Sin City Assassin (The Bill Dix Detective Series Book 3) (12 page)

Blass tossed Marie a manila envelope. “Yup, it’s all in there. He’s at one of two hospitals, there’s people watching him, possibly even Dix, and you’ve got forty-eight hours to check everything in the file.” He kissed her on the head. “I’ll call you when I need him eliminated.”

Blass grabbed his personal items and left the safe house in a rush. Marie dumped the contents of the manila envelope on a coffee table. She stared at all of it for a few minutes. She wondered if she’d bitten off more than she could handle.
Oh Marie, why are you always trying to impress him?
When are you ever going to learn?

Chapter 25:

Dix met up with Sergeant Frazier and they hit the ground running. Frazier explained to Dix that the money found in the burned vehicle safe was a dead end. Numerous banks and casinos used the same band so tracing where it came from would take months and probably reveal nothing useful.

Frazier’s eyes lit up based on what he was going to share next. “Dix, check these out.” He handed Dix some photographs. “So near as we can tell, the two men from the Range Rover have been positively identified as brothers out of Canada. It appears they’re well known criminals, and have been wanted by Canadian authorities for years."

Dix examined the photos and tried to compare the faces to the ones he saw the day before damaged by the vehicle fire. The fact they were identified by dental records made it almost impossible for Frazier to have things wrong here. “Wow, I guess the Canadians will be happy to hear they can mark two off their wanted lists.”

Frazier chuckled. “That’s not all, buddy. According to the people my detectives talked to, the two guys have a sister.”

Dix instantly thought of the female driver involved when Peterson was shot and wondered if it was the same woman who killed the undercover officer. “You think she’s our missing suspect?”

“I sure do. Without a doubt, flip to the back, it’s her latest photo. It’s the girl all right.”

Dix studied the photo. “You think she could be the Praying Mantis too?”

“Yup. Our people are saying the photo you have there is the Praying Mantis and she’s our murderer. Her name is Marie Roy. She’s brutal, a stone cold killer. And she’s fearless. I sent another officer to sit with Petersen until we can nab her.”

Dix looked at the photo again. He saw pain, anger, and fierceness in the woman’s eyes. He wondered how she became who she was.

Dix whistled and caught himself biting his nails while shaking his head.
I’ve got to stop chewing my damn nails
. He looked at Frazier. “We need to grab her. I think she’s working for someone. I also think maybe she killed her two brothers. Whatever she’s up to, it isn’t good and we need to grab her ASAP.”

“I’ve got everyone working on finding her. There’s no doubt she won’t go down without a fight. We will try to capture her, but based on everything she’s caused, I can’t guarantee she won’t be killed first by law enforcement.”

Dix looked up at Frazier when he finished his statement. He understood the local officers would want revenge and would likely shoot and kill Marie Roy if they ever got the opportunity to do so.

“My guys worked on the cell phone and keys from the Range Rover,” Frazier continued. “The keys are melted and gave us nothing. They got the phone to power on, but that’s about it.”

Dix was well known for his knowledge of cell phone forensics. He’d used a single cell phone to take down an entire operation in Miami years ago when he’d learned that cell phones contained data and information that could greatly enhance an investigator’s ability to crack cases. He was itching to get a shot at the cell phone himself.

“Can I mess with the phone back at your office?” he asked Frazier. “I think I have a few tricks I can use to get the data from it.”

“Certainly. Maybe there will be something useful in it. We don’t have much else right now, so while everyone’s looking for Marie Roy, we can go back and work on the phone.”

Dix and Frazier headed back to the police department. On the way, Dix spoke to his wife and Petersen and gave them the update. Dix cautioned Petersen about Marie Roy, sent her photo to him via text, and asked that Petersen and Michelle keep their heads on a swivel. If Marie Roy wasn’t dead, she’d be coming for Petersen regardless of who was protecting him.

*******

Frazier led Dix through several doors until finally escorting him to the forensic lab located inside the police department’s main building.

Dix whistled. “Wow, you guys have some high-tech equipment. Is that a Cellebrite over there?” He pointed to a small device in the corner of the room.

