Moving Target (32 page)

“Can you tell what went on here?” B. asked.

“Mrs. Rogers remembers coming to on the sidewalk a few blocks
from here. When she woke up, she had a pillowcase over her head and duct tape around her hands and legs. She’s a tough old bird, I’ll give her that. She managed to get loose and find her way home. I went back and collected the duct tape and the pillowcase.”

“She didn’t see who was responsible or remember what kind of vehicle dropped her off?”

“No.”

“And there aren’t any witnesses?”

“Not so far,” Hernandez answered. “If anyone saw anything out of line around here yesterday morning, they have yet to come forward. LeAnne asked me to wait until after you got here before calling the incident in. With Mrs. Rogers safe at home, I didn’t have a problem with that. Besides, I wanted to see if the two of you had any clue as to what’s going on. What can you tell me?”

“Somebody took her,” B. said. “And then they let her go.”

“What’s this all about, really?” Hernandez asked. “Look around. This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where someone can visit the nearest ATM to meet a ransom demand.”

“It’s not about money,” B. said. “At least not directly. Before Lance got sent to prison, he and his computer science teacher invented a cutting-edge program called GHOST. It’s a program my company would like to have in our bag of tricks, and I was prepared to pay good money for it. We’re pretty sure there are a number of other entities interested in GHOST, including whoever grabbed Mrs. Rogers.”

“Why did they let her go?”

“Because they got what they wanted,” B. replied. “The ransom demand was called in to Lance’s hospital room in Austin. He gave them the access codes. Whoever took Mrs. Rogers has the program.”

“I’ve been with LeAnne Tucker for the past several hours,” Richard Hernandez said. “If she knows about this, she hasn’t mentioned any of it to me. So how is it that you two are privy to so much information?”

“We were worried about Lance, so I stationed an operative in the hospital to look out for him,” B. answered. “There’s already been one attempt
on his life, and we were afraid there’d be another. Unfortunately for us, the bad guys went for Mrs. Rogers instead of Lance, and we didn’t see that coming.”

“It sounds like you were expecting someone to make a move long before the threatening note showed up.”

“Yes,” B. said, “and I believe we’ve been proved right.”

They were still standing on the sidewalk outside LeAnne’s house. Ali shivered involuntarily. “It’s cold out here,” she said. “How about if we go inside for the rest of this discussion?”

B. wasn’t ready to move. “What brought you here, Detective?” he asked. “Why here on this street in the middle of the night?”

“Mrs. Tucker called me.”

“You’re the guy who arrested Lance in the first place. Why would she call you?”

“She had my number.”

“Why?”

Hernandez paused before he answered. “After I heard what happened to him, I stopped by and talked to Phyllis, the grandmother. I offered to organize a crew to install a wheelchair ramp.” He shrugged. “I guess I’ve always felt a little guilty about the part I played in what happened to Lance. Yes, he was a hacker, but he also seemed like a good kid. It looks to me like they threw the book at him when they didn’t need to.”

“You arrested him,” B. said, “and High Noon supplied the evidence that made the arrest warrant possible. We’re on the same page, Detective Hernandez: You and I both think Lance and his family got a bum deal, and maybe, if we work together, we can do something about it.”

“Work together how?”

“Does the name Lowell Dunn mean anything to you?” B. asked.

Hernandez shrugged. “The name sounds familiar, but I’m not sure why.”

“Mr. Dunn was head of maintenance at the detention center. He
was someone who liked Lance and was in his corner. Hours after coming to the hospital and telling LeAnne that he didn’t buy the official version of what supposedly happened to Lance and after offering to help, Mr. Dunn died in a house fire.”

“Okay,” Richard Hernandez said. “I remember now. That incident happened earlier this week. I believe the guy was smoking in his La-Z-Boy.”

“That’s what initial reports said,” B. told him, “but you should check with your department.”

“Why?”

“Because the Dunn case is now being treated as a homicide.”

“Since when?”

