Drained (17 page)

“Um, okay.”

“Do you have video here, ma’am?”

She nodded. “We have a couple of cameras in the building.”

“Would I be able to view some of that video?”

“Um, sure. When were you looking for?”

I reached into my suit jacket and pulled out my notepad. I flipped to the page where I’d taken notes from my phone call with Andrews. “Last Friday between one and two in the afternoon.”

“Okay, it’s going to take me a minute to pull this up. I’m not so hot with the video system.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Did you want to grab a coffee while you wait? On the house.”

“I hear it’s Chicago’s best.”

“That’s not just a slogan. We’ve won awards.”

“I should probably try it, then,” I said.

“Just stick your head out of the door, ask, and Melony will bring you one.”

I opened the office door, requested a cup of dark roast, black, and had it in hand moments later. I stepped back into the office and again stood watching the owner clicking keys on her computer. A moment later, video played on the monitor. I blew across the top of the coffee and took a sip. The coffee was exceptionally strong yet smooth—the best I’d had in quite a long time.

The owner, Vanessa, didn’t take her eyes from the computer. “Well, how is it?”

“Excellent,” I said.

A hint of a smile crossed her face and disappeared just as quickly.

The owner rolled her chair a foot back from the computer screen and waved me over. “Here we go. Friday at one o’clock.”

I rounded the woman’s desk and looked at the screen, which was divided into quarters. One camera was mounted on each counter, with two cameras for the indoor seating area. I opened my folder and pulled out the driver’s license photo of Rebecca Wright. “This is the woman we’re looking for.”

She looked at the photo, nodded, and fast forwarded until someone approached the counter. We repeated the process for the first ten minutes then slowed to watch everyone in the business come, order, and sit or go in real time.

At seventeen minutes after one o’clock, a woman I figured to be Rebecca Wright appeared in the building. She walked to the counter, ordered, and paid cash. She stood around for another few minutes before taking her coffee and walking from the front of the building. We followed her in the corner of the screen through what the indoor camera caught of the outside seating area. Rebecca took a seat, alone, outside at the table next to the front door. A minute or two later, someone approached her. Rebecca stood and appeared to hug the person, who was mostly blocked out by the Chicagoland’s Best Coffee banner. The person slid out a chair with his foot and took a seat on the other side of the table. All I could really see was that it appeared to be a male, he wore gray pants, and his hands were clasped together on the table’s top. He appeared to be wearing a suit. The two sat for twenty minutes before Rebecca stood and appeared to hug the person again, and they both walked off. The man never entered the building and never had a coffee. I watched the guy’s hands the entire time he sat at the table—he never touched anything.

“Shit,” I said.

The owner glanced up at me standing over her, looking at the screen.

“Sorry,” I said. “Do you think I could get a copy of this footage?”

She scrunched her face. “I don’t actually know how to do that.”

“How long does your system save video for?”

She shrugged. “Until it’s full? I honestly don’t know.”

“Well, how long back can you access from today?”

She clicked a couple of keys and looked at me. “Looks like a month or so.”

“Okay. I’m going to get someone in here who can make a copy of the footage if that’s all right.”

“That would be fine.”

I thanked her for her time and purchased the BOSS coffee mug on my way out. I hopped into my rental car and dialed Beth, who answered right away.

“Good timing. I’m just about to walk up to the condo that this Andrea lives in. Did you come up with anything out there?”

“I have her on video meeting a guy.”

“Great!” Beth said.

“Except the guy never enters the building, you can’t see much of him or his body, he never orders a coffee, and the owner doesn’t know how to make me a copy of the footage.”

“Ugh,” she said. “Not so great.”

“Correct. Not so great.”

“Can we get anything from it? Height, weight, hair color? Did you see the guy touch anything?”

“He didn’t touch a single thing. The height, weight and hair I’m not sure on from the video I saw. I’ll ask one of the tech guys back at the Chicago office if they can make a trip out here and copy the video either way, maybe they can do something with it.”

“They should be able to at least copy it and look at it further,” she said.

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Are you heading over to Skokie to her employer now?” Beth asked.

“Yeah, I’m not sure if there is going to be anything for us there, but I’m in the neighborhood, and it’s worth the trip, I guess.”

“Okay. Let me get this interview done, and then I’ll meet you back at the Chicago office.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“See you in a bit.” She hung up.

I searched for the Skokie public works office in my phone and hit the button to navigate to it. My phone informed me the drive would be just ten minutes. I followed the suggested route.

I flashed my credentials as I pulled into the Chicago FBI office. The stop at Rebecca Wright’s employer had been less than fruitful. She’d worked in the records department with one other person sharing her office. The two women weren’t close and didn’t speak outside of work. Rebecca’s supervisor allowed me to look around her desk—I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I’d gotten in and out within forty-five minutes.

I found a parking spot in the lot and got out. I’d spoken with Andrews on the drive back. He was at the Classified OD office downtown, waiting to speak with someone in their legal department. He said he’d have Agent Toms meet me in the lobby and take me over to the tech department, who’d apparently found something. I tried calling Beth on my way back to the field office, but the call went to her voice mail—I’d assumed she was still conducting her interview with Andrea Fradet.

I entered the building and walked across the FBI insignia toward the desk near the back. The same security guard from the other day greeted me at the counter.

“Here for Agent Toms,” I said.

“Ah, he wanted me to give him a jingle when you arrived. Um, Agent Rawlings, right?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Let me get him down here. One second.”

I glanced at the guy’s name badge—Jerry. He picked up the phone, made a call, and hung up a few seconds later.

“He’ll be down in a second,” Jerry said.

“Sure. Thanks.” I leaned against the front counter and waited. I pulled back the sleeve on my suit jacket and checked the time—a few minutes after eleven. I pulled out my phone. I’d missed two calls from Karen in the last few hours. I sent her off a quick text message that I’d gotten an early start, loved her, and would call her as soon as I could.