One of the technical officers looked up from a laptop. He noticed Frazier had no idea what the stranger had just asked him. “It sure is, with the latest update, I can get into thousands of phones with it.”

Frazier looked at the group in the room. “My apologies everyone, this is Bill Dix. He’s helping us with the Mantis case and would like to take a look at the cell phone from the Range Rover.”

Dix shook the young analyst’s hand. “Bill.” He shot the kid a smile. “Nice to meet you.”

“Hello, my name is Pierre.” He motioned to the recovered cell phone. “I’ll show you the phone, but it’s pretty much a goner.”

Dix walked over to see the pieces of the phone scattered on the workbench. He quickly noticed it was a phone utilizing a SIM card, which made him believe it was a phone that had GPS capabilities. Based on current agreements with cell phone providers, Dix knew GSM devices, as long as the GPS function was on, could be tracked through GPS coordinates.
Let’s hope this thing will power up long enough for me to get something useful, including the phone number.
He could do quite a bit with a little luck if the device cooperated.

With quickness and precision, Dix put the phone back together and took an SD card from a nearby phone and slid it in the appropriate slot. He hoped the phone would try to download the SD card and give him a chance for the Cellebrite machine to do the rest. Dix already knew the phone type. He didn’t have to search through all of the cords in front of him to connect the phone to the Cellebrite software; he needed a “100.” He grabbed the correct cord, worked his way through the cell phone forensic device, and tried to power on the phone. Pierre and Frazier watched with great interest. Dix hit the power button and nothing happened. A collective sigh was heard in the room.

Dix did not give up. He showed Pierre how to get more power to the phone with an extra charged phone battery, and how to get it to power on by bypassing the home switch.

“Jesus, Bill, I would never have thought of doing that. How do you know this stuff?” Pierre scratched his head.

Dix chuckled and kept working on the phone. It finally powered on. Dix worked frantically to extract data before it shut down again. He quickly looked for the cell phone number through the settings on the phone and initiated a logical extraction with the Cellebrite device. He’d rather have a physical extraction of the phone, but he was pretty sure he didn’t have enough time for one. A few anxious minutes later and Dix had the last known coordinates of the phone, one text message, and the phone number for the device. He and the others in the room felt a certain bit of excitement.

The last coordinates for the phone placed it within six meters of an apartment complex on the outskirts of Pahrump.

He’d received a call during the time he was tinkering with the cell phone advising him that his team from Florida had landed and were already briefed on the case. Dix dialed the team leader and sent his team to start looking into the apartment complex in Pahrump.

Meanwhile, Dix cut and pasted the text message into a word document, made the text larger, printed out some copies, and passed them around to the remaining agents and analysts in the room. The text was to a foreign phone number and read:

“
She lands in an hour. Take her out prior to Mr. Laurin showing up. We’ve got 100k ready to transfer.”

Most of the people in the room weren’t really sure what the message meant, but it appeared likely that it was a planned murder on a female target for one hundred thousand dollars.

Dix and Frazier looked at each other and smiled.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Dix asked Frasier.

He laughed. “I think the two brothers we found in the Range Rover were trying to have their sister whacked. She found out and killed them first.”

“Yeah, I think that sounds about right, which we kind of already suspected anyway. I’m more interested in who Mr. Laurin is.” Dix wondered about the man and how he fit in the case. He stiffened up and grinned while considering the Mantis’s ability to continually outsmart anyone who crossed her path. He wondered if she survived the shootout or had succumbed to her injuries. His intuition led him to believe she somehow survived. He frowned thinking that if she did survive, she’d make every effort to find Petersen. Dix asked a couple of his guys to check on the name Laurin in Canada and the United States, specifically men with criminal histories. This left Dix and the analysts the phone number to play with.

Dix cranked out a search warrant for the phone, got it signed by a local judge, and sent it to the phone company. He called to confirm the company received the search warrant and used a little of his charm to get his request to the top of the pile.