“Since this afternoon,” B. said. “A guy by the name of Marvin Cotton, a guard from the detention center, is currently in custody. Cotton has a history of arson offenses. You might want to check with the scheduling records at the center and see if he had the opportunity to ignite the cloud of aerosol glue that set Lance Tucker on fire. There’s also a good chance that if you happened to take a look at Marvin Cotton’s e-mail history at work, you’d find a communication from him to a technician who disabled certain security cameras inside the detention center, cameras that made it possible for whoever set the fire to come and go without being caught on video.”

“Does this technician have a name?”

“No,” B. said, “but you should be able to find that out with a minimum of difficulty.”

“Should I bother to ask how you came to know all of this?” Hernandez asked.

“Probably not,” B. said, “but if you pass along any of these suggestions to the detectives assigned to the case, just call it gut instinct. That’ll be better for you, and it’ll definitely be better for us.”

“Fair enough,” Detective Hernandez said with a laugh. “How about we go inside before your friend here freezes to death?”

He led the way. Ali turned back to B. “When you said we needed an Inspector Elkins on the ground in Texas, I thought you were kidding.”

“Hardly,” B. said. “That’s one of the tricks I’ve learned from our old friend Stuart Ramey. With him, it’s standard procedure.”

“What’s that?” Ali asked.

“Make friends with the locals. Come on, let’s go in. You are freezing.”

A
s soon as Ali stepped into the living room, two small dogs catapulted out of a shabby easy chair where they had been cuddled next to a wan older woman swathed in a layer of blankets. The dogs raced toward the door in a frenzy of high-pitched barking; after ascertaining that Ali and B. represented no immediate threat, they returned to the chair and resumed their previous positions.

“You must be Mrs. Rogers. I’m Ali, and this is B.,” Ali said. “We’re with High Noon. We wanted to talk to you about what happened today.”

“There’s no point,” Phyllis Rogers said. “I don’t remember any of it. Well, maybe some. I remember waking up a time or two in the trunk of a car. That’s all. I’ve heard that there are supposed to be levers or buttons or something in cars to let people out of trunks these days, but I was in no condition to find one.”

“You probably were dosed with scopolamine,” Ali said. “It’s one of the date-rape drugs. There’s an airborne version called Devil’s Breath. Someone used some of it on me once. I was out for hours.”

“It happened to you, too?” Phyllis asked. “Did you ever remember anything?”

“Eventually, I remembered bits and pieces from just before it happened.
And that’s what I wanted to ask you about. Do you remember anything at all?”

Phyllis frowned. “I took the boys to school. LeAnne was here for breakfast. I was cleaning up the house when the doorbell rang. I remember walking toward the door. I looked out the peephole, and I seem to remember there was a woman standing outside, but that’s all. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up outside on the ground a little while ago.”

“We’ll see if there are any prints on the doorbell,” Detective Hernandez put in, “but I’m guessing that’s going to come up empty.”

“What about the dogs?” Ali asked. “Where were they? Wouldn’t they raise hell about a stranger showing up and doing something like that to you?”

“I was vacuuming,” Phyllis explained. “Duchess is petrified of the vacuum cleaner. She goes into a blind panic if a vacuum cleaner comes too close to her, so whenever I vacuum, I lock them in the dining room.”

“You mentioned that you saw a woman on the front porch,” Ali said. “Did you get a look at her?”

“Not really. She was looking back toward the street. All I saw through the peephole was the back of her head. She had long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.”

“Young or old?”

“I couldn’t tell. Young, maybe, but I’m not sure.”

“You said she was looking back toward the street. Did you see a vehicle there?”

“No, not that I remember.” Phyllis paused and frowned. “Wait, there was something about the garage. I remember being in the garage, but I don’t know why. My car was parked in the driveway.”

All through the conversation, LeAnne had been sitting on a sofa near her mother. Ali turned to her. “Can you show me the garage?”

When they reached the door that led from the kitchen to the garage, Ali used the eraser end of a pencil to press the door opener. When the light came on, it revealed a two-car garage. In one bay sat an eighties-
vintage Taurus with faded blue paint. The other bay was stacked full of boxes, bikes, skateboards, and an accumulation of stuff that most likely was deposited on moving day and never unpacked.

