial numbers on a dollar bill—ten numbers, two letters; once forward, once backward. He told us he almost spent it a couple of times. He finally tucked it into the back compartment of his wallet to make sure he didn’t.”
“That’d be impossible to see even if we had Ritter’s wallet, which we don’t,” Rae said.
“Yeah. We didn’t see it, either, with the dollar-bill guy,” Smith said. “He told us about it as part of a plea bargain.”
Lucas shook his head. “There’s gotta be a way to break it . . .”
Smith shook his head. “Sorry, man. There isn’t. That’s the way of the world now.”
* * *
—
SMITH WAS PACKING UP when the FBI phone technician called and said that Parrish’s phone had been turned on at his house all evening. A few minutes later, the Arlington cops called and said they’d found Ritter’s car a block from the Applejack’s. The doors were locked, but the car appeared to be empty, with no bloodlike discoloration on the fabric seat. They’d tow it and open the trunk, but the Arlington cop said the trunk was more like a lunchbox than a cargo hold, and nobody could have squeezed a body inside, with or without fingertips.
“But there could be documents,” Lucas said. “I want a callback as soon as you open the trunk.”
“We’ll call,” the cop said.
19
Forte ran the passports through the relevant databases to see where Ritter might have gone with them; he called back after dinner to tell Lucas that both had been used for trips to Europe and back to the U.S.
“He didn’t stay long—two days in France, three in Spain, for one of them; three days in France, two in Germany, for the other,” Forte said. “I could be wrong, but I suspect he was validating the passports with travel. Used passports already carrying visa stamps are less interesting than brand-new ones, if you’re working passport control. They’ve already been checked.”
The next morning, Bob called after his workout, and Lucas told him that he was going out to walk around for a couple of hours. “I need to think, that’s all. Figure out what we can salvage. Like you said, Ritter was our guy, and now we need a new one.”
Lucas went back to Georgetown, which was close by and not a bad place to walk. He wound up in a diner, eating a short stack of pancakes with bacon, reading the Post. There was a short item on page three about the Smalls/Grant controversy, but with nothing new.
When he got the check, he paid with his last twenty-dollar bill, which was a mild surprise. He’d stopped using credit cards for small charges in unknown places—every exposure created another possibility of getting hacked—and so always carried a supply of cash. He rarely let the count get below a couple of hundred dollars. He left the diner with fifteen dollars and change, the lack of cash scratching at the back of his brain like a weevil on a cotton boll.
And he hadn’t figured out the next step.
* * *
—
HE’D SEEN a Wells Fargo Bank a couple of blocks away and walked over. He put in his ATM card and punched in his code . . . and noticed the Braille dots below the operating instructions. He wondered why they’d put Braille on a machine where a blind guy couldn’t find it easily.
A bell rang in his head.
He collected his cash, stuffed it in a pocket, and called Rae. “Go down to the business center, however that works—maybe you’ll need to take your own laptop—and download a Braille chart that shows letters and numbers and print it out. I need you to figure out how it works—Braille, that is. You know, how to read it.”
“You mean, with my fingers?”
“No, no . . . what each Braille pattern means—what letters they are, the numbers.”
“Well . . . Okay. What are we doing?”
“Looking for the key to Ritter’s laptop.”
“It’s in Braille?”
“Remember those weird dots on the back of his belt?” Lucas asked. He heard an intake of breath.
“Oh my God, you could be right. Why don’t I download it on my iPad? I can do that in a minute.”
“I won’t have the belt in a minute, but the iPad sounds fine. I’ll get back to you when I get the belt. Or we’ll meet back at the hotel and work it out.”
“I’ll download it now. The Stump will be amazed . . . which he usually isn’t.”
“We don’t know what we’ve got yet,” Lucas said, “but this feels right. A code on his belt could be as long and random as he wanted, would be handy, anyplace, anytime, impossible to misplace, and not obvious. People who know Braille would never see it because they’re, you know . . .”
“Blind.”
“Right. And people who aren’t blind probably wouldn’t recognize the dots as a code.”
