Chapter 24
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Miami
FBI Special Agent Kim Otto had stopped in the kitchen for coffee before she joined them in the office. She was off the clock and here as a personal favor, so she wore jeans and a navy blazer and her familiar direct approach. She parked herself in the only available chair.
“Good to see you both again,” she said to Flint and Drake before she turned to Gaspar. “What’s up? How can I be of service?”
Gaspar moved to a seat at the workbench, tapped a key, and the wall of monitors turned on. He began with the United States map and a constellation of pins scattered across it. Some were red, some blue, and unevenly distributed.
“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started,” Gaspar said. “I’ll go over this quickly and answer questions later.”
“Works for me,” Otto said. “I don’t have much time, and this isn’t my case.”
“Beyond that, I’m not sure we want the FBI asking questions about it,” Flint replied.
“Let’s see how it goes. You can decide when I’m done,” Gaspar said.
“Flint sent me a DNA sample from the unidentified man who attacked him in the alley behind his home. I ran the DNA through my databases and got a hit. He’d been arrested for statutory rape, tried, convicted, and served a few years.
The death certificate gave his name as Arthur Snopkowski, and he died eleven years ago.
Heart attack in Ohio. He left a wife and two kids.
They had a closed casket funeral, and he was buried in a local cemetery. ”
“So his real name was Lazarus?” Drake joked.
“Exactly. Snopkowski can’t be dead eleven years and dead again in Flint’s alley two nights ago. So I went back to the original case and covered all the bases. The autopsy, burial records, life insurance payout, probate, tax returns, the wife’s life afterward, and the kids. Everything checked out.”
“You’re saying either the DNA result is wrong or Snopkowski’s death was faked,” Flint said flatly. The idea didn’t seem as far-fetched to him now as it might have a week ago.
“It’s happened before. Guy walks out for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back, then he’s found years later living with a woman in Mexico, or whatever.
” Gaspar nodded while he gulped Cuban coffee.
“But how often does a man officially dead turn up alive years later with no real explanation? I ran searches across federal records first and found more examples than I expected. So I asked Otto to pull what she could easily gather from internal files I might have missed. She sent back another stack. After that I went looking at state and county and civil records. Probate disputes, life insurance fights, anyplace a person coming back from the dead might create a paper trail.”
Drake said, “What we’re looking at on the wall is what you’ve found so far?”
Gaspar tapped another key. The blue pins disappeared, leaving only the red ones. “Red pins are federal reports. FBI, DEA, Marshals, ATF, and a few outliers. Each shows a person who turned up dead or alive years after they disappeared the first time. Each is a cold case that hasn’t been solved.”
“That’s a lot of open files,” Otto noted.
He removed the red pins and displayed only the blue ones.
“Blue pins here come from softer sources. State, county, local records mixed with civil court filings, insurance disputes, probate fights, news reports, and the like. I pulled them after I had the federal pattern to work from. Each one is broadly the same. Person disappears or dies, family and friends accept the story, years pass, and then the story breaks open. A body surfaces, a face gets caught on a security camera, a fingerprint or DNA hits when it shouldn’t. ”
“Put the red and blue ones up together again,” Flint said.
Gaspar put up the combined map. Flint looked closely at the pins. Texas had three red federal pins and Florida had four. Indiana had two blue local ones clustered around Carterville and a single red federal pin forty miles east of it.
“How far back does this cold impact pattern go?” Flint asked.
“Fourteen years is as far as I can track it. Before that, the records get spotty. Lots of reasons. Digitization patchy, fingerprint and DNA databases incomplete, county systems not talking to others,” Gaspar replied.
“I can’t give you a specific date from what I’ve been able to pull together so far. ”
Drake had been analyzing the pins, too. “Looks like you’ve got sixty-three open or recently closed federal ones, right?”
Gaspar nodded. “And more than two hundred of the others. It’s likely I’ll find more, given the volume I’ve already located. I’m still looking.”
“What you’re showing on this map is bigger than one pattern,” Otto said. “If all of these pins were situations that fit a single pattern, we’d have noticed it before. We haven’t.”
