The Match

Chapter Thirty-Five

The caller ID read “PETER BENNETT.”

“My name is Chris,” the voice said.

“That’s not the name on here.”

“I know. I wanted to get your attention.”

“How did you get my number?”

“It’s not relevant. We need to talk.”

“About?”

“Peter Bennett, Katherine Frole, Henry McAndrews, Martin Spirow.”

The man named Chris waited for a response. Wilde did not give him one.

“I hope that’s all,” Chris said, “though there will certainly be more if we don’t act.”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. My name is Chris.”

“And why should I trust you?”

“The real question is, Why should I trust you? I’m the one with a lot to lose here. We need to meet.”

“Where are you calling me from?”

“Look out the front window.”

“What?”

“You’re in the Crimstein house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Look at the front yard.”

Wilde moved toward the picture window by the door. He gazed out into the night. A thin man stood silhouetted by the streetlamp. He lifted his arm and waved to Wilde.

“Come outside,” Chris said. “Like I said, we need to talk.”

Wilde hung up and turned to Matthew and Sutton.

Matthew said, “Who was that?”

“I’m going into the front yard. Lock all the doors. Both of you go upstairs. Watch us from your bedroom window. If anything happens to me, call 911, your mother, and Oren Carmichael. In that order. Then hide.”

Sutton asked, “Who is he?”

“I don’t know. Bolt the door behind me.”

Chris was scrawny and pale with thinning blond hair. He didn’t so much pace as stomp as though putting out small brush fires. He stopped when Wilde approached.

“What do you want?” Wilde asked.

Chris smiled. “Been a while since I did that.”

He waited for Wilde to ask, Did what? When Wilde didn’t, he continued.

“I used to drop bombs on people’s lives. I don’t mean literally. Well, maybe I do. I would reveal the worst secrets to unsuspecting, trusting people. I told one woman at her bachelorette party that her fiancé had posted a revenge porn video of her online. I told a husband with two sons that his wife had faked her third pregnancy to keep him from leaving her. Stuff like that. I thought they had the right to know. A secret revealed was a secret destroyed. I thought I was doing good.”

He stopped and looked at Wilde.

“I know you have a lot of questions, so let me just get to it. I know enough about you to know that you’re an outsider. You live on your own. You understand bucking the system. I would pretend this is all a hypothetical to protect myself, but there really isn’t time. I have to trust you. But a quick reminder before I start: You saw how easily I traced you down. That’s not a threat. That’s a gentle warning, if you foolishly decide to go after me. You live off the grid in part out of fear of being found. Take your fears and raise them to the tenth power in my case. There are many who want me behind bars or dead. I don’t want you for an enemy. You don’t want me for one either.”

“What do you want?” Wilde asked.

“Have you ever heard of an online organization called Boomerang?”

The name was not entirely unfamiliar. “Not really.”

“It’s a like-minded group of some of the best hackers on the planet.”

“I assume you’re a member.”

“I was,” Chris said, “the leader.”

Chris waited again for Wilde to react. To move it along, Wilde said, “Okay.”

“Boomerang’s purpose was to find online trolls and harassers, awful ones, the worst of the worst — and both stop and punish them.”

“You were vigilantes,” Wilde said.

Chris tilted his head back and forth. “I look at it more like we were trying to maintain order on lawless land. Our system of justice hasn’t caught up to the internet yet. The online world is still the Wild West. There are no laws, no rules, just chaos and despair. So we, a group of serious and ethical people, tried to bring some degree of law and order. Our hope was that laws and norms would eventually catch up and make us obsolete.”

“Okay,” Wilde said, “now that you’ve justified your vigilantism, what does it have to do with me?”

“You don’t know?”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“It would help if you participated here, Wilde. I’m putting myself out here.”

Wilde remembered the message sent to DogLufegnev: Got you, McAndrews. You’re going to pay. “I’m guessing that your group stumbled across Henry McAndrews. He was a serial online bully, albeit for hire.”

“We did, yes.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Kill? My God, no. We never killed anyone. It never worked like that. Citizens — victims really — applied to Boomerang for help. Online. We have a website. If you wanted our help, you filled out forms — name, contact, how you were bullied, all the details. It’s a fairly extensive process. That’s on purpose. If someone hurt you to the point that you needed Boomerang to intercede, you should be willing to spend a few hours filling out an application. If, on the other hand, you gave up on the application, then your case wasn’t serious enough to deserve our attention.”

Chris stopped again. Wilde said, “Makes sense,” again to keep it moving.

“The final applications were then divided amongst our members, where we each culled through them. Most were rejected. Only the most deserving got our full attention. Are you starting to put it together, Wilde?”

“Peter Bennett,” Wilde said.

“Precisely. We got an application about the onslaught of bullying and harassment he’d been facing. I don’t know if he filled it out or someone close to him, like his sister, or a devoted fan or someone posing as him.”

“Did the application come to you directly?” Wilde asked.

“No. Panther handled it.”

“Panther?”

“Everyone in Boomerang was anonymous. So we all had animal aliases.”

Wilde remembered the name on the “Got you, McAndrews” post: PantherStrike88.

“Panther, Polar Bear, Giraffe, Kitten, Alpaca, and Lion. None of us knew the identities of the others. We had very strict security protocols in place. At the time, I only knew her as Panther. I didn’t know her real name or even her gender. Anyway, Panther got the Bennett case. She then chose to present it to the group. There are six of us — five have to be on board in order to mete out retribution.”