“How did you recognize it?” she asked.
“Thought about it a lot . . . all the places I’ve seen different dot codes,” Lucas lied. “The Braille idea sorta popped into my head.”
“Someday you’ll have to tell me the truth,” Rae said.
* * *
—
WITH RAE GOING OUT on the ’Net to find a Braille chart, Lucas called the Frederick County medical examiner, identified himself, and talked to a Medical Examiner’s investigator named Gates. “You have a body there, a James Ritter.”
“Yup.”
“I need to come over and see his belt,” Lucas said. “It’s a gun belt, made for wide loops, like on jeans.”
“What are you looking at?” Gates asked.
“The back of the belt. There might be some . . . information . . . on it. That we can use,” Lucas said.
“Really? I didn’t see anything.”
“It’s my superpower,” Lucas said. “I can be there in an hour.”
“I could take photos with my iPhone and have them to you in four minutes, if that makes any difference to you,” Gates said.
“Well—yeah, let’s try it. I need the whole length of the back of the belt. I’m sitting on the side of a road in downtown Washington and I’ll wait for the call.”
“Not four minutes, though, more like seven or eight.”
“I’ll wait,” Lucas said.
* * *
—
LUCAS WAS WAITING with his iPad when the photos came in seven minutes later, three of them, all tight and well focused, with a note that said, “From left to right. Are the dots a code?”
Lucas didn’t bother to answer the question, sent “Thanks,” and headed for the hotel.
Back at the hotel, Lucas found Bob and Rae waiting in Rae’s room, and when Rae let him in, she waved her iPad at him, and said, “Bob and I have been figuring out Braille. It’s simple enough. You still think it’s Braille on the belt?”
“Sure looks like it to me,” Lucas said. He turned on his iPad, called up the photos, and they all crouched over the room’s desk, the two iPads side by side. Lucas asked, “How do we know which way is up or down?”
Rae explained, and Lucas said, “So you read them.”
She did, and wrote each letter or number on a legal pad as they scanned the belt photos: there were twenty-four symbols: “c3cejd24lstpv319qubdo6g9.”
“That’s nothing but a key to something,” Bob said.
* * *
—
LUCAS FOUGHT through the FBI bureaucracy to get on the line with Roger Smith, the FBI computer tech. “Do you have Jim Ritter’s laptop handy?”
“It’s in a lockup, but I can get it in a minute or two.”
“I got some numbers for you,” Lucas said.
/> “Hang on.”
* * *
—
LUCAS HUNG ON, and Bob said to Rae, “If this works, I’m probably going to have to kiss Lucas’s ass. You might not want to be here for that.”
“No time for it anyway,” Lucas said. “If this works, we need to get down to Quantico and check this stuff out.”
Rae: “Why? We’ll just have him email it to us.”
Lucas rubbed his face, and sighed. “Shit. You know, deep in my heart, I don’t understand that we don’t always have to go places to get things anymore,” Lucas said. “I was about to drive an hour over to the Medical Examiner’s Office to look at Ritter’s belt. The investigator sent me the iPhone photos in seven minutes. Kind of scizzes me out, the way it comes out of the sky now.”
* * *
—
SMITH CAME BACK to the phone, said, “We’re up and running. What’s your best guess?”
Lucas read the string of numbers and letters to him, and the tech typed them in, and said, “Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s backward, or whatever,” Lucas said.
“Or maybe I mistyped something. I’m going to read them back to you,” the tech said.
He did, and, toward the end of the string, said, “ddo6g9.”
Lucas said, “Wait. Wait. Toward the end of the string, it should be bdo, not ddo . . .”
The tech said, “Wait one . . .” and then, “Shazam! We’re in.”
“I could come down and look at it, but if you could send the stuff, it’d be a hell of a lot quicker.”
“I can send it. What’s that chick’s name, the one working with you?” Smith asked.
“You mean Rae?” Lucas looked at Rae.
“Yeah, the pretty one . . . the basketball player.”
“Rae.” To Rae, quietly: “He kinda likes your looks.”