Chapter 46

A Dead Wizard’s Plan

 

 

Parker leaned on the hood of the rental car in Angela Harding’s driveway, watching white-suited officials from the Santa Clara County Coroner’s Office load her body into a van. The menthol smell of the vapor rub he’d dabbed under his nose filled his nostrils. He’d left Jaden inside the house with the crime scene investigators and Palo Alto detectives and came outside for some air. According to the coroner’s estimate, Angela and her small dog had been decomposing for two days, and no amount of vapor rub could completely mask the smell.

They’d found her taped down on her kitchen table with her head left on the floor where it had fallen after being removed with, what Parker knew the medical examiner would rule a sword. Her dog had been discovered in a laundry room. It had been cut nearly in two, no doubt by the same sword. Though the weapon and manner of death were consistent with the Collector’s other murders, Angela’s body had not been posed and her ears had not been removed. The killers, Parker now believed there were two—Musuka and Akandu—had subdued her, taped her down, and cut her head off. They had not surprised her while she slept as they’d done their other victims. Evidence of violence was everywhere: busted furniture, damaged wallboard, and a mutilated dog. The M.O. had changed. It had become much less controlled, almost chaotic.

Maxwell Morris sat slumped over the steering wheel of his car. Parker limped over and tapped on the driver’s side window, careful to avoid the vomit puddle. The three of them had been the ones to find her. After knocking on her door and receiving no answer, Jaden had jumped the backyard fence. He’d come back moments later, saying he could see a woman’s legs hanging off the kitchen table through the back window. Both doors had been locked, but the front door’s electronic dead bolt offered little resistance to Jaden’s shoulder. The smell had hit them immediately, but they had not been able to catch Maxwell before he’d raced into the kitchen. Parker was no stranger to horrific crime scenes. Jaden had at least seen training videos, but Maxwell had never encountered anything like it outside of a Hollywood movie.

The car window slid down, and Maxwell stared up at him through bloodshot eyes. “I can’t get the image out of my mind,” he said.

“It’ll pass,” Parker said, but he knew the sight would change the despondent technology executive forever.

“No way. I’ll never forget it. Who would do such a thing to her? She was so beautiful and brilliant.”

“Could it have been the Day’s son?” Parker asked.

Maxwell shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not like that. Certainly, not by himself. You heard what his parents said. Lincoln is afraid of his own shadow, and he could never overpower Angela. Jesus, he’s… he’s…”

“Musuka, the mouse,” Parker offered.

“Exactly.”

“Then who’s Akandu? Could it be one of his parents?”

Maxwell gagged, pushed open the door, and added to the vomit puddle. Parker was relieved he hadn’t wiped away the vapor rub.

“Not Marcus,” Maxwell said, and spat some more into the puddle. “He could never do a thing like that. Couldn’t handle the mess. All that blood and gore. He’d hyperventilate and pass out.”

Pass out? Parker raised his eyebrows.

“Marcus has a thing about neatness. It’s probably some kind of OCD. Everything around him must be clean and ordered. He can be very….” Maxwell’s voice trailed off.

“Very what?”

“Odd. I’ve seen him refuse to enter cluttered rooms, and God help you if you met him with wrinkled clothes.”

“Wrinkled clothes?”

Maxwell took several strained breaths, almost panting. “Yeah.”

Parker had found dozens of articles on the internet describing Marcus’s legendary attention to detail and compulsive behaviors. Many of the articles had been unflattering accounts by fearful anonymous employees who’d signed strict nondisclosures threatening them with financial ruin if they discussed the company or its founders. None of them suggested the extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder Maxwell was describing, but OCD was common among men with TBS.

“Does Marcus have any other extreme behavioral traits? Anything that would have you question his mental well-being?” Parker asked.

Maxwell closed his eyes, perhaps contemplating the nondisclosure. When he opened them, he said, “We all think Marcus is a little out-there, but he’s not crazy enough to have done that to Angela.”

Parker remembered the way Marcus had looked at Jasmine when he’d denied being Akandu. It sure seemed to him the Xperion head had implicated his wife, but the Vegas neighbor said Akandu was a man. Voices could be faked, though. “I got the impression from Marcus that Lincoln might think of Jasmine as Akandu.”

Maxwell spit. “When?”