“And did you in this case?”

“No. We decided that it wasn’t worth our effort.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, we can’t take them all on, and a lot of us felt that Peter Bennett wasn’t a very sympathetic victim, what with the accusations of roofying and cheating leveled against him.”

Added up, Wilde thought. “So you dropped it?”

“Yes. And normally that’s the end of it. Case closed. We move on to the next. That’s what we all did. Except for Panther.”

“What happened?”

“What I didn’t know about Panther — what I couldn’t even imagine — was that she was a huge Love Is a Battlefield fangirl. Like she was really into the show. That was why she pushed to bring the case forward. Hard to predict who likes what, right? Panther was a hardened FBI technician, incredible at her job — but her head got turned by celebrity.”

Wilde saw it now. “Panther was Katherine Frole.”

Chris nodded. “I’m still putting it together, but once I had Katherine’s name, I was able to hack into some of her accounts. Not all. Not even most. She was an expert too, remember? But she was openly a massive fan of this insipid reality show. So when Boomerang nixed the Bennett case, my theory is Katherine couldn’t resist breaking protocol and reaching out personally to the applicant.”

“To Peter,” Wilde said.

“This is all speculation, but maybe Katherine called him and said how sorry she was that Boomerang rejected his application. Maybe she took it a step further. Maybe she met with him. Maybe she gave him the name of his biggest stalker.”

“Henry McAndrews,” Wilde said.

Chris nodded. “You can guess the rest. Not long after that, someone murders Henry McAndrews. When the body is discovered, maybe Katherine Frole realizes what she has done. Maybe she confronts Peter. Or maybe Peter realizes that he has to silence her.”

“A lot of maybes,” Wilde said.

“Either way, Katherine Frole ends up dead.”

“So that might explain Henry McAndrews and Katherine Frole,” Wilde said. “But how does Martin Spirow figure in?”

“Spirow was another troll presented to Boomerang.”

“Did he harass Peter Bennett?”

“No. He posted something truly vile under a dead woman’s obituary. The dead woman’s family applied to us.”

“Did you accept or reject the application?”

“Not me,” Chris corrected. “Boomerang. We do everything as a group. But in this case, we accepted it. But see, Boomerang had various levels of punishment. His was mild. Let me cut to it, Wilde. I think someone — it could be Peter Bennett, it could be whoever filled out his application, it could be someone close to him or even a crazed fan — decided to take matters into their own hands because Boomerang did not act.”

“By killing Henry McAndrews?”

“Yes. Then they killed Katherine Frole to either cover their tracks or, I don’t know, as punishment to her. Her body was found in a small office she kept near her house. Very secretive. It’s where she did her Boomerang work. I think whoever killed Panther forced her to give them names and files, and now they are on a killing spree.”

“Do you know which names?” Wilde asked.

He shook his head. “Panther handled over a hundred cases.”

“Why are you coming to me?”

“There’s no one else,” Chris said.

“Why not the authorities?”

Chris chuckled at that. “You’re joking, right?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

“The entire Boomerang menagerie is a top-priority target of the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, National Security...” Chris spotted Wilde’s skeptical expression and said, “Yeah, I know. I sound full of myself. But this is why we had all those protocols in place. You called us vigilantes. To the government, we are worse. We’ve hacked into law enforcement databases, private government websites, secure military mainframes, you name it. Some of the cyberbullies we’ve punished? They are very powerful people. The top echelons of society. They want revenge. The government wants us too. You may think black sites have all been closed down. They haven’t. They’ll drag us there in a heartbeat. Best-case scenario? We spend years in a federal penitentiary.”

Wilde knew that Chris was probably right — the feds would arrest them at a minimum.

“But at the same time,” Chris said, and tears formed in his eyes, “I caused this. I can’t just walk away now, can I? I need to stop it before more people end up dead. So I’m pulling out all the stops and marshaling all my knowledge and resources. I have trackers, interception software, and most of all, the hacker’s main tool — people. Everyone thinks that what we hackers do is magic, but here is what they all forget: Behind every firewall, password, security package — whatever — are human beings. You can trade favors with them.”

Funny, Wilde thought. Hester Crimstein, who knows nothing about technology, had arrived at a similar conclusion when she talked about people’s self-interest. Everything changes, nothing changes.

“When I searched through this entire situation, one weird name kept popping up. Yours, Wilde. When you called Vicky Chiba half an hour ago, I listened in. I know why you’re involved. You’re a skilled outsider. You get what I’m trying to do. I can’t go to law enforcement. I can’t put the other members of Boomerang at risk. I can’t betray them or those who filled out applications and entrusted us to help them. Any kind of exposure could be catastrophic.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“We pool our resources. I tell you what I know. You tell me what you know. We keep each other in the loop. We catch this killer before they kill again. And maybe, as a bonus, you and I figure out what really happened to you when you were a little boy in those woods.”

Wilde said nothing.

“Neither one of us trusts people, Wilde. That’s part of how we ended up where we are. But that doesn’t matter right now. I can’t betray you. I mean, what would I say?”

“But I can betray you.”

“True,” Chris said. “But one, that wouldn’t work well for you. I’m too dangerous. I have safeguards in place. You wouldn’t want to see what I could unleash.”

“And two?”

“You know every word I’m saying is true. So why would you?”

Wilde nodded. “Okay,” he said, “let’s see what we can do.”