House on Fire

46

Breakfast was a little awkward. Not on my part, but Patty seemed embarrassed around me. Brendan was much more communicative than he’d been the day before. I left before Patty and the kids had to head out the door — she to the hospital, they all to school — because I had to get to the office as soon as I could. We all hugged goodbye, and I kissed Patty on the cheek.

I texted Dorothy and asked her if we could meet first thing.

She was there before me. I’d run into some bad rush-hour traffic around Braintree. Dorothy handed me a mug of black coffee as I entered my office. She was wearing jeans and a black sleeveless top.

“Whoever killed Maggie Benson also took her phone,” I said.

“And you want to locate that phone.”

“That’s an interesting idea. I’ll call the detective who’s on the homicide. But I had a different thought. I saw her taking pictures of Kimball’s documents on her phone. Won’t they be backed up to her iCloud account? Won’t they be on some Apple server somewhere?”

She shrugged. “The detective can serve a warrant on Apple. Maybe he did already.”

“I’ll ask.”

“And then they get in line. It’s a long line — takes a couple days. Apple gets a lot of warrants. Unless it’s a missing person’s case, say. Those, Apple will give them within minutes. People think they have some right to privacy — wrong, they do not. Cloud storage falls under their terms of service, which basically says, ‘We cooperate with law enforcement.’”

“So how can I get it?”

“Without knowing her Apple ID and password, you’re stuck. You can’t.”

“Shit.” I picked up one of my Blackwing pencils and drummed its eraser on the desktop, making a rhythmic tattoo.

“Plus, Nick, you don’t know the pics ever got backed up to the cloud.”

“We don’t?”

“Only if her phone was set to automatically sync with iCloud. But there’s different settings. I set mine to sync only when it’s plugged in. I do that to save battery.”

“So the pictures might not even have been backed up.”

She nodded. She seemed to be about to say something. I said, “What?”

“What are you doing?”

“Doing?”

“This case. You said the client wants the investigation shut down.”

“She does.”

“So what, we’re going to work for free? For a woman who’s loaded? My God.”

“This is about Maggie now,” I said. I didn’t explain.

My mobile phone rang. It was George Devlin.

His big white RV, bristling with antennas, was parked outside on the street. I knocked on the exterior to let him know I was there, then opened the door and got in.

Inside the light was dim, and it took my eyes a while to adjust.

George Devlin did not go out in public, not since he returned from the war. He lived in dim light because he didn’t want to be seen. When he joined my Special Forces A-Team, he was a happy, upbeat, and very handsome guy. A chick magnet. Someone on the team dubbed him Romeo, and it stuck.

Until the day that an IED nearly killed him. He survived, but most of his face was gone. Now it was a welter of scar tissue. He had nostrils but no nose, a jagged slash of a mouth. Some might have called him a monster.

George was sitting on a stool in the darkness, in front of a slim counter that held electronic equipment, secured to the walls of the RV. He spoke in a raspy whisper, because his vocal cords were badly damaged. “Do you have any drawings?”

“Blueprints,” I said, and handed him the sheaf of papers on which the drawings had been printed.

He moved his head close to the pages and looked them over in silence.

“You targeting the executive suite?”

“Right.”

“Seventh floor. What’s the company?”

“Phoenicia Health Sciences?”

“Sounds like a government cat’s paw.” He loathed the government and considered all law enforcement agencies to be the enemy.

“It’s not. It’s a CRO — a company that does tests for pharmaceutical companies.”

“What does this have to do with Sean Lenehan?”

I explained quickly about Sukie Kimball and how she wanted proof that her family’s company had buried the evidence that Oxydone was dangerously addictive. After a slight pause, I told him about Maggie’s murder. He didn’t know her, of course, but I wanted him to understand that for me, this was personal.

“Well, I want to tell you something,” he said, and he swiveled on his stool to look at me directly through his one eye. Pulled out a small white inhaler and breathed in through it. “I am constantly in pain, Heller.” His mouth made a clicking sound. “And only Oxydone gets me through.”