“When we were talking earlier. The way he looked at her when I asked if he was Akandu.”

“I wouldn’t read too much into how those two look at each other, at least anymore. They are both lawyering up for a divorce battle.”

“Hmm. What do you think though? Could Jasmine be Akandu?”

Maxwell gulped more air, and Parker stepped back out of vomit range. “She’s certainly strong enough. She could’ve overpowered Angela easily.”

Parker pictured Jasmine’s slender, almost sleek, build. “She seemed small to me,” he said. “Angela probably had fifteen pounds on her.”

Maxwell chuckled. “Jasmine is a world-class triathlete. She’s climbed Mount Everest, swam the San Francisco Bay, and ran about a hundred marathons. Angela wouldn’t have stood a chance against her. But unlike Marcus, Jazz is not crazy, and she would never do anything to jeopardize Xperion. The company’s her life, her real baby. Lincoln was just a distraction. Besides, if Lincoln is killing people, his mother wouldn’t be helping him, she would be number one on his list.”

“That bad?”

“You have no idea.”

Angela had alluded to the same dysfunction between mother and son. Parker glanced back at the house. A crime scene tech was fingerprinting the front door. If the killers had left any prints, they’d likely been obliterated by his and Jaden’s when they’d forced their way in.

“What was Angela doing to stop the Anomaly?”

Maxwell burped and an acidic hint of vomit made it past the vapor rub.

“She was working with a security consultant. They had a plan to trap the hacker and close the holes he exploits.”

Parker thought about the tipster from Atlanta. “Is the consultant a woman?”

“I don’t think so. As far as I know, the consultant is a man. He’s some kind of secret hacker. No one is supposed to know his true identity.”

Parker leaned on his cane to take some of the weight off his throbbing leg. “I need to talk to this consultant.”

Maxwell shook his head. “I have no idea how to get in touch with him. Only Angela did. Besides, he’s very sick. I think he may even be dead.”

“How was the consultant going to trap the hacker?”

Maxwell rubbed his eyes. “It’s all about getting what we call event trace data. The consultant tricked the hacker into performing actions he could trace. Then he collected the event data and sent it to Angela’s team so they could use it to find and close the security holes. They’ve been doing it for weeks.”

Parker didn’t know what any of that meant. He looked around for Jaden. This techie stuff was much more up his alley.

The crime scene investigators finished with the door, and Jaden stepped out onto the porch. Parker waived him over, but Jaden held up his phone to show he was on a call.

“If Angela’s team has that data, why is it taking them so long to shut down the hacker or identify him?” Parker asked.

“Now you sound like Jasmine. So far, Angela’s team hasn’t collected the right data to identify the player controlling the Anomaly. That’s what the consultant’s trap is supposed to do, but it has to be sprung while the Anomaly is fighting a player we are monitoring. Not easy when you have over fifty million players. The consultant’s trace programs can’t monitor them all.”

“What was the plan?”

“Angela and the consultant have been luring the hacker to certain players.”

“Bait for the trap,” Parker said.

Maxwell nodded.

“Were Jyothi and Charles bait?”

“Yes,” Maxwell said, then hastily added a qualifier: “But we didn’t know the hacker was going to actually kill them.”

Jaden walked over, and Parker pointed out the puddle. “Watch your step.”

The young agent drew close and whispered, “Need a moment.”

“We’ll be right back,” Parker said to Maxwell and the two of them stepped away from the car window.

“Chavez called,” Jaden said.

“Let me guess, no dead Lincoln.”

“Right. No Lincoln and no big guy. Chavez said the house was vacant and sterile.”

“Sterile?”

“That’s the word he used—sterile. No dust, no fingerprints, no sign anyone actually lives there.”

“No furniture in the house?”

“Plenty of furniture, just looks like a showroom.”

“Like father, like son.”

Jaden looked perplexed.

“Marcus is obsessive about cleanliness.”

“Interesting. Chavez used that word too. He said everything in the house is obsessively ordered. Clothing meticulously folded, cabinet contents precisely arranged. Nothing random.” Jaden worked the screen on his phone. “Except in one room. I have a picture.”

Parker waited, expecting Jaden to show him a room full of victims’ ears.

Jaden held up his phone. It showed pieces of a torn-up poster-sized photo of what appeared to be Jasmine Day strewn across a neatly made bed.