An hour later, Frazier received an email response from the phone company regarding Dix’s search warrant. According to the phone company, the phone’s subscriber was a Robert Laurin of RL Associates, Toronto, Canada. Dix immediately called his men working the Laurin angle and updated them of the discovery.

Dix poured over the call detail records of Robert Laurin’s cell phone, specifically around the time of Petersen’s shooting, and when the cops found the Range Rover. He noticed the device made and received a few phone calls, but was primarily used to send or receive text messages.
This guy is smart; you’d need a wiretap to read all these texts.
Dix called the telephone company back and asked if he could get all call detail records to include the cell tower information for each call. With this data, he’d be able to plot out a rough course of the phone’s travels as well as identify high frequency callers. If he could retrieve the contents of the phone, he’d use it for another idea that popped in his head while he worked frantically to bust this case open.

Around the time of the shootout he and Petersen were in, the device made an outgoing call to a number in Canada. Dix assumed the phone belonged to one of the dead brothers and not their sister, unless she knew enough about phones to ditch it. Based on the call records, Dix determined three phone numbers appeared connected through calls, locations, and text messages. He wrote a search warrant for all the phones and had it signed by the same judge that he used on the first search warrant. The data came fairly quickly from the phone company and Dix asked Frazier if he could utilize Pierre from the tech room to help crunch the data. He agreed, and Dix had the phone company email all the files to Pierre. Dix and Frazier grabbed a cup of coffee and waited.

Roughly two hours later, Pierre motioned for them to come back into the lab. They could see the excitement in his eyes.

“Guys, check this out. So, I imported all the records, mapped out the call history,” he clicked a button on the large screen in front of them, “and came up with this.”

Dix recognized the patterns displayed among the data while Frazier stood there with his mouth agape and dumbfounded. A series of red, blue, and green lines covered the screen.

Dix tried to make sense of the map. “What do all the colors represent?”

“Ok, check this out. So I coordinated the colors to each person; red and blue are the brothers, green is Marie—”

Dix cut him off. “Wait, you have her number identified?”
If that’s the case, we have options
.

“Yup, without a doubt.” He pointed on the large monitor. “This is her phone number and location of her phone now.”

Both Frazier’s and Dix’s jaws dropped. The information on the screen showed Marie’s phone to be in Las Vegas. Before they acted on the information, they both wanted to know exactly what the phone data meant.

Dix noticed a black number on the screen that Pierre hadn’t talked about yet. “What’s the black number?”

“That’s a high frequency caller to all three of them, but mostly to Marie. And, judging by the photos and text messages, I’m pretty sure the user of that phone is banging Marie.”

“Hold on! You have the actual photos and text messages? How the heck did you do that without a wiretap?” Dix asked incredulously.

Pierre turned slightly red. “I did an exigent request for records and the phone company messed up and sent me all this info.”

Dix wrinkled his brow and looked at Frazier. “You have any U.S. Marshals up here?”

“Yeah, why? What are you thinking?” answered Frazier.

“I’m thinking we do a pen register and a ping on Marie’s phone. We can get data from her calls and we can get the location of the phone through its GPS function. We’d be closer to nabbing her if those things pan out.”

Frazier looked puzzled. “I’m not sure what all that means, but we’ve got several U.S. Marshals here in town.”

Pierre smiled and leaned forward hoping to chime in to help the officers and demonstrate his expertise to Dix. “Hey Bill, we’ve got the capability of running that stuff right here.”

Dix raised an eyebrow. “Well that’s convenient, let’s run the show through you then.” Pierre wore a great big grin on his face. He hoped it would convince Frasier to put in a good word for him when he reapplied for the officer position.

Frazier continued. “I don’t know what the hell you two are talking about, but if it helps us nab the Praying Mantis, I’m in.”

Dix worked on the search warrant and included the telephone number being used by someone appearing to have a romantic relationship with Marie Roy. He had to be creative with the probable cause for that specific phone. They woke the judge up and she begrudgingly signed the search warrant. Based on the nature of the case and the likelihood Petersen was in grave danger, Dix convinced the phone companies that this was an exigent case and asked them to build the pen register and initiate the cell phone pings as soon as possible.