“Witness protection failures fit in here somewhere,” Flint replied. “Those who came out of the program early, or who got burned and ran, or who were identified and killed years later. Some of those will be here.”
“True,” Otto said. “Both federal and state WITSEC lose people every year and most of them never make the news. That’s the whole point of being in WITSEC.”
“Then you’ve got the low-end operators,” Flint said. “People who pay a few thousand to disappear and end up with a stolen Social Security number. Sloppy work that gets undone the first time the number gets tested.”
“There’s a lot of that out there. More than the Bureau likes to admit,” Otto replied.
“And then the one-offs. Spouse fakes a death for the insurance money. Embezzler walks away from his life before the audit lands. Guy with a felony warrant disappears into a new name and doesn’t come back up until a traffic stop ten years later.” Drake shrugged. “Human nature. Keeps us in business.”
Flint kept looking at the pins. “So most of this is noise. Somewhere inside it is the signal.”
“When you find it, if you need me, you know my number,” Otto said on her way out. “I’m off the clock, but I’m sure they’ve been texting me this whole time. With my phone blocked in Gaspar’s gizmo here, they’ll be sending out a search party if I don’t turn up. I’ve gotta run.”
“See you when I see you,” Gaspar said as she collected her tech and hustled to the front door. He buzzed the front door open and she let herself out.
The office was quiet for a moment after she left. Flint shook his head. Otto was a tiny woman, but she could fill a room.
“All right,” Gaspar said. He pulled a stool up to the forensic cabinet. “Let’s see what you brought me.”
Flint handed him the sealed Faraday bag. Gaspar opened the front of the forensic cabinet and set the bag inside. He closed the cabinet door, slid his hands through the shielded gloves on the front, and unzipped the bag inside the box.
“If I’d opened that bag out here, the phones would have been live for half a second before I could stop them. Long enough to ping whoever’s listening for them. Inside the box, they’re deaf and mute. Same as when you sealed them,” Gaspar said for Drake’s benefit.
The phones came out one at a time, screens dim but still powered. Flint had bagged them without shutting them down, which was the right call. Powered down, they would have locked themselves into a stricter encryption state and given Gaspar far less to work with.
While Gaspar worked, he talked. “Before I get to the phones, let’s discuss the Gulfstream.”
“Is the footage real or a deep fake?” Flint asked. “Do we even have satellites that can capture that kind of explosion in the middle of the Pacific?”
“Real. And yes, but it’s not the sort of intel governments want floating around on the dark web. So if you go looking, you’ll come up empty,” Gaspar replied.
“Figures,” Drake grumped.
“I ran footage several ways and checked more than one source. Checked frame analysis, compression artifacts, sensors, metadata, the angle of the sun off the cloud layer at the time stamp, and a couple other things. It checks out,” Gaspar said.
“The Gulfstream was there, over the Pacific at that hour, and it exploded on camera exactly the way you viewed it. So far so good.”
“Sounds like there’s a but coming here,” Flint replied.
“NTSB’s preliminary report says a center-tank rupture.
Vapor ignition. Bad maintenance, bad luck, bad day,” Gaspar said.
“I pulled the raw spectral data. The signature isn’t a fuel-tank fire.
The expansion pattern is too tight and too fast, and it starts inside the cabin, not under the wing.
That’s a shaped charge. Inside the fuselage. Intact one frame, gone the next.”
“Inside the fuselage,” Flint repeated slowly, recalling the video. “Meaning they put it on the plane before takeoff. The Gulfstream didn’t blow up on its own.”
“So definitely not an accident.” Drake had moved up behind Flint. “The FBI would call that murder. With either three or four souls on board, including Craig Keane.”
The picture had been shifting under Flint’s feet. Now another piece of it had locked into place. The Gulfstream was sabotaged. Craig Keane and everyone aboard had been murdered.
“Takes some of the guesswork out of the case,” Flint said. “Too bad the satellites can’t give us the killer and the motive.”
“Maybe the phones can help with that,” Gaspar said.