Parker took the phone and studied the image. The photo looked as if it had been taken at a costume party or promotional event. Jasmine, dressed in a black robe and wearing a golden crown was sitting on a throne that Parker thought he recognized from an old movie or television program. He handed the phone back to Jaden. “That’s not what I expected.”

Jaden grunted. “Yeah. What do you make of it?”

“I think Lincoln doesn’t like his mother very much.” Parker glanced back at Maxwell. “Apparently, Mrs. Day never aspired to be mother of the year.”

Jaden put his phone away and looked at the house. “This killing seems different from the others.”

“Very different,” Parker agreed.

“Time frame is off too,” Jaden said.

Parker scratched his beard. “Yes. Been a little less than two weeks since Tate. Not much, though.”

“Could it be a copycat?”

Parker shook his head. “The Xperion connection makes that unlikely. Angela wasn’t selected randomly. Her murder is connected to the others.” He rubbed his leg. “The evidence of struggle bothers me, though.”

“Angela was awake,” Jaden said. “She resisted.”

“I don’t think the struggle was between Angela and her killers.”

Jaden raised his eyebrow. “You think there were multiple killers this time?”

Parker leaned heavily on his cane. “Remember that fable Marcus told us?”

“How could I forget?”

“I think maybe Musuka joined Akandu as part of his training.”

Jaden’s eyebrow climbed nearer to his hairline. “And by Musuka, you mean the Day’s son?”

Parker nodded. “Yes. I came away from the meeting today believing Lincoln Day was doing the hacking and Akandu was doing the killing, but I think they did this one together, and it didn’t go well.”

“You think Lincoln and Akandu got into it while they were killing her like they did back in Vegas?”

Parker shrugged. “Don’t know, but something different happened in there.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“Same place we started this morning, looking for Musuka and Akandu.”

Parker studied the younger man. “How are you handling this?”

“This, sir?”

Parker nodded toward the house. “Angela. The way we found her.”

Jaden shrugged. “I’m okay. I guess. It was pretty awful in there, though.”

Parker put his hand on the young agent’s shoulder. “That’s about as bad as it gets. You may have trouble sleeping.”

Jaden grinned. Bravado. “Then you’ll have to give me some of those pills of yours.”

Parker studied him some more. Despite the joking and claim of being okay, Parker suspected the young man would feel differently after the adrenaline and shock wore off. “I find mixing them with scotch works best.”

The young man’s grin evaporated. “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

They returned to Maxwell’s car window. Maxwell’s eyes were still rimmed red, but the color of his face looked better, less green.

“Let’s begin again,” Parker said. “You were explaining Angela’s and the consultant’s plan for trapping the hacker.”

“Not really much to it,” Maxwell said. “The consultant was supposed to bring the bait player to the Anomaly. While the Anomaly and the bait player fought, the consultant would use a special program to collect the data containing the hacked account and the hacker’s MAC address.”

“MAC address?” Parker asked.

“Media Access Control Address,” Maxwell said. “All devices that access the net have them. They’re supposed to be unique and permanent.”

Parker didn’t like the way Maxwell said supposed to. He glanced at Jaden. Jaden shrugged then asked what a bait player was and while Maxwell explained it to him, Parker thought about the woman in Atlanta. She had to be the player Maxwell was talking about. He checked the time on his phone. Almost seven back east. He sent her a message asking if she was available and stared at the screen. After several seconds without a reply, he added, Angela Harding has been murdered. Must talk now.

He was still staring at the screen when he heard Jaden’s voice.

“Everything okay?”

A rivulet of drool had run from Parker’s mouth, and he had the feeling Jaden had asked the question multiple times. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Yeah,” he said.

“You sure?”

Parker gave the concerned agent a reassuring smile. “Sure.” But he wasn’t sure. Instead, Parker offered some bravado of his own and wiggled his eyebrows. “Nothing to alarm Ms. Fulbright about.”

Jaden nodded slowly.

Parker turned his attention back to Maxwell. “Who else at Xperion knew about Angela and the consultant’s plan?”

Maxwell shrugged. “Rituraj, but he’s fried. He’s been practically living in the office throughout this whole ordeal.”

“Call him. Make sure he doesn’t leave. We’re on our way back to talk to him now.”