I nodded. Said nothing. It sounded like an advertisement. Only Oxydone gets me through. The man had to live his life not only terribly disfigured but in physical agony.

He went on. “Is Oxydone addictive? Of course it’s addictive. I’m an addict. But I can’t imagine life without it.”

I didn’t know what to say. He didn’t mind being an addict. As long as he kept getting a prescription, and he was somehow able to function, who was I to say it was wrong? But that didn’t diminish one bit my determination to find proof of the goddamned study. Because for everyone like Devlin there was someone else — maybe ten people — who were helpless under the drug’s spell.

And because of what had happened to Maggie.

“I assume Phoenicia’s employees use RFID cards like everyone else, right?”

“Right.”

“Are you looking to clone one card or multiple?”

“Multiple. And choose whoever has the highest access level.”

“Have you used this toy before?” He slid across the counter what looked like a laptop computer in its case. “It’s called the Boscloner. It captures and clones RFID cards.”

I shook my head. “What’s the read range?”

“Three feet.”

“Really? That’s fantastic.” He showed me how to use it, how to control it with my iPhone, how to clone a lot of ID cards and not just one.

“Once you get into the target’s office, what do you want to do?”

“Steal the entire contents of his computer hard drive. Everything.”

“If they have even rudimentary security, their network’s gonna be password protected.”

“For sure.”

“You don’t have the guy’s password, I assume, right?”

“No.”

“All right, so you need two separate payloads.”

“If you say so.”

“Here we go. This is what you need.” He handed me a little black device with a USB plug at the end of it. Maybe a couple of inches long, half an inch thick. “This is called the Bash Bunny.”

“Cute name.”

“From the folks who brought you the Rubber Ducky and the Pineapple. Notice the switch on the side?”

I nodded.

“Up for payload one. Down for payload two. Then you plug it in to a USB port.”

“Okay.”

“Now, we’re going to need to copy all the files to something, and we’ve got a choice. This guy or this guy?”

One device he held up was a five-inch oblong, three inches wide, fairly thick. The other looked like a black credit card. It said Sandisk on it.

I took the credit card. “That holds two terabytes of data,” Devlin said, “as opposed to four terabytes on the other guy. But two terabytes will surely be enough.”

“If you say so.”

“I should warn you the one you’re holding is a lot more expensive.”

“I have a rich client.” Who’d asked that the investigation be discontinued. But I had a feeling she’d eventually pay.

“What antivirus program does Phoenicia use, do you know?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“Huh,” he said. He swiveled on his stool and hunched his shoulders. Tapped at a keyboard. A flat-screen came to life. He tapped some more. “All right, let’s see. I’m on the Phoenicia Health Sciences website. Help wanted. Positions available. Here we go. Requires familiarity with Office, LANDesk, and McAfee ePO.”

“Translation?”

He shook his head. “These corporations are so stupid. They tell you right there on their website what antivirus software they use. What kinda security is that? All right. Well, good for us.”

Devlin spent a few more minutes programming the little black device, and then I left with my collection of toys.

I also thought it might be useful to do some basic social media research on Dr. Arthur Scavolini. I don’t know of a better invention for eliminating privacy than social media. People post everything about themselves — pictures of their kids, their families, pictures of themselves doing adventure travel, pictures of themselves with more famous people. Where and when they did whatever. All kinds of personal stuff.

So I knew he’d gone to Rush Medical College in Chicago and trained in Chicago and at Duke. He seemed to have no hobbies. He had three kids and worked a lot of hours. Overall he seemed extremely nerdy, but that just made him a perfect fit for the job. He seemed to be well-off, seemed to have come into wealth a few years back. He and his wife, Linda, had gone on a high-end cruise in the Mediterranean a couple of years ago and had posted lots of photos of Morocco.

But the task still remained: I had to figure out how to get into his office. That was going to be the hard part.