The elevator doors at the side of the room opened, and Agent Toms headed my way.

“The tech guys found something for you, I hear,” he said.

I turned to face him. “Yeah, that’s what Andrews said. Know what they found?”

He shook his head, causing his jowls to wiggle. “Let’s go find out. They are in the other building. Figured I’d walk you over there instead of having you come up, then down, then walk you over there.”

“Fair enough.”

Agent Toms headed toward the doors at the side of the building opposite the elevators. I followed him outside and into the adjacent building.

“Get anything else from out at that scene in Aurora?” I asked.

“I just got back a little bit ago. Left as soon as our forensics unit had finished with the bodies.” He stopped in front of an elevator and thumbed the button to take us up. “Not sure if we got anything new, but the vehicle will be brought back to our garages here this afternoon for forensic processing. We have a few agents sticking around the area to do some door knocking, and Agent Bower, who I left the scene with, will touch base with the family as soon as they arrive at the medical examiner’s.”

“Okay. So the family of the woman has been contacted?”

The elevator doors opened, and we stepped inside. Toms pressed the button for the second floor. “The local medical examiner will contact the family for identification. After that, Agent Bower will introduce himself to the family, collect their contact information, and forward it on to Andrews, you, and your partner for interviews.”

I nodded.

The elevator let us out on two. I followed Toms down the hall to the left. He stopped at a pair of frosted glass doors that simply said Technology Unit in black. He pushed the door open, and we entered. A large white-floored room spread out before us. Workstations and rows of computer monitors filled the right and left walls. Each workstation appeared to have a bank of six computer monitors dedicated to it, two monitors high by three wide. A gray rectangular desk ran directly down the center of the room, covered with more computer monitors, power ports, and what looked like diagnostic equipment. A man glanced over at us as he connected a laptop computer to a port on the desk’s top. At the workstations on my left and right, four men and two women sat. Blue FBI jackets hung on the backs of a few of their office chairs. Toms walked toward the back of the room. The far wall we approached was white and filled with windows and doors. Through the windows, I could see that each room was an individual lab. Toms turned right at the back of the room, walked down a short hallway, and stopped at an office door. He rapped on the door with his knuckles and pulled it open when someone inside told him to come on in.

I entered the office behind Agent Toms. A man sat behind a desk, looking up at us. At his back was another wall of monitors in the same fashion as the workstations in the main office—two by three. The man had dark hair that receded in the front. He appeared in his late forties, and a graying goatee wrapped his mouth. He wore a blue dress shirt and patterned gray tie.

“Skip, this is Agent Rawlings,” Toms said. “Rawlings, this is Skip Brady. He runs the tech unit here.”

The man rose from his chair and shook my hand.

“From Virginia, right?” he asked.

I nodded. “I heard you guys found something on the computer and tablet that were dropped off,” I said.

“Find something, we did,” he said. “Let’s go have a talk with my guy who found it.”

He rounded his desk and waved for Agent Toms and me to follow him from his office.

We all walked the short hall back toward the labs. I looked through the lab window on my right and spotted the computer and tablet we’d brought in, sitting on the workstation there. A man was sitting in front of a computer in the corner of the lab, his back to us. Skip knocked on the door, and we entered. The man before the computer spun on his chair to face us. He appeared to be in his early thirties and was small in stature. He wore a yellow dress shirt, which looked a size too large, tucked into a pair of khakis, with a black tie.

“This is Mike O’Neil. He’s got something for you on these electronics,” Skip said.

I shook the guy’s hand. “Agent Hank Rawlings.”

“Pleasure,” he said.

“So what did you find?”

“Well, I’ve been working with the Jasmine Thomas computer mostly because the tablet is cooked—more on that in a minute.”

“Find anything on the computer?” I asked.

“Well, it works, and we have access to everything. I was left a note to be on the lookout for anything related to Classified OD. I tried looking into that. There was nothing in her browsing history related to the site, but we do have something interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Jasmine had one of these programs installed on her computer that remembers logins and passwords for all the sites she had accounts with—which, these programs are about the worst thing ever, by the way—trusting all your user names and passwords for everything, including banking, to a third party just isn’t smart. Aside from that, the program does have account information for Classified OD saved in its memory. Though when I tried to access her account there, it told me that it was not a recognized user name and password. So I thought maybe she changed her password and filled out the ‘lost my login’ information form on the site, hoping that the site would send the reset information to her e-mail, which we have access to. We never got anything, meaning she must have closed her account there or had it closed by the company.”

“Why would she have it closed by the company?” I asked.

“Ah, well when people post fake classified listings and get reported, the place could close the account.”

I nodded. “Any signs that’s what happened?”

O’Neil shook his head.

“Okay, so she did have an account at one time but no longer does. Can we see when it was closed?”

“I checked through her e-mail for one of the standard ‘sorry to see you go’ e-mails or anything from classified OD, actually. Not a single message. Maybe the company keeps records of account terminations.”

“Okay.” I pulled my notepad out and jotted down what he’d said. “What’s up with the tablet?”

“Dead as a doornail.”

“Dead how?” I asked.

“Cooked from the inside, just like the cell phone I was looking into.”

“You can’t get anything from it?”

“No, but I think I know how it was fried.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, I’m thinking that someone sent the tablet, cell phone, and computer a virus,” he said.

“The cell phone. This is Jasmine Thomas’s as well?” I asked. “If memory serves, it was the only one found.”

Skip cleared his throat and responded. “That was the name on it, yeah.”

O’Neil continued. “Well, the reason I think that someone sent it is this.” He turned and clicked a few buttons on his computer. A window popped up on his monitor with what looked like some kind of computer code on it.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.