Inside the enclosure, he pulled the first phone out of the bag. He flipped it over, worked the case off with a thin tool, and looked at the internal board.
“Custom hardware. Not just custom software on a consumer phone. The board itself is unique. I can see it from the layout,” he said. “Let’s look at the second one. Looks identical externally to the first.”
“So all four are the same handset. Same case, same model?” Flint asked. “Suggests they got dedicated gear from a single source.”
“And it’s sophisticated. I can see that much already,” Gaspar replied. “What about the guy in the alley? Did you get his phone?”
“He didn’t have one.”
“Let me look at the activity log on Phone 4. This is the one from the goon Patterson shot in the Langford pilot’s lounge, right?” Gaspar asked.
“Exactly.”
“Each of these phones has been trying to reach its network since you put them in the bag. They haven’t been able to connect, but they’ve been logging the attempts. Addresses, endpoints, contacts they’re trying to ping. That’s what I’m looking at now.”
Flint saw lines of data scrolling past as Gaspar worked the screen. He stopped on one.
He opened a separate window and ran a search. “I’ve already done some searching on Cody Patterson, your retired Indiana cop. Address, phone number, public records.”
A list of results came up on the cabinet’s screen alongside the activity log. He copied Patterson’s number from the results and ran it through the activity log search. The result came back fast.
“Cody Patterson’s number is in this phone’s contact tree.”
“Show me.”
Gaspar pulled the result up on the wall monitor so both Flint and Drake could see it. A line of metadata. A timestamp. And then Patterson’s Indiana number, embedded in the contacts.
“How long have those contacts been showing up in Phone 4?” Flint asked.
“I’d have to pull more to tell you exactly,” Gaspar replied. “But this Phone 4 has been talking to a network that’s been talking to Patterson’s number for a while. Weeks at least. Probably going back to when he first started looking for his brother. Maybe even earlier.”
“Which means they’ve been on him all this time,” Drake said. “Everything he’s touched will be there in one way or another, right?”
“Yeah,” Gaspar said. “So they are light years ahead of where you are on this thing. Whatever this thing is.”
After a moment, Flint asked, “What else can you give me on those phones right now?”
“Not much more. I can image all four phones and start pulling. Phone 4 is the priority because it was active most recently. The others will fill in gaps once I figure out how to get into the software. It’s likely to take a while.”
Flint considered the implications. Patterson had been in Flint’s secure rooms. His bungalow and Scarlett’s safe house were protected by sophisticated countermeasures. Phone 4 couldn’t have overheard conversations there.
But like most people, Patterson had used his phone extensively. He’d made calls, texted contacts, saved numbers, taken photos, searched the internet. He’d probably looked up records, run GPS maps, and more. Every one of those actions was accessible to Phone 4.
Patterson likely kept his old contacts in Carterville, along with Scarlett, Flint, and Drake. He probably had some case notes on there, too. Especially since his laptop was stolen.
All of that was available to Phone 4 and had been for weeks.
“We have to assume that whatever left a trail on his phone, they have now. First order of business is to get him off that phone,” Flint said aloud. “We need new ones, too. Do you have any here we can use?”
Gaspar said, “Let me get them for you. How many do you need?”
“Four to start. We’ll collect more when we get a chance,” Flint replied.
“How do we get the word to Scarlett?” Drake asked.
“We can’t warn Scarlett or Patterson on his existing phone or any other channel that he’s used before,” Flint warned. “We’ll leave our existing tech here inside your new gizmo, as Otto called it. They’ll know we came here. Nothing we can do about that now.”
Gaspar nodded. Flint could tell he didn’t like it, but the situation couldn’t be fixed retroactively.
“And whoever’s behind this already knows where Scarlett lives,” Flint said. “I’ll need to deal with that issue first. We can’t have Maddy in danger.”
Drake’s scowl suggested exactly what he’d do to the man who had the balls to touch Maddy. Flint was glad to see it.
“I’ll get you those new phones,” Gaspar said. “Don’t turn them on until you need to use them. They’ll be broadcasting the first time they’re powered up. These guys are sophisticated. They’ll find you fast.”