Chapter 30
June had still not gotten a reply from any of the three people who’d given strange responses to the question about Gun Club.
She’d emailed them again and was busy finding their phone numbers and home addresses when her phone pinged with a text.
It was Robert, telling her the burner was unlocked and giving her the new access code.
She sent back her thanks and a promise of breakfast at Wonderland when she returned to Milwaukee, then unplugged the phone and sat down to work her way through it.
Typically, the security provided by burners was their anonymity.
Unconnected from any known account, data paid for in cash, destroyed after a few days or weeks to start the cycle again with a new phone and new number.
On top of that natural protection, or maybe because of it, people who used burners tended to watch their words in text and email.
So she didn’t have high expectations. Maybe a few cryptic texts, a couple of phone numbers. Someplace to start.
But she hadn’t expected the phone to be completely empty.
No call history, no text history, no browser history.
No emails. No contacts. No previous searches archived in Google Maps.
And zero other apps. In fact, the only indication the phone had ever been used was a scratch on the battery cover and the absence of the usual manufacturer-added bloatware, which often harvested user information and was a colossal pain to remove.
She’d seen her share of burners, and this was the cleanest she’d ever come across.
Why work so hard to sanitize an anonymous phone you were going to smash with a hammer and toss in a dumpster?
She thought about the cassette tape again. The Messenger and his people were going to a lot of trouble to stay under the radar. But something nagged at her.
She went back to the recording transcript and read through it one more time.
Here it was, toward the end. Check your messages twice a day, he’d said.
Clearly the slow-motion cassette network wasn’t the only means of communication.
Inevitably, some things would have to be dealt with more rapidly, or one-on-one—hence the burner.
And she knew it had been in use. But there was nothing in its memory.
So where were the fucking messages, and how did you check them?
Grrrr. She got up and paced the house. She put water in the kettle for tea, then paced some more, waiting for it to boil.
What if they were loading an application fresh, every time they wanted to use it? And then deleting it afterward?
That was a little excessive, even for the truly paranoid. But it was a pretty good way to keep a clean phone. And even if deleted, most apps stored each phone’s details on company servers, so they’d remember your information when you reinstalled them.
The most popular encrypted apps were Signal, which June used herself, along with WhatsApp and Telegram. There were dozens more. But even if she found the right app, she’d still need a username, password, and phone number. Without those, she couldn’t log in.
Unless, she thought hopefully, the truly paranoid had gotten a little sloppy.
She navigated through the security settings to the password manager. There was a single entry. No name for the app and no username for the account, but there was a password and a ten-digit number. Ten digits would be the phone number you’d need to log in. Gotcha, you lazy fuck.
She loaded Signal but got nowhere. Then WhatsApp. Same result. Then Telegram. Fingers crossed while it loaded. Then she opened it.
The login prompt came up. The app filled in the username automatically from the server. June felt the rich flush of pleasure that came from figuring something out.
The username was Duke Nukem, after the hero in the old-school first-person shooter game.
Enderby, she assumed, rolling her eyes. Such a bro.
She entered the phone number and password from the phone’s password manager and was rewarded with a chat screen.
She was in. She did a little victory dance bump and grind, wishing Peter was there to help her celebrate.
The fact that these guys used Telegram was unsurprising. For years, Telegram had been the app of choice for criminals and extremists of all stripes. The company was known for, and had often bragged about, ignoring all governmental requests for information.
Until the owner had been arrested in France and thrown in jail.
It had taken only a few days for him to change the company policy.
But because of the way it organized private groups and public channels, not to mention zero content moderation, it was still the preferred communication app for certain groups.
The interface gave her two chats to choose from.
The first chat was a group called Gun Club. Aha! This was what KT had been searching for. But there were no messages, and all the other members were hidden. June figured it was set to self-delete. Teenagers and criminals really loved that feature.
The second chat was still up. It was one-on-one between Duke Nukem and another user named Circuit Rider. There were only four messages.
From Circuit Rider: “Plan A failed you’re up. Good luck my friend.”
The reply from Duke Nukem was a thumbs-up emoji and a flexing biceps.
An hour later, Circuit Rider had responded. “Truck 2 blocks s of house. Keys on floor. Wpn in glove. Leave car w keys.”
Then Circuit Rider followed that up with: “Take or destroy electronics and notes. Leave nobody. M’s orders.”
The reply was a squirt gun emoji and a grinning face.
If this was in fact Enderby’s phone, by looking at the times on the messages, June could put it together easily enough.
Reed had just killed himself and Enderby was being activated as Plan B.
Circuit Rider had left him a truck and a gun.
She assumed the truck was the Toyota. And Enderby had left his car for Circuit Rider.
Holy crap. She dropped the phone on the counter, thinking hard about the ramifications.
Between the message content and the timeline, she’d gotten confirmation of a deeper conspiracy with at least one more person involved. If she gave the phone to Durant, he could probably get the investigation reopened.
The problem was that, because Peter had lifted the phone from the murder scene, handing it over to the police would get him into even more trouble than he already was. And legally, because of the break in the chain of evidence, the phone and its contents were also now inadmissible as evidence.
Regardless, she’d also learned something else.
The Toyota hadn’t actually belonged to Scott Enderby.
It had belonged to the third conspirator, the person who called himself Circuit Rider.
Maybe that’s why the ownership was so murky.
It had been registered to someone named Gerald Latimer, but Durant had told Peter that Latimer had been dead for years.
However, the registration had been renewed at the Tacoma address multiple times.
She could run down any connections there, maybe get a name that way.
Then she realized she might have a much more direct connection to the third conspirator. If Circuit Rider hadn’t already dumped his phone, maybe June had a way to communicate with him. Using the same app.
She looked down at the phone and scanned the messages. Her eye caught on the last sentence.
“Leave nobody. M’s orders.”
Those last four words made her shiver.
Leave nobody, June was pretty sure, meant Kill everybody.
Good Lord, she thought. Who the holy hell are these people?