“That explains why no neighbors noticed what happened,” Ali said. “Whoever did this put their own vehicle in the garage so no one would see your mother being loaded into the trunk.”

“I understand that someone took her, but I don’t understand why they let her go,” LeAnne said.

“Your son paid the ransom demand,” Ali said quietly.

“But how?”

“He gave the kidnappers what they wanted: his program.”

Shaking her head, LeAnne leaned against the doorjamb and began to sob. “Now he’s lost that, too? Poor Lance. That was the one thing he had left—his precious program. He thought if High Noon wanted that, he’d at least have a chance of getting somewhere, but if GHOST is gone . . .”

Ali reached out and touched the woman’s shoulder. “Give your son credit,” she said. “He did what he did in hopes of saving his grandmother, and it appears to have worked.”

There was a single step leading from the kitchen down into the garage. LeAnne sank down on it as though she no longer had the strength to stand. “You don’t know Lance. He was always such a good kid. Until that hacking thing, I don’t think he was ever sent to the principal’s office. All because of that, his life is ruined, and so is ours. Before this happened, he was headed to college; he had a girlfriend; he was going somewhere. All of that is gone. He’s got nothing. My boss called this afternoon: I’ve missed so much work the past two weeks that I’ve lost my job. That means we’ll lose the house and be on the street. How can I be such a failure?”

“You’re not a failure,” Ali said. “You’re a single mom doing the best you can. And if Lance was willing to give up something as important to him as GHOST in order to save his grandmother’s life, that means you’ve done something right.”

“I was furious with him this morning when he insisted on having that full-of-business nun call Mr. Simpson instead of the police. That made no sense to me.”

“Your son must have figured out that everything going on had something to do with his GHOST program. He probably also realized that someone like B., someone who’s part of the cyber security world, would know a whole lot more about cyber crime and how to deal with it than anyone in a small-town police department.”

LeAnne shook her head. “Cyber this and cyber that. I wish Lance had never had anything to do with computers. His father’s father bought Lance an old laptop for his eighth birthday. By the time he was ten, he was figuring out how to do programming. He was entering his freshman year when we moved here. I was a little worried when Mr. Jackson started taking such an interest in him. You hear things these days about teachers exploiting kids or molesting them or something. When I realized there were girls in Mr. Jackson’s club, too, I didn’t worry as much, but he and Lance did spend huge amounts of time together after school and on weekends. I know that.”

“As I recall from what happened at the trial,” Ali said, “there were surprisingly few e-mails going between them, and there was nothing at all linking Mr. Jackson to the hacking situation.”

“Mr. Jackson was one of the few teachers who spoke out publicly against the tagging system, but nobody was able to prove that he had any hand in the actual hacking. Believe me, they tried. They searched through all of Lance’s e-mail accounts and our phone records, trying to establish that there was a direct connection. After poor Mr. Jackson took his own life, there was even more gossip about it, but nothing ever came of it.”

“You just mentioned that Lance had a girlfriend.”

LeAnne nodded. “Jillian.”

“Jillian Sosa?” Ali asked. “The co-captain of the computer science team?”

“That’s the one, and that’s where they met, in the computer club.
She’s a sweet girl, and smart. I liked her a lot, even though I worried that it was like a reverse-Cinderella thing.”

“Meaning?”

“Her parents both died—in a car wreck, I think. She met Lance when she came to San Leandro to live with her aunt and uncle a year or so ago. They have plenty of money, and obviously, we don’t. I worried that she and Lance were getting too serious, especially when I came home from work one night and figured out that she had spent the night. I was worried that she’d get pregnant. When the hacking thing came along, that was the only good thing: Lance broke up with her. He claimed he did it for her own good because he was afraid she’d get sucked down the drain right along with him. He said he had done the hacking on his own, and he was going to pay for it on his own without taking anyone—not Mr. Jackson or Jillian—along with him. He was afraid she’d be considered guilty by association.”